Read more from Kim Lawton's interview with religious studies professor Dr. Allen Callahan about religion, art, and Martin Luther King, Jr.:

On the relationship between art and religion:
For a while in the modern period, earlier even in this century, some people were saying that art would be our new religion, you know, since we had sort of gotten over God and gotten over organized religion, or we were in recovery from organized religion. That's one of many prognostications of modernists that didn't cash out. I think that's because religion was undersold, even though it had a lot of problems, and art was oversold.

Religion at least pretends to be, claims to be, a portal. It opens to transcendence of ourselves; it points us in the direction of those things that are greater than ourselves, that take us beyond ourselves. And what art does is records our coming and going through that portal. It's not transcendence itself; it's an attempt to make some kind of record of it, to express it in some way. And to express things that at the outset we acknowledge are inexpressible.

The arts are that human effort to express those transcendent moments, but they're not the transcendent moments themselves. Those take place in spaces that we have designated as religious. I see that when the religion is good, that is, when people are in touch with their transcendent selves, then the art gets good. On the other hand, when there's some confusion about that, perhaps even a denial of it, when we don't have access to those things that are beyond ourselves, that are bigger than we are, greater than we are, then in my humble opinion, that's where the art becomes a challenge. And we may be moving through such a moment now.

On the arts and the African American community:
Because of the unusual history of people of African descendent in the United States, because of their slave ancestry, they come to the production of art under some unusual constraints. So, certain forms of artistic expression become favored forms over others because they are more immediate, more accessible, not as constrained-music, for example.

When I'm talking about art, I'm talking about the whole nine [yards]-music, plastic arts, various fine arts, even textiles and dance. It's in music especially that Africans Americans have been able to express or give voice to transcendent moments. They're very good at that. Historically African Americans have been very, very good at doing that, and I say they're good at that not just out of some kind of group chauvinism, although that has something to do with it, but also because that's been the verdict of just about everybody around the world. Everybody around the world has listened to music of this particular group of people that's been produced under these very unusual circumstances, and it moves them, and so some form of that music is moving people all over the world today.

On the origins of religion and spirituality in African American art:
Of course, African Americans are not native to North America. They came here on slave ships from West Africa. And those people had a life before they came here. In that wide region, say Western Africa, roughly the size of maybe the continental United States, one of the common elements of culture was a sensitivity to this transcendent dimension of life. This comes up in various ways. It was common in what we'd call West African religion to revere the ancestors, because they were part of the community. The community wasn't simply all the people in your neighborhood who were still alive. It included the people who were dead. And you had certain relationships with them, too, and you had to manage those relationships. These relationships with the living, with the dead, with the elements, with the powers of what we call nature now-all of those were negotiated through the language of music and dance. Those unhappy people who were kidnapped from West Africa brought with them that sensibility that couldn't be completely expunged or erased. They held on to that. That special sensibility for making contact with those things beyond ourselves, especially through music and dance, endured and came to be characteristic in what came to be African American culture.

On spirituality, art and music:
The kind of music that affects the body, and music that calls for physical response-much of what we call popular music in the United States-has its roots in African American music. Now, because that music has now become international, the elements of that music are ingeniously adept at putting people in touch with rhythms beyond themselves and taking them outside themselves; people are now stepping outside themselves in Tokyo and in Paris and in Buenos Aires and all over the place in clubs, at dances, with elements of this music. It has distinctively spiritual roots, because that's what makes it work. Even when the music is far removed from those roots, even when it's commodified, internationalized and removed very far from its roots, that power is still there. In other instances where the music has been closer to its roots, the connection between the work that it does and the way that it does that work on the human spirit have been clearer. The outstanding example is the civil rights movement, and those rallies when people met in churches before and after the speeches, sometimes even during the speeches, there was music, there were songs.

On music and the freedom movement:
In the civil rights movement, everybody who participated has the same thing to say about the importance of music. That was an engine, an emotional and spiritual engine that drove the movement. People sang songs; they sang songs during their rallies in the churches, they sang songs when they were marching, they sang songs when they were in jail. And some of these songs were very old. Some of these songs go back to the days of slavery, the Negro spirituals. Now the question is, why those songs? What is it about a song like "We Shall Overcome" that resonated so powerfully with those people? And once it did that, once it set that tone and their struggle became in a way internationalized, the whole world began to see what was going on in the South in America in the early 60s. Then everybody in the world got the buzz.

