Looking back, Raboteau says, the civil-rights era seems like a clear “kairos moment,” divinely marked by God as a time for action. Perhaps another such moment is happening today. I spoke with Raboteau about his prophetic figures—the lessons from their activism, and the tensions inherent in their radical political projects. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Emma Green: In many of today’s activist movements, and particularly ones focused on racial and income inequality, the heads of religious institutions play a role, but they’re not necessarily the most visible leaders. Why have the prophetic voices of today’s activist movements become more secular than they were, say, during the civil-rights movement?

Albert J. Raboteau: Each of the people in my book went through some kind of conversion experience that motived their action and opened them up to seeing themselves as part of the long tradition of prophesy with Judaism and Christianity. I think that’s less the case today with activists—the movements don’t seem to flow as much from churches as they did in the past.

It may have something to do with the fact that church growth in the country is decreasing. If you look at the Pew reports on religious membership, the “nones” (people who don’t identify with any particular religious tradition) seem to be increasing. That’s less so in the black church, but it’s true generally among church-goers. There is also a sense among some people that religion is such a fraught and controversial issue that they’re reluctant to use religious reasoning in order to justify social action.

Then I think probably another factor is the sense in which people are reluctant to engage in discussions of values because they worry that the discourse will turn into anger and fighting— that religion is one more source of disagreement in a highly polarized society.

The two book-sellers at my local book store, which is now selling the book, asked me a question: “What good is religion in politics?” And my answer to them was, “Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer.” Their response was, “That’s not fair because they were exceptional.” I said, “Yes, they were exceptional, but they were also exemplary.”

What the book in part is about is to look at how exceptional these characters were, but also how exemplary. We shouldn’t just keep them frozen in some kind of civil-rights museum of the past. They should still provoke us to civic discourse that has a different kind of character, and more empathy.

Green: You talk about how Dorothy Day experienced a loss of community when she was baptized in the Catholic Church—a lot of her socialist, Labor-oriented friends felt that she was aligning herself with an institution that was fundamentally corrupt.

This seems to be a tension in the model of prophetic voice you describe. Religious institutions can be oriented toward stability, and have often been directly opposed to calls for change from the radical fringes. How do you reconcile these two legacies of religious institutions and figures: their distinctive ability to speak prophetically, but also their distinctive ability to cause harm?