Now that a few days have passed, it’s worth saying something about the much-discussed initial response to the massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E Church, in which a scattering of Republicans and
Fox News personalities suggested that this was anti-religious violence, an anti-Christian attack, rather than the white supremacist violence (shaped by whatever demons occupy the shooter’s mind) that it quickly proved to be.
That initial response was a characteristically partisan mistake, in the sense that it reached for a narrative familiar to American conservatives (the persecution of Christians overseas, the growing suspicion of traditional forms of Christian faith at home) in a situation when the facts fit more closely with certain liberal priors (about the persistence of racist ideas, in particular) instead. But what’s interesting is that the reach wasn’t
entirely mistaken: In grasping for their own preferred narrative, those conservatives brushed up against a somewhat different but immensely important truth about black Christianity in the United States.
By this I mean that while the Charleston massacre wasn’t
primarily motivated by the hatred of Christianity or religious faith, it still was
in some sense — a historically important sense — an anti-religious attack. The victims and the institution were not randomly chosen from among all the possible places where black people might be found; the killer deliberately selected a famous house of prayer, deliberately murdered a group of people gathered there for religious reasons. And in so choosing, he associated himself with a distinctive tradition of religious persecution that’s old as white supremacism itself.
African-American Christianity hasn’t been persecuted in the United States in the way that, say, minority religions are currently being persecuted by the Islamic State; the martyrdom of black Christians hasn’t taken the form of being
explicitly asked to abjure Jesus Christ or die. But because the religion of the slaves and their descendants has been crucial to black Americans’ resistance, their long campaign for equality before the law, it has also been a place where the weight of oppression has been particularly heavily applied. Not only during the civil rights era’s church burning and bombings but long before, the quest to subjugate black people has logically required targeting their churches, their religious institutions, their ability to freely practice Christian faith. The faith of black people is not the thing that white supremacists hate most about them, but it is a thing that white supremacists consistently tried to break and weaken, gentle and diminish, in order that white supremacy might be sustained.
This was true for practical and political reasons, but also deeper cultural and theological ones. The black church hasn’t just been a locus of black civic life and ultimately political organization; it’s also been one of the major intellectual conduits, from the age of abolition to the era of civil rights, through which black Americans have pressed their moral claim on white America. By its mere existence, to say nothing of its flourishing, black Christianity has essentially called the bluff of white American Christians:
We embrace the same religion; now vindicate your profession of faith and embrace us as your brothers. This was Martin Luther King’s message, most famously, but it wasn’t his alone, and long before the civil rights era white supremacists seemed to understand its power, and recognize that it was a kind of dagger pointing at the heart of their own racial ideology.
In the 1950s and 1960s,
that dagger finally went home. But for decades and centuries before that, slaveholders and segregationists worked to turn it aside – to make their attempted marriage of white supremacism and gospel faith easier to live with, less self-contradictory on its face. Some of that work was intellectual, the work of constructing
elaborate scriptural justifications for racial hierarchy. But a lot of it was structural and social, designed to prevent black Christians from
presenting as equal members of the two races’ common faith. Hence the antebellum impulse (frustrated by underground slave Christianity, which in turn faced explicit persecution) to exert absolute control over the religion of the enslaved, so that Africans might be good Christians but only on the master’s terms. Hence the post-Civil War division of many Protestant confessions along racial line, often precipitated by black leaders but in reaction to a segregation of religious services and leadership that was designed to effectively deny the fullness of Christian brotherhood to African-Americans. And hence, finally, the spasm of violence directed against the churches and ministers whose Christian witness (and
Christian arguments) ultimately helped bury Jim Crow.
Those eras, that persecution, is mercifully over; one Confederacy-worshiping gunman cannot bring it back. But its legacy has not been fully assimilated (for fairly obvious reasons) into the memory of white Christians. Just one example: In conversations about the waning influence of institutional religion in the United States, I’ve often heard people make comments to the effect of, “well, of course, the church in America has never really known persecution.” The person talking is usually a white Protestant — Catholics, whatever our other blind spots, have our own reasons not to make this particular mistake — and of course the comment is true as applied to mainstream conservative white Protestantism. But it’s false as applied to “the church in America” in its historical fullness: America already has been the site of a sustained exercise in persecution, albeit a persecution of a very distinctive and peculiar kind, and nothing that potentially threatens conservative Christians in our arguably-secularizing, arguably de-Christianizing America (marginalization, loss of influence, even fines and discrimination over certain issues) is likely to impose the kind of burdens on believers that the black church, for centuries, had to bear.
And the memory of those burdens, that persecution, probably helps explain why today you don’t
see quite as much anxiety about the potential marginalization of conservative Christianity among African-American Christians as you do among white Christians, even when their theological commitments are similar. There’s concern, certainly, but there just isn’t the same sense of dispossession, the same fear of the unknown, because far greater dispossession and far darker fears have defined the experience of black Christianity in this country going back hundreds of years.
Which means that for white Christians facing whatever the American future holds, a debate like the one that’s happening around the Charleston massacre and Confederate flag right now is actually potentially very significant. It hints, at least, at a kind of crossroads for people, white conservative Christians, who thought of themselves as the core of America but who feel like they’re becoming more peripheral to the society that we’re becoming or moving toward.
On the one hand, that peripheral feeling could lead, as it sometimes has in the Obama era, to a kind of emergent white identity politics, a doubling down on whiteness-as-Americanness that marinates in its own dispossessed self-pity, a nationwide version of the Dixie
ressentiment that, more than explicit racism, explains the enduring appeal of the stars-and-bars.
On the other, the newfound feeling of being peripheral could encourage healing and outreach across the lines that have divided white Christians from their brethren in the past. This is what the Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore has in mind, I think, in his much-cited piece
urging Christians to take down the Confederate battle flag. The point of doing so is not to make some sort of concession to political correctness or liberal pressure; it’s to extend a hand to the people whose ancestors were actually victimized, enslaved, and yes,
persecuted as Christians by the culture and the civilization that went to war under that flag.
“White Christians,” Moore writes, “let’s listen to our African-American brothers and sisters. Let’s care not just about our own history, but also about our shared history with them. In Christ, we were slaves in Egypt—and as part of the Body of Christ we were all slaves too in Mississippi.”
This strikes me as a powerful message — and a good enough reason for white southern Christians, whatever the understandable pull of ancestry and memory, to finally take down the flag.
But then what happens to Christianity in America during and beyond its current period of decline may also depend on whether white Christians heed those words in a wider, more comprehensive fashion. They — we — need to find a way not only to recognize the historical persecution of black Christianity in this country, but to
enfold its story into a fuller narrative, a fuller American history, a new iconography of faith: One that can be shared by future believers across the lines of race, in whatever America awaits.
