Black Folk Religion

“I’m from three generations of Southern Baptist preachers. My father was a Southern Baptist preacher and a chaplain in the Army. And I was bred on black folk religion… that combined the ideals of American democracy with a theological sense of justice… that said that people who were considered property and disposable were essential in the eyes of God and even essential in a democracy, although we were enslaved. And it was a religion where the language, symbols and God talk was accessible, to even 7-year-olds… Everybody in the community had access to the theological microphone. So as a little black girl growing up in the South, I was deeply influenced by this black folk religion…

I grew up in the heart of Southern apartheid, and I’m not saying that I didn’t realize that it existed, but our parents were spiritual geniuses who created a world and a language where the notion that I was inadequate or inferior or less than never touched my consciousness. I grew up believing that I was a first class human being and a first class person. And our parents were spiritual geniuses who were able to shape a counterculture of black folk religion that raised us from disposability to being essential players in society. And it also taught us something serene about love. “I love everybody. I love everybody. I love everybody in my heart.” And so hate was not anything in our vocabulary...

Black folk religion grew up in the bush harbors on plantations. There were no buildings. There was not an institutionalized church… It was a gathering spot for the community. And it was in this setting that black people began to talk about God in this society where they were enslaved. And everybody participated. The spirituals came up out of this environment. And everyone had a voice in the conversation, so it was not as if the preacher’s voice was the most primary and most essential voice. It was participatory.

It was black folk religion. It was ordinary black people and not black preachers… Martin Luther King should not be seen as the black church. He came out of black folk religion and was part of the Southern Freedom Movement.  “I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside, down by the riverside and study war no more.”  When you look at black spirituals, you hear a theology and a philosophy of nonviolence, and so that this was an essential part of black folk religion. It was not a retaliatory religion. It was a religion predicated on right relations and love and nonviolence.

I can’t control the world, but I can control myself. And you are not going to coerce me into hating. That’s the meaning of the song “I love everybody. I love everybody in my heart. And you can’t make me hate you. And you can’t make me hate you in my heart.” Now, that’s very powerful because you have to understand that this spiritual — it was an acknowledgement not only that we control our internal lives, but also it contested the notion of the omnipotent power of the white enslaver. That was very revolutionary and very profound...

I went on my first demonstration — and I’m embarrassed to say this — but we were surrounded by horses and state troopers who wouldn’t let us go to the bathroom, and I kept looking up at the sky, waiting for the Exodus story to happen to me… And it didn’t happen… And so I lost religion that day, and I slowly became a Marxist… a materialist…I thought black folks were religious fanatics… The paradox is that even when we think we’ve left home, we never really go anywhere… although I thought that I was not religious… I was… Black folk religion was so deeply ingrained in us that we never really left it. So I carried with me the songs… the testimonies… the whole notion of right relations… justice as basic…

A defining moment for me happened when I was getting my locks washed, and my locker’s daughter came in one morning, and she had been hustling all night. And she had sores on her body, and she was just in a state, drugs. So something said to me, “Ask her, ‘Where does it hurt?’” And I said, “Shelly, where does it hurt?”… that simple question unleashed territory in her that she had never shared with her mother… she talked about having been incested… as a child… the source of her pain. And I realized… I needed a larger way to do this work, rather than a Marxist, materialist analysis of the human condition.

And also, I was riding down the road one day in Washington D.C. after having been at a demonstration against the war in Iraq. And suddenly, out of nowhere, I started crying, and I realize that God had been with me even when I hadn’t been with myself. And those moments made me really begin to seek, to go back to really think deeply about black folk religion and to really want to develop, in a very intentional way, an inner life that had to do with how I lived in the world...

Let me just say something about Black Lives Matter… that has always been the cry of African Americans from the point of its captivity, through enslavement, through Southern apartheid. And Northern migration and de facto segregation was the assertion that black lives matter in a society that said that black people were property, in a society that said that black lives did not matter. And part of what happened after post-Civil Rights Southern Freedom Movement is that people thought that what the movement had been about was jobs, position, status. When, in fact, it had not been about that at all. It had been about — when King talked about the mountain top, he was talking about a higher level of consciousness… a movement where we harmonized the “I” with the “we” and the “we” with the “I.”

