The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Given Hauerwas’s belief in the unity of the virtues, the choice of Pius XI—a pope who was antidemocratic, unfaithful in fateful ways to the church and its Lord, and intolerant of religious and political freedom—as the best exponent of the Kingship of Christ is not only unfortunate; it is no less than tragic.83 But then, given the dilemmas I have shown Hauerwas and Baxter to be trapped by, and their refusal to engage the nitty-gritty world of real politics, their misled—and misleading—choice is sadly predictable.

  Hauerwas and Baxter have largely missed the major areas of concern in the struggles to relate church and state, and religion and politics, because they have not viewed these matters from the perspective of those who suffered for the freedom to worship and practice their beliefs. The political struggle to implement democratic ideals in our society is the real story behind the First Amendment. It is about much more than the wall that separates church and state. If the truth be told, however, the real wall of separation most grievous to American Christianity and the Church of Christ is not between church and state; it remains the wall between black and white. About that, Hauerwas and Baxter have nothing to say.

  Sixteen

  GARDNER TAYLOR: THE POET LAUREATE OF THE AMERICAN PULPIT

  One of my most enjoyable moments as a writer came when I interviewed the Rev. Dr. Gardner Taylor for this profile, published first in the Christian Century, which I serve as a contributing editor. Taylor is one of the nation’s foremost preachers and certainly one of the twentieth century’s homiletical giants. He preached in sanctuaries around the world and served as the president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention. And for more than forty years, Taylor was pastor of the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, making it one of the legendary pulpits in American Christendom. Besides being a master wordsmith, Taylor is a man of great humility. He is also a sly wit and a sage bristling with insight and wisdom. In order to fully appreciate his many gifts, one has to hear Taylor, like all great orators, in person, or at the very least, on audio recording. I encourage readers to purchase the multivolume The Words of Gardner Taylor, edited by Edward L. Taylor, which features Taylor’s written words accompanied by compact discs of his sermons and lectures (Judson Press).

  “GARDNER TAYLOR IS THE GREATEST PREACHER living, dead, or unborn,” Wyatt Tee Walker proclaimed as he introduced Taylor in the fall of 1993 at a service marking Walker’s twenty-fifth anniversary as pastor of Harlem’s Canaan Baptist Church. (Walker gained fame while serving as one of Martin Luther King’s trusted lieutenants.) Among black Baptists, the pastoral anniversary forms a distinct genre of religious appreciation. It is an often lavishly orchestrated event joining praise and pocketbook in feting a congregation’s spiritual head.

  But on the crisp October morning of his celebration, Walker shared the spotlight with the man Time magazine in 1980 dubbed “the Dean of the Nation’s black preachers,” a phrase that then New York Mayor David Dinkins would later repeat in his remarks at the service. After acknowledging Taylor’s role as an adviser (“he used to tell me, ‘Dave, you’ve got to bite bullets and butter biscuits’”), Dinkins declared Taylor’s preaching could be described in “only two ways: good and better.”

  These free-flowing compliments might appear to be the natural excesses of a feel-good service where the spirit is high and such praise, no matter how heartfelt, is by design the order of the day. But they mirror the sentiments of many more—black and white, religious and secular, preaching authorities and lay-people—who have been entranced, even transformed, by Taylor’s legendary oratorical gifts.

  Taylor, however, is more modest about his protean pulpit work. When I mentioned Time’s declaration, he deflected the tribute with characteristic humor. “You know what they say a Dean is, at least of eastern schools?” he asks, playing me with the instincts and timing of a seasoned comic. “Somebody too smart to be president, but not smart enough to teach.” He smiled, shrugged his shoulders in self-deprecation, and deadpanned, “So much for being Dean.”

