A new book on religion and race in politics should give us pause
The University of Notre Dame’s Mark A. Noll is one of our leading historians of religion, specializing in the history of evangelicalism. Never dull or predictable, he has consistently presented a face of evangelicalism that I hope more of the public can meet, showing its constituencies to be far more diverse than most news-media comment suggests.
Now Noll has given us God and Race in American Politics: A Short History, a book not about the 2008 presidential election, but one that — surprisingly and profitably — tells us a lot about how we talk about God in politics, yesterday and today. As he does so often, Noll here writes serenely about volatile subjects, to inform a nation and provide perspective.
When I first began to write about religious history 50 years ago, fundamentalism, evangelicalism, and Pentecostalism were seen as fringe elements. As evangelicalism has since prospered, it has attracted first-rate scholars, many of them influential professors at first-rate universities and writers published by the most prestigious presses.
Despite its title, this book is not a broad view of race — American Indians and Asian-Americans, for instance, are not even mentioned — but only about African-Americans, who have always been on stage in the drama of race and politics. A quote from a character in the Walker Percy novel Love in the Ruins shockingly frames a question that haunts Noll’s history: “Was it the nigger business from the beginning? What a bad joke: God saying, here it is, the new Eden, and it is yours because you’re the apple of my eye. … And all you had to do was pass one little test, which was surely child’s play for you had already passed the big one. One little test: Here’s a helpless man in Africa, all you have to do is not violate him. That’s all.
“One little test: You flunk!”
Noll’s terse history is crammed with statistical data, legislative history, references to revealing events, and more critical comment than one expects in narrative histories. There are also jolting quotations to show how both supporters and opponents of slavery and segregation turned to biblical truth to justify their opinions, increasingly forging a shared, yet still different, evangelical tradition. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln noted that both sides “read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other”; so do preachers on all “sides” in Noll’s story. But how they prayed and spoke differed.
We’ve heard the current debates about African-American preachers and politicians, the fiery language of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and the questions about Barack Obama’s faith. Mainstream pundits uninformed by history often reduce black religious rhetoric to slogans about “black liberation theology.” That theology, with its concern for the oppressed, did represent an episode in history in the late 1960s and 70s in America and South Africa. Noll mentions that stormy moment, but takes a longer look at African-American rhetoric. He quotes early biblically based preachers whose cadences are still audible in the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and many less-recognized black ministers along the way to today.
For one tradition in black speech about religion, rooted in the sting of color, listen to Daniel Walker in 1829: “Can the American preacher appeal unto God, the Maker and Searcher of hearts, and tell him, with the Bible in their hands, that they made no distinction on account of men’s colour?” Or Frederick Douglass in 1861: “Color makes all the difference in the application of our American Christianity.” As for the Bible, Douglas wrote, “The same book which is full of the Gospel of Liberty to one race, is crowded with arguments in justification of slavery of another.”
As Noll shows, however, not all black religious leaders adopted that kind of language. Only a militant, exclusivist minority rejected white-church support of the black cause. Celebrating the federal ban on slavery in Washington, Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne proclaimed in 1862 that “if we ask, Who sent this great deliverance? The answer shall be, the Lord, the Lord God Almighty, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.” Bishop Payne went on to pray, “Thou, O Lord, and thou alone couldst have moved the heart of this Nation to have done so great a deed for this weak, despised and needy people!”
In Noll’s history, the post-Civil War period saw the “emergence of black civil society.” It was during that time, he writes, that a “distinctly African-American religious voice” became stronger. But there was never, he adds, “one African-American voice”; there developed, instead, a “distinctly African-American force field in which different religious expressions arose, merged, competed against each other, and provided an unusual measure of fruitful hybridization.” That hybrid was largely an amalgamation of Calvinism, with its emphasis on God’s sovereignty in history, and evangelicalism, with its stress on personal salvation and biblical authority, reflected through the prism of black experience.
Pushed to the edges of white churches or excluded from them for centuries, black people invented their own religious style. It was “defined by immediate contact with the divine,” Noll says, along with “Bible knowledge keyed to miraculous interventions” that sustained black people throughout slavery and segregation.
