I was raised during the post–Civil Rights, black power, and black bourgeoisie eras. My father and mother were almost fifty years old when I was born. Since they were born in the early 1920s, former slaves and the children of former slaves did much of their rearing. With this backdrop, I have quite a different upbringing than my peers. Most of my peers’ parents were at least one generation behind my parents. It was a bit unnerving for me because my parents were so old school and my friends’ parents were much freer in their parenting styles.

So much of my early life was impacted by my parents’ rural post-slavery upbringing and their life experiences in the South with whites. They lived a hard life in the South. My dad in particular told stories about racism that were heartbreaking for him and affected him until his recent death in his nineties. One such story is about something that happened when he was less than eleven years old (around the age of my middle son, Nehemiah). My father had to work to help provide for his impoverished family. One of the first of his many jobs was as a worker in a dry cleaner where he learned tailoring and dry-cleaning during this time. On one occasion, eight suits came up missing. The owners of the business blamed my dad.

That night, the police came to my grandfather’s home and snatched my father out of bed. They told my grandmother that if she got in the way they would kill her. Her pleas went unanswered as they whisked him away and put him in jail. They beat him to force a confession, but to no avail. My grandmother ran to the home of her white boss. He went to the police station with her, and she almost collapsed when she saw the condition my father was in. He was so brutally beaten that she had trouble recognizing him.

Her boss asked the sheriff what was going on. They explained that they believed my father had stolen eight suits. The gentleman took one look at my father, noticing his age and size, and asked, “How can someone this boy’s weight and size carry eight suits?” The policemen stood dumbfounded. The boss then exclaimed, “What would he do with them?” After hearing the reasoning of my mother’s boss, they let him go with no apology or explanation. Some of these men were likely seen as upstanding men in the community, keepers of the law, even leaders in their churches.

Later in life, when he was around sixteen years old, my father lied about his age to enter the draft for World War II. At the recruitment office, they learned that he was not eighteen years old yet. When the recruiter rejected his application to go into the army, my dad cried. The recruiter asked, “What’s the matter, boy?” My father responded, “I want to go to war! I want out of South Carolina!” Baffled, the recruiter granted his request by lying about my father’s age. My father always told us, “Going to two world wars was better than being a black man in the Jim Crow South!”

These and other experiences colored how I was raised to deal with whites, whether Christian or not. Just as my father’s experiences impacted my perceptions about race, so my perceptions will mark those of my three sons. Every week, yet another incident involving racial tension splashes across the headlines and dominates our news feeds. I fear for my sons’ lives. I have to hold back tears when I deliver “the talk” that every black parent has with their children. The talk is our way of preparing our children for what it means to live in America today.

This is how it works. One generation’s pain and fears are passed on to the next … and the next and the next. There is a thread that links all of us inexorably to the past. It doesn’t mean that we must repeat the sins of racism and bigotry of the past, but it does mean that they impact us in some way.

Family history matters. One of my great privileges as a pastor is to counsel members of my church who are dealing with varying levels of crisis. When persons are working through issues—whether related to marriage, singleness, or raising children—one of the key things to work through is family history. Family history provides a framework for how a person was nurtured in this sinful world. I need to know what circumstances contributed to the person sitting in front of me. Going through family history reveals the components that helped cause the brokenness that the person needs help repairing.

We understand that family history has a deep impact on the life of a person. But it blows my mind that in American Christianity today, we behave as though our familial past has nothing to do with our present. And it’s disturbing how dismissive my evangelical brethren can be toward the past and its impact on where we are today with respect to race in this country and in the church. It grieves me that there is such an unwillingness to go there. Nehemiah 1:6 helps us to understand the impact of sin from one generation to the next: “Let your eyes be open and your ears be attentive to hear your servant’s prayer that I now pray to you day and night for your servants, the Israelites. I confess the sins we have committed against you. Both I and my father’s family have sinned.” We can no longer afford to remain asleep to what has happened and what continues to happen. The Woke Church must understand its history.