  His humor and refreshing lack of hubris, combined with a preaching genius of extraordinary duration, have won the energetic seventy-seven-year-old Taylor a legion of admirers during his half century of ministry. Most of his career has been spent as pastor of Brooklyn’s 14,000-member Concord Baptist Church of Christ. He made that pulpit perhaps the most prestigious in black Christendom before retiring in 1990 after forty-two years of service. The imposing, block-long gray brick church is a massive monument to black Christianity’s continuing vitality in the midst of the well-documented decline of mainline religion. Under Taylor’s leadership, Concord built a home for the aged, organized a fully accredited grade school (headed for over thirty years by Taylor’s late wife, Laura), and developed the Christ Fund, a million dollar endowment for investing in the Brooklyn community.

  For Taylor, his success is an example of how God works in human life. “It is as if God said ‘I’m going to take this unlikely person from the Deep South and I’m going to open opportunities for him to show [the world] what I can do,’” he says.

  Taylor was born poor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1918, the only son of the Rev. Washington and Selina Taylor. “My father was a huge, tall, ebony man who had no trace of anything but Africa in him,” Taylor says. “And he was extraordinarily arrogant about it.” By contrast, his mother “looked white.” After her husband’s death, Selina Taylor attended “normal school” to become a teacher, later earning a degree from Southern University through extension courses. In one of his four books of sermons, Taylor writes that despite his parents’ lack of formal education, they “had a natural feel for the essential music of the English language wedded to an intimate and emotional affection for the great transactions of the Scriptures.” The same is true of their son.

  Although his father died before Taylor was thirteen, his father’s influence, more than that of any other preacher’s—especially his eloquent declamation and his wide range of reference—marks his son’s preaching style. “Dad didn’t finish high school, but he read voraciously. Sixty years ago, he spoke about Darwin’s survival of the fittest and the battle of Thermopylae.”

  “Wash” Taylor enjoyed a wide reputation among Louisiana blacks for his brilliant preaching. Carl Stewart, Gardner Taylor’s lifelong friend and a former basketball coach at Southern University, has for several years hosted a Baton Rouge radio show devoted exclusively to broadcasting the younger Taylor’s sermons. Stewart illustrates Wash Taylor’s preaching appeal by telling the story of a discussion between two Louisianans about an upcoming funeral. “‘Hey, are you going to the funeral today?’ one person asked. And his friend said, ‘Who’s dead?’ And the other fella retorted, ‘It really doesn’t matter. Wash Taylor is preaching.’”

  Despite his father’s influence, Taylor attended Louisiana’s Leland College in hopes of becoming a lawyer. “Clarence Darrow fascinated me,” Taylor says in explaining his career choice. And because an aunt who helped raise him held the ministry in contempt, Taylor confesses that his view of religion wasn’t exalted. “I didn’t have the healthiest attitude about black preachers,” Taylor says. “I thought preaching was a foolish way for people of normal intelligence to waste their lives.”

  But Taylor’s plans changed dramatically when he survived a deadly automobile accident in which two white men died. Taylor experienced his “call” in that event, discerning God’s claim on his life. “I thought that God must have wanted me to be his lawyer.” Instead of enrolling at the University of Michigan law school where he had been admitted, Taylor ventured north to the now defunct Oberlin School of Theology. At Oberlin he read avidly, following writers ranging from Heywood Broun to Walter Lippmann. Their “literary styles affected me,” he says. He also served as pastor of a church in nearby Elyria, Ohio, and after graduation, he pastored one in Baton Rouge, before being summoned at the tender age of thirty to Brooklyn’s Concord Baptist Church, then with a membership of more than 5,000.

  In New York Taylor j
oined an elite fellowship of ministers. “I don’t think ever in the history of these two millennia have so many pulpit geniuses come together in one setting as I found in New York in the early ’50s. . . . My God, it was unbelievable,” he says. Taylor’s multiracial aggregate included such preaching luminaries as Adam Clayton Powell Jr., George Buttrick, Paul Scherer, Robert McCracken, Sandy Ray, and Fulton J. Sheen. Taylor has fond memories and wonderful stories about them all.

  “Adam . . . with his angry oratory . . . was withering, blazing,” he says of Powell, the controversial and colorful former pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church and a longtime congressman. “He was a bon vivant. Adam had hair he could throw over his brow.” Powell’s nonkinky, straight mane, along with his pale color, led to his being called “light, bright and almost white.” “While we [black people] talk about the exaltation of our features, there was still [in the admiration of Powell’s features] a lot left in us that adored white society,” Taylor says.

