black church

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The big idea: It's crucial for all preachers -- black and white -- to fight racism in 2020

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The big idea: It's crucial for all preachers -- black and white -- to fight racism in 2020

In times of turmoil, brutality, fire and rage, black preachers have always turned to the Old Testament prophets.

Hear Jeremiah addressing the king and his court: "Thus says the Lord: Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan and the widow, or shed innocent blood. … (If) you will not heed these words, I swear by myself, says the Lord, that this house shall become a desolation."

There's plenty more where that came from. No one is shocked when black pastors take biblical texts about sin, justice, repentance and mercy and weave them into images and headlines from the news, said the Rev. Terriel Byrd, urban ministry professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University. This is a crucial role they have always played in their communities and as bridgebuilders to others.

"Even when they know that what they're going to say will be rejected, they dare to speak as prophets," he said. "They aren't afraid to preach what they need to preach. If you go to church during times like these, you know a black preacher will not be silent."

After decades of studying the art of preaching -- he is the former president of the African American Caucus of the Academy of Homiletics -- Byrd knows that traditions are different in white sanctuaries. But he is convinced America needs to hear from all kinds of preachers after the killing of George Floyd, his neck under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.

On the streets, some white police are kneeling -- this is powerful symbolism on many levels -- with protestors in prayer. Unity across racial lines in churches will be just as important.

Black church leaders will be on the scene during peaceful protests. When it's time to heal and clean up, all kinds of religious believers will take part -- black, white, whatever. But will they be able to speak together?

"It's crucial for white-church leaders to step forward and take a leadership role at this moment," said Byrd, reached by telephone. "If we have some true partnerships form, with a real sense of honesty and equality, we could see a way forward and make real progress fighting this injustice."

This is not, of course, the first time that clergy have faced this challenge.

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Democrats need to start asking more faith questions (especially about Catholic voters)

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Democrats need to start asking more faith questions (especially about Catholic voters)

After Democrats voted in the Alabama primary in early March, researchers for CNN and other National Exit Pool newsrooms asked them several questions.

Reactions to the candidates were sorted by gender, race, LGBTQ identity, age, education level, political ideology and other factors. However, researchers didn't ask about religious faith and how often voters attended worship services. They didn't probe differences between evangelicals, Catholics, Mainline Protestants and "nones" -- Americans who claim zero ties to organized religious groups.

"We don't know the answers to these kinds of questions because they are rarely being asked," said Michael Wear of Public Square Strategies. He is best known for his work as faith-outreach director for Barack Obama's 2012 campaign and as part of the president's White House staff.

"This isn't just about exit polls. It's hard for Democrats to do their planning, and to allocate resources during campaigns, without this kind of data. … We need cross-tabs in these polls so that we can compare differences between white evangelicals and black evangelicals, between Catholics who go to Mass all the time and those who don't and other groups as well."

Exit Pool researchers did ask about religion in South Carolina, the pivotal state in former Vice President Joe Biden's stunning surge. It was significant that Biden was backed by 56% of Democrats who attend religious services "once a week or more," while 15% of those same voters backed Sen. Bernie Sanders. Among those who "never" attend services, Sanders was the clear winner.

Similar religion gaps emerged in North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee. In news coverage, these trends were linked to Biden's support from African-Americans, including churchgoers -- a huge voter bloc among Democrats.

That's important information, said Wear. But it would have helped to know how Catholics in South Carolina voted, as well as more about evangelical Protestants -- black and white. It would have helped to know what issues mattered most to active members of various religious groups and how faith affected their choices.

It's possible that pollsters and journalists do not ask these questions, he said, because key "players in the Democratic Party leadership aren't asking the big questions about religion, either."

Part of the problem is that many Americans have decided that the "religious" now means "Republican," according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted after the Iowa caucuses.

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Define 'evangelical,' please (2019 edition)

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Define 'evangelical,' please (2019 edition)

There is no record that political pollsters in ancient Rome even knew that Jesus of Nazareth told a Jewish leader named Nicodemus that he needed to be "born again" in order see the Kingdom of God.

Germans in the Protestant Reformation embraced that "born again" image and called themselves the "evangelisch." Then in 1807, English poet Robert Southey was one of the first writers to turn the adjective "evangelical" -- think "evangelical" preaching -- into a plural noun "evangelicals." There was no earthquake in European politics.

But America changed forever when Bible Belt Democrat Jimmy Carter shocked journalists by saying that he had been "born again." That firestorm led Newsweek editors to grab a phrase from pollster George Gallup and proclaim 1976 the "Year of the Evangelical." Lots of politicos noticed, including a rising Republican star named Ronald Reagan.

The rest is a long story. 

"The news media and polling agencies realized that the 'born again' vote was a seminal political factor," noted historian Thomas Kidd, in a recent address at Wheaton College, the alma mater of the late evangelist Billy Graham.

"The Gallup organization," he added, "began asking people whether they had been 'born again.' The emergence of EVANGELICAL as a common term in news coverage of politics was a major landmark in the development of the contemporary evangelical crisis. … The media's frequent use of 'born again' and 'evangelical' connected those terms to political behavior."

More some evangelical insiders relished this attention, while denominational leaders and other mainstream evangelicals failed to realize that "they were losing control of the public's perception of their movement," said the scholar from Baylor University.

But one thing would become crystal clear, according to Kidd's new book, "Who is An Evangelical?" His bottom line: "The gospel did not make news. But politics did."