THE CHURCH AND SLAVERY 

In the formation and creation of America, people from Africa were kidnapped and marched from the interior of Africa to be shipped in inhumane conditions across the Atlantic. They were sold to build an economy based on free labor. But it wasn’t really free because it cost them their humanity. To justify the treatment of slaves, society marked Africans as less than human. This helped to soothe the conscience of scores of slave owners in the “New World.” Racism and genocide in this New World were justified by greed that was and is rooted in the idolatry of self-importance.

The transatlantic slave trade was responsible for the forced migration of between 12–15 million people from Africa to the Western Hemisphere from the middle of the 15th century to the end of the 19th century. The trafficking of Africans by the major European countries during this period is sometimes referred to by African scholars as the Maafa (‘great disaster’ in Swahili). It’s now considered a crime against humanity.

The slave trade not only led to the violent transportation overseas of millions of Africans but also to the deaths of many millions more. Nobody knows the total number of people who died during slave raiding and wars in Africa, during transportation and imprisonment, or in horrendous conditions during the so-called Middle Passage, the voyage from Africa to the Americas.¹

It would be wonderful if we could assume that this was simply a cultural issue, that Christians were not involved in this system of slavery. But that is not the case. George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and many others who are considered leaders of our faith were owners of slaves. George Whitefield spoke strongly against slavery in 1740 in an angry, open letter to three southern colonies, “Your dogs are caressed and fondled at your tables; but your slaves who are frequently styled dogs or beasts, have not an equal privilege. They are scarce permitted to pick up the crumbs which fall from their masters’ tables…. Although I pray God the slaves may never be permitted to get the upper hand, yet should such a thing be permitted by Providence, all good men must acknowledge the judgment would be just.”

Clearly Whitefield understood the evils of slavery. But before we praise him as a great abolitionist, consider this: “by the late 1740s, Whitefield advocated legalizing slavery in Georgia. His concern for orphans had won out over his concern for blacks…. Whitefield was not out of step with the times. By 1776, only one denomination in America—the Quakers—had declared slaveholding a sin.”²

Jonathan Edwards is known to have owned six slaves. In his article “Jonathan Edwards, Slavery, and the Theology of African Americans,” Thabiti Anyabwile writes, “We’re not surprised, then, that most of our theological heroes from this period—without respect to their theology—remained silent on, justified, and even participated in African enslavement.”³

The Quakers were a bright light during this period of history. Their activity on behalf of the abolition movement and the Underground Railroad was responsible for the freedom of many slaves. Levi Coffin started helping runaway slaves as a child in North Carolina. Later in his life, Coffin moved to the Ohio-Indiana area, where he became known as the president of the Underground Railroad. These activities put these people at considerable risk, but they persisted in their work to save many lives.

Slave masters were afraid of blacks gaining literacy or access to the Bible. There was high resistance to slave conversions in approximately the first one-hundred-plus years of slavery. Why? I believe it was because white masters understood the implications of the gospel for the dignity of blacks. If they were introduced to the theology of the imago dei, slaves would have understood that they were fully equal with their masters in value. Reading Philemon and 1 Peter 2 would have broken the masters’ ungodly hold. As Craig Keener and Glenn Usry write:

The first American slaveholders did not want their slaves to hear about the Bible, because they feared that the slaves would understand that Christianity made them their masters’ equals before God.⁴

Moreover, Albert Raboteau states:

Slaveholders feared that Christianity would make their slaves not only proud but ungovernable, and even rebellious.⁵

Some historians say there isn’t much evidence of slaves being proselytized as a strong movement prior to the Nat Turner revolt. “Nathanial ‘Nat’ Turner (1800–1831) was a black American slave who led the only effective, sustained slave rebellion (August 1831) in U.S. history. Spreading terror throughout the white South, his action set off a new wave of oppressive legislation prohibiting the education, movement, and assembly of slaves and stiffened proslavery, antiabolitionist convictions that persisted in that region until the American Civil War (1861–65).”⁶ He believed that God was revealing to him to revolt against the America slave system.