  “Buttrick [possessed] the poetry of the English Romantic poets. He was Wordsworth in the pulpit. He had a probing mind and relentless logic, and a gift for aphorism. For example, he said that the past ought to be a milestone, not a millstone.” Paul Scherer, a former professor of homiletics at Union Theological Seminary, had a thespian bent. “Scherer was grand in manner. He had a great voice and a magnificent head of hair. As Jim Fry, a former student of his used to say, ‘When Scherer said good morning, it was an occasion.’”

  When Scherer was invited to deliver the prestigious Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale University, “He said to a former classmate who was then a faculty member at Yale, ‘You know, it’s a great honor for them to have me here. I can’t tell you how honored I feel. But why did they wait so long?”’ Taylor relates, laughing at the story. Taylor delivered the 100th installment of the Beecher Lectures, which were published in 1977 as How Shall They Preach.

  Taylor’s unique blend of gifts may place him at the forefront of even this great cadre of preachers. His mastery of the technical aspects of preaching is remarkable. He brilliantly uses metaphor and has an uncanny sense of rhythmic timing put to dramatic but not crassly theatrical effect. He condenses profound biblical truths into elegantly memorable phrases. He makes keen use of parallels to layer and reinforce the purpose of his sermons. His stunning control of narrative flow seamlessly weaves his sermons together. His adroit mix and shift of cadences reflects the various dimensions of religious emotion. He superbly uses stories to illustrate profound intellectual truths and subtle repetition to unify sermons. And his control of his resonant voice allows him to pliantly whisper or prophetically thunder the truths of the gospel. What was once alleged of southern Baptist Preacher Carlyle Marney may be equally said of Taylor: he has a voice like God’s—only deeper.

  Taylor’s commanding physical presence, hinged on a solid 6'1" frame, suggests the regal bearing of pulpit royalty. His broad face reveals seasoned character. His wide set eyes are alive to the world around him. Taylor’s forehead is an artistic work of chiseled complexity. Furrows furiously cross-hatch his bronze brow, extending to the receded areas of his exposed, upper cranium where a shock of grey hair fastidiously obeys its combed direction. Taylor’s massive hands are like finely etched soft leather. They function as dual promontories that stab the air in the broad sweep of pulpit gesture or clasp each other in the steadied self-containment of quiet reflection.

  Taylor’s snappy sartorial habits, though, hint more at Wall Street executive than Baptist preacher. For a class on homiletics that he occasionally teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary, Taylor wore a dark-blue, double-breasted wool suit with a windowpane design, a burgundy-striped shirt, and a paisley tie. And at Wyatt Walker’s pastoral anniversary, he wore a charcoal-gray pin-striped suit, with a white shirt and burgundy tie.

  But it is not his sharp dressing which draws most attention to Taylor. The preacher’s magnetism lies in his intimate and unequalled command of the language and literature of the English-speaking pulpit.

  James Earl Massey, himself a noted preacher, professor of homiletics, and dean of Anderson School of Theology in Indiana, ranks Taylor “as one of the top five unique pulpit geniuses of any generation in American life.” Massey contends that the gifts such figures as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Phillips Brooks, and Henry Ward Beecher brought to the American pulpit scene, “Taylor has brought in one person.” Taylor possesses Beecher’s “prolix ability to spin words,” Brooks’s “earnestness of style and breadth of learning,” and Fosdick’s “ability to appeal to the masses and yet maintain a dignity in doing so.”

  Preaching authority Henry H. Mitchell, author of the widely cited Black Preaching, points to Taylor’s familiarity with the preaching tradition as a key to his appeal. “He’s not only master of black preaching as such. He knows all the great white preachers and quotes them [as well].”

