by Curtis Bunn
“That’s how Trump gets a stronghold because there’s a nonsensical world at work, so then why wouldn’t an immoral person be able to lead the charge of morality? The world is just so abstract that they are able to develop a plan with all these evil characters with all these kinds of weird conspiracies that see Trump as the Messiah figure, because they are so far away from an ideal of an equitable world that’s loving and non-bigoted. And, so it really is this kind of fairy tale, but more like a Brothers Grimm–style fairy tale that they have to paint these monsters and the wolves in the Hansel and Gretel–style craziness, and it seems that we’re back to that kind of weird reality that I say has nothing to do with the redemptive power of Christ.”
In the aftermath of the rioting and looting by domestic terrorists at the Capitol building on January 6, which resulted in the deaths of five people including a police officer, Reverend Ramsey chucked his prepared sermon for January 10. “I’m not going to give the sermon I started to write on Monday. I’m not going to talk to you about the power that comes from knowing God loves you. That he, she loves just because you are. I’m not going to give that sermon because I can’t. There are more pressing things that have to be discussed, right. The elephant in the room cannot be ignored; faith has to inform the context of our lives.”
What Reverend Ramsey, like most of us glued to cable news, saw was a mob of Americans, domestic terrorists, amassed in the name of the outgoing president and God—some waved flags, “Jesus Saves” and “GOD, GUNS & GUTS MADE AMERICA, LET’S KEEP ALL THREE!”—perpetrate an assault on American democracy. It was based on a big lie, that President Trump lost the 2020 election because of massive voter fraud, specifically in cities with large numbers of African American voters.
“Think of January sixth, which happened to be the Day of Epiphany on the Christian calendar,” Reverend Ramsey added. “And the events at the Capitol, and no reasonable person can ever argue about inequity again, no reasonable, faithful person can ever doubt the existence of white privilege again. I say all of this not to be political, I say all this to be faithful, to be human, to help us take on the role of healers, to take on the role of people of promise, people of hope.”
De La Torre said he consistently asked his students: “Why do you want to become a minister? Because you can make a living off of this and you can have some security? How are you doing this? Because it’s a calling! You risk everything, even your life, for the gospel message. You know, we have domesticated the calling. We’re more concerned with the pension plans once the minister retires, as opposed to the official part of doing the work of the gospel.”
Even though he lost reelection, Trump’s influence remains. Avowed white nationalist groups have been emboldened by his rhetoric and recall his admonition to one fringe group, the Proud Boys, during a presidential debate. Asked to rebuff them, Trump said, “Stand back and stand by.”
There is an even more virulent strain of white evangelicalism now manifesting as Patriot Churches. It’s a small patchwork of nondenominational congregations that view the Democratic Party and the political left as godless and giving succor to socialists, the LGBTQ community, and those who favor a woman’s right to choose. It’s no accident that Trump threatened to form his very own “Patriot” party to challenge what is left of the traditional Republican one.
“The Patriot Churches belong to what religion experts describe as a loosely organized Christian nationalist movement that has flourished under President Trump,” wrote Sarah Pulliam Bailey of the Washington Post. “In just four years he has helped reshape the landscape of American Christianity by elevating Christians once considered fringe, including Messianic Jews, preachers of the prosperity gospel and self-styled prophets.”
But Trump didn’t invent any of this. Republicans, traditional, moderate, and conservative, for decades have been supplying just enough oxygen to white fear of a Black planet. In Trump, they found the ideal avatar. One of the myths promoted by the media and politicians, when it serves their purposes, is that the United States is divided, and divisiveness is the order of the day. But the results of the 2020 presidential election, where Black voters in major cities such as Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta repudiated Trump and Vice President Mike Pence and put President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris over the top, is evidence that America is not divided. Rather, it’s white people who are divided over whether to support equality, equity, diversity, and representation, or to reinforce white supremacy. And though there are many who would consider themselves allies and be considered allies by African Americans and BIPOC communities, how many are disrupters? Those willing to literally cast their lot in with movements dedicated to making a more perfect union.
Can I Get a Witness?
Ruby Sales grew up in the Baptist tradition in Jemison, Alabama, and her father was a minister. As a young woman, she felt compelled to get involved in the upheaval happening in the streets across the United States, as mostly Black people demonstrated for human and civil rights. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights group formed to give young people more of a voice during the civil rights movement.
“I was done and through with religion when I joined the movement,” Sales said. “And it took me years to understand that movements are where people connect their internalized, inner consciousness with the world we live in outside. That movements are about the very breath that we take in and the very breath that we put out.”
Sales debunks the binary assertions that the Black church was either arm in arm with Black liberation movements or hostile to them.
