Although it is by now common to cite the black Christian experience in debates about the relationship between religion and politics, the black church is rarely viewed as a genuine source of information about these matters in ways that count. As Cornel West has stated:
Ironically, the black church experience is often invoked as an example of the religion/politics fusion, but rarely as a source to listen to or learn from. Instead, it is simply viewed as an instance that confirms the particular claims put forward by the respective sides. The black experience may no longer be invisible, but it remains unheard—not allowed to speak for itself, to be taken seriously as having something valuable to say.50
The black church view of the relationship between religion and politics has roots in the denominational affiliations that shaped it, the ongoing experiences of oppression in national life that black religion ceaselessly addresses, and broad experiments in American civil religion.
Black Christians are overwhelmingly Baptist and Methodist, a legacy that extends back to slave culture.51 Because it was illegal to baptize and preach to slaves during much of slavery, the process of exposing slaves to Christianity was gradual. As slaves were eventually incorporated into Christianity on limited terms in the mid-1700s, they were deeply affected by Methodists and especially by Separate Baptists. The Separate Baptists were viewed with suspicion by both the established church and society at large during their initial stages of growth in the early 1700s.52 Deeply disinherited, poor, without formal training, and broadly suspicious of external authority, the Separate Baptists naturally appealed to slaves who were even more ostracized from American culture than the Baptists because of their legal status as personal property.
But as they grew, Separate Baptists continued to exhibit two traits that marked their early years: their opposition to slavery and their enthusiastic leadership of the fight against established religion.53 Thus, at the base of the denomination to which slaves were overwhelmingly drawn, and in which they eventually established independent churches in the mid-1800s, was an emphasis on the strong relation between political and civil issues and personal and communal religious belief. The arguments that radical religious dissenters made for freedom from slavery and freedom of religion prefigured the legal and social arguments advanced by black intellectuals, organizers, and leaders in the fight against institutional racism in two important ways.54
First, the religious dissenters’ arguments expressed religious themes of social justice linked to belief in God. The arguments of Isaac Backus and John Allen against slavery and religious intolerance pictured these injustices as offenses not only to civil society, but to authentic Christian belief.55 Second, although their arguments were unquestionably motivated by religious concern, dissenters cast their arguments in the language of civic piety and civil responsibility in making moral claims on the state to act justly. These two narrative strategies were adopted and ingeniously expanded by black Christians, especially the prophetic wing of the black church. This vital branch of black Christianity has relentlessly explained and justified the moral and religious claims of black Christian belief in the language of civic piety, whose vocabulary includes legal redress, moral suasion, civil rights, and political proclamation.
This last point reveals as well African-Americans’ participation in and expansion of traditions of American civil religion. Although for Hauerwas and Baxter it is “counterfeit” religion, a progressive, largely liberal version of civil religion is critically celebrated within African-American prophetic Christianity.56 As Charles Long says, “The distinction between civil religion and church religion is not one that looms large for us.”57 He continues:
In the first place, it is the overwhelming reality of the white presence in any of its various forms that becomes the crucial issue. Whether this presence was legitimated by power executed illegally, or whether in institution or custom, its reality, as far as blacks were concerned through most of their history, carried the force of legal sanction enforced by power. The black response to this cultural reality is part of the civil rights struggles in the history of American blacks.58
Long further argues that it is not incidental that black churches have been the locus of civil rights struggle because it “represented the black confrontation with an American myth that dehumanized the black person’s being.”59 Furthermore, the “location of this struggle in the church enabled the civil rights movement to take on the resources of black cultural life,” such as organization, music, artistic expression, and proficiency in collecting limited economic resources.60
In appropriating and improvising upon a vocabulary of civic piety, black Christians have appealed to the sacred symbols of national life and its democratic principles, which find literate expression in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps the most famous example of this longstanding black church tradition is symbolized in the brilliant career of Martin Luther King Jr. Like his Separate Baptist predecessors and his Black Baptist ancestors, King employed the language of civic piety (particularly civil rights) in articulating at once the goals of African-American religion and a version of liberal democracy.61 Although he remained rooted in his religious base, King transcended the narrow focus of sectarian and myopic religious concerns to embrace a universal moral perspective in addressing, first, the specific suffering of black Americans and, eventually, the economic exploitation and racial oppression of other “minorities.”
But King’s genius lay in his ability to show how increased democracy for African-Americans served the common good by making democracy hew closer to its ideals than its performance in the distant and recent past suggested. King spoke a language of civic piety (especially civil rights) that resonated with crucial aspects of American moral self-understanding, particularly since such self-understanding was closely linked to ideals of justice, freedom, and equality. King and his colleagues creatively reinterpreted documents of ultimate importance in national life—particularly the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—in extending the goods at which they aimed (including democracy, justice, and equality) to blacks and others excluded from their original intent.62
Shaped profoundly by the black Christian Church and rooted in black theological perspectives on love, justice, equality, and freedom articulated in the rich history of black resistance to racism, King and his cohorts forged empowering connections between their religious beliefs and the social, civic, and legal goals to which they believed their faith committed them. Indeed, they translated their religious efforts into the language with the best chance to express their goals in the national arena. For the black church, justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public, civic piety is love’s public language, equality its tone of voice, and freedom its constant pitch. For Hauerwas and Baxter, such translation may prove problematic, but for black Christians it has meant survival.
