Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  Another equally significant transformation came out of the 1960s and 1970s as well. This was the rise of modern conservatism. For our purposes, this most notably includes the burgeoning of the religious right as a significant force in American politics. Obviously much of this can be attributed to a reaction to the social changes wrought by the movements of the 1960s. It also originated from a deeper sense of what the right-wing political operative Patrick Buchanan later referred to as the “war for the soul of America.” The religious right emerged in part from the same people (such as Jerry Falwell) who had articulated the fears of many conservative church people about what a racial revolution would do the country. In the 1960s, they blasted Martin Luther King, established “segregation academies” associated with churches in response to the mandatory desegregation of public educational institutions, and decried what they believed to be a moral decline that would lead to the downfall of America. Initially resistant to political activism, they moved significantly on that issue in the 1970s. Richard Nixon courted them with his “silent majority” and “southern strategy” campaigns in 1968 and 1972. The movement reached its apex, and found its unlikely hero, in the election of former actor Ronald Reagan in 1980. Two decades later, religious conservatives found their champion in one who was truly more of their own: former Texas governor and reformed alcoholic and true evangelical believer George W. Bush. In particular, Bush’s very narrow 2004 electoral victory over Senator John Kerry came in large part due to votes in Ohio drawn out by the state’s Definition of Marriage Amendment, mandating in the state’s constitution that only marriages between one man and one woman could be recognized by the state.

  These two forces—the liberation theology emerging from the civil rights movement and the conservative uprising of the religious right—shaped American religious life, and political debate, over the ensuing decades. The rise of theologies emanating from the civil rights struggles, as traced in this chapter, ironically came simultaneously to the decline of 1960s-style liberalism and the triumph of modern conservatism politically, and to some degree in the intellectual world. Moreover, as churches broke through historic barriers to interracial relations, Americans divided up socially and politically into red and blue states; those political colorings came with distinct racial associations and social polarization. A multiethnic, multireligious America emerged and flowered just as social and political rifts deepened, income inequalities worsened over the stretch from about 1974 to 2016, and movements such as Black Lives Matter drew attention to continued racial disparities in American life.

  This chapter traces some of the main elements of theologies that came out of the civil rights and farm workers’ movements of the 1960s. It then looks at recent court battles involving Native American religious practices and suggests why the kinds of liberation theologies that have been empowering for other groups have less resonance for them. Finally, the chapter examines recent religioconservative figures who have articulated theologies of purity that have resurrected older hierarchies of race and religion in American history. The paradox of the rise of liberation theology in religion and the cresting of conservative movements in the sociopolitical world illuminates much about current American political cleavages, racial tensions, and socioeconomic inequalities and divisions. The story also suggests much about the racialized bounds that continue to mark Americans’ religious habitations and practices.

  BLACK POWER, BLACK THEOLOGY, AND THE CHURCH

  By 1969, black Christian authors and theologians exposed the unspoken assumptions and practices of white racism that pervaded the American Christian establishment. The “black theology” movement of the 1960s, led by figures such as James Cone, Vincent Harding, and Jacquelyn Grant highlighted the implicit racism they saw running through the Western theological tradition. Corresponding with these theological developments came radical acts and public displays that shocked many white Christians, who had become accustomed to nonviolent street protests. Their work from this era drove the continued civil rights agenda after the “civil rights movement” as it normally is historically conceived had come to an end with the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.

  Themes of the blackness of God, developed initially by Henry McNeal Turner in the nineteenth century and pursued by a variety of folk artists and poets and writers during the Harlem Renaissance and after, reappeared in the 1960s in the phenomenon of black theology. A professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City since 1969, James Cone became its best-known exponent. First announced in his book Black Theology of Liberation, Cone followed this work with a series of treatises on themes in African American religious history, including the groundbreaking 1972 text The Spirituals and the Blues. Heavily influenced originally by German modernist theologians that he read in his graduate training, Cone later rejected reliance on white theologians and terminology. He argued that black Christians would have to devise their own understandings freed from a dominant theological tradition too entangled in racism and colonialism.

  In reflecting on the course of black theology, Cone noted that “my reflections on God were defined by the great contradiction of racism in the U.S. as mirrored in U.S. history and the freedom movements of the 1950s and 60s.” God is black, Cone said (inspiring also the title of Vine Deloria’s classic of a few years later, God is Red). By that, Cone meant not that God had a particular skin color, but rather that God always and by definition aligns Himself with the oppressed and against the oppressors. Black people in the United States were thus a chosen people. He sought to bring together Martin Luther’s King stress on beloved community with Malcolm X’s emphasis on justice for the oppressed and judgment on the oppressor. God is black, he said, because he “freely chooses to be known as the One who liberates victims from their oppression.” After his original articulation of black theology, he was more convinced than ever that God could only be known among the oppressed struggling for justice. He found no place for a “colorless God in a society where human beings suffer precisely because of their color.”

  Knowing God meant siding with the oppressed and participating in their liberation. Asking “‘How can white persons become black?’ was analogous to the Philippian jailer’s question to Paul and Silas, ‘What must I do to be saved?’” The fallacy was thinking it could be achieved through work, rather than understanding that “blackness, or salvation (the two are synonymous) is the work of God, not a human work. It is not something we accomplish; it is a gift.” Cone challenged the notion of a “raceless” Christ: “For whites to find him with big lips and kinky hair as offensive as it was for the Pharisees to find him partying with tax-collectors. But whether whites want to hear it or not, Christ is black, baby, with all of the features which are so detestable to white society.”

  Others who had been closely involved with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement turned to the insights of black theology to comprehend their experiences in the 1960s. In “Black Power and the American Christ,” the civil rights organizer and Mennonite minister Vincent Harding interpreted black theology for a largely white and liberal Protestant leadership; Harding insisted that the open expression of black fury was far healthier than the silent anger that had broiled underneath the surface for so long. When blacks saw whites fleeing cities in racial transition, “leaving their stained glass mausoleums behind them,” black power advocates found ample material for their critiques of white America. In place of the “redemptive suffering” preached by SNCC, black power could be the “redemptive anger” that would bring down judgment on white American power:

  The ideology of blackness surely grows out of the deep ambivalence of American Negroes to the Christ we have encountered here. . . . If the American Christ and his followers have indeed helped to mold the Black Power movement, then might it not be that the God whom many of us insist on keeping alive is not only alive but just? May he not be attempting to break through to us with at least as much urgency as we once sensed at the height of the good old “We
Shall Overcome” days? Perhaps he is writing on the wall, saying that we Christians, black and white, must choose between death with the American Christ and life with the Suffering Servant of God. Who dares deny that God may have chosen once again the black sufferers for a new assault on the hard shell of indifference and fear that encases so many Americans?

  In this rendering, black power was a response to the white Christ foisted on people of color in American history.

  Harding had been involved with the National Committee of Negro Churchmen, which served as a liaison between black civil rights leaders and the white Protestant establishment. Harding and other black churchmen on the committee perceived a persistent problem that had faced America since the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619. They saw the fundamental distortion in American life derived from imbalances of wealth and power between whites and blacks. This “distortion” then justified the assumption that whites could exercise power while blacks should appeal to the conscience and not seek to use the mechanisms of power to advance their agenda. But discussions of power were central to the Christian tradition, for a more equitable sharing of social goods was a prerequisite for “authentic human interaction.” Key in that would be blacks finding self-love, for “as long as we are filled with hatred for ourselves we will be unable to respect others.” It meant also building from power bases already established in black communities.

  On May 4, 1969, James Forman, formerly of SNCC, stormed the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City, one of the country’s most prestigious (and socially conscious) congregations. Forman’s act, and the resulting document the “Black Manifesto,” put into practice the assumptions explicit in academic black theology. Forman presented the “black manifesto,” which was a product of the National Black Economic Development Conference in April of that year. In his address, Forman connected the black struggle in America to the cause of colored people around the world. “Caution is fine,” he warned, “but no oppressed people ever gained their liberation until they were ready to fight, to use whatever means necessary, including the use of force and power of the gun to bring down the colonizer.” Forman argued that the churches were sustained “by the military might of the colonizers,” and called on “black people to commence the disruption of the racist churches and synagogues throughout the United States.”

  Performative acts such as those of Forman coincided with a national hysteria about like actions by the Black Panthers and student radical groups. Public reaction to them significantly fed growing support for “law and order” and “silent majority” political candidates who spoke to fears about the breakdown of social order. Martin Luther King himself, later in his life, also had raised power relations, economic inequalities, and colonialist military interventions abroad as a central part of his critique of American society. But by that time, the “classic” period of the civil rights movement already had solidified into the kind of nostalgia Vincent Harding portrayed, and advocates of black power demonized by comparison. Local church people in places such as Cairo, Illinois, made up the grassroots of black power crusades, but nationally the movement was perceived to have moved away from the Christian base of the civil rights freedom struggle.