The Nat Turner revolt confirmed some of the suspicions and fears of slave owners. Therefore, they began proselytizing slaves, but placed limits on the nature of the redeeming power of the gospel for them. With the help of clergy, slave owners essentially placed an asterisk on slave discipleship. Moreover, it was an edited version of the true faith intended to keep the slave in a “lesser than” position. The American historian Eugene Genovese explains:

A great burst of proselytizing among slaves followed the Nat Turner revolt. Whereas previously many slaveholders had feared slaves with religion—and the example of Turner himself confirmed their fears—now they feared slaves without religion even more. They came to see Christianity primarily as a means of social control. Hence the apparent contradictions of the period: a decline of antislavery sentiment in the southern churches; laws against black preachers; laws against teaching slaves to read and write; encouragement of oral instruction of slaves in the Christian faith; and campaigns to encourage more humane treatment of slaves.⁷

In light of this, the American church viewed slavery as a step up from the conditions of the slave in Africa and a help in the process of civilizing the African in America. Churches were only willing to encourage the conversion of blacks if their understanding of the gospel and the Scriptures was limited. However, this strategy would not last long. The gospel rebels against anything that attempts to stifle its power. Ultimately, the liberty that is inherent in the nature of the gospel is impossible to obscure. Yet, many whites attempted to do just that.

With a few notable exceptions, each denomination made its own accommodation in due time, and the schism of the northern and southern branches merely strengthened a fait accompli. Thus, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church declared in 1861 that the slave system had generally proven “kindly and benevolent” and had provided “real effective discipline” to a people who could not be elevated in any other way. Slavery, it concluded, was the black man’s “normal condition.”⁸

Many modern mainline denominations played a role in soothing the conscience of those involved in the oppression of slavery by creating theologies and ideologies that justified these atrocities. One such ideology was that blackness was a curse. This was used to communicate black inferiority. Poor biblical theology created the so-called “Curse of Ham,” a bizarre misappropriation of the curse Noah pronounced on his grandson Canaan, not his son Ham, which was said to apply to all black people of Africa and beyond. Several works have documented that Christianity adapted this from the ancient Black Moors and Arabian Muslims. There are key differences in how its implications worked out, but this is the proposed origin of the fallacy.

Historians Bernard Lewis and William McKee Evans have presented much evidence to support the view that the Islamic world preceded the Christian in representing sub-Saharan Africans as descendants of Ham, who were cursed and condemned to perpetual bondage because of their ancestor’s mistreatment of his father, Noah, as described in an obscure passage in Genesis.⁹

Although this quote reflects its influence on the slave trade, this heretical fable found its way into the anthropology of American Christianity and can be felt up to the present day. The idea that blacks were cursed helped cement the creation of a black and a white church as two separate entities in the United States. Black churches started before the end of slavery, but exploded after Reconstruction because of continued racial bias by white Christian churches.

THE CHURCH POST-SLAVERY 

From Black Codes to Jim Crow, the church’s witness during this time in history is troubling. The Ku Klux Klan started in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 to resist the Republican Party’s efforts during Reconstruction to establish the economic and political equality of blacks. The KKK did “off the record” work to terrorize blacks and any whites who were sympathetic to blacks in the South. Here’s how one observer from the time described the Klan’s resurgence and the church’s muted response.

