76 - Are American Negro Churches Christian?

Are American Negro Churches Christian?
By Joseph R. Washington, Jr.

THESIS: Negro religious institutions have developed a pattern of life totally irrelevant to the Christian faith. The historical conditions which severed Negro religio-socio-theological life from mainstream Christianity have issued in religious compartmentalization. Rooted in racial concerns and emerging through response to social questions, the Negro has little basis for renewal. The hope for the Negro in religion, as in every other aspect of life, lies in full participation within the mainline congregations whose errors are under the judgment of a dynamic theology which seeks to interpret the contemporary mission and message of the church. But, there is no present possibility for the inclusion of Negro religion within the Christian faith; only a few Negros are accepted in Christian communities outside the bond of color. On the way to the inclusion of Negroes into the mainstream the present may best serve as a period of preparation for the future when Negro (qua Negro) institutions will no longer be the only alternative for the Negro who is also a Christian.

THE current insistence which demands the entrance of Negro Americans into the political, economic, and social mainstream has not left unaffected the religious communions. It is evident, for the first time in American history, that full participation of the Negro is the pervasive mood of the influential forces which determine the future of the nation-however deliberate and void of enthusiasm. This new fact of seeing the Negro as a responsible participant in all areas of our structural life may be realistically recognized as a future rather than a present fulfillment.

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I

It is clear that a universally-geared technological economy operated by a comparable bureaucratic administration of organization men cannot permit racial conflicts which tend to disrupt a well-oiled organized society or rob it of necessary though colored cogs.

It is also clear that one does not need to be a functionalist to perceive the truth that the church mirrors the culture. The natural drive towards merging denominations inherent in the growing movement called ecumenicity can hardly be passed off as a mere occurrence accidentally emerging in the same climate of a world-wide technological revolution. To the degree that the economy seeks to integrate persons regardless of color, we can expect a similar response within the church. The fiction of the church as a sphere of private life not unlike the local country club will easily submit to reality when the very economy which supports it institutes the inclusion of hitherto unacceptable demands and equal access to the leisure-time activities for all employees as an insurance of operational efficiency.

There is a noticeable absence of tension between Protestantism and the culture in which its religious life is nurtured because the persons involved in both are one and the same. Few split loyalties or personalities are engendered by either Negro or white Protestantism at the point of the exclusive nature of these various denominations. But tension of a less heroic nature does persist. It is the tension between those limited Protestant voices who urge the churches to become an accessory before the fact in the sphere of race relations and their numberless opponents who insist that the churches become an accessory after the fact. This tension points up the ethical dimension of Protestantism beyond the realm of functionalism. The two positions ultimately agree concerning the outcome which does not depend upon their efforts; the disagreement concerns the minor question of timing. To those who have perceived the historical responses of Protestant churchmen to ethical issues of social consequences there is little doubt but that the vast majority who approve of following the society will have their way.

The major non-Roman religious bodies in America are best described as middle class in their life and mission. The extension of the middle class expands with each fiscal year, drawing within its bulge Negro white-collar employees and blue-collar workers inspired by middle-class values. In this light, the tension between be-

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fore- and after-the-fact Protestants appears less irrelevant though no less inconsequential. In this historical period white Protestant dominance is more fiction than fact and pluralism is more fact than fiction. As white Protestants commence to adjust to playing the minority role in politics, they do so in religion as well. Simultaneously, the political power of Negroes who may be described as primarily Protestant in religious heritage has just begun to display itself in the realm of economics which augurs well for improvement of their monetary well being, even if their social status will improve ever so minutely if at all.

The significance of this direction is in its turn or opportunity for Protestantism to steady its ranks with the rising Negro whose inclination to Protestant forms is undeniable, but who may turn to uniquely Negro or no religious loyalties insofar as he achieves participation in the economic mainstream of American life. The argument of the before-the-fact Protestants tends to this advantage-the growth of Protestantism as an inclusive community of faith.

It is worth noting the liberal awareness which views the future as one of diminishing returns for Protestantism. This is heightened by the tendency of the previously Protestant if segregated Negro to participate in the middle class without his traditional religious perspective. Thus beyond the theological and ethical question threatens the practical problem due to numerical losses of an increasing number of Negroes who prefer identification with Protestantism per se and are denied this opportunity of commitment within an inclusive faith. This double problem of a pluralistic America in which the dominance of Protestantism no longer rides and the loss of the Negro who is turning to other or no theistic religions urges before-the-fact liberals not to be deterred by the majority of their fellow churchmen.

Presently, working-class Negroes are being influenced by forces such as the Black Muslims, and middle-class Negroes are either turning increasingly to rigid Negro churches or away from Protestantism. The latter trend is unhappily viewed by some liberals as ingratitude for the favors extended by the various Protestant denominations in the past. It is pointed out that only Protestants have granted Negro clergymen and laymen places of leadership in the churches.