King was talking about a Pentecost moment… the things that had really united black people and held us together in terms of being a part of a community where we were well-guarded and well-protected, that many of us, many young people like myself, that we all left our homes, never to look back… we left the black community unguarded. And the mission was no longer a beloved community, but the mission became integration. Generations of young African American children were pushed to achieve this mission, and we sent them into places that were unsafe, where they were humiliated and their egos were decimated in structures. As Toni Morrison said, “Out there, they don’t love our children.”

And these generations of African American children have felt abandoned, and there’s a chasm that has grown up between younger and older African Americans based on this sense of younger people of having felt that they were abandoned. And they don’t understand why did we send them, young children, into places like that without any protection... How do we let young people know that we love them? How do young people show their love for older people?

In the United States, you have gentrification… the devastation of public spaces that once unified people together in relationship to one another… The role of public theologies for the 21st century is a redefinition of community and our relationship to each other. And so I think we are called upon (to) expand not only our understanding, but the reality of a global beloved community...

I was in a group three weeks ago with John Lewis that Black Lives Matter Atlanta had convened, and we were dealing with the intergenerational divide. And somewhere in that conversation, I offered an apology for the ways in which they had been abandoned. And that shifted the whole mood in the room. There is a hunger that young people have to be claimed, to know people. Because without knowing another generation, they feel incomplete, just like I feel incomplete without knowing younger people. We are incomplete without knowing each other.

One of the greatest trigger-fingers of the empire, is to destroy intimacy, to destroy how we know each other. The black community has been under this assault ever since enslavement where black people’s families were sold away from each other. We’ve had to constantly fight to maintain that intimacy. And we were doing a good job of it, except, paradoxically, since integration, the intimacy has been further shattered...

I don’t like aging a whole lot. The ankles, the knees hurt, et cetera. But one of the things I do like is that from where I sit on my front porch, I have hindsight, insight, and foresight. And that’s a beautiful gift of aging... How do we raise people up from disposability to essentiality? And this goes beyond the question of race. What is it that public theology can say to the white person in Massachusetts who’s heroin-addicted because they feel that their lives have no meaning, because of the trickle-down impact of whiteness in the world today? What do you say to someone who has been told that their whole essence is whiteness and power and domination? And when that no longer exists, then they feel as if they are dying or they get caught up in the throes of death, whether it’s heroin addiction.

That’s why Donald Trump is essential, because although we don’t agree with him, people think he’s speaking to that pain that they’re feeling… I don’t hear anyone speaking to the 45-year-old person in Appalachia, who is dying of a young age, who feels like they’ve been eradicated because whiteness is so much smaller today than it was yesterday… There’s a spiritual crisis in white America. It’s a crisis of meaning… I want a liberating white theology… that speaks to Appalachia… that begins to deepen people’s understanding about their capacity to live fully human lives and to touch the goodness inside of them rather than call upon the part of themselves that’s not relational. Because there’s nothing wrong with being European American. That’s not the problem. It’s how you actualize that history and how you actualize that reality. It’s almost like white people don’t believe that other white people are worthy of being redeemed...

It must be more sexy to deal with black folk than it is to deal with white folk if you’re a white person. So I want a theology that gives hope and meaning to people who are struggling to have meaning in a world where they no longer are as essential to whiteness as they once were... Love is not antithetical to being outraged… There are two kinds of anger. Redemptive anger moves you to transformation and human up-building. Non-redemptive anger is the anger that white supremacy roots itself in. So we have to make a distinction. So people think that anger, in itself, is a bad emotion, and it’s where you begin your conversation.

I became involved in the Southern Freedom Movement… because I love the idea of justice. Most people begin their conversation with “I hate this” — but they never talk about what it is they love. We have to begin a conversation that incorporates a vision of love with a vision of outrage. You can’t talk about injustice without talking about suffering. But the reason why I want to have justice is because I love everybody in my heart. And if I didn’t have that feeling, that sense, then there would be no struggle...