In the south after 1865, the condemnation of racism invited retaliation by secret societies. One such society was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). During Reconstruction, the Klan terrorized Republicans, persecuted blacks, and intimidated scalawags. The 1920s witnessed a rebirth of the KKK in the United States. Again the Protestant churches responded in a variety of ways. While most denominations deplored the covert activities of the Klan, few spoke out directly and publicly condemned the Klan: “The attitude of the Protestant churches towards the Klan as reflected in the minutes of national conventions assemblies and councils reveals resolutions deploring lynching and mob violence, but none referred to the Ku Klux Klan.”¹⁰

Vigilante squads had their first mass meeting at the First Baptist Church according to The Hidden History of Tulsa by Steve Gerkin. In “1915, the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan was born…. The second Klan required its members to be not only white and male but also Christian. Religion became the centerpiece of the second Klan’s platform, and Klansmen showed their allegiance to their faith through church attendance, speeches and writings and the recruitment of ministers as members.”¹¹

The story of Black Wall Street provides a disturbing illustration of the unholy alliance between the church and the KKK. Black Wall Street was in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where affluent blacks lived and flourished among thriving black businesses and a sense of cultural renaissance.

Detroit Avenue, along the edge of Standpipe Hill, contained a number of expensive houses belonging to doctors, lawyers and business owners. The buildings on Greenwood Avenue housed the offices of almost all of Tulsa’s black lawyers, realtors, doctors, and other professionals. Deep Greenwood, as the area at the intersection of Greenwood and Archer Avenues was known, served as a model African-American community to towns worldwide. Greenwood was a very religiously active community. At the time of the racial violence there were more than two dozen black American churches and many Christian youth organizations and religious societies.¹²

The citizens of Tulsa didn’t like the flourishing of blacks in Greenwood, so they created a diversion to cover one of the greatest state-supported massacres in US history.

That wealth infuriated White residents and business owners, and their anger exploded on May 31, 1921. According to The Tulsa Historic Society and Museum, police arrested a Black man named Dick Rowland on suspicion that he assaulted Sarah Page, a White woman, in an elevator the previous day. Local newspapers circulated unsubstantiated reports about Rowland allegedly raping Page, and an armed White group confronted a similarly armed Black group of World War I veterans outside the courthouse where the sheriff held Rowland. The two sides exchanged shots until the outnumbered Black militia, initially trying to prevent a lynching, had to retreat.

White Tulsans then attacked the Greenwood neighborhood for two days. Smithsonian Magazine says the mobs destroyed 35 blocks and killed almost 300 Black people. Police and the National Guard intervened primarily to put out building fires and arrest Black people, some of whom were taken out of vigilante custody. Franklin says that White rioters, aided by city government and the National Guard, “were deputized and handed weapons” to carry out the massacre.

But while anger towards Rowland may have lit the fuse, Franklin says the riots systematically targeted Black wealth.¹³

Although almost all the black churches in Greenwood were destroyed by the angry mob, they skipped the First Baptist Church. “Notably, First Baptist Church of North Tulsa was spared—spared because it was mistaken for a white church.”¹⁴ The incident was categorized as a race riot, because this designation would allow the insurance companies to refuse reimbursement to the Greenwood residents for their loss of property.

Where was the church’s prophetic voice in response to this massacre? Well, a few white churches collected clothes, bedding, and other goods for a few days in response to an ad requesting help in rebuilding Greenwood after the fire. But the response from a particular white pastor threw cold water on those efforts and a different perspective prevailed. The pastor of Centenary Methodist Church claimed that the black population was solely responsible for the riot. Not surprisingly, Centenary became known as the primary gathering place of the Tulsa chapter of the KKK during this time in Tulsa’s history.

You might think that this was an isolated incident, but nothing could be further from the truth. Cities across the country experienced similar events: Atlanta race riots of 1906, Chicago race riots of 1919, the Rosewood massacre of 1923, Washington, D.C. riots of 1919, Knoxville, Tennessee, race riots of 1919, and the East Saint Louis race riots of 1917. All of these efforts were moved to both systemically destroy the opportunity for blacks to build wealth and served as the foundation of building a mythological legacy of “black laziness.”

