The Reverend Wright “scandal” scared me. And not in the same way it scared most of white America. While the talking heads looped the infamous “God, Damn America” sound bite that nearly damned Obama’s campaign, the media, and the nation, missed a bold opportunity to explore Black Christianity and liberation theology. The “radical” pastor was intended to be our reason to fear Obama, his faith, his patriotism. No one bothered to investigate the origins of Christian faith for the African American community, to question why a reverend might still be upset by the social condition of his people in the 21st century, to distinguish the differing approach of two faith communities. It was this failure to sympathetically peel back the context of America’s painful racial history that scared me. Bill O’Reilly, please take note.
So join me for a few minutes to explore how racial formation and Christianity are both wicked and hopeful cousins in the dysfunctional family of U.S. history.
I first engaged in this history during a religion and civic culture course. During a heated debate about religious works and the notion of “salvation” – Christian deliverance from sin for eternal life with God – a mentor of mine asked the question: “So what is it? Would the real Christianity please stand up?” Her question indicated that throughout American history, markedly different concepts of Christianity emerged with great influence — from the antebellum period to reconstruction and Jim Crow. It is a history too few of us know.
I could not begin to explore the touchy question without discussing the life and work of a man who scoured the depths of his own spirituality to make sense of his role as an American Christian. Phillip Berrigan (1923-2002), a former Catholic priest and devout peace and civil rights activist, spent his adolescence believing what he was raised to believe: that America was righteous, that slavery had ended, and that democracy thrived. He willingly fought in WWII to defeat fascism and later realized that the human cost and the atrocities committed on both sides hardly made it the “Good War.”
The road soon led Berrigan and his brother to become ordained priests of the Josephite order, which specifically emphasized social justice. Based in New Orleans, Berrigan made it his mission to discover why his African American parishioners lived in abject poverty. From the context of his faith, he challenged segregation, specifically why hospitals weren’t treating black patients in the area. His findings led him to later remark in his autobiography that “to live in America is to be a racist, either by commission or omission . . . Racism influences where we live, whom we choose to have for friends, whom we marry, where our children go to school, where we work and worship.”[i] A weighty statement that leaves most whites defensive, but the keyword is ommission. By living complacently in a racist society, one’s inaction – omission – indirectly props up the system.
As a young priest at the outset of the civil rights movement, he observed an order of French priests who took working class jobs, protested alongside the angry poor, and vociferously spoke out against unjust government policy. The Pope threatened the “worker priests” with excommunication, but Berrigan saw their actions as a profound manifestation of Christ-like behavior and used them as motivation for his controversial sermons and work in the Deep South.[ii] Berrigan became an active participant in civil rights protests and organized several acts of famed civil disobedience in objection to Vietnam. His stands amounted to 11 years of served jail time by the end of his life. “Where should we draw the line between social activism and our more traditional religious duties?” he asked, “Was there really a line to draw?”[iii]
After 18 years of challenging his congregations and Church superiors with this question, Berrigan left the priesthood in 1973, finally declaring that the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church stood in the way of practicing his faith, his purpose as a human being. He came to a profound personal realization that the institution he gave much of his life to was at odds with what he believed to be authentic Christianity. Through his work in New Orleans, Berrigan found himself torn between traditional American (white) Christian attitudes and practices and the inspiring outlooks of African American Christianity that emphasized charity, justice and humility in the face of racism; it is for this reason that Berrigan’s story provides us access to the challenge of determining what we might consider ‘authentic’ Christian behavior.
As stated above, exploring the evolution of these two divergent spiritual worldviews, we also see that, within the context of American history, religion is implicitly connected to racial formation. At the outset of ‘New World’ colonization, Christian culture characterized the human condition in such a way that degraded the self. Humanity, in essence, was a sick, depraved state due to the biblical transgressions that tainted all souls with ‘original sin.’[iv] Only by purging these evils through faith in Christ would salvation be obtained; only when the Gospel was spread throughout the world would Christ return for judgment. According to David Stannard, this absolute, Puritan truth “meant total extermination or conversion of all non-Christians.”[v] Thus, when encountered by millions of indigenous peoples, the colonists found divine justification to eradicate this exotic culture by means of murder or conversion. For centuries, natives were perceived as not only heathen, but as sub-human beings, and therefore expendable in the colonists’ quest to conquer the new world for God and country.