Such acts of translation also rest on the black Christian belief that the entire world belongs to God, that religious truth is not bound to the sanctuary, and that God often employs apparently disinterested or even hostile persons, forces, and institutions to achieve the divine prerogative. This truth can be partially glimpsed in the popularity of the scripture “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.”63 This often quoted passage forms one of the most visible hermeneutic strategies employed in the black church, one that reflects a strong doctrine of providence and a serviceable theodicy geared toward black survival and a momentous confrontation with suffering and evil.
For prophetic black Christians, not only is speaking the language of civil society not taboo, but the messages of God are likewise not limited to homiletical proclamation, theological discourse, or other ecclesial expressions of God talk. Since the world belongs to God, and the powers that exist, even if evil intentioned, may have good consequences in the eyes of faith, God can use whatever forum necessary to deliver divine gift or judgment. This whole theological approach is implicit in the statement by a jubilant black person who, upon h
earing of the 1956 Supreme Court decision declaring segregated transportation in Montgomery, Alabama, unconstitutional, exclaimed, “God Almighty has spoken from Washington, D.C.”64 For black Christians, God is the original and ultimate polyglot. The language of civic piety (especially civil rights) serves God’s purposes, as does the language of theological study and religious devotion. Thus, the civil rights movement helped foster a progressive understanding of the relation between religion and politics that rested on precedents of such interaction in American civil religion.
I have given this severely abbreviated genealogy and justification of the positive relation of religion to politics in African-American Christianity to suggest the rich resources it contains for critical thinking about the relation between church and society. The progressive and prophetic black church, as I have sketched it here, rejects the premises of Hauerwas and Baxter’s arguments about the relation of faith and politics. Faith has a large part to play in the public arena, but only if it will redescribe its goals in languages that are publicly effective, accompanied by the politics with the best chance to make those goals concrete and relevant. Black Christianity avoids attempts to impose Christianity on the world, a strategy as old as religious establishment and as new as national attempts to manipulate God for political favor.65 Rather, it retains the strengths and insights of religious belief while making arguments for the common good and public interest that are subject to criticism and open to revision because they are neither final nor infallible.
Its history prevents black Christianity from endorsing Hauerwas and Baxter’s pessimistic views about the ability of Christian faith to mix with politics without losing its soul, without surrendering its capacity to criticize liberal democracy. Hauerwas and Baxter are right to remind us that Christian faith is in perennial tension with all political accounts of the good. Indeed, the history of AfricanAmerican prophetic Christianity is the story of the relentless criticism of failed American social practices, the constant drawing attention to conflicts between political ideals and realities, and the ageless renewal of a commitment to broaden the bounds of liberty so that democracy is both noun and adjective, both achievement and process. But some political accounts of the good are better than others, and only those Christian communities willing to risk the erosion and expansion of certain aspects of their Christian identity in secular affairs have the opportunity to affect the public interest for the better.
This, of course, is why Hauerwas and Baxter’s views of the various problems associated with the freedom of religion are viewed suspiciously by the prophetic black Christian Church. By avoiding the nasty and brutal sphere of politics, Hauerwas and Baxter cannot adequately account for the black struggle and suffering endured to receive the freedoms the First Amendment guarantees. Black Christians have always understood that the batteries are not included, that American ideals, principles, and promises are never given, but must be secured through political struggle in the public realm. With Fish, they recognize that the “game has always been politics.”66 Hauerwas and Baxter’s account not only masks the social and political roots of their own faith, but it effectively discounts the experience of black Christians who provide precisely the sort of example of the relation between church and politics that might have a chance of bringing greater clarity to this complex debate.
Finally, black prophetic Christians are wary of theological discussions that reduce the social embodiment of Christianity to the church and that portray the state as the enemy of Christian freedom. If theological justifications of slavery had not done so before, white Christian opposition to the civil rights movement chastened black Christian expectation of white Christians’ moral and religious support of the goal of African-American liberation.67 While arguing that the role of the church was to attend to the spiritual aspects of life in the church while avoiding the acrimonious and schismatic business of politics at all costs, many white Christian churches ironically furnished ideological and theological support to the forces that impeded the progress of the civil rights movement.68
The greater and more tragic irony, however, is that often white Christians actively opposed black progress by participating in White Citizens’ Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, or other hate groups that harassed and even murdered black Christians. Even if they didn’t actively participate in such heinous crimes, many white Christians “retreated into the womb of an ahistorical piety.”69 By adopting positions similar to those that Hauerwas and Baxter suggest, these white Christians were rendered impotent to affect the lives of their black Christian colleagues because their theological stance was deeply apolitical and hence unable to make claims on the public good in ways that were immediately helpful to black Christians.
