[Dialogue] more on CF&LC

[W. J.]

Lucille and colleagues,
   
  Lest we and the ICA-USA Board of Directors conveniently forget, our Spirit Movement roots in radical Christian existentialism in 1950s Texas spawned a wave of New Left radicalism that fed SDS [that would include Jon & Maureen Jenkins et al] and SNCC [George Walters: that would include Charles Sherrod etc] and the civil rights and radical feminist movements of the '60s and beyond.
   
  It's interesting that so much has been written about CF&LC because of Sandra Cason "Casey" Hayden, Tom's first wife. Here's more.
   
  from Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle by Steven F. Lawson:
   
  . . .As more young women began to enroll on college campuses in the 1950s, some of them fell under the influence of campus ministers expounding Christian existentialism, whose principles of authenticity and personal witness provided a radical critique of mainstream America and southern racism. Typical of this group was Sandra "Casey" Cason. Attending the University of Texas at Austin as an undergraduate in the late 1950s, Cason became active in the YWCA and the Faith and Life Community, which advocated leading one’s life according to principles of brotherhood and respect for others, commitments that were taken seriously. . . . From Texas, Cason went on to become one of the most important southern white female staff members of SNCC.
   
  from Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left by Sara Evans:
   
  The longing for a new purpose in American society was becoming intense. For at least some young Christians in the south, the opportunity to act upon their faith and passionate concern would be welcomed as a great relief. Moreover, through conferences and meetings a small group in the south had begun to develop contacts with black students unlike any they had previously known. For deeply religious southern whites the discovery on a personal level that black people were human beings, "just like us," was an often startling and moving experience.6 
  A number of campus ministries provided particularly conducive environments for both soul-searching and social action, and many of these were modeled on the Christian Faith and Life Community at the University of Texas. Dorothy Dawson remembered the Faith and Life Community as "the most intellectually alive" place on the campus. Led by a charismatic Methodist minister, Joseph Mathews, the community had evolved an intensive internal life of study and worship. Consciously reacting to the bureaucratic, success- and status-oriented ethos dominating the campus, members sought the theological dimension in every aspect of their lives. Existential theology became, for them, a kind of social gospel, placing a premium on Christian witness at the "prophetic edge" of history. Their name asserted that Christianity was not only a "faith" but also a "life." The degree to which they had departed from the mainstream was reflected in the fact that the community was the only place on the
 Texas campus where black students were allowed to live at that time.
  In 1958-9 Dorothy Dawson and Sandra Cason moved into the Christian Faith and Life Community. . . .
  . . .it was a natural extension of intellectual and moral concerns to join an integrated community, which in turn catapulted [Cason] into activism. When the YWCA initiated a series of pickets at local restaurants, Cason and Dawson joined their friends, and Sandra Cason was transformed from a "lively bobby soxer" into one of the principal leaders of the interracial movement in Austin. A year later she was heavily involved in the emerging civil rights movement.
   
  from Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America by Wesley C. Hogan
   
  There were not many Caseys in the southern movement. A tall, blonde, white woman with an intense philosophical bent, she had been raised by a single mother in Victoria, Texas. Both her mother and her grandmother taught her that "people should be honest and kind to each other." She entered the University of Texas at Austin in 1957 and soon moved to the Christian Faith and Life Community, the only integrated housing on campus. There she joined wide-ranging seminars under Reverend Joseph Matthews [sic!]. Matthews asked the students to read and discuss the philosophers appearing in the wake of World War II devastation. The voices of European philosophers in particular resonated with this young group of interracial students in the segregated South of the later 1950s. People’s experiences with Nazi Germany led them to the idea that wihle political systems could not prevent the occurrence of evil, one could still insist on one’s values. Casey felt that these "small, intensely
 confrontational seminars" proved "far more challenging than any of my classes at the university."4
  The participants, white and black, regarded the Bible as a book of history and found value in the symbolic meaning of the stories. As the existentialists suggested, there were no meaningful ways to make sense of the world—no history, no truths—except the actions one took every day. When an individual world-view that a student had fashioned prior to coming into contact with the Faith and Life Community began to break down, the group called it a "Christ event"—a sanctioned crisis. As Casey put it, "there was talk about pushing people to their limit. They did not use the phrase ego-death, but that’s what it was, where there was a collapse of systems. And what happens at that point is that you’re still here standing on the basic ground." That ground "is what they called God." Those willing to release their attachment to belief systems came together, creating a symbolic and ritual life around the idea that "you live in community and you only live in community." In fact, Casey
 concluded, the idea of an independent self existing apart from anything else was a lie.5
   
  More later,
   
  Wayne Marshall Jones
  
Lifeline248 at aol.com wrote:
  Many thanks, Marshall, for the pages from Rossinow's book--and for everything else you've contributed.  
Lucille Tessier Chagnon

Doug Rossinow . The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity and the New Left in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. x + 498 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-11056-3.

For anyone interested, I found a 1998 review of Rossinow's book by James Farrell at  
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=28741905267699
Here's an excerpt of the 4th paragraph, which points us to a book by Farrell, the reviewer:

      "As I do in my book The Spirit of the Sixties (Routledge, 1997), Rossinow emphasizes the importance of religion and spirituality to the New Left. Activists like Casey Cason (Hayden) came to the movement, and attracted countless others, because they framed their activism as a matter of faithfulness to long-established ethical traditions. Rossinow traces this moral dimension of Sixties activism to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement's emphasis on "the beloved community." But he also identifies a "Christian existentialism" that flourished in campus centers like the University of Texas's Christian Faith-and-Life Community. There, long before the communes of the late Sixties, young people formed intentional communities that connected them to longstanding communities of faith and justice. Students discussed writers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich and Albert Camus, and took their work to heart. When John F. Kennedy titled his June 1963 speech on
 civil rights "A Moral Imperative," even he understood that the civil rights movement went beyond civil rights to moral right."

Lucille T. Chagnon, M.Ed.
Literacy Acceleration Consultants
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