Around this time, a key difference emerged between treatments of white-skinned and non-white peoples, exhibited by the case of the English’s brutal treatment of their Irish neighbors. The difference boiled down to whether the population in question possessed souls. While they were a despised obstacle, the Irish people’s ‘humanity’ was not an issue. Assimilation and conversion, as opposed to total removal, was the end goal; however, the “savages” encountered in North America were ostensibly inconvertible and thus had to be eliminated in accordance to God’s plan. Many of the Irish had merely fallen into barbarism and unlike the New World indigenous, did not possess innate inferiority. Christianity and “white” became further synonymous to each other.[vi] (During the 19th century Westward expansion, the tactic was reversed and more missions and Christian boarding schools were built to assimilate Native Americans.)
With this framework, early-America and its budding capitalist system was soon born on the back of African chattel slavery. It became increasingly relevant to Christian leaders that if slavery were to exist, so to would a justification for its existence. By this time, African slaves were widely considered fully human, which meant they were also subject to conversion.[vii] But this posed a difficult philosophical challenge considering that American Christianity, along with its espoused democratic principles, expressed freedom. Paul Harvey notes several difficult questions that surfaced at this time for American Christians:
If blackness was (by definition) unfreedom, and Christianity was (by natural law) freedom, then how could the two be commingled? . . . Would not the ultimate freedom promised by Christianity infect the minds of the not-free, such that they would begin to question their status, or to doubt the validity of Christianity?[viii]
Despite this fear, however, many white Christians persisted in their belief that African slaves could fit within a plan for divine providence. The prolific Puritan minister Cotton Mather contended that the Bible showed unmistakably God’s intention for Africans to be servants to their masters – their time on earth was merely their service to Jesus Christ. The Old Testament passage, the curse of Cannan — son of Ham, was routinely used for centuries as reasoning for enslavement, despite the fact many theologians felt it was mere reliance on folklore and stood in defiance to ‘high’ theology.[ix]
An antislavery movement before 1807 gained traction, but the organized push for equality spurred by Christian (Quaker), humanitarian and sentimental approaches subsided after the slave trade was abolished at this time. Notions of true equality and cognizance of the oppression at hand informed many white Americans, but other economic, religious and political forces quelled their dissonance. The American experiment of liberty, equality and the important notion that it is one’s environment that shapes his or her spirit and capability told many whites that enslavement was wrong and anything but Christian. However, as Winthrop Jordan illustrates in his renowned historical analysis, simultaneous challenges of maintaining a national identity, fear of miscegenation (cross-breeding) and the retention of purity continued to feed the engine of racism. A construction emerged that Negroes, although fully human, were inferior and should never be fully American even if converted to Christianity.[x] Nationalism and faith, as they do today, clash to co-exist.
But as Eddie Glaude and many other historians illustrate, shortly after being introduced to their oppressors’ religion, African Americans re-appropriated Christian myth and determined that the Christian God was ultimately a God of justice. They too drew on religious texts and history to find their meaningful position in the world as slaves. “Like the nation in general, African Americans, through biblical analogy, saw themselves as the children of God and linked the freedom of the Israelites with their own eventual liberation,” says Glaude.[xi] This simple act of self-definition, as compared to the oppressive label of inferiority given by their masters, marked a significant moment of agency within African American communities. It became the premise of Liberation Theology. The very line of Christianity that Jeremiah Wright preaches. While Christian America waffled in its own hypocrisy, African American culture stirred within a Christian framework that called into question how this great American experiment of equality could operate without acknowledging the great sin of oppression and abhorrence of difference in America’s infancy.