In 1930, Dietrich Bonhoeffer learned from the black church (Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York) how his experience under the Christian-endorsed Nazi regime paralleled the experience of racism and injustice in the United States. His encounter with the black church “allowed him to empathize with the suffering of marginalized people so deeply that, on his return to Germany, the devilish spirit of Hitler’s National Socialism was readily apparent.”¹⁵ He wondered how America’s theology could allow us to perpetrate injustice and racism against the American negro. He railed against the false dichotomies in our theology, particularly our view of comprehensive gospel transformation. He writes:

God has granted American Christianity no Reformation. He has given it strong revivalist preachers, churchmen and theologians, but no Reformation of the church of Jesus Christ by the Word of God…. American theology and the American church as a whole have never been able to understand the meaning of “criticism” by the Word of God and all that signifies. Right to the last they do not understand that God’s “criticism” touches even religion, the Christianity of the church and the sanctification of Christians, and that God has founded his church beyond religion and beyond ethics…. In American theology, Christianity is still essentially religion and ethics…. Because of this, the person and work of Christ must, for theology, sink into the background and in the long run remain misunderstood, because it is not recognized as the sole ground of radical judgment and radical forgiveness.¹⁶

THE CHURCH IN CIVIL RIGHTS 

When we talk about civil rights in America, we have to talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is impossible to look at his ministry and his writings and not see the gospel in it. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail reveals the overall sentiment of the evangelical church during that time. His words are just as true and prophetic now as they were then:

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.¹⁷

His indictment here is quite enough. Although he had allies, evangelicalism’s theology wasn’t robust enough to include his mission. Evangelicalism and reformed circles have always prided themselves for being “theologically robust.” If our theology isn’t wide enough to fit racial equality and fighting injustice within it, then, my friend, our theology is wanting.

One of the events that galvanized the early Civil Rights movement was the abduction and murder of fourteen-year-old Emmitt Till. Emmett was born in 1941 in Chicago and grew up in a middle-class black neighborhood. He was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 when he was accused of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who was a cashier at a grocery store. Four days later, her husband and brother kidnapped Emmett, then brutally beat him, shot him, and threw his body in the river. The men were tried for murder, but an all-white, male jury acquitted them. In a 2007 interview, Carolyn admitted that she had lied about Emmett making advances toward her.¹⁸

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, while politically motivated, raised fundamental issues for the black church and for American Christianity as well. Once the Montgomery, Alabama, campaign for civil rights and human dignity had caught the imagination of black people everywhere, the integrity of the black church itself became an issue.

While the movement was galvanizing the hearts of black Christians, evangelical and fundamentalist Christian colleges were struggling with how to deal with racism without upsetting too many folks or appearing to side with the “lawbreakers” of the Civil Rights movement. “Faculty and students who saw racism as a systemic problem requiring an institutional response were met at every turn by the insistence that individual conversion was the only answer.” Schools like Bob Jones University made the strategic decision to not admit black students as a way to prevent interracial dating and marriage.¹⁹

I would say that the Civil Rights era created a greater schism than already existed because it highlighted the differences in how the black church and the white church responded to the issue of racism. White evangelicalism’s lack of involvement in the movement as a whole hurt our long-term relationships with one another. Even to this day, the black church has never forgotten the brash disconnect of Christian conservativism’s silence or verbal support of segregation.

THE CHURCH IN THE MODERN ERA 

We are at the cusp of another church movement that will determine the trajectory of the church in America for some time to come. Whether they call it “race battle fatigue” or post-traumatic stress, many black Christians have expressed frustration and weariness of fighting this battle within the church. Many are just done with evangelicalism. The popular rapper Lecrae shared a similar sentiment in his interview about “divorcing white evangelicalism” on Truth Table’s podcast.²⁰ Whatever you think of Lecrae’s decision, his choice reflects a broader sense of frustration among African Americans. We are tired of arguing about race and injustice.

