20 January 2009

The movement that flourished under the example of Martin Luther King, Jr. is sometimes accused of wearing a kind of religious veil to cover its essentially humanistic character. King’s rhetoric of Christian love, it’s said, was only tangentially related to the real unifying power of the movement, which was a common cry for justice that arose from the black experience itself. Whites and blacks alike have made this argument, sometimes in order to disentangle the civil rights movement from any intrinsic religiosity and sometimes to insist on a “purer” religion based on faith and worship rather than political goals.

What these arguments almost never take into account is the inevitable difficulty involved in rescuing Christianity from its white caricature. It’s probably true that Christianity often ended up as a self-justifying veneer for the civil rights movement rather than a real core, but it’s no less true—and likely more so—that Christianity often ended up as a self-justifying veneer for the white resistance to black equality. As Frederick Douglass says “most unhesitatingly” in his Narrative, “the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection” (ch. ix). Given this as the dominant face of Christianity, it’s amazing that Christianity retained any credibility at all for the black population. When religion had become so self-mutilating a veneer not for justice but for greed and cruelty and power, it’s amazing that there could arise even an inkling of faith as a force for freedom and love.

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Tags: Black theology,Racism