Antebellum resistance writers and abolitionists turned the tables on American theologians to suggest that, in fact, their Christianity was not legitimate. The ‘sanctified’ white race was now a subject of pervasive and influential African American Christian literature that subverted traditional Christian teachings. The spiritual writings spread throughout the south, serving as a rallying cry and organizing tool for the oppressed populations. Black congregations inverted the Christian notion of adherence to scripture and purity of daily life into a “religion that masked a sublimated outrage balanced with patience, cheerfulness, and a boundless confidence in the ultimate justice of God.”[xii]
Black heroes were not so kind to their white Christian counterparts. Abolitionist Frederick Douglas declared, “The existence of slavery in this country brands Republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.”[xiii] David Walker, decades before the civil war, stunningly prophesized the plight continued racial oppression would bring America if reconciliation and justice were not reached. Peace would come only once the sinful white Christians, who he addresses interchangeably as Americans, were to see that God truly did create all men equal: “Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together . . . But Americans, I declare to you, while you keep us in bondage, and treat us like brutes, to make us support you and your families, we cannot be your friends.”[xiv] Christianity was at once the shackles used by the oppressors and the weapon of equality for the oppressed.
To the end of his life, Phillip Berrigan described himself as a Catholic trying to become a Christian. This profound statement denies the absolute truths of “belief” complicit in the subjugation and annihilation of millions that paved the way for America’s prosperity. Faith and salvation are work of progression, never fully wrought, never obtained by mere compliance to tenets and sacramental rites. From Berrigan’s unique story and the stories’ of the Nat Turner’s and the Martin Luther King Jr’s of African American history, we learn that — provided we agree God is compassionate and just — authentic Christianity must be more than, in the word’s of Frederick Douglas, “an empty ceremony.” The abolitionist wished faith were “a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man.”[xv] Yet, today institutional Christianity at large, although not exclusively, clings to a “pie in the sky” mentality that renders faith communities across the world mere bureaucratic, money-making businesses that preach the Gospel, but fail to connect Christ’s teachings to the sins of our past, the ignorance of our presence, and the actions we can take now and in the future to correct injustice.
Often missing from the two millennia of religious pronouncements and justifications constituting Christian history is Jesus himself. Where were and where are the Beatitudes in the politics of Christianity? Where is Christ’s simple message of loving the enemy, caring for the least of humankind, and leaving behind wealth for a life of service? The African American Christian leaders of the civil rights movement, in their drive to end segregation and Jim Crow by espousing Christ’s views, simultaneously unraveled “blackness as inferiority that had enslaved so many Americans for so many centuries.” (Harvey, 25) For Berrigan, the Catholic Church in America didn’t address these questions on a wide-scale level, eventually leading him to believe he could impact the faith more from the outside looking in:
“The church is a major, worldwide institution, and it is even more conservative, perhaps, than our government. Not conservative in the sense of “conserving” the gospel, but in maintaining useless rituals and policies that are designed to protect, and perpetuate, the institution. The church is a major bureaucracy, and major bureaucracies are disobedient to the Gospel . . . If the church wanted to come to grips with the gospel, it would have to give up its property and its exemptions from the state, and involve itself with resistance on a major scale. It would have to resist the violence against our poor, and stop pretending that one political party is more humane than the other.”[xvi]
Essentially, Berrigan’s view of authentic Christianity is undistinguishable from Christ’s life and purpose, the same Christ, who when encountering a temple made a haven to wealth-mongering merchants, took an angry, fervent stand against a corrupt institution. In that moment, more than any other example from the Gospels, Christ showed us his sincere humanity and, most importantly, that faith is more than words.
[i] Berrigan, Philip. Fighting the Lambs War. Common Courage Press. 1996. p. 50
[iv] Stannard, David. American Holocaust. Oxford University Press. 1992. p. 242
[vii] Jordan, Winthrop. The White Man’s Burden. Oxford University Press. 1974. p. 105-6.
[viii] Harvey, Paul. “A Servant of Servants He Shall Be.” Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity.
New York University Press. 2003. p 18.
[x] Jordan, Winthrop. p. 205-226.
[xi] Glaude, Eddie. “Myth and African American Self-Identity.” Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity. New York University Press. 2003. p 33.
[xii] Wilmore, Gayraud. Black Religion and Black Radicalism. Orbis Books. 1998. p. 36
[xiii] Douglas, Frederick. Against Slavery. Penguin Books. 2000. p. 44
[xiv] Walker, David. Against Slavery. Penguin Books. 2000. p. 143
[xv] Douglas, Frederick. p. 43
[xvi] Berrigan, Phillip. P. 38.
