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The Black Church Is Dead

Jamye

by Eddie Glaude, Jr., Ph.D.

Huffington Post

The Black Church, as we've known it or imagined it, is dead. Of course, many African Americans still go to church. According to the PEW Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life, 87 percent of African Americans identify with a religious group and 79 percent say that religion is very important in their lives. But the idea of this venerable institution as central to black life and as a repository for the social and moral conscience of the nation has all but disappeared.

Several reasons immediately come to mind for this state of affairs. First, black churches have always been complicated spaces. Our traditional stories about them -- as necessarily prophetic and progressive institutions -- run up against the reality that all too often black churches and those who pastor them have been and continue to be quite conservative. Black televangelists who preach a prosperity gospel aren't new. We need only remember Prophet Jones and Reverend Ike. Conservative black congregations have always been a part of the African American religious landscape. After all, the very existence of the Progressive Baptist Convention is tied up with a trenchant critique of the conservatism of the National Baptist Convention, USA. But our stories about black churches too often bury this conservative dimension of black Christian life.

Second, African American communities are much more differentiated. The idea of a black church standing at the center of all that takes place in a community has long since passed away. Instead, different areas of black life have become more distinct and specialized -- flourishing outside of the bounds and gaze of black churches. I am not suggesting that black communities have become wholly secular; just that black religious institutions and beliefs stand alongside a number of other vibrant non-religious institutions and beliefs.

Moreover, we are witnessing an increase in the numbers of African Americans attending churches pastored by the likes of Joel Osteen, Rick Warren or Jentzen Franklin. These non-denominational congregations often "sound" a lot like black churches. Such a development, as Dr. Jonathan Walton reminded me, conjures up E. Franklin Frazier's important line in The Negro Church in America: "In a word, the Negroes have been forced into competition with whites in most areas of social life and their church can no longer serve as a refuge within the American community." And this goes for evangelical worship as well.

Thirdly, and this is the most important point, we have witnessed the routinization of black prophetic witness. Too often the prophetic energies of black churches are represented as something inherent to the institution, and we need only point to past deeds for evidence of this fact. Sentences like, "The black church has always stood for..." "The black church was our rock..." "Without the black church, we would have not..." In each instance, a backward glance defines the content of the church's stance in the present -- justifying its continued relevance and authorizing its voice. Its task, because it has become alienated from the moment in which it lives, is to make us venerate and conform to it.

But such a church loses it power. Memory becomes its currency. Its soul withers from neglect. The result is all too often church services and liturgies that entertain, but lack a spirit that transforms, and preachers who deign for followers instead of fellow travelers in God.

Black America stands at the precipice. African American unemployment is at its highest in 25 years. Thirty-five percent of our children live in poor families. Inadequate healthcare, rampant incarceration, home foreclosures, and a general sense of helplessness overwhelm many of our fellows. Of course, countless local black churches around the country are working diligently to address these problems.

The question becomes: what will be the role of prophetic black churches on the national stage under these conditions? Any church as an institution ought to call us to be our best selves -- not to be slaves to doctrine or mere puppets for profit. Within its walls, our faith should be renewed and refreshed. We should be open to experiencing God's revelation anew. But too often we are told that all has been said and done. Revelation is closed to us and we should only approximate the voices of old.

Or, we are invited to a Financial Empowerment Conference, Megafest, or some such gathering. Rare are those occasions when black churches mobilize in public and together to call attention to the pressing issues of our day. We see organization and protests against same-sex marriage and abortion; even billboards in Atlanta to make the anti-abortion case. But where are the press conferences and impassioned efforts around black children living in poverty, and commercials and organizing around jobs and healthcare reform? Bishop Charles E. Blake Sr., the presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ, appears to be a lonely voice in the wilderness when he announced COGIC's support of healthcare reform with the public option.

Prophetic energies are not an inherent part of black churches, but instances of men and women who grasp the fullness of meaning to be one with God. This can't be passed down, but must be embraced in the moment in which one finds one's feet. This ensures that prophetic energies can be expressed again and again.

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.

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. is currently the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and chair of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.

Replies to this Topic

Marvin

As both a pastor of black Baptist churches for the last 35 years and as a professor at Ashland Theological Seminary and other seminaries since 1983 I certainly understand the point that Professor Glaude is trying to make about the death of the black church. I have also enjoyed readng the various responses his Huffington Post article have generated.

In truth, however, the prophetic black church to which we all refer so fondly has always been defined by just a few congregations and a few pastors operating against a tidal wave of conservatism and complacency among the majority of black churches within all Christian denominations. If that is true, then the concept of the black church as the prophetic voice within America society is not dead; it continues as "a still small voice" to this day. That is what it has always been.

