His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

Lewis was beaten and, lying on the pavement, was ready to die. Yet he survived,

For many Americans, especially non-Christians, the thought that Christian morality can be a useful guide to much of anything is risible, particularly since so many white evangelicals from 2016 forward chose to throw in their lot with a solipsistic American president who bullies, boasts, and sneers. Yet Lewis’s life suggests that religiously inspire

“The finest task of achieving justice,” Niebuhr wrote, “will be done neither by the Utopians who dream dreams of perfect brotherhood nor yet by the cynics who believe that the self-interest of nations cannot be overcome. It must be done by the realists who understand that nations are selfish and will be so till the end of history, but that none of

In Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural, the new president appealed, eloquently but theoretically, to “the better angels of our nature.” John Lewis is a better angel. The American present and future may in many ways hinge on the extent to which the rest of us can draw lessons from his example.

“The tragedy of man,” the twentieth-century Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “is that he can conceive self-perfection but cannot achieve it.” And the tragedy of America is that we can imagine justice but cannot finally realize it.

In the middle of the last century, Lewis marched into the line of fire to summon a nation to be what it had long said it would be but had failed to become. Arrested forty-five times over the course of his life, Lewis suffered a fractured skull and was repeatedly beaten and tear-gassed. He led by example more than by words. He was a peaceful soldier

He was as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the creation of the republic in the eighteenth century. This is not hyperbole. It is fact—observable, discernible, undeniable fact.

As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it in a phrase drawn from the abolitionist Theodore Parker, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Bends, not swerves—but what we can miss in this cold-eyed understanding of history is that the arc won’t even bend without devoted Americans pressing for the swerve.

the Selma march, Lewis recalled, “injected something very special into the soul and the heart and the veins of America. It said, in effect, that we must humanize our social and political and economic structure. When people saw what happened on that bridge, there was a sense of revulsion all over America.” Revulsion, then redemption: Is there anythi