The interesting result of this tension may be seen as a defensive posture which seeks in the past performance of Protestantism the reason why Negroes should gratefully adhere to these various de-

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nominations. It is not that the failures of Protestantism are ignored but that their deeds of kindness and penance ought to be honored.

II

A thorough historical search clarifies the claim of Protestantism that from 1619 to the beginning of the nineteenth century, no other American institution openly and consistently expressed such indubitable interest in the Negro. No less real were the churches' gain in outlets for missionary fervor which generated an incalculable amount of enthusiasm and gave purpose and meaning beyond the cost in personnel and money.

Of course the institutional approach to the virgin territory of the slave was prompted by the missionary zeal to spread the gospel. At the same time it was necessary to counteract the general opinion that slaves should not be introduced to the gospel since the obvious result would mean openness to the Christian doctrine of freedom. The earliest opposition to proclaiming the Christian faith among Negroes was profoundly theological in nature: the Christian faith is inseparable from the doctrine of freedom. Though this doctrine cannot be severed from ultimate moral values, moral ideals are the fruit and not the root of theology. From the commencement of the missionary endeavor to bring the good news to the slave Negroes, it was necessary to face the theological edge of the Christian faith. Theology was quickly by-passed in favor of telling the Negro a simple story. Here, in this decision, not only were the roots of the Christian faith expendable and of spurious value, but the real meaning of the Christian faith was distorted. Negroes have yet to recover from this indifference to theology taught to them by missionaries.

The way around the theological question, particularly the doctrine of freedom, was to require slaves to take an oath prior to baptism to the effect that they presented themselves for the sacrament merely for the health of their souls and not as a means to seek freedom from their duty-obedience to their masters in this world. From the beginning, slaves were taught to seek their good in the life beyond, not in this world. The absence of a rounded theology was instrumental in the development of those spirituals which centered on the world beyond to the exclusion of a meaningful existence in this life. However provocative and accurate this eschatological theme, it suffered

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from the nondevelopment of other equally significant theological concerns.

Popular opinion suggests that the lack of theological grounding given to the Negro was simply due to his total illiteracy as a slave. This half-truth fails to identify the fact that any experiment in teaching Christian doctrines was ruled out a priori, by and large, and never became a general ingredient for the religious foundations of the Negro. Moreover, there were a limited number of Negroes who were not only introduced to Christian doctrines but who gave evidence of real comprehension. However, the religious communions in America have in each generation been so overwhelmed with other problems that they never expended the energy necessary to do a thorough job of religious education among Negroes.

The initial and pervasive failure of Protestantism was theological. This error may prove to be far more disrupting to the Protestant mission than its social impotence which merely reflects the culture. The lack of a theological perspective among Negroes remains the critical and sole irresponsibility of Protestant churchmen.

It is not enough to plead that one can be a Christian and a slave without contradiction-this is too narrow a concept of the Christian doctrine of freedom. If the price of reaching slaves with the gospel was de-emphasis of theology, the claim of spreading the Christian understanding of God, the world, and man is at least suspect. It is less true that doctrines were not within the grasp of slaves who early expressed real critical abilities. What is certain is this: the essence of Protestantism as autonomous self-criticism was regrettably withheld from the Negro.

Under the discipline of missionaries, slaves were kept busy in the evenings in cathechism classes and revivals both of which were drills in the moralities of a substandard religion. Ethical issues were not raised. Moreover, the view of salvation was misconstrued as faithful following of morality codes. It is widely recognized that the religious services of scriptural memorization and recitation, prayers, and lessons in etiquette drawn from the Bible provided a most effective means of social control. While there were obvious exceptions to this general effectiveness, Protestant missionaries were in great demand. These enthusiastic evangelicals served to reinforce the institution of slavery; they were invaluable to the plantation lords and no less a welcome diversion for the slaves. And it is this conception

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of religion as diversion which continues to rear its ubiquitous head among Negroes today.

Missionaries compromised their own theological insights in order to evangelize the slaves. This was true of the Baptists and Methodists whose theological dimensions were less systematic than their Episcopal and Presbyterian brethren. The fact that Methodists and Baptists were more successful than other communions with slaves does not simply imply that Negroes were more receptive to a non-critical approach; it does indicate that limited time and funds were allocated to development of the slaves.

III

The contention that this initial, limited Christian outlook, originated by Protestant evangelicals, provides the basis for the misunderstanding of the Christian faith by American Negroes finds corroboration in the common knowledge that the religious congregation among Negroes is not essentially different in theological awareness from that of their slave ancestors. In fact, the Negro congregation is better known for its role as the spearhead of social protest than for its contribution to the tension between faith and culture. Indeed, the social protests of religious congregations are hardly rooted in the theological depths of faith. Social protests have an ethical thrust born of political and social thought which only vaguely resemble theological perspectives. To protest that the social impact of Negro congregations basically results from the gospel teachings of missionaries is to foster a misconception which borders on illusion. However glib the use of Christian terminology, Negro protests have been rooted for the most part outside the Christian faith. Indeed, the radical protest which finds its expression in some Negro congregations even today is based upon influences external to the Christian faith, if not in contradiction with the faith.