I mention "We Shall Overcome" because when the Wall fell in Berlin, that's what people were singing. They've got plenty of great hymns in Germany. Why sing a Negro spiritual? But by the time the Wall fell, that song had become identified with freedom, not just for a bunch of people who were the descendants of slaves in the United States, but for everybody. People even learned to sing that song in Tiananmen Square. It started in a special place, and it's packed with a special kind of spiritual energy and a set of spiritual connections and associations that are very powerful, and now it's like what someone said about Lincoln when he was laid to rest. It's now with the ages. It now belongs to everybody who aspires to be free, just as the people who originally coined that song aspired to be free. That energy somehow is packed into that song like a battery, and people can tap it; that happened in the civil rights movement, and for that song in particular it's now happening all around the world.

On Mahalia Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr.:
They became closely associated early in the civil rights movement. King made no secret of his admiration for Mahalia Jackson, but then a lot of people admired Mahalia Jackson. But Mahalia Jackson returned the favor. She became associated with King; she sang at protest rallies, and after King was assassinated, she sang at his funeral. She sang "Precious Lord, take my hand," which was his request. He had mentioned to her that should someone have to sing at his funeral, that's the song that he would like sung. It's a classic gospel song written by Thomas Dorsey, with whom Mahalia Jackson was also very closely associated. King knew that music, and the people that he knew knew that music very well and embraced it.

Mahalia Jackson could move everybody. This is a gospel singer who was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, right? I think it was '97. She was just incredible. She sang at the Newport Jazz Festival, and she just rocked the house. People stood in the rain to hear her. When she got finished singing, they didn't want her to stop. She was a gospel singer-a very particular idiom developed by one group of people. But it just spoke to everybody. And she drew on those elements that were most powerful in African American music. Somebody said that she was the first gospel singer to draw the blues in or to use the blues. I don't think that that's musicologically correct, but it gets at the point that she tapped those powerful elements in African American music, and she was very up front about that, she was unashamed of it, she promoted what was essentially African American in the American musical heritage.

When she started singing gospel music in the earlier part of her career, it was very controversial. A lot of people didn't like that. People in African American churches thought that was improper because she did a lot of things and invoked a lot of behaviors in other people that were not quite proper sometimes. They clapped their hands, they swayed their bodies, they stamped their feet. And she did all that stuff. She was once reprimanded by a minister who told her that just wasn't proper deportment in church. (Mahalia Jackson was a Baptist. She was a good Baptist, and there was a time when Baptists just didn't do that kind of thing, or at least certain kinds of Baptists didn't. But she had cut her musical teeth in the Holiness Church, where they did that kind of thing all the time.) She was confronted by this Baptist minister about the way that she sang, and the way that other people responded to her singing, that she provoked this in other people, hand clapping and all that carrying on, and she staunchly defended those practices. She said that this was right, that she read in her Bible that you were to make a joyful noise unto the Lord, that all the earth was to sing praises, that there was to be hand clapping, that the music was to be loud.

Of course, the Psalms are replete in the Bible with these instructions that you're to make a joyful noise with cymbals and instruments and dance. It says that; it's right in the Bible. People have been trying, in the churches especially, to forget that for centuries. And that stuff just keeps coming back; like a bad penny it just keeps turning up, and she championed that.

At some point earlier in King's career he was very ambivalent about those kinds of expressions in churches. And he says so. He writes about this in "Stride toward Freedom"-the emotionalism for which black churches were famous. King was very ambivalent about that-people running up and down the aisles and shouting and falling out. He didn't like that. I think that as King moved and became the person that he became, and became the leader of this movement that was changing the world, it was a movement of working class people, people who were close to those roots, his own people, even his own church, who related to that form of expression. It was in him, because he grew up in that. And he saw the power of it. He saw that it was something not to be ashamed of. It was indispensable to the maintenance of the spiritual fortitude that these people showed in the face of great danger and even death. And so the more he was involved in that, the more he was challenged by that, the more the music meant, the more important it was to sing those songs, the more important it was to line those hymns and to draw on that deposit of spiritual energy that had been made decades and even centuries ago by his ancestors.

