One of the most intensely perplexing, yet gratifying, intellectual experiences is teaching undergraduates those subjects normally eschewed in polite company: race, religion, and politics. The pedagogical challenge for teachers is to facilitate a learning environment wherein students shift the locus of their intellectual gaze to the interstices between their subjective frames and an objective orientation toward inquiry. An important step in enabling students to re-calibrate their approach to inquiry is to make text selections that do not merely reproduce the reified and essentialized notions of race, religion, and politics that find sustenance in subjective frames. As the sociologist Dvorda Yanow reminds us, not even academic researchers are immune from the temptations of treating socially constructed concepts as possessing natural or immutable characteristics. An important criterion in the development of course syllabi should therefore be whether prospective texts broaden the extant body of knowledge while simultaneously reframing, debunking, or complicating prevailing modes of understanding race, religion, and politics. For teachers who share my pedagogical concerns, three exemplary works that warrant serious consideration are Jonathan Rieder's The Word of the Lord is Upon Me, Barbara Dianne Savage's Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, and George Shulman's American Prophecy.
Jonathan Rieder is quite familiar to students of urban sociology for his keen ethnographic insights into the fractious consequences of virulent and pathological fears of the racialized other. Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism is indispensable reading as a chronicle of the tragic failure of white Americans to achieve what Charles Taylor refers to as the “recognition of the other.” In The Word of the Lord, Rieder's analytic gaze shifts to a hermeneutics of performance that frames Martin Luther King, Jr.'s singular contribution to the civil rights movement. Unlike the sweeping narrative histories by David Garrow (Bearing the Cross), Taylor Branch (Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan's Edge), and Clayborne Carson (In Struggle), Rieder envisions King as a magisterial — yet all too human — leading actor, director, playwright, and choreographer in an epic drama of national redemption. King deployed an intricate repertoire of cadences, inflections, and registers of voice in the highly variegated styles of talk before white and black audiences, black congregations, political and cultural elites, mass meetings and rallies; and in boisterous yet intimate “backstage” racial banter with Southern Christian Leadership Counsel's inner circle. Rieder does not characterize King as an inauthentic chameleon, but as a paragon — indeed, even an apotheosis — of a nascent American ethic of multi-layered identities, fluid and porous boundaries between groups, and a finely-tuned facility for code-switching among various cultural, spiritual, and intellectual idioms. Rieder analogizes King's multifarious voice not to the tonal suppleness of a jazz musician, but to the “agility of a ballet dancer — twisting and turning, rising and falling in complex rhythms and moods” (135).
The Word of the Lord is vulnerable to the criticism that it vivifies King as a pollyannaish avatar of a crass multiculturalism. However, that critique is belied by the book's insistence that an unmitigated commitment to “real prophecy” is the underlying constancy in the panoply of voices, codes, and styles King employed in different venues. Despite his own wrenching episodes of self-doubt and depression, King possessed an unwavering moral clarity and righteous indignation about the nation's racial crimes against humanity (white supremacy, slavery, imperial aggression in Vietnam, and genocidal policies against American-Indians). As Rieder notes, King assumed a non-consequentialist posture toward prophecy — i.e., the moral urgency to redeem the nation's soul could not be tempered by potential threats to the civil rights movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Counsel, and even his own personal safety. King's prophetic voice also found expression as an internal critic of the civil rights movement. He resisted expressions of racial chauvinism and prejudice toward prospective alliances with Mexican-Americans in the planning stages of the Poor People's March. Although King fully embraced racial pride and indulged certain nationalistic sentiments, he formulated a nuanced semantic critique of “Black Power,” as an inadequate organizing principle for achieving racial justice (309). A similar dynamic is reflected in King's embrace of black Christian nationalism without extending it to the more muscular form of black liberation theology espoused by James Cone, and more recently by Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Rieder also places King's prophetic voice at the center of his vision of a “beloved community”: a nation redeemed through an embrace of a transracial and universalistic ethic of agape and a philosophy of nonviolent reform. Rieder notes that this vision provided King the framework wherein the prophetic voice serves as the medium through which the demands for justice by an oppressed minority are translated into universalistic moral — and non-racialized — language that may resonate with the majority white population. This prophetic function parallels current debates among political theorists (most notably between John Rawls/Jean Bethke Elshstain and Robert Audi/Nicholas Wolterstorff) about the necessity to translate expressly religious discourse into secular terms as the former enters the public square.
