If thou sayest,
“Behold, we knew it not;”
Doth not He that pondereth the heart consider it?
And He that keepeth thy soul, doth not He know it?
And shall not He render to every man according to his works? (Proverbs 24:12)
And we being exceedingly tossed with a tempest, the next day they lightened the ship; And the third day we cast out with our own hands the tackling of the ship. And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope that we should be saved was then taken away. (Acts 27:18-20)
***
“I can’t wait, wait for you to change your mind
It’s late, I’m trying to walk the line
Well, it’s way past midnight and there are people all around
Some on their way up, some on their way down
The air burns and I’m trying to think straight
And I don’t know how much longer I can wait[1]
***
Charlie Dates:
“The danger is, whether progressive or conservative, the Black church can become White in ethos, in expression or in its interpretation of Christ. No greater threat to the witness of truth exists than a scenario in which the Black church becomes a captive of white supremacy or white enlightenment. The truth is, the Black church is not a monolith and will never fit neatly in the progressive or conservative binary. The difference between the Black church and any other Christian institution in America is that rather than abandoning Scripture as a tool of our oppression, we apply Scripture as God’s rule for our liberty and living. The difference is in how our social ethic is rooted in both righteousness and justice, not either righteousness or justice. The difference is that we’ve come to see Jesus and his power to sustain and flourish us from the margins without the benefit of large donors, political capital or ownership of media outlets.”[2]
Jemar Tisby:
“While the question most often raised is, ‘Are black Christians evangelicals?’ the more salient query is, ‘What limits do white evangelicals place on black Christians?’ or ‘When do black Christians distance themselves from white evangelicalism based on race and justice concerns?’ In other words can black Christians bring both their race and their religion with them into white evangelical spaces? … Race sits at the heart of evangelical theology, church polity, and political outlooks. Any explanation of evangelicalism that treats race as a peripheral matter misses a primary characteristic of the movement. Insisting on the centrality of race to definitions of evangelicalism highlights the ways race informs religion and how religion informs race.”[3]
David W. Wills:
“To ask about religion and politics is to ask, as much as anything else, about the way the exercise of power in America has been given meaning. Particularly important here is the way the exercise of coercive power has been understood. Nowhere has the exercise of this kind of power been more widespread and problematic in America than in the relation of blacks and whites. … The issue in America between blacks and whites has therefore…essentially always been one of power – its exercise and meaning – not prejudice. … To ask about the relation of religion and politics in Afro-American history is…to ask how black people have attempted to come to terms with one of the foundational realities of American life, the exercise of white power… The truth is that the black church at every stage has had to come to some kind of bargain with the dominant political forces…the black church throughout its history has been compelled in its political efforts to come to terms both with other forces within the black community and with the political forces of white America. … The encounter of black and white…is not a central theme only in Afro-American religious history but also in American religious history generally.”[4]
William Pannell:
“But what would my white brother know of this? He taught me to sing, ‘Take the World, But Give Me Jesus.’ I took Jesus. He took the world.”[5]
Francis Bacon:
“The idols and false notions which have already preoccupied the human understanding and are deeply rooted in it, not only so beset men’s minds that they become difficult of access, but even when access is obtained will again meet, and trouble us in the instauration of the sciences, unless mankind when forewarned guard themselves with all possible care against them. … There are also idols formed by the reciprocal intercourse and society of man with man, which we call idols of the market from the commerce and association of men with each other; for men converse by means of language, but words are formed at the will of the generality, and there arises from a bad and unapt will of the generality, and there arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind. … The human understanding, when any proposition has once been laid down (either from general admission and belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation: and although most cogent and abundant instances exist to the contrary, yet either does not observe or despises them or gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusion.”[6]
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy:
“The content of the American Revolution was no novelty, no new discovery of the nature of man; it was, first of all, an assertion of the equal right of the pioneers to have their English way in the new world…an equality of the new States with the old Monarchies, or, as the Preamble of the Declaration says, ‘an equal station among the Powers of the Earth.’ This Equality of 1776 still belongs to the Anglo-Saxon world of values….
“In revolutions, we believe in a new word without divining its full scope, without knowing what hopes or fears our own word raises in the hearts of our fellowmen. The sudden or slow reaction of our neighbors [and] enemies…to our word of faith shows us how much we have been in the dark, and how much the word itself was like a seed buried in the darkness of a new soil. To our faith and to the words of our faith the answer comes from the outside world.
[If we believe this, what should we say? We having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore speak that we may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.]
[Beyond Anglo-Saxon internecine claims to equality], “the word…found an echo which resulted in changing the word itself. It became a word of hope for new peoples, slaves, immigrants, Indians, who had not been so much as thought of in 1776. … [Outsiders not originators] “announced the change of Equality from a word of faith to a word of hope. … It is only in a later stage of the revolution that Hope replaces Faith. … Hope is active. And action is…completely sterile without a foregoing promise, without the Word. Without the promise of faith, and its desperate decision to bear the worst, the later activities of hope would be of no practical result.”[7]
Whether children of faith or hope, one law for all: bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. In Him alone, the faith in equality and the hope for equality become the greater equality from the one love that rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in truth.