On the arts and the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.:
It's a challenge for American art to appropriate that legacy, because that was a transcendent moment in our country. King was a prophet. He was truly a prophet, and he was recommended as such in his lifetime. No less than Abraham Joshua Heschel commended King to the American public as a prophet. Heschel had written a book on the prophets that is still a classic. Heschel was not a Baptist minister; he did not grow up in the black church; he wasn't an African American Baptist, he wasn't an African American, he wasn't a Baptist. He was a brilliant Jewish scholar, one of the most brilliant Jewish scholars of his age. He commended King to his community as a prophet. That's a pretty impressive recommendation.

King is a prophet and as such opened up a portal to transcendence for the American people, and not simply one community of American people, or people who were involved in one movement. King was bigger than that. Perhaps as early as the March on Washington, King was already greater than any one group or any one section of the country. He was now a prophet who was speaking to everyone. When he spoke in Washington in 1963, he spoke to the entire nation, and he spoke in the shadow of the Lincoln monument. He spoke in the shadow of a very imposing sculpture of a man who had spoken to the nation in a very difficult time. And Lincoln spoke in a way such that the country was different after he was finished talking. His Gettysburg Address revolutionized the American consciousness. The country was different after Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address. He was able to speak to a country that was now turning to binding up its wounds, a country that had almost rent itself in two. He was able to speak to everybody; in an extraordinarily succinctly crafted speech he presented a vision for the entire country.

Between that time and 1963 when Martin Luther King spoke to the nation, no one had done that. Lincoln was the last person before King to speak to an entire nation. Lincoln spoke to North and South. He spoke to people who had worn blue uniforms, people who had worn grey uniforms, people who had worn no uniforms. He spoke to people who had been masters and people who had been slaves. Lincoln spoke to all those people at the same time. And he spoke to them of a nation that was theirs, that belonged to all of them. And after he finished speaking, the nation now had a new self-understanding, or at least access to a new self-understanding.

Fast forward to 1963. The president of the United States, who had made some very impressive statements about the destiny of the nation, nevertheless had great difficulty talking to all people at the same time, because once again the nation was riven with various differences and distinctions and conflicts. But when King spoke, he spoke to black and white, he spoke to Protestant and Catholic, he spoke to Jew and Gentile. He spoke to his friends, he spoke to his enemies, he spoke to everybody. And he says, "This is my vision of our country. It's not what we are, but this is what we can be. This is what I want this country to be, for myself and for my children." And he began to talk about that and said, "I believe that this is a vision, it's a dream that includes people in the North. But it also includes people in the South. It includes people in the east coast, people on the west coast, people who are the descendants of masters, people who are the descendants of slaves, people who came here in the 19th century, people who came here just yesterday. It includes everybody." We're still having difficulty living up to that vision, and in my humble opinion, no one since has been able to speak to the American people and to provide them with a vision that included all of them.

On the exhibition "In the Spirit of Martin":
Looking at the images of King in the exhibition, I was struck by their variety. Let's imagine for a minute that we didn't have a photograph of Martin Luther King. Let's imagine that all we had were these artistic renderings of his image-what it is that he looked like to people. It would be difficult to get a fix on what King looked like, for me, just looking at these various artistic renderings or representations of him. They just look different. Now it could be argued that that's to be expected of art, and it is. The photographs of the young King in Montgomery at age 26 are a little different from the photographs in Memphis, Tennessee at age 39. But something else is at work, too. Those artistic representations are being made under the pressure of artistic conventions and other aspirations and understandings of King. King is being interpreted. I've seen the same thing in images of Jesus, where how Jesus is rendered is really driven by people's understanding of Jesus and not by anthropological considerations or forensic reconstructions of what some guy looked like who's living in Palestine in the first century. That's not what it's about. I see some of that happening with King already, and that's what supposed to happen. What it also suggested to me is that artistically, as a nation we still don't quite have a fix on what King looked like, that is, how he appears to us, how we should understand him. It's easier to understand him as a martyr, for example. In its classical definition, a martyr is a person who dies for the cause. But King, even in a life that some of us would consider quite short-he was 39 when he died-had a public life that was comparatively long given the brevity of his life. Basically from age 26 he's an international public figure for the last third of his life-he did a lot in his life and said a lot in his life, a lot that's very important for us in this country and for the world. And we still don't know what to make of that.