As St. Louis-area clergy urge a nonviolent response to a grand jury’s decision about whether to charge a white police officer in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, they’re re-evaluating their role in the struggle over race relations.
Religious leaders have become complacent in the decades since the civil-rights movement ended legal segregation, said Carl Smith Sr., 59, pastor at New Beginning Missionary Baptist in Woodson Terrace, Missouri. The August shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson and the weeks of unrest that followed awakened people of the cloth, he said. A decision on charges that could come any day and the prospect of renewed violence have forced religious leaders to the forefront and, for some, into a period of introspection.
“We have stopped doing what we were supposed to do,” Smith said in an interview after an interfaith service Nov. 22 in St. Louis. “We have stayed confined to our four walls, instead of coming outside of these four walls.”
This report mentions the Rev. Rebecca Ragland, a St. Louis-area Episcopal priest who got herself arrested late last week. She was with a group of protesters who were blocking a street. They were told to disperse, and she turned around to face police instead, [url=http://www.stmarysarlington.org/episcopal-church-blog/id/831/episcopal-priest-arrested-in-ferguson-protest-dragged-along-the-ground–ctmagazine.aspx]she said[/url]. She was arrested in spite of wearing an orange vest saying “Priest.”