Kaitlyn Schiess is a staff writer at Christ and Pop Culture. Her writing has also appeared at Christianity Today, Relevant and Fathom Magazine. She is the author of The Liturgy of Politics (IVP).
Many scholars describe the civil rights movement as a political movement with religious dressing—useful for the movement’s purposes but not central to the message. But the work of historian David L. Chappell, based on testimonies by civil rights activists and leaders, contradicts this. Their accounts indicate that “it was, for them, primarily a religious event.”