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"For the first time in the history of American race relations, there is now afair chance that people of different histories, different theologies, and different social perspectives may actually be capable of communicating these differences to each other, in a new expression of the 'one body with many members.' "

The Churches and the Future of Racism
By Donald W. Shriver, Jr.

IN MY OWN experience of the so-called Civil Rights Movement, nothing stands out more symbolically than a day in March, 1965, when a group of white southern Presbyterians joined a worship service in the Brown Memorial Church in Selma, Alabama, and then marched three-abreast down the street to lay claim again for voting rights before the door of the county courthouse. At the end of that long day, we listened to President Lyndon Johnson recommend to Congress the Voting Rights Act. I heard the speech while sitting in the back of an automobile. Its most memorable moment came when, in his Texas drawl, the President quoted the song that we sang in Selma that very day: "We shall overcome," he said, with emphasis.

It was an ambiguous moment. Did Lyndon Johnson have a right to that phrase? Among the various equalities that must be written into the life and law of a democratic order, is there included an equal right to each other's memories, songs, traditions, and defining culture? Can the words "we shall overcome" mean the same thing to white politician and black marcher? Does the transfer of the song from the lips of one to the other imply a certain assault and insult?

To detect this ambiguity, in so little a detail, was to enter by way of one's own white participation in the Movement into the pain of that ambiguity. And it was to stand on the verge of a new era in interracial understanding in America. Beyond those early days and into the late sixties and seventies, the ambiguities continued.

The history of black and white relations and stand-offs is being written, but we need also to forge

Donald W. Shriver, Jr., is President and Professor of Applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary, New York. A graduate of Davidson College, Union Seminary in Virginia, Yale and Harvard, Dr. Shriver has been both a teacher and a pastor. He is the author of Rich Man, Poor Man (1972), Spindles and Spires (1976), and Is There Hope for the City? (1977). This article is an abridged version ofa lecture delivered at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary.

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ahead with another task. We must, I am convinced, in the present and the immediate future work our way toward new moral readings of American history.

I

Concretely, this task means that all of us should look at history, for a change, through the eyes of the people least visible in the record-that we bring to the search for historical documentation a sense of the missing documents. It means a search for the traces of people who are not there in the record but who were there, however much difficulty they may have had in leaving traces of their presence. Feminists, of course, are making parallel claims upon history-writers. Together, the black and feminist theologians both remind us that history always needs to be revised. This means welcoming an opportunity to read history emotionally and imaginatively through the eyes of Kunta Kinte and Chicken George, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. It means dwelling with curiosity on the mystery of how a church of black people came into being under the pressures of slavery, by what interior strength the black family survived slavery, the black church found nourishment in the ghetto, and the lures of an otherworldly hope spilled over into hope for this world. To read history morally is to ask how some things came to be that should not have been; how other things came to be in spite of much that hindered their being; and what things have yet to be, whose right to be must be asserted.

It is a long, hard lesson to learn. Truly to do so, we must begin anew to approach our reading of national and world history with the same openness that we say we bring to our reading of the Bible: "God has yet more light to break forth from his holy word." Yes, and more light to break forth from our legacy from the pilgrims whom pastor Robinson sent off from Plymouth with those words.

My colleague James Cone, reading a book of mine that made allusion to those 1620 immigrants to New England, cautioned me not long ago: "Remember the slaves that had already arrived in Virginia in 1619." This country began with black people, too. For two hundred and fifty years no one let them write the history of their survival, but it is time their descendants wrote it.

To take this route toward a re-reading of our nation's history will be to court two real dangers. We must be moral in our search for our history, without being guilt-ridden; and we must see history through the eyes of the oppressed, without being blind to the virtues of the society that oppressed them.

Southerners, like the oppressed, remember history, partly because the results of history still hurt. In the depths of the social crisis of the sixties in Mississippi, Governor Ross Barnett turned savagely to his fellow white southerners on the side of the Civil Rights marchers with the accusation: "These people who want to change southern traditions are

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burglars in our midst. They are stealing our grandfathers' inheritance." It is difficult to repent of the sins that your grandfathers committed. If you love and revere them at all, you cannot with peace of mind disagree with them. And if you feel guilty for such disagreement, you have assumed a burden from the past which the God of history, notably the God of Ezekiel's grape-eaters (chap. 18), does not mean for any generation to assume.

