Part 3: Inspecting the Wall

Toward A Recapitulation of Faith and Faithfulness Amongst Black Students in Racialized American Society.

Inspecting the Ruins and Assessing the Damage

Then I went up in the night by the valley and inspected the wall. and so returned.   (Nehemiah 1:5)

American Christianity is for many Black people too firmly entrenched with racist and oppressive forces. Because of this enmeshment, Christianity —especially among youth— represents white exploitation, dehumanization, white dominance, and black subordination. The message and attitude of white supremacy infiltrated American Christian society and has remained embedded therein through each epoch of the American experiment. Anything associated with Blackness was evil, vile, vulgar, and primitive. Anything associated with whiteness was beautiful, virtuous, godlike, and worthy of emulation by all. Besides, these attitudes were endorsed and endowed by God and his Son, White Jesus. These are the destructive forces that have left the interest of the vast majority of the urban landscape unimpressed, disinterested, and turned off to the white man's religion.

You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.” (Nehemiah 1:7)

The Leaven of White Supremacy

America’s inner cities in the twentieth century were wrested with urban decay and hopelessness. The landscape, the ways of being, and the socioeconomic obstacles in the cities would have been a constant reminder that those who inhabited them were forgotten and inconsequential. This message has continued to resound in urban areas as issues like gentrification and police brutality test the hearts of inner-city youth and urban inhabitants. The evils of racism and oppression continue to thrust members of the community into finding alternative sources of religious meaning, ethical behavior, and religious organization. To recover the good news of the Gospel, we must examine the ways systemic racism has affected the apprehension of truth, the organization of religious life, and the development of ethical standards. 

Slavery and Segregation

In her research on the connections between slavery and Christianity, Katharine Gerbner postulates that protestant supremacy^[1]([2]) preceded white supremacy in the Caribbean islands and the United States. For protestant planters, freedom was tethered to whiteness, and whiteness was tied to Christianity. This belief led to the initial anti-conversion sentiment of the 17th and early 18th centuries. In fact, according to Gerbner, the association between Protestantism and freedom was so strong that most slave owners dismissed the idea that their slaves were even eligible for conversion. ^[3] Protestant supremacy evolved into white supremacy, and the shift from religious to racial terminology prohibited the extraction of that poison from the evangelical, mainline, and Catholic movements that would follow. Eventually, missionaries convinced planters that slaves deserved the opportunity to be converted to Christianity, and in so doing, would become more docile and diligent workers. Christianity would remain inextricably bound to whiteness, slave ownership, land ownership and citizenship until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Chattel slavery in the Americas was the byproduct of a theology based on whiteness. Southern landowners were able to justify their actions by misappropriating the scriptures for their own sinister gain. The wicked institution of slavery codified race and concretized racist attitudes of white dominance. Christianity's collusion with it made it impossible for Blacks to see Christianity as anything other than an oppressive and dehumanizing ideology. After the abolition of slavery, white institutional racism persisted, as did the belief in Black inferiority. White dominant attitudes switched from manifesting in the institutions of slavery to the political and economic powerlessness of legalized segregation.

In fact, the white Protestant church was among the first groups to segregate after the Civil War, and in this way, it paved the way for the embrace of racism at the turn of the century. ^[4]  Segregation led to the establishment of independent Black churches, but in many ways, these churches encouraged Black parishioners to accommodate and accept a subordinate status in white society. Otherwise known as maneuvering respectability politics. To promote accommodation, Black preachers encouraged members to take on an otherworldly orientation, telling them that things would get better in the by and by. E. Franklin Frazier, in his work, The Negro Church in America, describes the plight of Black clergy:

The freedom of the Negro preacher was circumscribed by the fact that members of his congregation were in debt to whites or dependent upon whites for their jobs, and the very land on which the church stood was often the property of whites. The preacher was usually easily controlled, but if other means failed, he could be threatened with violence. ^[5] Although the Black church served as a refuge during a hostile time, it was simultaneously exploited as an extension of white control and dominance.

Complicity in Socio-Economic Disparity

Over time, new and more subtle forms of racism emerged in the United States, especially in urban areas. Emancipation, Industrialization, and War created opportunities for newly freed Black s to migrate north and west. They would learn through the effects of white flight, redlining, and ghettoization that they'd traded in the chains of chattel slavery to being reduced to economic and political chattel. Harold Barron writes,

The ghetto provides the base for segregated schools. The inferior education in ghettos schools handicaps the negro in the labor market. Employment discrimination causes low wages and frequent unemployment. Low incomes limit the market choices of negro families in housing. Lack of education, low-level occupations, and exclusion from home ownership or control of large enterprises inhibit the development of political power. The lack of political power prevents Black people from changing basic housing, planning, and educational programs. Each sector strengthens the racial subordination in the rest of urban institutions. ^[6]

While these communities allowed Blacks to develop a new sense of community based on their physical proximity, the damage of centuries of trauma and dehumanization had already been done. It would begin to manifest itself in the underground economy, alcoholism, and addiction, Black flight, and broken homes. The White Church during this time was unwilling and unable to reckon with the in-migration of Blacks and their needs. At best, they were silent and complicit; at worst, their congregations withdrew with the first threat of Negro invasion.¹¹

The White Church during this time was unwilling and unable to reckon with the in-migration of Black s and their needs. At best, they were silent and complicit; at worst, their congregations withdrew with the first threat of negro invasion. The church's impotence amid the destruction of the Black community added to the distrust and disillusionment of Black Americans.