  Carolyn Knight, a professor of preaching at Union Theological Seminary and highly regarded pastor of a New York church, recalls a conversation she had with Taylor that displayed his endless pursuit of preaching excellence. “He told me last year—and he advised me to do it—that in preparation for his Beecher Lectures, he went down into the stacks of Union’s library and read every set of published Beecher lectures.”

  Taylor’s reputation as the “poet laureate of American Protestantism” is a considerable achievement. Throughout its history, black preaching has been widely viewed as a form of public address brimming with passion but lacking intellectual substance. Like black religion in general, black preaching is often seen as the cathartic expression of pent-up emotion, a verbal outpouring that supposedly compensates for low self-esteem or oppressed racial status. Not only are such stereotypes developed in ignorance of the variety of black preaching styles, but they don’t take into account the black churches that boast a long history of educated clergy.

  James Weldon Johnson’s classic poem God’s Trombones provides a literary glimpse of the art and imagination of the black folk preacher. C. L. Franklin’s recorded sermons, spread out over sixty albums for Chess Records, brought the vigor and ecstasy of the black chanted sermon—dubbed in black church circles as “the whoop”—to the American public. By and large, however, Americans have remained insulated from the greatest rhetorical artists of the black pulpit.

  Of course, broad segments of American society have sampled the richness of black preaching through the brilliant political oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson. Both King’s and Jackson’s styles of public speech—their impassioned phrasing, intellectual acuity, and imaginative metaphors—reflect their roots in the black church. And their involvement in civil rights and politics extends the venerable tradition of black preachers serving as social critics and activists.

  But their oratory—like that of preacher-politicians from Adam Clayton Powell to William Gray—has been shaped by the peculiar demands of public life and informed by a mission to translate the aspirations of black Americans to the larger secular society. The aims of their public speech have led them to emphasize certain elements of the black preaching and church tradition such as social justice, the institutional nature of sin, and the redistribution of wealth, while leaving aside such others as the cultivation of the spiritual life, the nurturing of church growth, and the development of pastoral theology. Such varying emphases are usually framed as the differences between “prophetic” and “priestly” religion. If the former has been most visible to American society in the guise of churchbased civil rights activists, the latter has been closer to the heart of the religious experience of most black Christians.

  Though Taylor has combined both approaches—he was active in the civil rights movement in New York, and was a close friend and preaching idol of Martin Luther King, Jr.—he realizes that his life work has ruled out the kind of visibility that comes from high-profile activism. “I recognized early that the [kind of] work I do is not attention grabbing. . . . When I came along . . . college presidents were the lords of black A
merica. Later, it became civil rights [leaders]. Still later, it became [holders of] political office.”

  Taylor humorously admits that with every attempt he made to “do something else [other than pastor], I got trapped. . . . They put the whole board of education off when I was a member,” he says. “Governor Rockefeller wiped it out.”

  As James Massey maintains, “Taylor has stuck with the church. He has been busy handling the themes of the gospel, busy heralding what it was that Jesus came to do. He’s been busy honoring the name of his Lord, shaping a community around that name and seeking to effect society in ways that are consonant with the gospel purpose. This is not newsworthy, like leading a sit-in.”

  Don Matthews of Washington’s First Baptist Church, the church of fellow Baptists Bill Clinton and Al Gore, agrees. “We’re in a time when the pulpit and the church in general are not particularly admired by anybody else that isn’t in it. The only place it is perceived as powerful is in the political world. . . . But the people who have the spiritual word to speak aren’t paid much attention by the New York Times or the Washington Post.”

  William Augustus Jones, noted pastor of Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist Church, contends that Christians are “resident aliens” who have a radically different perspective on the world than secular citizens. “For a preacher to be regarded as popular means that his faithfulness to the word is not what it ought to be.”

  Ironically, Taylor’s most bitter disappointments and defeats have come within the church world to which he has been single-mindedly devoted. Over dinner at Greenwich Village’s popular Spanish restaurant El Charro’s, Taylor, joined by his wife Laura—a shock of healthy black hair loosely pinned atop her hauntingly beautiful ebony face of high cheek bones and deep-set eyes—recalls the 1952 fire that destroyed Concord Church.