Many African Americans who engage the white church end up feeling like pawns for diversity instead of true agents of gospel change. When they speak out against injustice and white silence, they find themselves sidelined. Their unwillingness to “keep the peace” results in losing a place at the table.

One of the by-products of the refusal of evangelicals as a whole to engage the issue of racism and justice is the rise of Black Nationalism. For many African Americans, the appeal of the Nation of Islam, Hebrew Israelites, and the Black Consciousness Community and other such organizations is increasing day by day. They see their purpose as the restoration of black dignity and respect. These are huge needs in the black community. And the appeal is made much stronger against the specter of a church that is still divided along racial lines.

Growing up in D.C., I can attest to the influence of the Nation of Islam. In the middle of broken black neighborhoods, you would see freshly shaven black men wearing suits and bow ties and promoting black dignity. I looked up to them and wanted to be like them. In many ways, they were effective in helping blacks feel a sense of worth and dignity. They had a handshake and the greeting of peace that spoke of brotherhood, connection, and respect. One of their staples has been their commitment to developing and raising up black men. One of their senior leaders, Malcolm X, was known for his rhetorical genius and his love for his people. He argued that the Bible was being twisted to fit an agenda aimed at the continued enslavement of blacks.

In the early ’90s, conscious hip-hop broke out like a fire: Dead Prez, X-Clan, Public Enemy, and Poor Righteous Teachers were among some of the most noted in the genre for their socially and sometimes spiritually aware art. Other groups laced their black power ideology with slick slang that only the streets could discern. Much of their lyrical content was pro-black and anti-Christian. Some of their content made admitting you were a Christian embarrassing. I was a college student at the time and remember being drawn to these ideologies because of their commitment to black dignity. However, I didn’t understand that I was yearning for the dignity that God gives all people. I was willing to hear it from anywhere. I sat in black history classes, talked on the quad, read books, and studied non-Christian religions to find it. As I swept through many black mystery cults and ideologies, I could agree with the sociology and some of the practical desires, but something seemed off.

Many African Americans have experienced more affirmation of our dignity from black power movements than we have from the church of Jesus Christ. Pastor Tony Evans expresses this well:

To refer to myself as a black evangelical means that I am a man who has been doubly influenced. On the one hand I have had the distinct mark of the black experience indelibly etched on my life. That means I, like most black baby boomers, have known the good and bad of being black in America. It means I have experienced the ravages of racism while also having partaken of the great history and culture of African American life.

On the other hand it also means I have been profoundly influenced by white evangelicalism. I have studied in its institutions, interfaced with its … leadership on its epistemological and theological worldview. I have integrated some of its perspectives and values into my own life and ministry.

It is unfortunate, though, that my appreciation and legitimate pride in my race was not provided me by my study of Christian theology. Instead, it came as a result of the civil rights movement. It was not until the social revolution of this era that I, like many of my contemporaries, developed a new awareness, appreciation, and awakened self-consciousness of blackness.²¹

The arguments waged by Black Nationalist organizations are the most common obstacle to evangelism and mission to blacks in the inner city and on college campuses. This puts black evangelical Christians in an uncomfortable dilemma. We struggle to share the faith in a context that charges that our religion is a tool to keep us in our place. At the same time, we occupy a place of feeling “lesser than” within the white evangelical context. It’s a hard place to be. Yet our call is to preach the liberating gospel—and believe that this gospel can tear down centuries-old walls that divide.

The truth is that we have not been at this freedom thing for long at all. Consider this chart that pictures the timeline from the system of slavery to segregation and beyond:²²

We’ve made progress from the overt institution of slavery … we’ve moved past separate but equal … but we have so much farther to go.

These may be hard truths to hear; but this is my heart. This is the heart and the experience of a people, my people, your people. We are one. We are family. This is our history. The strings of our family history have tethered us to a past that binds the present and tempts us to continue the conspiracy of silence. Or we can wake up from our slumber!