Among black churches, God was a palpable presence whose Spirit intervened in people’s lives, sometimes with miracles. Congregations did not simply hear stories about God; they were in them. Language familiar in Negro spirituals dealt with God and the slavery of worldly life, God and the Promised Land. The sung lines about “crossing the Jordan” were not torn from dusty history books. They referred to current events and future dreams and plans.
Race was central to the white church, too. In Noll’s stories, most of the time preachers, prophets, and politicians in the white communities claimed God. Anti-slavery church leaders, often revivalists like Charles Grandison Finney and radical abolitionists did try to awaken consciences by invoking God. But in the South, most white people “used” God, invoking his name and word to defend slavery and segregation. Yes, very late, long after the Civil War and into the civil-rights movement, some Southerners linked with Northern church leaders to organize movements, mobilize denominations, and quicken consciences. Noll is careful and fair to show us the commonality among some black and white religious leaders who defended racial justice, giving white Christians credit for taking political risks and finding impulses for good in many Protestant movements, conservative and progressive, tardy, timid, and muffled though most of those voices were.
But more prevalent was the language of proslavery advocates in the South, like Thornton Stringfellow of Virginia. In Stringfellow’s A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery (1841), he showed that “Abraham, Moses, the Apostle Paul, and even Jesus himself,” Noll writes, took slavery for granted or did not try to end it.
In the period 1865-1925, evangelicalism grew in the United States; modern Pentecostalism — its movement fostered by a pioneer black evangelist, William J. Seymour, the son of a slave, who began Pentecostal revivals in Los Angeles in 1906 — was born in the early years of the 20th century. White evangelicals were at ease with the divine immediacy of the black church. North and South, however, they were not involved with social issues, lagging behind mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. The Pentecostal stress, too, was less on social reform than on individual salvation and piety, and the Pentecostal movement, despite early revivals that mixed black and white people, increasingly divided along racial lines. Black Pentecostal churches became organizing centers of black life, although they did not lead movements for social justice either.
Thus, in effect, the black voices in sermons offered an involved God to black people. Their white friends and foes increasingly described God as personal Savior.
I have been following the distinctions among white and black spokespeople since the summer of 1962, when at the Hampton Institute I gave professorial lectures over the course of four mornings, while King delivered four preacherly sermons in the afternoon to hundreds of African-American pastors. They sat back and respectfully took notes as I provided historical references. But they shelved their notebooks, leaned forward, and stood and stomped as King gave marching orders through them to the people of God they represented and to whom they were to preach. In terms of the differences I have described between white and black churches, I was talking about God, while King was offering God to black leaders in a time of change.
Such approaches to God-talk, apparent so often in God and Race in American Politics, influence everything. Awareness of the rhetorical differences and theological assumptions can help the public decode the language heard in controversies even today. Noll mentions how God shows up in civil and uncivil debates about “in God we trust” on coins or “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as in discussions of abortion and homosexuality. Many people, both black and white, who use God-words calculate their potential for rousing constituencies, for claiming how “we belong” and you do not. Noll argues at the end of his book: “Historic Christian faith offers … a standpoint from which it is possible to see how much believers themselves have done to promote the evils of racism in American politics while at the same time recognizing how often they have offered hints of redemption as well.” Pundits and commentators this year — as they have before — usually fail to recognize the distinctions and paradoxes Noll describes, and how they developed. They therefore miscast the character of preachers and congregations, demonstrators and marchers, vital leaders and those who reminisce about olden days.
To recognize the differences among religions, and how they are misunderstood, is to have grounds for fear about the future: We still have difficulty talking about race, even in religious contexts. But the fact that both black and white religious leaders, at least for the past half century, have led civil-rights and reconciliation movements inspires hope.
Noll makes clear that he views the religious right as a corruption of biblically based conservatism in racial matters, but religiously conservative himself, he is also critical of those who prejudge the faults of that right wing, as well as of timid progressives who display little of the religious power of the black preachers he quotes. He lets his judgments emerge from his study of stories, statements, sermons, and history. At times he cites statistics and legislation, so readers should not look for excitement on every page. But, be they religious or not, they will find fresh tools for interpreting the rhetoric in politics and the posturing of people who find God useful.
That makes God and Race appropriate reading in this election year, as it will be in 2012 and after.
Martin E. Marty is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a panelist for On Faith, at Washingtonpost.com. His most recent book is The Christian World: A Global History (Modern Library, 2008).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 6, Page B18
