The prophetic or justice-oriented element of black religion ebbed and flowed. It was in one such partial ebb, in the early part of the twentieth century, that the key civil rights organizations such as the NAACP were formed. Yet "civil rights organizations not only internalized the ideas about justice, liberation, hope, love and suffering that had been preached in the churches; they also used church property to convene their own meetings and usually made appeals for support at church conferences" (1986, 97).
In Cone's estimation the most significant figure in the recent history of black religious thought is Martin Luther King Jr. Much has been written about King's graduate education and the influence on him of white theologians, the essayist and maverick Henry David Thoreau, and the Indian pacifist and nonviolent freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi. Cone insists that although the influences of these men on King was significant, King was more than anything a product of black Christianity and its tradition. It's true that King used the intellectual tools of white thinkers and Gandhi to explain what he stood for to the white public. But, insists Cone, King derived "his convictions about God from his acceptance of black faith and his application of it to the civil rights struggle" (1986, 99). At the core of King's faith were the ideas of love, justice, liberation, hope, and redemptive suffering. King interpreted love "in the light of justice for the poor, liberation for all, and the . . . hope that God has not left this world alone" in the hands of evil persons (1986, 99).
Martin King believed that those who fight for justice must be prepared to suffer in the struggle, yet they must never inflict suffering on others. Cone says that King "took the democratic tradition of freedom and combined it with the biblical tradition of justice and liberation as found in the book of Exodus and the prophets" (100). With this he integrated both traditions with the New Testament idea of love and suffering as found in the story of Jesus' death. Thus, says Cone, King fashioned a theology that was able to challenge all Americans to "create the beloved community in which all persons are equal." The Gandhian method of nonviolence provided the civil rights movement with its strategy, but, as King himself said, this method became an integral part of the struggle through the black church (100).
King hoped that through nonviolent suffering blacks would liberate themselves from bitterness and a feeling of inferiority in relation to whites and that such suffering would also affect the conscience of whites, liberating them from their attitude of superiority. This approach initially put King at odds with the Black Power movement, which occasionally suggested hate toward whites (though this point, exaggerated by the white media, was never its main significance). When black power first made its appearance, King "said he would continue to preach nonviolence even if he became its only advocate" (101).
Yet King himself became more radical during this period. He realized that the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Bill did not significantly alter the life chances of the poor, and he judged President Johnson's War on Poverty a dismal failure. Like Malcolm X, King became a scathing critic of the entire political and economic order. The famous dream of his 1963 speech had turned into a nightmare. He began to see connections between the failure to overcome poverty and the expenditures for the escalating Vietnam War. Against the advice of many of his closest associates among black ministers and white liberals, he spoke out in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets. In an address to a large audience he condemned America as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" (cited in 1986, 101)--a statement which was plausible to many young people of my generation and Cone's, especially young blacks, at the time King uttered it. King insisted that God would break the backbone of U.S. power if the nation did not bring justice to the poor and peace to the world. He was attacked from many sides as he proclaimed God's indignation against the three great evils of war, racism, and poverty. Yet in his isolation he found hope in the tradition of his people. Cone cites King from this period as follows:
Centuries ago Jeremiah raised a question, "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician?" He raised it because he saw the good people suffering so often and the evil people prospering. Centuries later our slave foreparents came along and they too saw the injustices of life and had nothing to look forward to morning after morning, but the rawhide whip of the overseer, long rows of cotton, and the sizzling heat, but they did an amazing thing. They looked back across the centuries and they took Jeremiah's question mark and straightened it into an exclamation point. And they could sing, "There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sinsick soul." (Cited in 1986, 102)
The sinsickness which oppressed the slaves of whom King spoke and which, at one remove, oppressed him in the 1960's, was not mainly a sickness that oppressed people had brought on themselves through sinfulness; rather it was a sickness, a depression of the soul, created by systematic injustice and, in King's case, by the isolation--may it only be temporary--of the prophetic voice.