 

Charles Hamilton set forth a challenge that serves to define when the black church will truly be dead in his book on the Black Preacher in America. He asserts that it will occur when another group arises within the community that can assemble a large gathering on a weekly basis, in space that it owns, without the need for issuing an announcement or invitation suggesting that it is time to gather, and with a budget that is sufficient to provide both staff and support for its operations. There is no such group presently at work within the black community. Thus, the black church continues to occupy a unique position that will not be supplanted any time soon.

There are certainly other groups and secular entities that are present within the black community, and there are clearly new voices being heard from within the ranks of music, literature, and the academy. However, the black church continues to operate, even to thrive based upon the formula set forth by Hamilton; himself an academic from Columbia. Like the famous words from Mark Twain, "Rumors about my death are premature."

Having said that, the vast majority of black churches remain too disengaged from the people and problems that reside just outside the door of their churches as I have argued in my books Preaching to the Black Middle Class and Where Have All the Prophets Gone?. However, this is not a new problem. Less than 5% of black clergy played any active role in the civil rights movement of the 60s and fewer than that were involved in the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s. The black church that Glaude describes is not dead; it has simply never been as large or as numerous as many had been led to believe. James Cone exposed that back in 1969 with the release of Black Theology and Black Power.

The key to this perception of being a prophetic voice in a sinful world has been the effectiveness with which some preachers and churches did their work.

As an active pastor in Cleveland, Ohio it is apparent to me that most of my colleagues have never seen their role as being one of prophetic critique. The vast majority assume the less public role of being priest and pastor. They need constant urging to assume a prophetic role both within the black community and beyond. However, despite their unwillingness to engage on the issues of war, poverty, sexism, HIV/AIDS and others, there remains a core of committed prophetic voices in keeping with God's word to the prophet Elijah in I Kings 19: 18.

The reason we can name the prophets of the Old Testament is because there were so few of them! It really has not been very different so far as the black church is concerned.

 

Marvin A. McMickle

Antioch Baptist Church

Cleveland, OH

wilma

I would agree that the Black church as we have known it in the past, no longer exist.  I believe, however, that its death was almost certain after integration.  It did not die because of integration but died because it embraced totally all of the passive, insatiable need for validation from white society, turn the other cheek, mentality.  It was created out of a forced need for security.  As a people we accepted the definitions, copied the traditions, embraced the explanations, and were more than willing to covet the ministry for social status.  Even at our boldest point, the reason we marched, demonstrated, and protested, was to compell white society to "accept us". 

When Stokley Carmichael, H Rapp Brown and others introduced the idea of "Black Power", an attempt at making our own definitions of who and what "WE" were, the Black church turned them in and turned their backs.  Instead they taught acquiescence and fed an ongoing diet of a pabulum philosophy of inclusion/acceptance, and pie in the sky prayer.   Black ministers were the ones the police and media called on to "quiet and quell" the raging crowds of oppressed Black & brown people.  Ministers were selected because they were "ALWAYS" front and center, ready to compromise and sing "We shall Overcome.  They were the chosen "leaders" - not by us, but by ever present media messages and by political selection.  We bought in on the deception and the deceivers. 

Today, the Black church is almost irrelevant.  Not that Black people are not highly spiritual and do not maintain a strong and sustained belief in GOD, but NOT in instituional religion.  Look at who makes up most Black church congregants - Older Black women and small children.   If you ask a Black minister to pool his resources with another Black church, both mnisters will look at you like you are a two headed monster.  (the response will be different if they are asked to pool resources with a "white" church)  You are asking that they give up their last vestige of "control" and "status" in favor of the common good.  Ministries out of the Black chruch are marginal at best on the impact they have on the horrendous problems destroying the Black community.  We act as though Martin Luther King was the beginning and end of our journey to equality.  Black churches  live in the past because it is safe, ministers are well paid, and the congregants passive. There is one on every corner beause it is lucrative to the minister who can establish a church, even a store front and they are willing to take a small slice of a desperate population.

Black churches are caricatures but unfortunately they provide the fodder.  Black youth are not interested, older people are getting disillusioned with love offerings, and 'first lady" offerings.  The next big event at the chruch is a fundraiser for the church building fund so that they can build a bigger, more elaborate church.  A monument to the minister.  Yes, the Black church is dead and should be.  MAYBE,  just MAYBE, leaders may emerge with new insight about how to define US and our NEEDs and then begin moving toward addressing them. 

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