With the unconscious and uncritical acceptance of simplified Christion abridgments equated with spurious moral values, Negroes were early introduced to religion without theology-Christianity divorced from the mainstream of the Christian faith.

This virtually complete omission of the doctrines of classic Christian theology, not only as dogmas but also as guidelines, resulted in an impoverished version of the gospel for the faithful slave. Missionaries waived theology in favor of biblical literalism, an approach

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which ignored the history of the Christian church. The caste System in religion put the lid on the psychological identity with the European heritage of Protestantism. The religion of Protestant expression was accepted without its source and authority, this side of the early Christian community.

With the radical separation of Negro congregations from their white sponsors, in response to the psychological and social forces following the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Negro Protestantism was left to develop on its own. Negro religious communions were set adrift, for the most part at their own request, from a historical tie with Protestantism, possessing a deeply embedded simple equation between New Testament literalism and cultural morality-without any doctrines of the faith or historical tie with the church as guides to relevance and meaning.

When the socio-economic forces eliminated Negro and white Protestant communication in the life of the church, the opportunity for identification with the white man's historical ties was lost. Thus the Negro religious bodies became the instruments for salvation, moral guidance, and social protest. The core of these activities found direction outside the historical community of faith, in the majority of instances. And in times of crisis Negro religious bodies recalled the biblical stories and related them to the catechetical teachings. There was no way out of slavery or second-class citizenship through the Christian faith, conspicuously stripped of its inherent social protests, an unknown history to the Negro. It is no surprise to find that the religious perspective provided no support for radical protests prior to the 1850's and that the roots of protest did not find their beginnings in the religious teachings of the missionaries. In fact, the sole reason for protests being centered in churches is due to the fact that these buildings were singular in their ownership by Negroes and thus provided the one place where Negroes were able to gather in mass.

IV

A gulf of intimacy continues to divide Negro and white Americans, so much so that it is meaningless to speak of religious communities in America except as Negro and white. Moreover, if Protestantism involves identification with the Reformers and their post-Reformation interpreters, it is not helpful to call Negroes Protestants in this historical and theological sense. The fact that Negroes form congre-

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gations called by the same denominational nomenclature as white Americans remains the extent of their common ground. There have been divisions of Negro congregations on every conceivable issue except that of the usual theological schisms because there is little theology in Negro Protestantism.

Past alienation from the theological roots of Protestantism, social separation from white Protestants and their historical and cultural extensions of the European tradition, addiction to religion as personal salvation by means of moral purity, worship as the primary means of release and the occasion for class identification-these are the bases for the religion of the Negro.

In this regard, a distinction is necessary between the Negro religion and the Negro church. Negro communities do not constitute churches in the theological sense, but religious congregations. Religion initiated and perpetuated in irrelevance can persist in response to whatever social, political, or economic needs are dominant. Concern with the ultimate or God and what is required of those who are called to live responsibly in his world may easily be less than primary for a segregated minority without a theology. There is a crass materialism which pervades the Negro congregations, overlaid with theological terminology and a feeling for religion which when analyzed may now be more liberally this-worldly than other-worldly. But the theological basis for this liberal perspective is missing; also missing is a theological point of view or justification for existence. The theological center continues to be a vacuum because its potential as the point of departure is yet to be discovered. This lack of awareness not only means that the theological void emits no tension or anxiety; it also means that the dictates of society and class values go unchallenged as the center and not the periphery of Negro Protestantism.

In the perversion of the religious community, for the nonauthentic if understandable purposes of ostentation and personal gratification, the Negro religious community takes its cue and then exaggerates it beyond recognition from the white community who are the bearers of the Protestant doctrine of vocation and who have status partly as a result of this doctrine's socio-economic rather than theological implications. Precisely at this point there is a significant difference between Negro and white Protestants. At least white Protestantism in its turn to cultural religion does so under the judgment of a theol-

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ogy which declares there is a tension between faith and culture and calls attention to the conflict between spurious religious concerns and the Christian faith. In this difference lies the seeds of renewal, however far white Protestantism may stray from its roots. In seeking economic and social status under the guise of religious affiliation and class congregations, the Negro is not only imitative but has no theology which judges his response in the sphere of culture. Negro congregations are free (or perhaps damned is equally theological) to treat economic values and class symbols as sanctions of religion.

These are the factors which support the hypothesis that Negro congregations are best understood as religious communities rather than Christian churches.