Another important strand of Cone's study relates to black nationalism. The black nationalist perspective is deeply embedded in the history of black religious thought. Malcolm X was not the first black nationalist and the non-Christian Nation of Islam not the first religious expression of black nationalism within black religion. Bishop Henry M. Turner of the AME Church once claimed that "We have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that God is a Negro as you white people have to believe that God is a fine-looking, symmetrical and ornamental white man" (cited in 1986, 103).
But Malcolm X was the most persuasive voice for of black nationalism during the 1960's when Cone's own theological outlook was being formed. Malcolm emphasized black unity instead of the beloved community, self-defense in instead of nonviolence, and self-love instead of turning the other cheek.
After the Watts riot in 1965 black clergy began to think more positively about Malcolm X's philosophy, especially his critique of Christianity and American society. Malcolm's claim that America was a nightmare and not a dream began to seem true as black clergy watched their communities go up in flames. Black power, inspired by Malcolm X, forced black clergy to question how black faith was related to white religion. As Cone puts it, black theologians always recognized white Christianity as an ethical heresy--racism, after all, contradicts the message of universal love--but they did not always extend this critique to European and American theology, the kind taught in the elite seminaries. Now a small group of black clergy separated themselves from King's absolute commitment to nonviolence; yet, unlike Malcolm X (who by then had been assassinated) and unlike most Black Power advocates, these clergy decided to remain within the black Christian fold. Several of them came together in The National Conference of Black Churchmen. They published in July 1966 in the New York Times a "black power" statement in which they sharply distinguished their view of the Christian gospel and the theology of white churches (1986, 105).
Thus "black theology" was born. The term "liberation" emerged as its dominant theme while Martin Luther King's message of justice, love, hope, and suffering was re- conceived in light of the political implications of liberation. Black clergy decided that they would not permit a white theology that refused to attack racism to separate them from suffering blacks in the central cities (1986, 105). "By rejecting white theology as heresy, the proponents of black theology were...forced to create a new theology of the black poor, one that would empower them in their struggle for justice" (1986, 110).
For black theology an important issue has been the reconnecting black religion in America with African history and culture (1986, 107). A related emphasis was the need of black theology to derive its meaning from the history and culture of the people in whose name it claims to speak. Cone himself responded to this need in his book The Spirituals and the Blues and other later works. He began to move away from his early use of white theologians in the 1960's (of course even then he had been critical of them) "to a greater use of slave narratives, sermons, prayers and songs as chief sources for the development of the themes of justice, liberation, . . . and hope in black theology" (108).
VII. Concluding Observations
I am convinced that Cone has described a large and significant aspect of the history of black Christianity. He has a solid empirical basis for the story he tells. This story is important for Unitarian Universalism in North America, because Unitarians and Universalists have been, at least in principle from early times, committed to social justice. As a little research into liberal religious roots in the unitarian Christianity of the Polish Socinians shows, this goes back at least to the sixteenth century.
As I suggested at the beginning it is important to distinguish between religions and theologies born of oppression and the struggle for justice and those, however interesting in other respects, that reflect or are somehow complicit with systematic injustice. It follows that, other things equal, liberal religious people should relate to the black Christian movement described by Cone somewhat differently from the way they relate to the various white denominations. They should expect that black Baptists and white Baptists may understand very differently the whole idea of God becoming flesh in Jesus. Should they have occasion to discuss theology with black Baptists, they might say something like this:
Perhaps we wouldn't use the language you use when you describe God's becoming flesh in Jesus because He is on the side of the poor and downtrodden or when you identify with the crucified Jesus as a victim of Roman imperial oppression who is vindicated by God when he is resurrected. But we welcome the way your religion gives you power to speak out against injustice and keep up the struggle for dignity. We want to be allies with such a spirit of justice, liberation, and hope.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Wednesday, August 25th 2010 at 2:51PM
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