(Go here to read my initial post on the Companion.)
The late Gayraud Wilmore (d. 18 April 2020) wrote the second chapter in the Companion. Titled "Historical perspective," Wilmore leads the reader on a rapid tour beginning with the black religion(s) of the enslaved peoples brought to the Americas, their gradual Christianization (with little leadership from slave owners, but with the encouragement of "radical white Baptist preachers"), and ultimately to three modes of organized black Christianity in the United States.
In historical order, although often overlapping in practice, Wilmore describes what he calls the survival, the liberation, and the elevation traditions. For obvious reasons, the survival mode of black Christianity was the leading form for enslaved people. It "reaffirmed black people's belief in a God who would punish the slave masters one day." And, in the interim, it helped maintain "people's sanity, keeping them alive, helping them to retain some semblance of personhood and self-esteem in the face of massive dehumanization." The nineteenth century eventually saw the eclipse of the survival mode but it reappeared following World War I with the seemingly sudden appearance of black Pentecostal and Holiness churches. (For a series of three posts on the concurrent rise and social place of white Pentecostals go here, here, and here.)
The liberation and elevation traditions developed among free blacks who left their segregated white churches and went "beyond 'make do' to 'do more,' and from 'do more' to 'freedom now' and 'black power.'" Wilmore laments the loss of Martin Luther King whose genius was that he "brought the three motifs or traditions together again." It is thus King "who stands at the pinnacle of black religious and political development in the twentieth century."
Even before King's assassination in 1968, however, the three-stranded cord had begun to fray with the separate development of the field of black liberation theology. Dwight Hopkins focused his General introduction on the form and content of black liberation theology while Wilmore places it in a more well-rounded historical context. Wilmore seems to distinguish black liberation theology as a new, fourth mode of organized black Christianity in America. And, like Hopkins, Wilmore connects this new theme of liberation with the concurrent post-colonial experience in much of the world: "freedom from racism, poverty, powerlessness, and every form of white domination."
Wilmore seems to acknowledge that black liberation theology displays elements of being a Western, academically-influenced enterprise. Its disconnection from the earlier modes of black American Christianity might be found in his explanation that black liberation theology begins with
Jesus the Oppressed Man of God who challenged the hypocrisy of Jewish religion, recapitulated in white Christianity and corruption of Negro religion, and the unjust power of the Roman state, recapitulated in the world-wide political and economic hegemony of American capitalism ...
But Wilmore ends with two heartfelt pleas. First,
to rescue the inheritance of Martin and Malcolm--the strategies of survival, liberation, and elevation--from moral and spiritual debasement by children who never knew them and who, shamefully, were never taught the truth about who they are and how they came to this sorry plight.
And second, for the Church to
return to basics and tap once again into that ennobling and enlightened religion that brought blacks through the civil rights period ... and helped them amass a modicum of Black Power ... into the twenty-first century [where] it will be surmounted [so] they can go into the next with integrity and hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment