by Curtis Bunn
But now, almost 400 years later, the church faces another challenge as less mature, yet even more feverish and blunt secular mass movements are at the societal helm, directing and demanding racial and social justice change, gender equality, defunding of or abolition of police forces, reform of the carceral state, and promoting LGBTQ rights. The question is, has the church overpromised and underdelivered?
“Well, I think seriously, if you look at Black movements in the United States, they’ve never been led by the church,” the Reverend Traci Blackmon said.
For decades, some observers have commented there has always been this “creation myth” around the civil rights movement: that the Black church was the first responder and was ever-present among frontline workers during the struggle for Black dignity and Black legal and political rights. The soaring rhetoric of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was always the call to the faithful, the commanding voice in the ears and heads of people; the “I Have a Dream” speech, when they recall the battles fought to gain basic rights, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which ended segregation in public spaces, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting.
But was the African American church really that white knight?
“It’s a fallacy of how we present a story after the fact. Certainly, there was involvement, but the church has never been the leading actor of Black movements for liberation,” Blackmon said. “They’ve been a partner…But just because Martin Luther King Jr. was a preacher doesn’t mean that the church was leading the movement.”
That might sound like blasphemy to many in the Black community, which has been weaned on a history that the church was always closely aligned with the push for civil rights. But even though Dr. King’s first church, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (the name changed in 1978, to Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, to honor Dr. King) in Montgomery, Alabama, was where he incubated his civil rights leadership, he moved on when his activism was deemed a distraction from his ministry.
He was once admonished that they, the church leadership, had hired a preacher, not an activist. Dr. King co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, which ultimately freed him to do social justice and Black liberation work with the practice of nonviolent protest. While led by ministers, the SCLC is a quasi-religious organization, more concerned with civil and political rights than with prayer and worship. Other Black religious groups, such as the separatist Nation of Islam, were not interested in actively soliciting the United States for human or civil rights. It wanted to be separate: an autonomous state within a nation. Malcolm X, before and after an epiphany around race on a trip to several African countries, was adamant that the United States was venal and corrupt, and wondered aloud, why would Black people want to be a part of that? Dr. King himself once said, in exasperation, to the entertainer and activist Harry Belafonte Jr.: “I fear I am integrating my people into a burning house.”
During the late fifties and early sixties, in Birmingham, more than “90 percent of the Black ministers shunned the activities of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” according to Paul Harvey, professor of history at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and author of Civil Rights Movements and Religion in America and The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. “Only a minority of churches and clergymen were involved in the movement.”
Some were comfortable with their standing in the Black community and fearful of the backlash from white society and their own parishioners. They too were apt to see marchers and protesters, Northern or otherwise, as troublemakers and agitators. Dr. King’s SCLC co-founders included the Reverend Joseph Lowery, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Even with those stalwarts on board, it’s not insulting to question the role of the church, even as we still mourn the 2020 losses of other church-based, civil rights titans, Congressman John Lewis and the Reverend C. T. Vivian.
In the encomiums and sweeping hagiography offered for the duo, the civil rights movement, once again, was offered up as a church-led, male-centered effort, when it was actually far more complicated.
“It was never led by the Black church. That’s a myth. It was a coalition between Black men and Black women,” said Ruby Sales, legendary social justice and civil rights activist and executive director of the Spirit House Project, a nonprofit organization that uses the arts and education to help bring about racial and social justice change and spiritual maturity. “Ordinary share crop farmers, maids, janitors, and teachers were the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement. And it’s only in the hands of people who bring to the telling of the movement, their own prejudices, their own aspects that they have reduced it to an either/or dynamic, when in fact it was simultaneous.”
In Upon This Rock: The Black Church, Nonviolence, and the Civil Rights Movement, author Allison Calhoun-Brown, who teaches at Georgia State University, wrote: “Churches have traditionally been viewed as places of stability and strength in the African American community. In church, one could find politics, arts, music, education, economic development, social services, civic associations, leadership opportunities and business enterprises. Black churches have been aggregated into the singular institution called ‘the Black church’ to the extent that they are united by their cultural, historic, social and spiritual mission of fighting the ravages of racism.”
Over the decades, the church has become less of a focus for Black life, and congregations are shrinking and aging. That said, when motivated, when it feels that it is singularly under attack, it can be energized and transformed into a potent force. Reverend Raphael Warnock’s victory in Georgia’s Senate runoff election was fueled in part by an unholy campaign waged by his opponent, Senator Kelly Loeffler, which characterized Reverend Warnock as “radical” and sought to demonize Black liberation theology. The fact that Reverend Warnock, a Democrat, commands the pulpit in Atlanta, at the church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. King once occupied, made it seem to some that the attacks were on the late, great man’s legacy.
“Don’t come for the Black church” became a rallying cry, which helped Reverend Warnock ride a tsunami of urban and rural Black voter turnout to make history as the first-ever Black senator from the state.