Learning is harder than teaching and teaching is the hardest thing to do — the most dangerous thing to do. (James 3:1)
Circular reckoning is the path of life, for God has said, “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom,” and His word says, if we seek wisdom we will discern the fear of the Lord.
Prominent historian of religions and Baptist minister, Charles H. Long, died last year, February 12, 2020. He learned and taught and teaches still if we learn to listen. Should American white evangelicals take the time to learn from his writings they would discover that to bring back what could have been means seeing one another as children of faith and hope. God has ignited a crisis of whiteness in America. The apprehension it generates and the healing it promises are opportunities for His saints to live again before Him, in His presence and in His sight – to again fear the Lord. God is giving us a chance to see His way of renewal. We need to jettison our syncretistic, narrow-minded, mean-spirited, and white-centered worldview. Otherwise, we will go the way either of Eliot’s hollow men (“The Horror), or of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (The Horror”). The myth of America’s origin with its fictitious bond among Americans we call civil religion, or Christian nationalism, or the Judeo-Christian (don’t ask Arthur Cohen) national covenant tradition are all masks for concealing whiteness. We need not depend upon Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Marx; or Hobbes, Burke, de Maistre, or Hengstenberg to believe and live by God’s commands, promises, and judgments He reveals in His Scriptures. For the sake of Christian fellowship, for the unity of the Spirit, and for the building up of the Body of Christ, we need to ask God to give us the wisdom to see again, what is evangelical in evangelicalism. Evangelicals proclaim the gospel in public without compromise. Evangelicals trust in Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit to live righteous lives. Evangelicals refuse to ignore the racist injustices our tradition committed in the past or withhold judgment and refuse to take action against their continued effects as social fixtures of wickedness remaining in place today. Discernment demands we stop deceiving our own selves. We must remove the log of whiteness lodged in our eyes. With a clear, healthy, sincere eye, the mask falls so we may see in the mirror of America the concealed face of whiteness. Beholding the face of whiteness – the power of whiteness – staring back at us in the history of America gives us ears to hear the prayers offered up to the “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears” in jeremiads like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly or Kanye West’s Donda.[8]
Cleared eyed we see that the founding faith of the American “people” established for white people their “separate and equal station to which,” they believed, “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitled them.” The sanctioning agent authorizing and legitimizing this semi-secular political declaration was a chimeric and idolatrous deistic demigod. Reliance upon this false god fabricated by the white mind was America’s original sin. And the second is like unto it. The church committed the syncretistic sin of equating this idol with the God of the Bible; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – as if in fact it were the one true triune God in whose name disciples of Jesus are baptized, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Nature’s god is not the God of creation upholding all things by the word of His power. Nature’s god has not determined the times before appointed to the nations or the bounds of their habitation. White people learned of this god listening more to Locke via Montesquieu than to the apostles and prophets of the Bible. The original faith in the word “equality” empowered by this idol extended to white people only. These originators limited the scope of equality to themselves. However, because they spoke of their faith it made them listeners of those who heard them, those who as outsiders, the others, the disqualified, spoke in return, declaring themselves the originators of the hope of equality. This creative response redefined equality. To see this is to know what white faith conceals and makes black hope visible, ending stigma and suspicion by dissolving the difference between white and nonwhite, to enjoy a mutual love for equality, and behold the beauty of colorsight.
Which brings us to the “optometrist” Charles H. Long.
Charles H. Long:
The “American cultural language, the American mode of perception, and the American religion…
[these three are one]
“is a description of the origins not simply of an American language rooted in the physical conquest of space
[from sea to shining sea to overseas –
“The United States maintains the largest active troop presence abroad of any country in the world…[9]]
“but equally of a language which is the expression of a hermeneutics of conquest and suppression. It is a cultural language that conceals the inner depths, the archaic dimensions of the dominant peoples in the country, while at the same time it renders invisible all those who fail to partake of this language and its underlying cultural experience.
[And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.]
“The religion of the American people centers around the telling and retelling of the mighty deeds of the white conquerors.
[Here the Puritans and Hollywood {but not Bollywood} agree]
“This story hides the true experience of Americans from their very eyes. The invisibility of Indians and blacks is matched by a void or a deeper invisibility within the consciousness of white Americans. The inordinate fear they
[We the People of the United States]
“have of minorities is an expression of the fear they have when they contemplate the possibility of seeing themselves as they really are.
“This American cultural language is not a recent creation. It is a cosmogonic language, a language of beginnings;
[Annuit Cœptus – Novus Ordo Seclorum MDCCLVI]
“it structures the American myth of beginnings, and has continued to express the synchronic dimensions of American cultural life since that time.