Moreover, it was not the white church-qua-church that called for the end of such barbaric and evil practices or that actively intervened to prevent the murder and maiming of black life. It was the sustained social and political struggle of a tiny band of black prophetic Christians and their allies who, by sacrificial action, civil disobedience, and appeals to the American conscience by means of the language of civic piety, forced the state to intervene through legal and political measures. As in the religious situation of colonial America during Revolutionary times, the state intervened to prevent one group of Christians from killing others.
Once again, civil protest and political power had put into law what Christian belief had professed but failed to practice. And black Christians interpreted such intervention as an extension of the providence of God over even secular political structures, as black Christians heard God Almighty speaking from Washington, D.C. This does not mean that the state is uncritically praised as the unwavering instrument of divine deliverance. It is, however, one of the legitimate means available to black Christians seeking to secure and protect their freedom, so long denied by law and Christian practice.
The poverty of Hauerwas and Baxter’s vision of the social embodiment of Christianity becomes even more evident when they return to one of the bleakest epochs in modern Catholic Christendom, the papacy of Pope Pius XI, to draw examples of Christ’s Kingship. Pope Pius XI, according to Hauerwas and Baxter, “boldly and bluntly asserts the importance of publicly recognizing and celebrating the Kingship of Christ in reconstituting the entire social order.”70 The whole point behind the feast celebrating Christ’s Kingship was to emphasize that “the common good is to be defined by Christ.”71 Furthermore, Hauerwas and Baxter claim that, in opposition to Will’s celebration of the secularism that led to the subordination of religion to politics, “Pope Pius XI sees such a subordination as the undoing of any true politics.”72 Finally, Pope Pius XI, according to Hauerwas and Baxter, “resists the temptation to conceive of politics in anything less than soteriological terms.”73
But Pope Pius XI is precisely the sort of figure who is an example of Hauerwas and Baxter’s worst fears: he promoted the moral subordination of Christianity to the political order. By signing a concordat with Mussolini in 1929, Pope Pius XI made Mussolini’s regime the first government in modern Catholic history to receive official recognition by the Vatican, thus supplying theological justification to the dictator’s murderous Fascist maneuvers.74 Pius XI “deliberately sabotaged democracy, the strongest opponent of Communism, for the politically and morally ruinous experiment of Fascism.”75 Pius XI was also a particularly cruel foe of religious tolerance and diversity.
Pius XI facilitated the “marriage of convenience” between Catholicism and Fascism that helped to destroy the Popolari (the Christian Democratic party), the People’s party, which was the second legitimate party in parliament and the only real alternative to the Fascists.76 More viciously, he requested the resignation of priest Don Sturzo as general secretary of the Popolari, banishing him from Rome at the height of the Popolari’s fight against Mussolini. After his departure, the Fascists moved to expand their efforts to “wipe out the ‘white’ trade-unions, co-operatives, and youth organizations.”77 Pius XI also used his proximity to Mussolini t
o repress the freedom of religious minorities, urging Mussolini to restrict Protestant missions in Italy and to outlaw Freemasons. Pius XI was also pleased when Mussolini prevented the building of a Muslim mosque in Rome and when the dictator persecuted Waldensians, Pentecostalists, the Salvation Army, and eventually Jews.78 After the Concordat of 1929, Mussolini exempted priests from taxation and employed public funds to prevent the financial collapse of Catholic banks.79
Most appallingly, the official pact between Mussolini and Pius XI led to the Vatican’s declaration that the dictator was a man “sent by providence.”80 Pius XI compromised the politically independent, socially prophetic, and morally insubordinate voice of the church by officially colluding with Mussolini’s Fascist Party to stamp out democracy, restrict the religious freedom of other denominations and religions, and betray some of the church’s own priests and members in an effort to placate Mussolini. As Denis Mack Smith says, Mussolini claimed that “the Church, as a result of their treaty, was no longer free but subordinate to the State.”81 During Mussolini’s dictatorship, and because of Pope Pius XI’s fatal compromise, this was tragically true.
The concordat with Mussolini is the infamous political legacy of Pius XI’s reign. He is hardly the figure to whom we should turn in thinking about Christ’s Kingship. Even Hauerwas and Baxter’s statements about Pius XI’s insistence on the link between soteriology and politics seems more appropriately elaborated, and less severely compromised, by contemporary exponents of that belief, especially liberation theologians.82 And although most liberation theologians are completely committed to the radical transformation of society in light of Christ’s Kingship—and are equipped with penetrating social analysis, progressive political activity, and broad historical investigation—few are willing to exclusively identify the Kingdom of Christ with the kingdom of this world. Pius XI failed to remember Hauerwas and Baxter’s lesson: that Christianity is in extreme tension with all accounts of the political good.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 31