Beloved Community

aka Lessons I Didn't Learn About the Civil Rights Movement

Last week I wrote about how Roan Boucher’s interview about Christian Nationalism made me instantly reflect on Ruby Sales’ 2016 “On Being” interviewabout both her organizing work during the Civil Rights Movement, and her thoughts on public theologies.

Both interviews occupied a lot of space in my mind for most of 2025 for many reasons. Mainly, I think, because the reflections shared by both Boucher and Sales made some things “click” in my mind as it relates to my interest in parsing out the ongoing personal and collective impacts of coming of age under multicultural neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s.

In this post—which will be my last for now on this theme—I want to dig a little deeper into the banner headlines of these reflections that I mentioned last week, as I continue to think through how these two interviews illuminated what progressive movements lost when they abandoned spirituality as part of community-building and political organizing.

POTENTIAL SOURCES OF POLITICAL POWER

Duri…