[COMMENTARY] When I moved to Detroit, one of the first things I noticed was the number of churches I saw. I couldn’t turn a corner without seeing a cross at the top or on the side of large traditional church buildings and smaller storefront churches. I started wondering: Why all the churches?
Recently, I got curious enough to attend a traditional black church in Detroit. It was at the time of the whole Obama/Wright controversy and it was clear that this church was an institution in the community that was interested in the national political debate. Soon after, it dawned on me that historically, the black church and black political leaders have always gone hand in hand. In fact, black leaders who are household names today, such as the Rev. Martin Luther King, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, all ascended to their positions through the black church. Organizations like the NAACP, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) were initially pulled into being by the strength of the black church. In fact, after doing a bit of research, it is apparent to me that the black church made the civil rights movement possible, not to mention centuries of organizing freed slaves and slaves, before that. Some of that strength still remains in the church as an institution that brings people together to provide some low-income housing and summer programs for kids as well as a social networking hub for the black middle class in Detroit and around the country. Yet, these are mostly local initiatives.
After the NAACP’s moment in the national spotlight for hosting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and after Wright got on his soapbox at the National Press Club with the sentiment “white people are out to get us,” I noticed the whole affair seemed a bit dated. We’ve all gotten used to the reactionary speeches that were necessary in the ’50s and ’60s to bring an end to segregation and the overt discrimination used by the traditionally white institutions at the time. Today, there has to be a different approach to conquering racism because now, though it is still very much alive, it has more subtle faces. On top of that, it seems the black church has lost its role of power for people in my generation.
Continued – Younger, educated black people, children of the black middle class, cannot identify with this traditional reactionary message of “down with the system” anymore because they are proof that the system works. Well, so it would appear. Anyone who sees the disparity of poverty levels between whites and blacks per capita knows that it doesn’t. But if one person “makes it,” then theoretically everyone else who doesn’t isn’t working hard enough, which we know is not true.
For instance, my friend Darrell Ezell, who grew up in the belly of Alabama in a black church-oriented community and who spent time in seminary school, has had the chance to leave the exclusive bubble of the black South experience to go to schools like Columbia University for a master’s in politics and religion and from there to the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom to receive his Ph.D. in religion and diplomacy. My friend Sylvester Johnson, meanwhile, dropped out of Oakland University to get a job to help pay his mom’s mortgage so they could keep their house.
There is a communication gap between Darrell, living proof that the system works, and people like Sylvester, who don’t have the time to criticize the system because they’re too busy working two jobs and just maintaining the status quo. And for both of them, what does the black church mean? Since I am no expert on the black church and am not in any place to comment on it in any depth, I called Ezell and posed the question: Is the black church relevant in American politics/society these days?
Ezell’s answer was no. He said the most important person involved in this research has been James Cone, a Southern black religious scholar whose research on liberation theology and the role of the black church backs his opinion. According to Ezell, the black church has been losing power since its peak with the civil rights movement in the ’60s. He noted that the ’80s saw a lot of damage to the black church when black men started falling away due to the crack cocaine epidemic in cities and the emergence of HIV/AIDS. At that time, the black church that was once the national voice of the black community during the civil rights movement was not instrumental in easing the modern crisis.
Today, black preachers of the traditional post are still defending the position of power they once had by any means necessary, and a public example of this was the Wright/Obama fiasco, Ezell said. Obama has proved that not every black leader needs the endorsement of the black church because there has been a shift in the role it has in society. Ezell said his church did not help him, rather, that it tried to hold him back from chasing his dreams because church leaders and members wanted him to become a preacher. Ezell feels his church community in 2001 was not understanding of his plight to encourage social justice throughout the state of Alabama. It was upsetting to many when he left his ministerial order in the A.M.E. Church to study theology and politics at Union Theologial Seminay and Columbia University in New York.
Ezell agrees there is a communication problem within the black community: the traditional prophetic preachers aren’t responding to the sociopolitical renaissance that is taking place and the progressive leaders are trying to change the traditional reaction to racial issues. “Today we need the traditional black church to do what?” Ezell asks. He said that he admires the “Prosperity Gospel” more than the traditional prophetic Gospel because the prosperity gospel is more inclusive; people of all demographics attend the widely popular sermons of prosperity preachers like T.D. Jakes. “Prosperity Gospel” is a more evangelical technique that promises prosperity such as money, health, happiness, through faith in Christ and God )
This communication problem should not be holding us back. As Obama said in his “A More Perfect Union” speech “We cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.”
I asked Sylvester Johnson what role he thought the church played for him. “I feel like the church gives my mom a feeling like she’s not alone,” he said, though he admits he does not attend church. “If she didn’t have church, I think she might lose it.”
Others believe the church is still very influential. “Of course it’s still relevant,” said Janie Martin, a 35-year-old mother of three who attends First Fellowship Baptist Church in Detroit. “Maybe not on the same level it used to be, but don’t let Barack Obama fool you, the black church is a powerful institution. How do you think black people still organize?”
But Ezell thinks the potential of the black church and the power of the institution is not being used to its full potential. He feels that the church could do more to prevent poverty, drug abuse and HIV/AIDs in the black community but that old values of exclusion and reaction are holding it back. He said he tried to extend the outreach at his church to include more help for those in poverty and to prevent and help treat HIV/AIDS on a broader level but was shot down by the leaders of the church. He said that with all the middle class black people who attend church there is no reason there should be poverty at the level it is in the surrounding communities or around the country.
This morning, when I woke up to church bells at the end of my block, and this afternoon when drove past six churches on the way home, I got to wondering again. I was wondering if all the churches were to disappear, what it would mean for the culture and the communities.