When David Chappell set out to write a history of the Civil Rights movement, he did not intend to write a book about religion. But Chappell, an atheist, found to his surprise that many of the subjects he interviewed for the book expressed a religious faith that could be called "fundamentalist" and considered the end of segregation in the South in the 1960's to be a case of the miracles made manifest. While not converted himself to this faith, he nonetheless concludes that the religious faith of the African-American participants in the Civil Rights struggle was the glue without which their political struggle would have failed.

Chappell starts by sketching out the position of white liberals, who from the time they first came to national power in the 1930's, counseled black leaders not to agitate for change in the South, fearing a backlash from poor whites who were part of the New Deal coaltion. Instead, white liberals hoped that economic progress and education would lead to the gradual reduction in discrimination. Meanwhile, black churches in the first half of the 20th century served as an "opiate" while provided solace rather than encouraging collective action.

Chappell describes the upsurge of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950's as less a political movement than a religous revival with political implications. Bayard Rustin said of Martin Luther King, Jr., "I was always amazed at how it was possible to combine this intense, analytical philosophical mind with this more or less fundamental--wll, I don't like to use the word 'fundamentalist'--but this abiding faith. Ralph Abernathy reported "miraculous cures" at the first mass meeting of the Montgomery boycott. After receiving death threats over the phone, King doubted whether he could go on. He prayed, and, he later wrote, "At that moment I experienced the preseence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as thought I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying" "Stand up for righteousnes, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever."

While the black churches crusaded for civil rights, white churches were mostly neutral. This was better than might have been expected, considering their enthusiastic support for slavery and the Confederacy a century earlier, or their support for the Religious Right political agenda in the 1980's. Some, like Billy Graham, were quietly supportive of civil rights. King appeared onstage at one of Graham's crusades in 1957, studied Graham's methods, and traveled with Graham to a conference of Baptists in Brazil in 1960.