“There’s a difference between the Black church that has been defined by the prosperity gospel that says that the verification of who we are is what we have and what we have comes from the empire rather than God,” she said. “Up until the Southern freedom movement and during the Southern freedom movement, the Black churches themselves had to create a theological discourse about the significance of Black lives in a society that enslaved us, in a society that reduced us to property. And so, I think the Black church, like any other institution, is dynamic, not static. What it is today does not necessarily mean what it was prior to integration.”
What the civil rights movement did was invert and reposition roles in the Black community, Sales said, since it was the congregants, ordinary Black Christians, who were members of the Black church that used it as a place to have mass meetings. What made it a freedom movement was that leadership “rearranged class relationships. And it changed who could have access to the public microphone and who was considered to be legitimate articulators of the Black condition and the Black agenda.”
It had not happened since Black reconstruction, so this was the second time that ordinary Black people, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, who could barely read and write and only went to the fourth grade, were the setters of the Black agenda. It was not only unsettling to white supremacy; it was unsettling to class in the Black community.
“And also,” added Sales, “what people missed was that in those Black churches, it also rearranged white, patriarchal power, because Black women were standing up in pulpits, not only articulating the movement goals but exegeting the meaning of biblical scripture as they talked about movement. And the problem with the retelling of the story is that people have not understood the deep redemptive, restorative meaning of what was not simply a civil rights movement. We sang freedom songs; we lived in freedom houses; we had freedom summer; so civil rights were part of a larger struggle, which was freedom.”
In Sales’s recounting of her firsthand experience in the movement, there was homophobia, but it played out differently for gay men and lesbians. Black gays could find a place in the church and, though seemingly stereotypical, they were the choir directors and they were the heads of youth organizations.
“They were welcome. They were very visible,” Sales said. “The problem in the Black church was never with Black gay men more so than it was with Black women.
Because, as Toni Morrison pointed out in Beloved, there was some tension between Black men and Black women…that Black men were fighting for their manhood, any threat to what they perceived what is meant to be a man was treated differently, included how they treated Black men who were gay. It’s not true to paint the Black church as being the same with Black gay men as it was with Black gay women.”
Comparing the movements of the 1960s with the Black Lives Matter movement of today is difficult for Sales, given how disparate the eras are. One still existed in the industrial age, while today’s is swaddled in and fueled by technology.
“In the sixties communities were still intact, we were moving towards a technocracy,” she said. “But our feet are now firmly planted in a technocracy that decimates intimacy, that decimates community. And so the question [of] whether Black folk are interested in [a] movement, or even if white folk are interested in [a] movement, is how is it that you build a movement that requires intimacy in a capitalist technocracy where intimacy is virtual and lived history doesn’t matter?”
The faux racial reconciliation offered by the white church is hypocritical and impotent, said De La Torre. All this reaching across the pew or across the political aisle does nothing to improve the lot of people of color and only serves the interests of white supremacy.
“No, I will not hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’ with white oppressors,” he wrote at the end of his book. “Instead I will ask all who seek justice, especially whites willing to repent of their complicity with white privilege, to join me in solidarity as I choose to sing a different badass song. Let us finally sing: ‘Basta! (Enough)!’”
A Reckoning
So we now know where some in the white church are headed, but where does the Black church go from here? The nation itself seems comfortable normalizing everything—genocide against indigenous peoples; slavery; domestic abuse; violence against Black and brown bodies; penning children in cages; war; poverty; white hegemony and white supremacy. Citizens clamored for a return to “normal” amid a pandemic that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The virus ruptured routines and diminished patience to where people were willing to risk infection and even death to belly up to the bar, dine indoors at restaurants, travel for the holidays—all against the advice of medical and health experts.
There were calls from many, who sought to downplay the insurrection of January 6, for healing, for unity. But healing and unity are also languages of white supremacy, because they seek to ignore and diminish white violence as they seek to bind a wound with gauze and bandages that needs radical surgery. John the Baptist speaks of reconciliation, but admonishes that there can be none without repentance.
Too many want to avoid accountability; the let’s-just-put-this-all-behind-us attitude that avoids rigorous review and clinical autopsy. Americans always want the quick fix—in the case of COVID-19, the vaccine. Even then there will be no return to normal. The change has been profound and lasting. As of the end of 2020, more than 8 million people had slipped into poverty, 1.2 million of them African American. The racial wealth gap is now a yawning chasm, income inequality is at an all-time high and rising, and the promise of a more egalitarian social and political union is threatened. And that threat comes from a political party that once touted personal responsibility, but now traffics in grievance and promotes white identity politics.
Across the aisle is a party that resists fully embracing a mandate of change demanded by the groups of voters, African Americans, people of color, young people, and progressives that continue to show up for it. It’s still too concerned with white comfort; how to placate the “forgotten Americans”—code for white people, who are intent on maintaining their caste dominance.
