How African American Christianity Saved [Some of] Christianity For Me

Undoing the biases of white evangelicalism

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

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There’s a runoff race for the Senate happening in Georgia next week. Since I’ve donated to ActBlue at least once, Raphael Warnock has been sending me text messages lately, urging me to send him more money to help him win. And while I don’t love being on everyone’s mailing list after donating to a political cause, I do really hope Warnock beats Herschel Walker in the race for the last Senate seat.

I adore the fact the Warnock is a Black pastor who preaches in the same church where Martin Luther King Jr. himself once preached. I love how he integrates his faith into his rhetoric, and obviously I’m not one who says that about everything. So why is he so different?

Well. Buckle in for a story.

Back when I was a Very Good, but Very Naive, Evangelical, I thought that my people were the only ones with the right answers. As it turned out, this narrow mindedness also came with a heavy dose of racism. I happened to live in pretty darn white suburbia, and when I went to church, we had a few people of color —maybe— but mostly a sea of Euro-Americans.

Even if it wasn’t directly taught, the messages my brain was soaking in were: my group has all the right answers —> my group is the “real” Christians —> my group looks like *this* —> *these* people are the ones I will now assume are right, real Christians.

In addition to those implicit messages, I also recall learning more explicit messages, like: “social justice” is code for Marxist. A Christian who calls themself a believer in social justice is not a real Christian. Democrats are socialists and baby-killers and therefore evil. And well, some of these Black churches… they just believe in social justice. YIKES. So obviously, they’re not real Christians. Plus, you know what we said about Democrats, and well, you know how Black people usually vote… *shrugs* But we’re not racist! We’re just a Bible-believing church!

My churches were defined by whiteness: our congregations were White. White people were missionaries to non-European countries or to “urban” places. Movies and illustrations depicted Jesus and his homebros as pretty much White. The messages preached in sermons served the values of whiteness, capitalism, and individualism.

Once I began to emerge out of white evangelicalism, I began to see there were all these other forms of Christianity that might possibly have something to offer. It’s embarrassing now how absolutely self-centered and full of smug hubris I was taught to be, but it’s also the truth. I was literally terrified to believe that some other strand of Christianity like Catholicism, or Episcopalian could have something to offer, because I’d been indoctrinated to believe this could be the first step on the slippery slope to hell.

And indeed, I slippery-sloped my way to total faith deconstruction, so they weren’t totally wrong, but they certainly weren’t right either. But after having lost all semblance of traditional faith while simultaneously being in seminary, you know what made me believe, at least for a moment?

The African American Christian tradition.

I attended a pretty liberal and diverse seminary in Indianapolis, and many of my fellow seminarians and the professors were Black. Every Wednesday we had chapel, and while a lot of Wednesdays I didn’t go since I wasn’t really a believer at that point, I still loved the music. We had an incredible pianist and a few singers who could belt out some gospel music that would ring down the marble-floored, glass-walled hallways of the seminary. The sun cast a shadow through the cross-shaped window in the front of the chapel and for a few moments, everything felt so spiritual.

Sometimes the songs were the same old songs I’d sung growing up, but what had been mostly triggering for me in a White church was given different life when sung in this space, by these voices. I didn’t have to agree with all the theology (and I didn’t), but it hit different when I heard it come from a person who had not lived their whole life in the dominant culture.

The other most powerful thing was that I finally recognized what it was to do theology from the side of the oppressed. When I was growing up in my White spaces, we always fancied ourselves as the heroes, as the good guys in the story. God was on our side, because it said right there in the Bible that we were the Chosen Ones! (amazing how we read ourselves into the lives of the Israelite people). But when I started to understand that forbidden social justice theology, it opened my eyes to so much I hadn’t seen before.

We can’t assume that just because we like ourselves and fancy ourselves the heroes, that we’re actually the good guys in the stories. When you listen to an African American person talk about Moses leading the people out of slavery in Egypt, you hear it all differently. You suddenly realize that what was a total abstraction to you — slavery, liberation — has been a very lived reality for their people. You realize maybe your people aren’t really the slaves in the Bible story after all, literally or symbolically.

What had become a dead, fruitless religion for me had new life breathed into it once I transplanted it to this particular setting. To hear a really good African American preacher is a whole body experience: the cadence and rhythm, the intonation and lyricism, the metaphor and allegories used by the preacher are, when finely done, a total work of art. This is preaching that grabs your soul straight out of your chest and makes you want to throw your hands in the air and yell amen even if you’re not the type to ever do that.

(side note: my seminary literally has a PhD program called African American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric, so yeah. This preaching can be a very finely studied art).

Doing theology from the perspective of the marginalized is powerful and compelling. It’s hard to really understand that when you’ve been not-marginalized, or at least not in a significant way, for your whole life. But if you can’t understand it firsthand, get yourself to someone who has been there and sit at their feet to learn.

Whether I choose to belong or not, I won’t throw away all of Christianity, because Christianity is SO much more than the pocket of conservative white evangelicalism that raised me and is currently going cuckoo politically. To call Christianity just that little pocket is to totally disrespect these other rich, amazing traditions. To assume white evangelicalism is representative of Christianity is to continue to paint with the broad brush of white supremacy and assume that what White people do represents the wholeness of what there is to offer. And that is simply not the case, and never has been.

What faith strands have been formative in your own faith development? How were you aware (or not!) of Whiteness or racialized identity in your own church, whether past or present? Would love to converse in the comments! And if you haven’t yet…please subscribe!