several books, including In Pursuit of the Almighty's Dollar. He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table: Contemporary Christianities in the American South, and reported the following:From page 99:Learn more about Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table at the University of North Carolina Press website.Of course, the black population of North Carolina had never been convinced that the state had rejected its Jim Crow past and turned into a smart and genteel version of the Research Triangle, Charlotte, and the Triad, writ large. This is where the Reverend Barber came in, for he was prepared with a deep analysis, a set of progressive allies, and something else rarely seen in public—a willingness to use the ordinary stuff of biblical exegesis, moral argumentation, and old-fashioned preaching in public to make a Christian case for why what the governor and legislature were doing was wrong.Opening my book to page 99 one finds oneself in the middle of a faith and politics conflict in the state of North Carolina with Reverend William J. Barber II and Moral Monday facing off against Republican state leaders. This proves to be great place to jump right into Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table because the entire book is a testament to the vital range of Christianities underneath those red election night congressional maps that signal the dominance of the conservative white Southern evangelicals in the American South in the early 21st century. While no other non-Christian body can count more than .6% of any southern state's population, the arguments between Christians over whether and how to welcome LGBT members in their churches and schools, how to address racism, whether even to honor the voting rights secured by the civil rights movement are anything but settled.
The South is a region where many people, liberal and conservative, black and white, call themselves Matthew 25 Christians, and visit people in prison because Jesus suggested its importance. Nevertheless, the southern states persist in having the highest incarceration rates in the nation with the highest percentage of its population in prison. Ironies abound. In North Carolina after Republicans took over both houses of state government and the governorship for the first time since Reconstruction in 2012, efforts were made to turn back the clock on voting rights, and health, education and welfare policies. On page 99 we meet a coalition of faith and social justice groups organized under the banner of faith determined to resist the government. One of the members of the movement, Courtney Ritter, mother of three from Pittsboro wears pearls and a cardigan for her arrest, so as to look as conservative and respectable as possible. She reports: "I felt a moral obligation to all of those people in the civil rights movement who had put their lives and jobs on the line. I wanted them to know that what they did mattered." Courtney is white and reported that she and her husband had moved to North Carolina from Alabama thinking it was familiarly southern but more progressive. In her disappointment Courtney thought, "Wow, I could have stayed in Alabama."
--Marshal Zeringue
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