But as many churches face financial challenges, some in church leadership have foregone their mission and mandate to simply survive, even though it might mean leasing their souls to political actors who don’t have the interests of African Americans at heart. Some have accepted government funding through numerous federal programs to stay afloat. During President Donald J. Trump’s one term, it was not uncommon to see groups of Black, mostly male, ministers (to be fair, leaders of some Historically Black Colleges and Universities, HBCUs, gave sop to Trump, too) who would appear for photo opportunities as the then-president signed some executive order benefiting religious institutions.
In May 2020, in honor of the National Day of Prayer, Trump, with his Evangelical Advisory Board alongside, held a ceremony in the Rose Garden and signed an executive order on the establishment of a White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative.
“Under the guise of religious freedom, this executive order further entrenches the Administration’s policies to allow religion to discriminate,” warned Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonprofit lobbying organization. “At the same time, it strips the limited religious liberty protections that exist for individuals who use the government-funded social services. First, the order creates ‘Faith and Opportunity’ offices or liaisons in every federal agency and department and tasks them with enforcing the U.S. Department of Justice’s 25-page ‘guidance on religious liberty.’
“This guidance contains extreme interpretations of the law in an effort to give a green light to religious exemptions, regardless of how an exemption would affect other people or the public interest. For example, the guidance explicitly states that faith-based organizations may accept taxpayer dollars to p
erform social services and use those funds to discriminate in hiring. And we know some government contractors want to cite religion to refuse to provide vital services required under their contract, like reproductive health care to victims of sexual assault.”
The church, white and Black, has been the beneficiary of federal largesse, particularly, though not exclusively, during Republican administrations. In turn, especially in the white evangelical and some other mainline denominations, they delivered at the ballot box for conservative candidates and the Republican Party. In exchange for legislation and proximity to power, some have been willing to turn a blind eye to governmental policies, such as sequestering children in cages at the southwestern border, which are antithetical to Christ’s example.
Some Black churches and ministers were unabashedly complicit. They were muted about the atrocities at the border. And some still claimed that President Trump was not a racist, even as he rolled back policies aimed at diversity, equality, and equity. At the funeral in Houston for George Floyd, the Reverend Al Sharpton delivered a eulogy that emphatically called out his fellow clergy: “There are too many cowards in the pulpit!”
One minister with a national profile who would not be called a coward is Reverend William Barber. Firmly in the tradition of Dr. King, Reverend Barber’s crusade, virtual and in person, centers on support of racial, economic, and environmental justice for everyone, specifically the poor and “low wealth” American, who he is convinced remain but an afterthought. “I do believe, and I’ll be honest with you, I’m conservative in this way, that our sins can find us out. I do believe that there can be retribution,” said Reverend Barber in a Q & A with The New York Times Magazine. “What you sow, you can reap.”
BLM and the Black Church
In the aftermath of the killing of Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement had arguably become the largest, most effective, and most far-ranging social justice and human rights movement…ever.
Black Lives Matter certainly has overshadowed some of the roles that always defaulted to the Black church, and some wondered if it hadn’t totally eclipsed the church. By marshaling the burgeoning power of social media, BLM did not depend on institutions or bureaucracies that might exclude marginalized communities, specifically LGBTQ ones, or go through the regular community and church-based channels to reach an attentive audience and activate it.
It was an adhocracy made powerful by technology. Simple hashtags such as #JusticeforTrayvon, #Blacklivesmatter, #Sandrabland, about the death of a young Black woman while in police custody in a small Texas town, and #SamuelDubose, who died at the hands of a Cincinnati police officer, became the jumping-off points for sharing information, stimulating conversation, and mobilizing groups to initiate corporeal protests.
“Black Twitter was instrumental in marshaling people and energy around issues like police shootings of unarmed African Americans in Ferguson and beyond,” says Karen Grigsby Bates, a veteran journalist and correspondent for National Public Radio. “It brought attention to aggressive policing before op-ed writers started to weigh in on the cause.”
Reverend Blackmon, the senior pastor of Christ the King United Church of Christ in Florissant, Missouri, won’t definitively say that the church has been sidelined. “There have always been preachers and Black leaders who have been deeply engaged in public square ministry and who show up in new and continuing ways with young people,” she said. “And that’s historical. And that’s current.”
Some agree with Reverend Blackmon, who was intimately involved in the protests in Ferguson after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. “When they came to Ferguson, by the busloads, kind of Freedom Ride–style, I don’t think I was in town when they initially showed,” recalled Blackmon. “But they slept in and met in the basement of a church, Saint John United Church of Christ, and began to strategize and organize in new ways. They weren’t there because they wanted to go to church. They were there because the church provided resources in terms of spaces to sleep and a place to eat. But they did end up going to worship there on that Sunday, out of deep gratitude.”
