The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness

1. The Gospel of Liberation: Black Christian Resistance Prior to Black Theology

13 1 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERATION B L A C K C H R I S T I A N R E S I S T A N C E P R I O R T O B L A C K T H E O L O G Y The Black Church The black church was born fighting for freedom. That fact is evidenced by the resistance and testimony of slaves,1 signified in the oppositional witness of pioneers of the independent black church movement ,2 and confirmed by the work of scholars across disciplines.3 The freedom for which the black church has fought has always been both internal and external, expressing itself politically and spiritually, embracing black bodies and souls. This is so because historically the faith of the black church has been shaped and characterized by two complementary yet competing sensibilities: revivalistic piety and radical protest. In the North American context, both have been present from the beginning, and it is the dialogue and differences between the two that constitute the central tension in African American Christian faith. Moreover, it is this tension, more than anything else, that plays itself out in the divided mind of the black church and in the dialogue between black pastors and black theologians regarding the church’s essential mission. Many black pastors, some even while very much engaged politically , have tended to emphasize in their preachments and privilege in their ministry the pietistic side of black faith aimed at the freedom of the soul, in this world and the next. On the other hand, black theologians , informed by a distinctive and undeniable trajectory in black faith, have focused primarily on the political side, radical protest aimed 14 T H E D I V I D E D M I N D O F T H E B L AC K C H U RC H at the freedom of the body in this world, expressed eschatologically by slaves who bore witness to it in their subtle songs about the next world. Historically, both the pietistic and the political side of black faith have been prominent, and each has made its own assertions about the character and meaning of freedom. Black theologian Gayraud Wilmore explains the political character of black faith when, in his classic text Black Religion and Black Radicalism , he rightly asserts that “there has been and continues to be a significant difference between black religion and white religion in their approaches to social reality and social change—whether in reference to theological liberalism or to fundamentalism.” Based on that fact alone, Wilmore persuasively argues, “black faith has been ‘more radical ’ in the proper sense of that much maligned term.”4 Owing to a unique political consciousness that was shaped in the brutal context of chattel slavery, racial oppression, and state-sanctioned terrorism in North America, this fundamental posture of resistance applies to black religion in general and, notwithstanding its “ambiguous politics,”5 the black church in particular. For in a racist context, even the black church’s pietistic proclamation has often, though not always, represented resistance through its assertion of black personhood , an egalitarian ethic and inclusive claim running through black faith that “all of God’s children got shoes.”6 Moreover, this ecclesiology of personhood expressed in its piety and its politics is, more than anything else, the single, unifying strand historically setting the black church apart as the conscience of the American churches. That is to say, of the American churches, the black church has clearly offered the most radical and sustained response to racism, what theologian James Cone has rightly called “America’s original sin and . . . its most persistent and intractable evil” (emphasis mine).7 This response has manifested itself in the establishment of independent churches and denominations, as African Americans refused to accept segregation and second-class citizenship within Christian communions, and culminated with the civil rights movement, during which they organized effective challenges to similar conditions within the society in general. Pioneers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the old- The Gospel of Liberation 15 est of the independent denominations, offered in 1817 this rationale and raison d’être: We have deemed it expedient to have a form of Discipline, whereby we may guide our people in the fear of God, in the unity of the Spirit, and in the bonds of peace, and preserve us from that spiritual despotism which...