  Advocates of “black theology” soon found themselves under critique, namely from black women who perceived the old false god of patriarchy barely hidden under the theoretically revolutionary rhetoric of black power. A young black feminist theologian named Jacquelyn Grant articulated major themes of black women’s theology. She insisted that “black theology cannot continue to treat Black women as if they were invisible creatures who are on the outside looking into the Black experience.” Given that women made up the majority of members of black churches (a demographic also true of white Protestant churches), a true liberation theology would have to address the freeing of black women from sexism, as well as the unshackling of black people in America from racism. Sexism remained a reality in black communities as well as white. While black men sought to expose stereotypes and identify with the oppressed, they could ignore the same conditions imposed on women. Western ideals of beauty and ugliness, stereotypes of black hypersexuality, combined with Christian teachings blaming women for the fall of man into sin, all combined to degrade black women, she argued. The injustices could be seen in the male-dominated structure of black churches, where men monopolized the professional ministry just as was the case in white churches.

  The black theology articulated by Cone, Wilmore, Grant, and others eventually fed into a worldwide movement of liberation theology in the 1980s. By that time, it was associated increasingly with radical priests in Central America who were confronting grotesque violence at the hands of right-wing paramilitaries trained in and funded by the United States. Later, after a long hiatus, black theology exploded on the national scene during the presidential election of 2008. Reverend Jeremiah Wright was the pastor of a large black congregation in Chicago, and Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic frontrunner, was one of its members. Wright gained infamy when snippets of his sermons and his rhetorical phrase “God damn America” went viral. Openly supporting Obama, Wright turned to the Bible and pronounced that “Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country and who lived in a culture that was controlled by rich white people.”

  Obama himself quickly distanced himself from his former pastor, insisting that Wright’s condemnations failed to recognize the progress that had been made since the 1960s. Commentators pointed to Wright’s roots in the black theology movement of the 1960s. Yet those seeking to explain the phrase “God damn America” recounted a truncated history of black theology. This short history of black liberation theology failed to explain the deep-seated anger within Wright’s preaching or his nod to much longer histories of racial oppression. They failed to witness the longer histories of liberation theology going back over generations of black religious thought and action. Narrowing that history to the recent past alone ignored the variety of ways (including in music and art, as well as formal theology) that African Americans had challenged the connection of whiteness and divinity in American history. Many of the examples raised in previous chapters of this book suggest the long life and power of black theology in the everyday religious lives of black Americans for centuries.

  LA RAZA AND THE CHURCH

  Black liberation theology found a counterpart in Latino Catholic activist thought during this same period. The parallels and differences between a mostly Protestant black liberation theology and a mostly Catholic Latino one suggested much about possibilities for alliances as well as differences that naturally emerged from such divergent intellectual backgrounds and social experiences.

  Following Cesar Chavez’s leadership of the strikes of farm workers from 1965 forward, the Catholic Church increasingly appeared to be on the side of established economic forces. From Pope Leo’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum forward, Catholic workers found theological support for labor organizations. Despite such support of the pontiff, growers in California enlisted allies in the Catholic hierarchy to suspend priests engaged in pro-Union activity during the farm workers’ movement. Recognizing how little the welfare of American Latinos mattered to the Catholic Church establishment, organizers sympathetic to the work of Chavez demanded that the Church address the issue of Latinos, particularly the Mexican and Central Americans who represented the largest single ethnic group of Catholics in San Diego. As one writer put it in La Verdad (The Truth), a movement newsletter, charged that the Catholic Church had been “milking the Mexican American barrio since the day of the conquistadors.” The church had accepted generations of contributions from the people, but had done little or nothing for them.

  Leaders of Católicos por la Raza (CPLR) asked the people of the barrio, “How many churches, let alone million-dollar churches, did Christ build?” While Catholic leaders built showplaces, its people suffered. Latino Catholics had watched the church in the Southwest become “no longer a church of blood, a Church of struggle, a Church of sacrifice. It is
our fault because we have not raised our voices as Catholics and as poor people for the love of Christ. We can’t love our people without demanding better housing, education health, and so many other needs we share in common.”

  The founding activists of CPLR made their Catholic theologies and sympathies clear, but insisted that the Church had failed to serve its Latino constituents. They demanded that church leaders come to the barrio, just as Jesus met the people where they were, and align themselves with la gente. In November 1969, meeting at a Catholic campground just east of San Diego, a group of Latino Catholics and students seized the area, renamed it Campo Cultural de la Raza, and sent a list of thirteen grievances to the bishop. They insisted on fair pay for Latino employees of the Church, that Catholic schools provide free admittance and texts for Chicano children, that Latino laymen and priests be considered for positions of authority in the Church, and that the church support the Delano grape boycott and Chavez’s United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. On Christmas Eve 1969, more than three hundred Latino activists attempted to enter St. Basil’s Church on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. While James Frances Cardinal McIntyre led elite parishioners in a chorus of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” those from CPLR were locked out of the church. Off-duty policemen attacked the protestors, twenty of whom were arrested for disturbing the peace.