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Old Time Religion -- Meeting the woman who could become St. Thea of Mississippi

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Old Time Religion -- Meeting the woman who could become St. Thea of Mississippi

The whispers began before Sister Thea Bowman reached Colorado for one of the final mission trips she would make before dying in 1990 at the age of 52.

The only African-American in the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, Bowman was a charismatic teacher, singer and evangelist and her ministry continued after cancer put her in a wheel chair.

Behind the scenes, folks at Our Queen of Peace parish near Denver were asking this question: Would this woman someday be hailed as St. Thea of Mississippi?

After her arrival, a local priest watched as Sister Thea led an interracial youth choir, rehearsing a gospel hymn, "Give Me That Old Time Religion," as well as the children's song she included in each service -- "This Little Light of Mine (I'm Gonna Let It Shine)."

Yes, people were talking about Sister Thea and sainthood, said Father William Breslin, pastor of this Aurora parish in 1989.

"Sometimes you have that sneaking suspicion," he said. "It's neat to be able to meet a person and experience. … It's neat to be able to put your finger on that special quality we can only call 'holiness.' "

Three decades later the U.S. Catholic bishops paused in Baltimore for a "canonical consultation," considering requests for a Vatican tribunal to begin investigating whether to declare Sister Thea a saint. On Nov. 14 the bishops said, "yes."

"The faithful in, and well beyond, the Diocese of Jackson" have made this request, Bishop Joseph Kopacz told the bishops. "Well before I arrived in Jackson" in 2014, "the requests were coming in. …The church embraced Sister Thea from her early years, but there were times when she felt like a motherless child."

During her 1989 "Sharing the Good News" mission -- which I covered for The Rocky Mountain News -- Sister Thea smiled, but shook her head, when asked about the whispers. She would talk about the word "saint," as long as she could define the term.

"People who really know me, they know all about my struggles," said an exhausted Bowman, leaning on the arm of her wheelchair after one service.

"You see, I'm black," she added, with a quiet laugh. "I guess the word 'saint' has a different meaning for me. I was raised in a community where … we were always saying things like, 'The saints would be coming in to church today' or 'The saints will really be dancing and singing this Sunday.' "

Alveda King's old dream

Fox News star Glenn Beck staged the show at the Lincoln Memorial, and then fired up his flock by claiming, "Something that is beyond man is happening. America today begins to turn back to God." Mama Grizzly Sarah Palin almost stole the show with a political shot at President Barack Obama, telling her fans, "You too know that we must not fundamentally transform America as some would want. We must restore America and restore her honor!"

But there was only one African-American preacher present whose last name was spelled K-I-N-G. There was only one orator who could infuriate pundits simply by standing with Beck on the 47th anniversary of her martyred uncle's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Tears of rage? Tears of joy? The Rev. Alveda King knew she would cause both by linking the Rev. Martin Luther King's classic cadences with the religious and cultural issues that loomed over what Beck insisted was a nonpolitical rally. Once a Democrat in the Georgia Legislature, the evangelical minister now leads African-American outreach programs for the Catholic group Priests For Life.

First, she reminded listeners that her "Uncle Martin" had compared America's promise of equal protection to a check marked "insufficient funds." But when, she asked, will "we know that the check Uncle Martin spoke of is good?"

"We will know when prayer is once again welcome in the public squares of America and in our schools. We will know when our children are no longer in mortal peril on our streets and in our classrooms, and in the wombs of our mothers," she said.

"We will know when righteousness rolls down like waters, and justice like a mighty stream. Yes, I too have a dream ... that America will repent of the sin of racism and return to honor. I have a dream that white privilege will become human privilege and that people of every ethnic blend will receive everyone as brothers and sisters in the love of God. I have a dream that America will pray, and God will forgive us our sins and revive our land."

Critics were not kind.

Chatting with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, columnist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post dismissed Alveda King as a "convenient figurehead or puppet. ... She's a fundamentalist, very conservative Christian. ... She's estranged from the rest of the King family, and from the keepers of his legacy."

And in a Washington Post essay before the rally, Martin Luther King III anticipated the coming efforts to embrace the causes now identified with the first family of civil rights. His father's dream, he stressed, "rejected hateful rhetoric and all forms of bigotry or discrimination, whether directed at race, faith, nationality, sexual orientation or political beliefs. ... Throughout his life he advocated compassion for the poor, nonviolence, respect for the dignity of all people and peace for humanity."

For Alveda King, these debates are signs of painful divisions -- many of them theological -- inside the Civil Rights Movement, black churches and the extended King family. While the late Coretta Scott King supported abortion rights and gay rights, other members of the family have fiercely questioned whether the views of her husband would have evolved in that direction.

One debate, for example, focuses on the significance of the decision by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to accept the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood in 1966. Alveda King and other opponents of abortion note that this was six years before Roe v. Wade and only three years after a Planned Parenthood pamphlet warned that, "An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun."

America's ongoing battles over abortion, insisted Alveda King, are one of many symptoms that her uncle's work remains unfinished.

"Our material gains seem to be going the way of our moral losses," she said, in her Aug. 28 sermon. "We are still suffering from the great evil divide of racism. Our children are suffering in failing school systems. Our sons and daughters are being incarcerated at astronomical rates. Sickness, disease and poverty of the spirit, soul and body are plaguing our communities. The procreative foundation of marriage is being threatened, and the wombs of our mothers have become places where the blood of our children is shed in a 'womb war' that threatens the fabric of our society. ...

"Yet, we are not without hope. Faith, hope and love are not dead in America. Hallelujah."