War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration

In addition, Black church leaders found themselves seeking to change their communities' streets, but the souls of the youth were left untouched, and thus their effectiveness dwindled over time. The presidency of Ronald Reagan marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks to his unprecedented expansion of the “War on Drugs” started by Richard Nixon in 1971. Public concern about illicit drug use continued to increase throughout the 1980s, largely due to media portrayals of mostly Black people addicted to the smokable form of cocaine dubbed "crack." These individuals were termed "super predators," and a furious amount of legislation related to crime and law and order took place during that period. These laws resulted in stop and frisk laws, three-strikes laws, and mandatory minimums.

While no one questioned how the drugs came into the neighborhoods, the War on Drugs culminated in a school-to-prison pipeline and evolved into what Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crow. In her book, Alexander paints a grim picture of how the United States' criminal justice system has functioned as an agent of contemporary discrimination.

Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you are labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a Black  man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”^[7]

Alexander’s assertions are undergirded by the 1994 confession of a top Nixon aide named John Ehrlichman,

You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black  people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black , but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Black s with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.^[8]

Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had presidencies embroiled in scandal, and both presidents had the overwhelming support of white American Christians. These factors created a faulty foundation that could not keep belief, hope and trust in Christianity from crumbling under the weight of the dead Black bodies, like those of Elijah McClaine, Ahmaud Arbery, Breona Taylor, and George Floyd bodies, which seem to incessantly pile up with little to no accountability.

In the wake of these destructive realities and the absence of a robust epistemology that spoke to the Black community’s dignity, plight, and purpose—Black religions emerged to fill the empty space. The Christianity Black youth and young adults have been exposed to, even in their own churches, is, for the most part, consistently unwilling and incapable of providing socio-economic justice, equity, or positive self-assessment.

In an ethnographic study of cult formation in the urban north at the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologist Arthur Fauset identifies important factors that seemed to attract individuals to the new Black gods. He lists: 1) spiritual hunger, 2) dissatisfaction with Christianity and Orthodoxy, 3) mental relief, 4) racial and nationalistic urges, and 5) desire for instruction,^[9]. These descriptors are not dissimilar to Barton's assertions on the formation of new faithfulness, truth and praxis in the Exilic period. 

New leaders like Noble Drew Ali and Elijah Muhammad spoke powerfully to the community's core cultural concerns. The various spin-offs of Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam religions would attempt to correct the absence of a positive self-image by elevating Blackness to a level of divinity. Black Christian cults provided practical, pragmatic solutions for the neighborhood. In these arenas, American Christianity had been weighed and found wanting. New religions based in urban areas preached messages about love, truth, peace, freedom, and justice. Noble Drew Ali, in fact, would go so far as to say that these must be proclaimed and practiced by all citizens of Moorish America. ^[10]

Elijah Muhammed would directly target Christianity as the cause of continued oppression and stifled mobility in the Black community. For Muhammad, the Black man in America, as well as the Black man abroad, had never been able to provide good leadership for himself under Christianity, because “Christianity is not the true religion of God."^[11] At the core of each of these Black religions were a rejection of white Jesus, a distrust in the Bible, a desire for justice, and a longing for a gospel with immanent social implications.

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[1] Religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of “Protestant Supremacy,” which excluded the majority of enslaved men and women from Christian communities. For slaveholders, Christianity was a sign of freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion. Over time, missionaries increasingly used the language of race to support their arguments for slave conversion. Enslaved Christians, meanwhile, developed an alternate vision of Protestantism that linked religious conversion to literacy and freedom.

[2] Gerbner, Katharine. “Christian Slavery.” Katharine Gerbner, 2018. https://www.katharinegerbner.com/publications/christian-slavery/.

[3] Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 2.

[4] David W. Reimers, White Protestantism and the Negro (New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 1965), 25.

[5] Edward F. Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York, NY : Shocken Books, 1963), 44-45.

[6] Owen Blank et al., “The Web of Urban Racism,” in Institutional Racism in America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 142-143. ¹¹ Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches: an Analysis of Protestant Responsibility in the Expanding Metropolis (New York, NY : Macmillan, 1966), 50.

[7] Michelle Alexander, “The New Jim Crow,” in The New Jim Crow (New York, NY : New Press, 2012), pp. 2-3.

[8] Harpers, Harpers, n.d.

[9] Arthur Huff Fauset, Black  Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945), 121.

[10] Drew Ali, Official Proclamation of Real Moorish American Nationality: Our Status and Jurisdiction as Citizens of the U.S.A (Place of publication not identified: Califa Media, 2018).

[11] Elijah Muhammad, “On Crime,” in Message to the Black man in America (Chicago, , IL: The Final Call Inc., 2012), pp. 109-138.

[12] James Baldwin et al., “The Negro in American Culture,” Cross Currents 11, no. 3 (1961), https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/24456864?seq=1.

[13] Megan Hemphill, “What the Research Means,” in Black  Lives Matter and Racial Tension in America (Nashville, TN: Barna Group, 2016), p. 11.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (New York, NY: SIMON SCHUSTER, 2020), 6. Kindle Edition.