In the final stages of our research on the relations of the next generation of "millhands and preachers" in Gastonia, North Carolina, I had a casual conversation with a young woman who had grown up there in the years following the great textile strike of 1929. Liston Pope's book centered on that strike, a traumatic social experience in Gastonian memory even to this day. Unwittingly this young woman vouched for the trauma when she commented, "I have almost worked up the courage to read the Liston Pope book."¹ It does take courage to look at some ranges of historical data. Lingering, derived guilt will not serve the cause of intellectual objectivity here. Only a certain subjective freedom in the context of Christian belief in the forgiveness of sins will serve us.

This freedom must embrace the ability to say a good word for the good in American history. Church historians, theologians, and ethicists will not serve the American church or people if they systematically ignore the possibility that there is something good, as well as something evil, hidden, or revealed in American history. For example, it is not insignificant that many black people have decide ' d to settle down and live in this country. That so many should be so willing to "keep on keeping on" in this racist society constitutes an enormous compliment and hope for our society. There is an Egyptian deliverance to be hoped for while still living in Egypt; the promised land lies ready, underneath our feet.

II

In working our way toward new moral readings of American history, we must preach and teach the faith in the context of a wider range of "ordinary" experiences that is customary in most white churches of America. In his description of indebtedness to the early influence of the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church in Bearden, Arkansas, James Cone says of the preaching that took place in that church:

… the truth of the story was dependent upon whether the people received the extra strength to go one more mile in their struggle to survive and whether they received the courage to strive one more time to right the wrongs in the world.²

Theressa Hoover made much the same point about the role of the black church in building and maintaining the dignity of black women in

¹ Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942); cf. also John R. Earle, Dean D. Knudsen, and Donald W. Shriver, Jr., Spindles and Spires: A Re-Study of Religion and Social Change in Gastonia (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1976), especially Chapter 7, pp. 308-312.
² James Cone, The God of the Oppressed (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 50.

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the ghettos of northern cities. She quotes the distinguished American actress Cicely Tyson's account of her own girlhood in the 1940s in New York City:

We were in church Sunday morning to Saturday night. it was our whole life, our social life, our religious training, everything … I sang in the choir and played the piano and organ. Sometimes when my mother worked late at night, Nana would take my sister, my brother, and me to the Baptist Church. It was that kind of thing that saved us. Church became a shelter for us. A lot of kids growing up with us are not here today because of drugs or alcohol, or, they died some violent death. They weren't necessarily bad kids.³

One might call that a historical-contextual-pragmatic theory of the church's misson. Or perhaps the New Testament phrase, as always, is best: "doing the truth." If that is the best way to talk about the gospel, perhaps the American black church remains the best example of regular, faithful interchange between the truths of ordinary experience and the truth that delivers us from the tyranny of the ordinary.

Many white Christians have yet to approach this level of interchange. For them, the church is otherworldly, not in the heavenly sense, but simply in its social-psychological isolation from meaningful reference to the life of the world in the midst of the cultivation of the spirit. I know, for example, how hungry American church congregations were for some spiritual illumination of the Kennedy assassination in November 1963; how similarly hungry some white and all black congregations were for such illumination of the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination; how hungry they were for some theologically consistent interpretation of Watergate; and how hungry they must be now for some interpretation of this nation's current decline in power and prestige within the community of nations.

It is the black church tradition in this country that comes closest to providing an example of the freedom of the gospel to illuminate these things. No quarrel there with the preacher's attempt to call a President, or a Governor, or a Mayor to account for a recent decision. No problem there with the Barthian method of preaching with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. How could one otherwise preach about the God and Father of Jesus, who inhabited a specific human history with us, in order to announce the co-habitation of the Spirit with every nook and cranny of human time and space? All else is docetism! The black churches of America may have the most convincing traditions available to stand against the docetism of most American churches.

III

The churches must work together on new patterns of racially comprehensive partnership. Black theologians, black church leaders, black Christians generally over the past ten or fifteen years, have demonstrated their determination to be heard, on their own terms, by white

³ Quoted in Theressa Hoover, "Black Women and the Churches: Triple Jeopardy," in Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone, Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966-1979 (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Brooks, 1979), pp. 379-80.

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Christians or not to be in speaking distance of them. We are closer to real church unity on the basis of this new candor than we ever could be so long as one party to the conversation is holding back on deeply felt truth. We are also closer to real unity in the church because we have available to us, by spoken and written word, the normative claims of the black American experience upon American society and its churches. For the first time in the history of American race relations, there is now a fair chance that people of different histories, different theologies, and different social perspectives may actually be capable of communicating those differences to each other, in a new expression of the "one body with many members." Best of all, this very condition holds out some promise of defining and experiencing the church in American society in some degree of liberation from the insulating shackles of racial and class structures.

Freedom of religion in America has meant the right to organize with others of the same race, class, neighborhood, ideology, nationality, or education. Political freedom, added to individualistic religious inclination, has thus been a formula for social-religious alienation. James Cone, protesting against forces in the black community that made for a socially insulated black experience, makes this notable plea:

If black religion is identical with the only possible interpretation of the Bible for black people, then what is the universality implied in the particularity of black religon? Without this universalism, I do not see how we can make any Christian or human claims about black religion…. To be Christian and human means developing a perspective on life that includes all peoples.⁴

This is a caution against the dangers of provincialism in the definition of church, gospel, or humanity. (That is quite different from white theologians voicing the same caution to the black church.) May a similar caution sound loud and clear in the pulpits of white churches.

Where all divisions of the church are struggling against the tides of history to "develop a perspective on life that includes all people," there, I suspect, the Holy Spirit camps in our midst. But if we are so to struggle, in our separateness, we must have occasions of relatedness. We must have occasions on every level of the human global community. What are the structures by which the parts of the church in our time can acquire ready, even if painful, access to the whole church? What are the pathways down which we must walk together in order to experience the ecumenical qualification of the congregational, the national qualification of the local, the global qualification of the national, and the unemployed's qualification of the employed?

The island-mind of our upbringing must yield to the continental human that God means to bring to birth. And this is the best possible moral argument for a connectional church theory, and the best possible argument for the ecumenical movement.

⁴ James Cone, "Epilogue: An Interpretation of the Debate Among Black Theologians," in Wilmore and Cone, p. 619.

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The weakness of American denominations as ecumenical educators lies precisely in their financial, organizational, and political strength. Strong people easily grow into the illusion that they do not need weak people. But communities of the strong do need communities of the weak. The churches of the oppressed in American still provide our best access to an understanding of the oppressed everywhere. They may be our best hope of living ecumenically in the world.

Is there not a sort of ecumenical spirit in the willingness of black people in Harlem to treat people in Morningside Heights as their neighbors? And is there not an ecumenical resource in the simple sociological fact that through the churches the name of Jesus is confessed in virtually every neighborhood in the country? The name of Jesus is a little door through the looking-glass of race and class discrimination. The meaning of the ecumenical movement is here: the hope for ecumenical humanity. Can the power of big church structures be put to the service of real, equalitarian, unpatronizing community between the strong and the weak of our society?

IV

We all have a part to play in the national search for a new understanding of pluralistic unity. In a recent Bulletin of the Martin Luther King Fellows, James H. Hargett writes on "Black Church Ministry in a World-Inclusive U.S.A., 2000 A.D."⁵ It is an essay with shrewd, prophetic, hopeful perspective on what it may mean to be black, Christian, and located in the late twentieth century urban ghetto. The Voting Rights Act was not the only historical legislation of 1965, Hargett reminds us. There was also the National Origin Immigration Quota and Refugee Act, which, breaking the racist immigration policies of the 'twenties, opened doors to a cross-section of the world. The result, in a mere fifteen years, is that especially in the cities-

Black is a shrinking though still highly visible entity in the old melting pot that has become a pluralistic stew…. By the year 2000, black culture will be only one of the many cultures and clearly less significant numerically than the Hispanic in a vast majority of cities.

The results, says Hargett, are already threatening the interests of black people.

Asians … seem to arrive here with the entrepreneurial skills to get ahead regardless of political power or land ownership …. Korean and Mexican gas stations and groceries in Los Angeles are already showing [this] strong tendency, to say nothing of the Cuban dominance of retail outlets in Miami. Even the underworld in the ghetto has been taken over, and the dope traffic brought under the control of non-white, non-black operators in black communities in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. With this acceptance of Third World overlords, black confidence in blacks will take a turn for the worse, unless something significant is done to reverse the trend.⁶

⁵ In The Bulletin of the Marlin Luther King Fellows, Inc., Spring, 1980. pp. 1-4, 7.
⁶ Ibid., p. 4.