It’s very obvious when I say black folk religion, I’m talking about a religion that began during enslavement in the fields of America. It was a religion that offered an alternative view of God from the view of God that empire gave us. It was the beloved community vision… a vision of justice… a very strong sense of agape… as Martin Luther King would say, was able to find the humanity in people who were slave owners. And it was also a theology of resistance, a theology of reaffirmation. I might be a slave, but I’m somebody. It was a theology of hope…

Let me give you an example. Black prayers that our ancestors forged. “I want to thank you for waking me up in the morning,” which contested the power of the slave master, acknowledging the power of someone greater, that the enslaver was not the alpha and omega of black life. “I want to thank you for the use of my limbs and the multiplication of my tongue. And I want to say, thank you, sir.” Calling God “sir” was not patriarchal, but it was a way of slapping the enslaver in the face and saying, “You’re not my ‘sir,’ you’re not my master.”

Instead, it bowed down to the altar of God, of something greater than human existence. It contained all of the sorrow and all of the expectations. I’m going to tell God how you treat me. “I’ve got a right. You’ve got a right. I’ve got a right to the Tree of Life.” These were people who were in chains, who were enslaved, asserting their right to the fruit of democracy, to the Tree of Life. That’s black folk religion. Always, there is a tension between liberation and oppression, between justice and injustice, between love and hate.

Black folk religion has saved America from tilting over into the abyss of fascism. It has been the salvation of a country. It has been the balance to talk about that kind of justice, and god talk, and reaffirmation, and love, and right relations. To talk about that in the heat of empire, to talk about God as a liberating God, has really been an important stopgap to save America from itself...

I’m probably going to get pelted with rocks, but let me just be a little brave… This whole business of demonization, I’ve been deeply concerned about it because it does not locate the good in people. It gives up on people. And you see that most especially in the right and the left. I have been very concerned about the demonization that comes out of right wing communities and also the demonization that I’ve heard on the left. And it comes from the same source of displaced whiteness.

At the heart of this business, of finding something good in people and not giving up on anyone and not writing anyone’s obituary until they no longer have breath in their bodies is very problematic today. And I have had deep problems with the anger, the vitriolic rage that has come out of the right and the left... The only safe landing space seems to be in the middle. I think we should really think about that. I do believe that we’re witnessing something that we need to pay real attention to...

We live in a very diverse world, and to talk about what it means to be humans, is to talk with a simultaneous tongue of universality and particularities. So as a black person to talk about what it means is to talk about my experience as an African American person, but also to talk about my experience that transcends being an African American to the universal experience.

We’ve got to stop speaking about humanity as if it’s monolithic. We’ve got to wrap our consciousness around a world where people bring to the world vastly different histories and experiences, but at the same time, a world where we experience grief and love in some of the same ways. So how do we develop theologies that weave together the “I” with the “We” and the “We” with the “I?”

~ Ruby Sales name first entered history on August 20, 1965. On that day, in Lowndes County, Alabama, a young white seminarian, Jonathan Daniels, threw his body in the way of a bullet directed at the then 17-year-old Ruby Sales, and he died instantly. She later created a non-profit, which she still runs, called the Spirit House Project, in honor of Jonathan Daniels’ legacy. She is one of 50 people spotlighted in the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C.

~ Jonathan Myrick Daniels (1939 – 1965) was an Episcopal seminarian and civil rights activist. In 1965 he was assassinated by a shotgun-wielding construction worker, who was a special county deputy, in Hayneville, Alabama while in the act of shielding 17-year-old Ruby Sales. He saved the life of the young black civil rights activist. They both were working in the Civil Rights Movement in Lowndes County to integrate public places and register black voters after passage of the Voting Rights Act that summer. Daniels' death generated further support for the Civil Rights Movement. In 1991 Daniels was designated as a martyr in the Episcopal church. He is memorialized in the Civil Rights Movement.

The SpiritHouse Project is a national 501(c)3 non-profit organization that uses the arts, research, education, action, and spirituality to bring diverse peoples together to work for racial, economic, and social justice, as well as for spiritual maturity. http://www.spirithouseproject.org/