Despite that stark and foreboding reality, Ruby Sales is optimistic. “This is not the first time that Black, brown, and white young folks have stood together. I mean, the anti-war movement (of the sixties and seventies); college takeovers. That’s reflected now in the movement that is saying that Black lives finally matter as much as white lives. Remember ‘Occupy Wall Street’? That was part of it as well. Movements don’t happen without a buildup.”
What positive change that does exist may now be reflected in church practice, which has been forced by the pandemic and police brutality to innovate and evolve.
The Reverend Blackmon said, “You know, this moment in time has created a need and opportunity for the institutional church to have to figure out who we are and how we are going to be and what we’re going to accomplish outside of our buildings.
“The playing field has been leveled in a lot of ways. What do you have to offer when your only way of communicating is virtual?” she said. “And when the people whose attention you have held captive for at least once a week and sometimes more are not just given the opportunity to listen to you, but can listen to any number of people over virtual space. What is it about what you offer in church, not you as a person, but you as collected bodies?”
The church, many believe, has to either lead, follow, or get out of the way. “Many of us are trying to figure out how we navigate between generations,” Reverend McBride said, “between an older generation that doesn’t recognize the world they live in and an emergent generation, which is creating a whole new world. And they need the same kind of pastoral care and spiritual support.”
“Boom!” Reverend Lewis said. “And shut it down! Woe unto the church that can’t be the sanctuary, right, for the immigrant; for the queer Black woman meeting, with a baby suckling; for the poor; for the disenfranchised. Woe to the church that doesn’t understand that our mentor is an outsider, who was outside of the power structure of the empire, who pushed every barrier for the sick; for the poor; for the outcasts; for the lepers; for the women; for the children; every barrier smashed to say the kingdom of God, the reign of God, is this kind of place where everyone belongs, where everyone has enough. If we don’t get that, that part of the church needs to die, so something else can rise again.”
Black Political Lineage: From Adam Clayton Powell to Barack Obama
By Michael H. Cottman and Curtis Bunn
Black people often posed these profound questions:
Who will stand up for us?
Who will champion our causes?
Who will have our backs?
Who will have the courage to speak our names?
While well-intentioned whites have sometimes thought they were the answer to these questions, the brunt of the civil rights changes in this country are the result of the hard work of Black politicians.
The lineage is long and winding, and it captures the essence of Black people’s survival in a country that has morally, socially, and legislatively oppressed them at every turn. As Black Lives Matter forges ahead to raise awareness of police brutality, mass incarceration, and the shame of public health (among other indecencies), enacting lasting change is still largely the domain of the political arena.
The contemporary civil rights battle is an old-school truth. Black men and women, in a far more racially explosive terrain, navigated the land mines with dexterity and skill, but mostly with commitment and bravery. Some were eloquent and unassuming. Many were audacious and loud. Still more were a mixture of all that. While this country has had Black politicians since before the end of slavery, the most significant Black politicians, whose actions led, most notably, to the election of President Barack Obama and, later, the election of Vice President Kamala Harris, began in the 1940s—and each decade produced more and more politicians who made an impact.
The 1940s
Reverend Adam Clayton Powell was arguably the first Black politician, who worked at a federal level, who saw it as a sacred obligation to improve the lot of Black people in this country.
Reverend Powell pastored the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, the same church that Reverend Raphael Warnock would someday lead, and his congregants, as well as his title, undoubtedly influenced his agenda and his belief in his ability to overcome the obstacles
he was to face.
In 1945, the Baptist minister became the first congressman from Harlem and served in that position for twenty-six years. Legislatively he argued for laws that would elevate Black people, while also doing the personal-touch work that made him a beloved figure uptown.
Powell helped to organize clothing drives and fed poor Black residents. He organized rent strikes and staged boycotts against companies that were discriminating against Black workers—both of which are hard to imagine a sitting congressperson doing now.
Powell was a community organizer, the way Obama would later be before he embarked on his own political journey. Powell helped build a Black political powerhouse that was unparalleled during his time. As the respected pastor of that time’s version of a mega church, Powell leveraged his congregation as a built-in voting bloc to effect change. Black voters packed the wooden pews every Sunday and listened to Powell’s message, registered to vote, and headed to the polls in large numbers for elections.
The history of Powell’s church underscored Powell’s quest for social justice activism and his staunch advocacy for civil rights: It was built in 1809, by seamen from the Ethiopian Empire, known as Abyssinia. The Abyssinian Baptist Church leadership believed worshippers should not be segregated by race inside the church, and led protests for open seating.
Powell embraced this history and infused the church with his fire-and-brimstone rhetoric. His strategic approach thus marked a new and successful branding of Black politics that in many ways led to the more well-known civil rights changes that were to come in the following decades.