The support the BLM movement received in Ferguson was not a one-off, as more clergy got involved, not in the organizing, but in the lending of tangible brick-and-mortar support and spiritual sustenance.
In her book Ferguson & Faith: Sparking Leadership & Awakening Community, Leah Gunning Francis, who teaches at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, recalled the memorable turn of events that took place on the night of September 29, 2014:
Young activists were present and chanting fervently, and the police were posted in front of them, fully dressed in riot gear. However, on this day, more clergy were present than usual, because word had spread that young protesters were often being arrested during these evening protests. In the midst of the standoff, a few clergy took a decidedly different public action: they knelt on the sidewalk outside the police station and prayed. They symbolically laid down their collars on the altar of justice and made clear that their resistance was an action of their faith.
One can point to high-profile performative incidents such as that to bolster the view that while the church may not always be fully on board with the BLM movement, faith and spirituality are.
“The fight for Black liberation has always been a faith movement,” Hebah Farrag, assistant director of research at the University of California Center for Religion and Civic Culture, explained. “It is just a different, newer faith.” In some ways the BLM movement has embraced West African religions, such as Yoruba Itan and Ifa; their spirituality and practices and ceremonies before meetings may include pouring of sacrificial libation and the invoking of ancestors.
“Reporting focused on the dissent and the protest and clouded the movement in a sense of aggression,” Farrag added. “I was seeing people carrying sage dressed in white. I was seeing ceremony and ritual…and I didn’t see any of that being picked up in the media.”
Reverend Dr. Valerie Toney Parker, a young adult minister on Chicago’s South Side, said, “It’s a fair critique” to ask if the Black church has been AWOL at this critical groundswell moment in the fight for universal social and racial justice.
“In fact, my work was centered [on] the assertion by Professor Eddie Glaude Jr., of Princeton, that the Black church is dead,” Parker said. “The Black church is not the center of Black life as it once was forty or fifty years ago. And because it’s not the center of Black life, a lot of social ills go unchecked. The church continues to operate more in a space and place of piety. The Black church is still alive with its vibrant worship. But as we’ve known it as the center of Black life and as we’ve known it as a pillar of our community for addressing civil rights and social justice matters, that part is dead. But like Lazarus, the question is: Can it be called back to life? That really is the question.”
Whether it’s comatose and on life support, or going through the motions, while the traditional Black church has never been at odds with the goals of racial justice and racial equality, there is a disconnect between what can be referred to as the traditional church and the BLM movement, given the provenance of the latter.
“So, the church sees itself as the moral compass of Black people, really. And yet does maintain this patriarchal and homophobic position, putting both as biblically supported and projecting that,” said the Reverend Nana Carmen Ashurst, who serves on the ministerial staff of the Greater Centennial African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church in Mount Vernon, New York.
Reverend Ashurst, who was once the president of Def Jam Recordings and Rush Communications and is presently the chair of the board of the Universal Hip Hop Museum, added that the composition of congregations should make them more inclusive. “The Black Church thinks of itself as having a long history in the leadership in the Black community, the fight for social justice, even though as an organizational structure in itself, it’s oppressive against women. It’s a funny thing, I’m an AME Zion and we call ourselves ‘the freedom
church,’ and Harriet Tubman was a member of the AME Zion Church and left her home to the Zion Church, and Frederick Douglass was an AME Zion preacher. So, a long history in the freedom movement and then of course, the civil rights movement.
“And of course, the majority of members of the churches, of all Black churches, are women. But they nonetheless maintain the patriarchal hierarchy, and the churches are extremely hierarchical; the pastor is the center of everything.”
It’s not gone unnoticed to many that in Reverend Warnock’s senatorial victory the paradigm of the traditional Black church plays out: The pastor ascends, even as the foundational, hard work is done by Black women. In this case, the persistent efforts of Stacey Yvonne Abrams, founder of the voting rights group Fair Fight Action and leadership of the state’s Democratic apparatus that includes Representative Lucy McBath and the chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia, state senator Nikema Williams, who represents the late congressman John Lewis’s district.
That has always been a salient tension between the church, Black and white, and the BLM movement. When Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi formed BLM in 2013, in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who a year earlier had followed and shot to death seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, it was neither male-dominated nor male-centered. It was much more inclusive than previous groups, organizations, or movements.
“By virtue of who we are,” Tometi, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, who built the Black Lives Matter website, told the Guardian, “me being the daughter of immigrants, Alicia and Patrisse being queer…naturally our own identities inform the work.”
They took inspiration from activists such as Bayard Rustin, a co-founder of the SCLC and an architect of many of the civil rights strategies in the late 1950s and 1960s, who also led the organizing of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. It was there, from that open-air pulpit, that Dr. King delivered the historic “I Have a Dream” speech/sermon. Rustin was gay, and many in Dr. King’s inner circle were openly hostile to him. He was not allowed to speak on that hot, late-summer day.