Seized by fury after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a little-known professor named James Cone began to write. In the space of a month, he had produced a small, angry book and an entirely new school of thought known as “black theology.”
Black theology insisted that God is found not on some ethereal plane, but here on Earth in the struggles of poor and oppressed people–a divine presence most fully embodied in the African-American fight against slavery, segregation and discrimination. For decades, Cone’s controversial ideas have percolated through academia.
But only now, 30 years later, scholars say black churches themselves are beginning to understand the fight for social justice not as a complement to their religious beliefs but as the core of their faith.
As some of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American thinkers gathered at the University of Chicago late last week, many–including Cone–argued that the “prophetic voice” of black theology may offer the best hope for black churches to remain relevant as African Americans look to alternative faiths, or, increasingly, to no organized religion at all.
“I think the black church is still too religious, too pious, too focused on itself and building buildings and raising money,” said Cone, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York. “In that sense, I’m not sure it’s listening.”
Black churches always have played a central role in their communities, and the church-based civil rights movement helped them establish a wider political voice.
But theologically, the scholars said, the black church has too often looked at God as a presence found only in the afterlife. Under the terms of black theology, one finds God only by engaging in the struggle for freedom and against suffering on Earth.
And churches must lead the way, according to a new generation of black theologians who grew up with Cone’s work and want to take it beyond the academy.
“We are losing people to Islam, we are losing people to the Nation of Islam, we are losing people to African traditional religions because the church is not asking or answering the very real questions in people’s lives,” Emilie Townes, a Baptist minister and theology professor at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Mo., said of racism and social injustice.
Dwight Hopkins, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School who organized the three-day conference on black theology that ended Saturday, met beforehand with pastors of 18 churches from across the country to talk about bringing the ideas of Cone and his successors to fruition.
“Black theology and black religious studies are at a point where they should be engaging the public, not just the academy,” Hopkins said. “It’s taking root in very strategic churches in urban centers–in Chicago, Oakland, Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta, Los Angeles. It’s moving to another level right now.”
One of the reasons the transition has been so difficult is that even those steeped in black theology have a hard time saying just what a church faithful to the idea would look like.
Cone said the key is a bigger vision and a focus on transforming the world outside the sanctuary. King saw the entire civil rights movement as his church, Cone explained, and so, too, today’s church leaders should be part of a movement.
Cornel West, the Harvard professor of religion who has become one of the nation’s best-known intellectuals, said a church that embraced black theology would be a church that practiced freedom and equality within its own congregation, avoiding dogmatism and showing love to men and women of all races; gay, straight or lesbian; young and old.
On a more fundamental level, West said it would be a church that recognized Christianity not as something borrowed from white culture but as something central to black experience and the black struggle for equality in America.
Pulling from his pocket a paperback book, its yellowing pages full of tremulous underlining, West said Cone’s groundbreaking “Black Theology and Black Power,” published in 1969, made it possible for him to hold on to his faith during grim days of rioting and fracturing of the civil rights movement.
“Here I was a 14-year-old and this book came along. It was emancipating. It opened up a whole new world for me,” he said. “And it provided an opening for a whole generation of African-American intellectuals who take Christianity seriously but still oppose white supremacy.”
Some white scholars have balked at black theology’s sweeping indictment of white society and its declaration that any religion in America not devoted to the struggle for racial and economic justice is a false religion. Many more mainstream thinkers, to Cone’s chagrin, have avoided black theology altogether.
“Theologians should represent the moral voice in this society,” he said, arguing that the struggle of poor, black Americans is society’s greatest moral problem. “If they aren’t the moral voice, the prophetic voice, then what the hell are they here for?”
Townes said that in addition to training ministers, black theologians today are more likely than at any time in decades to remain involved in their churches.
“We all heard that you can’t be taken as a serious scholar if you’re also a preacher,” she said. “We were the first generation to say no to that split.”