[And it came to pass, enacted, that any alien, other than an alien enemy, being a free white person who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years may be admitted to become a citizen thereof on application and making proof he is a person of good character, and taking the oath to support the Constitution of the United States. H. R. 40, Naturalization Bill, 1790, at https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/ under the theme “Enlarging the National Community.”
Collect the Statue of Liberty postcards tourists ever bought complete
Not one shows the broken chains fallen around and crushed beneath her bare feet.]
[To understand] “the meaning of religion in America [it is crucial to see] the overwhelming reality of the white presence in any of its various forms… Whether this presence was legitimated by power executed illegally, or whether institution or custom its reality, as far as blacks were concerned through most of their history, carried the force of legal sanction enforced by power. The black response to this cultural reality is part of the civil rights struggle in the history of American blacks.
“The location of this struggle in the church enabled the civil rights movement to take on the resources of black cultural life in the form of organization, music, and artistic expression, and in the gathering of the limited economic resources.
“The civil rights movement has been one of protest and exposition – a protest in the name of freedom and an exposition of the hypocrisy of the American cultural language. But more than hypocrisy was being exposed in this movement, for at points the American system was seen as a gross irrationality or
“A rationalized demonism.”[10]
William Pannell:
“We were naïve. We should have listened to Du Bois. The truth is that the history of America is one unending war against people of color… America continues its struggle over white racism and its best friend, nationalism. The Christian movement, in all of its varied expression, has been caught up in this global questioning…. Revivalism has not worked its hoped-for solutions to white Americans’ grievances about civil rights, or communism, or abortion rights. ‘Revive Us Again’ may have been the theme song among white evangelicals, but the hope was that such a return to God would save America – white America – not only from unrighteousness but also from ‘them’…. Now, at the end of an era, with Graham dead and the evangelical movement shattered along ideological lines, the question in the air is this ancient one: Where do we go from here?”[11]
Charles H. Long:
As followers of Jesus, how will we tell the story of America – “a story of America that is both true and authentic – a story that can respond to an objective and felt meaning of all Americans, a true story of the American peoples that moves beyond concealment and invisibilities”[12]?
Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter listening to Albert Ayler (1936-1970) Goin’ Home.[13]: Fear God, and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14)
[1] Bob Dylan, “Can’t Wait,” Time Out of Mind, Special Rider Music (1997), accessed at https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/cant-wait/.
[2] Charlie Dates, “Why America Needs the Black Church for Its Own Survival,” Washington Post (9/3/2021), accessed at https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/09/03/black-church-future-education/. The Rev. Charlie Dates is senior pastor at Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago and an affiliate professor at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary and Trinity International University.
[3] Jemar Tisby, “Are Black Christians Evangelicals?” in Evangelicals, Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be, ed. by Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George M. Marsden (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2019), pp. 272, 263.
[4] David W. Wills, “Beyond Commonality and Plurality: Persistent Racial Polarity in American Religion and Politics,” in Religion & American Politics, From the Colonial Period to the 1980s, ed. by Mark A. Noll (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 202, 217, 218.
[5] William Pannell, Introduction to My Friend, the Enemy (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1968), quoted by Lauralee Farrer in “This Is Then, That Was Now,” Fuller Magazine, iss. 1(2014), p. 16.
[6] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), paragraphs 38, 43, 46; quoted in Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936; orig. German, 1929), p. 62.
[7] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, Autobiography of Western Man (Norwich, VT.: Argo Books, 1969), pp. 648, 649, 652.
[8] Listen to “Lecrae interview on Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ – Christian Rap,” Rapzilla.com (5/1/2015), accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMmCLqNwGyg&list=RDUMmCLqNwGyg&start_radio=1&rv=UMmCLqNwGyg&t=206. West’s “Donda” hit no. 1 in 152 countries in August, breaking records on Apple Music. See Ethan Shanfeld, “Kanye West’s ‘Donda’ Breaks Apple Music Records, Hits No. 1 in 152 Countries,” Variety, U. S. Edition (8/30/2021), accessed at https://variety.com/2021/music/news/kanye-west-donda-breaks-apple-music-records-1235052438/.
[9] James Siebens, Ryan Lucas, Jocelyn Wang, “US Global Force Posture and US Military Operations Short of War,” Stimsom Center’s Defense Strategy and Planning Program (7/14/2021), accessed at https://www.stimson.org/2021/us-global-force-posture-and-us-military-operations-short-of-war/.
[10] Charles H. Long, Significations, Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group, Publishers, 1995, orig., Fortress Press, 1986), pp. 163, 165.
[11] William Pannell, The Coming Race Wars, Expanded Edition (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP, 2021), pp. 167, 168, 169.
[12] Charles H. Long, Significations, p. 167.
[13] Albert Ayler, Goin’ Home, Black Lion Records (1994, recorded at Atlantic Records, New York, 1964).
Fruit of His Lips 