The judgment that the absence of theology prevents the Negro congregations from bearing a corrective which distinguishes between participation in economic well-being and seeking economic values as ends in themselves discloses the Negro community as the most materialistic religious group in America. The truth that this absence of a theological dimension was not the result of failure or deliberation on the part of the Negro, historically and primarily, does not alter the fact. Those who join a religious community in search of meaning and relevance are thwarted in this quest, not because there is no ultimate belief in God, but because there are no middle guidelines on the way.

The question of Negro religious communities being Christian or even Protestant is not finally affected by this poverty of perspective, though the quality of authenticity and dynamism is in question. Whether or not this suicidal trend can be reversed or redirected is the basic question which faces the Christian who is also a Negro. There is no doubt that Negro communions are losing creative participants and that the only thing they have going for them is color which forces some kind of identity. It is this fact, that Negro congregations will exist for the foreseeable future because of the bond of color, which also is the reason why a new direction must be experimented with if the religion of the Negro is to have ultimate value.

V

The lack of theology or the critical understanding of the Christian faith is a serious defect which has been neglected at an extraordinarily high cost. If this perspective has validity, these congre-

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gations are at a point in history where it is imperative that they decide in which direction they are heading. Either movement into the mainstream of the Christian church or the general stream of religion is the authentic choice before Negro congregations who wish to be responsible. The urgency of this decision is the increasing loss of college-trained men and women to the church. To be sure, the Roman Catholic Church is making significant in-roads here, but this is indicative of the needs of Negroes and their inability to find a meaningful response within Protestantism.

Negro laymen and clergymen might helpfully begin at the most sensitive, and yet live, distinction between Christian principles and the Christian faith. This is a sensitive area because Negroes have been indoctrinated for better than three centuries with the simple equation of Christian living with the teachings of Jesus.

The teachings of Jesus are readily available to anyone who wishes to live by them as a basis for principles to spark action in the realm of civil liberties or rights. Commitment to the Christian faith is not required for response to Christian principles. To say, for example, the nonviolent movements are based upon Christian principles is no more significant than to say that pacifism stems from the same source. It is quite possible to be involved in either or both of these movements without loyalty to the Christian faith, however loyal one may be to Christian principles.

The Christian faith is indeed quite different. Christian principles take on a new and different meaning within the household of faith. The Christian faith begins with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is only from the vantage point of these events that the Christian affirms with the disciples that Jesus Christ is Lord. The Christian claims that these events give meaning to human existence and clarify the nature of God and the response he intends for man. Because God acted in Christ, the Christian is committed to the extension of the love of God between man and neighbor. In this way, the teachings of Jesus are not merely universal principles but the expression of a man who revealed himself as the Son of God and in whom the Christian has faith.

In this sense, the Christian is not motivated by principles, even the Sermon on the Mount. He is committed to respond to God in the best interest of himself and his neighbor which is without principle -save that of the love relationship between man and God which is

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the force that calls forth a favorable response, though a different one in each situation. The Christian understands that the imitation of Jesus is valid only in the form of Christ who submitted his will to God, and that the content of his response is necessarily distinctive for he is called to contribute in situations in a condition which is unique because he is unique.

Of course the Christian lives Christonomously, insofar as his faith is in God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ. In this order of existence the Christian seeks to be guided by God who is the Creator, judge, and Redeemer of the universe. In everything the faithful Christian does, he sees his action as an affirmation of the will of God.

Against this background is readily seen the distortion of Christianity in the Negro community. The Negro has grounded his belief in Christianity in an ethical code, the principles of which are not founded in an enduring faith and therefore devoid of content and the refreshment of a critical dimension. The principles he esteems are not relevant to his contemporary needs. Thus the Negro is forced to depend upon civil rights, religious feeling, sentiment, and color as substitutes for faith. It is the absence of historical loyalty to the Christian faith which expresses itself as religious sentiment. This feeling for religion is not inherent but nurtured, and to make virtue of necessity does not justify the title of Christian faith.

If Negro laymen and clergymen can begin to take seriously the theological disciplines so necessary for a meaningful faith, their contribution to the lives of their constituents and the future of Protestantism will be rich indeed. The time for a fully-integrated Protestant community is not yet, but on the way to this inevitability Negro adherents would do well to sharpen their perspective through communication with their white brethren at every possible level. An early target for both white and Negro sources of influence might well be the discovery and cultivation of promising young Negro leadership, nurturing them in either or both communities. The spirit and freedom which the Negro offers to a truly ecumenical fellowship will be met with a disciplined understanding, for the health of the church and to the glory of God. But the Negro cannot do this alone-he needs the wise counsel of his white brethren. The growth and vitality of Protestantism, in part, depends upon whether or not Negroes will become participants with an indigenous understanding of the Christian faith and church.