The Black Church is Dead-Long Live the Black Church

[Jamye Wooten]

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The Black Church is Dead-Long Live the Black Church By Anthea Butler, Jonathan L. Walton, Ronald B. Neal, William D. Hart, Josef Sorett, and Edward J. Blum  March 9, 2010 ReligionDispatches.com  A few weeks ago, Princeton's Eddie Glaude Jr. published an obituary for the black church in the Huffington Post-the Digital-Age equivalent of nailing a set of theses to a church door. And while it is a brief article, short on the conventions of mourning, in it Glaude details the long, lingering illness of the venerable institution, and cites multiple causes of death. What has finally died, Glaude explains, is the idea of the black church as a singular idea; what remains are black churches, in the plural. Glaude concludes his provocative pronouncement with what Jonathan Walton refers to below as "a prophetic challenge." The death of the black church as we have known it occasions an opportunity to breathe new life into what it means to be black and Christian. Black churches and preachers must find their prophetic voices in this momentous present. And in doing so, black churches will rise again and insist that we all assert ourselves on the national stage not as sycophants to a glorious past, but as witnesses to the ongoing revelation of God's love in the here and now as we work on behalf of those who suffer most. RD asked a selection of historians, religious scholars, and other interpreters of the black church to respond to Glaude's thesis, and to his challenge.

Saying It's Dead Doesn't Kill It by Anthea Butler, University of Pennsylvania   Well, I disagree with Eddie, (let's hope we're still friends, lol). The Black Church may be dead in its incarnation as agent of change, but as the imagined home of all things black and Christian, it is alive and well. As a historian, I understand that the moniker Black Church never meant the Pentecostals, the spiritualists, the NOI [Nation of Islam], the Garveyites and the like. It was meant for those traditional monikers of black Baptist, AME and other religious denominations. Growing up a black Catholic also meant that I was never one of that great number of the black church either. So when I read Eddie's article, I had to laugh, because you see, it perpetuates the stereotype even as it says that the black church is dead. Glaude says "the death of the Black Church as we have known it occasions an opportunity to breathe new life into what it means to be black and Christian." Psst. Eddie. Not every black person is a Christian, nor wants to be. This sort of thinking that every African American must be lodged in a Christian paradigm perpetuates the notion that Christianity is equated with the African-American Experience. Even a scholar like Professor Glaude, who is on one hand, critical of the megafest, etc., can't see his own participation in the Black Church Show. Remember the "State of the Black Union" featuring Tavis Smiley? That was an eight-hour church service on C-SPAN replete with theologians and prayer. So much for the Black Church being dead.   Read More

The Black Church Ain't Dead! (But Maybe It Should Be?) by Jonathan L. Walton, University of California-Riverside The history of Afro-Protestantism in America, most often referred to as the "black church tradition," is a complicated one, indeed. Hewn out of the crucible of a slaveholding society and populated by those who were theologically trained within seminaries of suffering, these venerable institutions represent the best of American society in general, and black human strivings in general. For instance, the organizational acumen and creative cultural genius of early black denominations disrupted the logic of white supremacy. With few resources other than a theological vision of equality and unrelenting commitment to freedom and justice, black congregations became sites of social improvement as well as moral consciences that exposed the hypocrisies of the dominant society. It is understandable why, then, we have come to commonly describe black congregations as having formed "a nation within a nation." Black churches were religious reactions to unfortunate cultural realities. When and where African Americans were excluded from the many spheres of society (i.e., economic, educational, political, and mass media), black congregations became, according to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "counterpublics" over and against apartheid systems. To be sure, self-segregation was never the ultimate goal; rather full-scale participation in the larger society. Read more

RIP: The Myth of the Black Church  by Ronald B. Neal, Claflin University In a recent Op-Ed piece in the Huffington Post, Princeton University religious scholar, Eddie Glaude, Jr., offered a provocative and deceptive proposition regarding Christianity in black America. After surveying recent sociological data gathered by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life and taking stock of the differentiated landscape of contemporary black America, Glaude concludes, "The Black Church, as we've known it or imagined it, is dead." This conclusion flies in the face of a forty plus-year-old socially engineered belief that Christianity in black America is fundamentally progressive and transformative; that Christianity in black America is distinct from traditional expressions of Christianity which lie outside of black America. In a word, Glaude's pronouncement buries a belief which has done a disservice to the history of Christianity in black America and to the present religious and social realities of Christianity among black Americans. What is more, it lays to rest a view of Christianity in black America which contributes very little to what most Americans should know about Christianity among black Americans. Read More

The Afterlife of the Black Church  by William David Hart, University of North Carolina-Greensboro In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the "madman" descends the mountain where he has received a sacred wisdom-a "gay science"-and proclaims to a bewildered audience that "God is dead." The audience cannot hear what he has to say. What he says strikes their ears as the ranting of a madman. If, as Eddie Glaude claims, the Black Church is dead, then its death is more than a twice-told tale, which is not to say it is not a tale worth retelling. To reread Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, E. Franklin Frazier, C. Eric Lincoln, Gayraud Wilmore and others is to be reminded of how old this declension narrative is. They all proclaimed, in one way or another, the death of God, the disenchantment of the world, the "living death" of the Negro Church, the death of the Negro Church, and the deradicalization of the Black Church. In the 1830s, long before any of these writers, Alexis de Tocqueville noted the intimacy if not interchangeability of church and commerce, the marriage of God and money in America. Read More

"This is the Air I Breathe": Unpacking Post-Black Church Proclamations by Josef Sorett, Harvard University Let me confess: I have become increasingly skeptical or suspicious of iconoclastic claims like "The Black Church is Dead," as was recently argued by Eddie Glaude. Such rhetoric might be viewed as part of a more recent trajectory in scholarship on African-American religion, to which I am tremendously indebted, that aims both to historicize and problematize overly general claims about Afro-Protestantism(s). I've even heard some call for a moratorium on the very phrase "the black church." For the sake of nomenclature, we might refer to this development as post-black church studies. This approach is defined by a concern, on one hand, with correcting the historical record by highlighting the longstanding reality of black religious diversity-both intra- and extra-Christianity, for lack of a better phrase. Yet, on the other hand, it also often reflects a presentist commitment to creating space for more voices in a public discourse that continues to uncritically privilege a certain (namely, Civil Rights/1960s and Protestant) narrative of black religious experience. While I think Glaude has an iron in both of these fires, it also seems clear to me that his lot, in this essay, is cast primarily with the latter. Read More

Sympathy, Frustration and Reform  by Edward Blum, San Diego State University I had three emotional responses to Professor Glaude's recent claims about the "black church" being dead. My first was sympathy. It's been a rough couple of years for the black church. It and its offspring black liberation theology were blamed for almost derailing the presidential campaign of Barack Obama (and black liberation theology got branded as somehow not black). Then, Barbara Dianne Savage of the University of Pennsylvania declared that the "Negro church" was an imaginary construct of early twentieth century sociologists and historians who flattened out complexity, rendered women silent, and ill-prepared the nation to understand black politics in the Civil Rights movement (she conveniently left out that women played a vital role in that early construction, one even co-editing with W. E. B. Du Bois the pathbreaking The Negro Church in 1903). And now, Eddie Glaude thinks the black church is dead. To the black church... I feel bad for you. Read More

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