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Something significant is being done by the black churches in these cities. As Hargett implies, no other ghetto organization is committed simultaneously to the welfare of one ethnic group and the welfare of all. For these newest arrivals to the ghetto, black Christians must now see themselves as hosts. "One black church in Los Angeles has already established classes in Spanish and ordered its large staff to take them." The hospitality tradition in the black church must now be stretched to include all sorts and conditions of human beings, as black Christians lift their "own proud ghetto lamp of welcome to others oppressed."⁷

This is a hard challenge to lay upon the spirit and the resources of a movement scarcely able to keep its ministry to the body and soul of its own people. But here it is-an example of universal perspective upon an emerging national community in the poorest, most overburdened segment of the nation. If this is not a miracle of the Spirit, then we must say that the age of miracles is truly over.

The time is overdue for churches of white European ancestry to join their black brothers and sisters in such a commitment. It is not an easy commitment, and the road to fulfilling it will be full of stones and bridges-to-be-built. I have tried in an article in The Christian Century to state some rules of this road for those who want to take their share of suffering in the construction of a pluralistic national society. The précis is as follows: (1) We must, like good scientists, study the details of strange world cultures until we no longer subject them to our ignorance or our ill-informed prejudices. (In this we shall need the help of history and social science.) (2) We must, like good neighbors, cultivate the art of empathy so that we feel a little of what the stranger feels, even if we cannot make those feelings really our own. (In this we shall need personal acquaintance with our strange neighbors, and good listening ears.) Finally, (3) we shall have to let our ideas of right and wrong be subject to the criticism of the foreigner, and in the meantime, while we learn, if foreigners inflict on us what we believe to be sin, we shall have to forgive them. (In this we shall need the strength of One who forgave us, because we also know not what we do.)⁸

If we build such bridges, we shall be participating in the building of a new country. It will be a country with certain characteristics:

(1) A country that values the self-direction of individuals a little less if that is the price of valuing the integrity of cultural communities more.

(2) A country that abandons the melting pot image of itself as it rewrites history in its schools, teaches foreign languages there, and tests its students on their mutually acceptable knowledge of each other, all out of respect for the labor that builds a culture over millennia and that must not be destroyed in a generation.

(3) A country that also abandons the dream of unlimited economic

⁷ Ibid., p. 7.
⁸ Donald W. Shriver, Jr., "The Pain and Promise of Pluralism," The Christian Century, Vol. XCVII, No.11 (March 26, 1980), pp. 345-350.

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growth as the solution to the imbalances of the rich and the poor, that shapes its tax policies around a new dream of "liberty and justice for all" wherein the price of liberty and justice gets paid by all and distributed to all.

(4) A country whose leaders test their claims upon the world community by the reality of liberty and justice inside this national community, who are not pretentious about national achievement because history and current fact do not justify such pretense, and who display justice partly in their vision of what it still demands of this nation.

Last year at Union Seminary, we convened a small group of black and Hispanic pentecostal leaders to talk to us and to each other about their experience in the faith and in the church. Said one young man: "I have been a Christian for only two years. Before that I had only prejudice against black people. Back then I wouldn't worship with them the way I do now." The remark not only resonated in my ear with the historical Christian experience of Pentecost; it also mounted to the rafters as a hopeful prayer for the American church of the future.

What secret does the Christian movement have to contribute to the national culture of the future in these scarcely United States of America? One hesitates to predict. But we should know enough about the origins of our movement to know that we might have some knowledge, some experience, for the explication of a famous line from a great American poet: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down."⁹ We know a lot about what it takes to build walls. That is no secret. What does it take to tear them down?

Deep in the history of Israel, the church, and especially the black church, there are answers to that question. How was a community built between scattered slaves in Egypt? How did a community of liberation survive in the American Egypt of black slaves? How did "one Lord and one baptism" manage to bind together black and white Christians on this continent when the very language of baptism is used by some to cover over the deep injustice of other bonds? How did anyone born in Bearden, Arkansas, grow to write the sentence, "To be Christian and human means developing a perspective on life that includes all people"? The answers, for American Christians, black and white, are not remote. They are very near in our history, upon our lips, and in the heart of our memories-"ready to be kept."¹⁰

⁹ Robert Frost, "Mending Wall," in The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. by Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), p. 34.
¹⁰ Deut. 30:14 (NEB).