Empowering the Black community through liberation theology and social justice
Now that we are in Trump’s presidency part two, the question presented to the black church is this: what do we do now? In an anti-black world that thrives on black creativity, the black church must not have the spirit of timidness, and black preachers must not be tepid on the issue of social injustice. Black liberation theology teaches us that we have a theology written for black people and written by black people. It teaches us how to return to our African roots and reclaim our African identity, an identity that we were taught to hate and not embrace as a people who did not migrate to America but were taken by force and economically exploited for over 500 years.
Suppose we want the black church to grow to the stature we want it to grow. In that case, we can not afford to have the mentality of the white evangelical church, nor must we have the rhetoric of the white evangelical church. Rhetoric such as “God is still on the throne,” “Jesus is King,” and “Jesus is my President” are examples of one being theologically lazy and spiritually bypassing the feeling of frustration and anger following the results of the previous presidential election.
We already know and believe God is on the throne, but not thinking critically about our current social condition and dealing with our emotions will harm our well-being. It is okay to be sad; it is OK to be angry and not to be OK. Most of us fail to realize that spewing such statements was used toward our people during enslavement, lynchings, Jim Crow, and even now in the current state of black America. I will never understand how a group can use the same rhetoric as the oppressor; it is not confronting. Our church must be a black liberation center, and for the black church to be a black liberation center, our church must have white evangelical theology eradicated. The destruction of this theology will free us mentally and physically; it will free our minds from European thought, and it will light the fire to do the liberation work our black community needs. Hence, the black church needs a Sankofa movement that will force us to deconstruct and return to our true identity.
The destruction of white theology will cause us to do the following in our denomination: take down the false pictures of white Jesus.
The false picture of a white Jesus has no place in any black church. The white Jesus is an oppressor; the white Jesus damages the black psyche, and the white Jesus paints whiteness as superior to blackness. The blackness of Jesus says that he is on the side of blacks, thereby understanding what life is like in the inner-city neighborhoods. Even in the bible, Nathanael asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). It is imperative to note that the color of Jesus has nothing to do with salvation. It is not from a salvific point of view but from a historical point of view. Saying that the color of Jesus “does not” matter is a form of white theology thought for James Cone reminds us in his classic A Black Theology of Liberation, “There is no place in black theology for a colorless God in a society where human beings suffer precisely because of their color.”
Kelly Brown Douglas, in her book The Black Christ, asserts that the white Jesus painting is detrimental to the black church for “it serves to remind many Black people of those who have come to personify White racism.” When you see a picture of a white Jesus in a black church, that church perpetuates white racism while in blackface; white nationalism will not save us, but black nationalism will. Since the gospel of Jesus Christ was black nationalism, we, as the black church, need to apply this to our thinking, for the social, political, and economic future of the black community is in our hands. When I say that the gospel of Jesus Christ was black nationalism, I am referring to his social justice ministry in the Greco-Roman world. For instance, feeding the five thousand (Matthew 14:17-21), making a whip, flipping the tables in the temple (Mark 11:15-19), and calling out those in power (Luke 11:37-53) is equivalent to the Black Panther Party’s ten-point program of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Thus, the work of Jesus in first-century Palestine is comparable to the praxis of black nationalism.
I love the Black church; we need to do better as much as I love it. These are the thoughts of a theologian.
Bibliography
Cone, James H. 1970. A Black Theology of Liberation. Philadelphia & New York: J.B Lippincott.
Douglas, Kelly B. 1994. The Black Christ. New York: Orbis Books.
#BlackLiberation #SocialJustice #BlackChurch