The second work that advances the pedagogical goals outlined above is Barbara Dianne Savage's highly readable and engaging Your Spirits Walk Beside Us. For students with only a cursory familiarity with the extensive body of scholarship on black religion, Savage provides a much needed counterweight to the privileged status in our popular culture of reified and essentialist notions, which misconstrue black religion as a monolithic institutional and theological presence in the nation's religious landscape. The urgency of Savage's intellectual project is poignantly underscored by the nexus of religion and politics in the 2008 presidential election. The exemplary scholarship in recent decades (by C. Eric Lincoln, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, and Gaston Espinosa, among others) on the polycentrism of religious life for people of color in United States did not forestall the highly politicized and racialized reaction to Rev. Jeremiah Wright's righteous exhortations against American racism and imperialism. Savage recounts how the mainstream press, many white Americans (and even Rev. Wright himself) conflated the particular strand of black liberation theology of Trinity United Church with the entirety of black religion (280). Notwithstanding its potential threat to Barack Obama's presidential aspirations, that unfortunate, but not unprecedented, episode of imposing an (unofficial) religious litmus test on a presidential candidate was not without its proverbial silver lining. Popular and scholarly interest in black religious life has been subsequently enlivened. Against this backdrop, Savage contributes multiple layers of analytic insight into the theological, political, and academic debates — and tensions — that infuse the intersection of black religion and black politics.
Savage proceeds from the basic assumption that the “black church” exists primarily as an illusory or metaphoric concept (9). In its reified form, the notion creates false expectations of a cohesive and internally organized, institutional life that is simply belied by the highly decentralized and variegated modes of worship, theological orientations, and approaches to civic engagement and political mobilization. The incongruity Savage identifies between the lived experience of black religion and its socially constructed mis-characterizations finds patterned expression in the popular mind, but also in scholarly treatments of black religious life.
The substantive focus of Savage's analysis begins with the decades preceding the advent of the modern civil rights movement. Among the earliest progenitors of the systematic study of black religion (W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Benjamin Mays), Savage astutely identifies conceptual and methodological limitations that pre-figure ongoing tensions and debates within black religious life. Du Bois, Woodson, and Mays did not study black churches qua religious institutions, but in order to understand their instrumental value in advancing racial uplift and empowerment. Savage notes that, despite some terse intellectual disagreements, all three scholars focused too myopically on developing an enlightened class of religious leaders, while minimizing — or ignoring — the importance of women in the church, as well as the pervasive absence of men from the pews. These scholars also harbored modernist prejudices against the emotional styles of worship which they viewed as impediments to social and racial progress. Similar themes and methodological limitations were reinforced by subsequent scholars in the early decades of the Twentieth-Century (e.g., E. Franklin Frazier, Charles S. Johnson, and Kelly Miller).
Savage rectifies the failure to acknowledge the long-standing significance of black women to African-American religious and political life. The richly detailed biographical profiles illustrate how prominent black women (Mary Macleod Bethune, Nannie H. Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Marian Wright Edelman) melded their deep religiosity with an abiding sense of political engagement and faith-based service in education, national public policy, international diplomacy, advocacy for the poor and disenfranchised, and broader access to participation in party politics. The (Weberian) elective affinity between religious faith and political action, implicit in Savage's work, is echoed by other scholars (Melissa Harris-Lacewell) who argue that particular theological orientations — for instance, black liberation theory as opposed to the prosperity gospel — are more conducive to political engagement.
The informal biographical sketches Savage draws, especially of prominent female leaders, clearly indicate that religious faith is not incidental to, or at the margins of, concerted political engagement. Indeed, religiosity is interwoven into the very sinews of politics; and it is this sense that Savage characterizes the civil rights movement as also at its core a religious movement; an assessment she shares with one of Studen Nonviolent Coordinating Committee founding leaders, Congressman John Lewis. This is indeed an important insight because it challenges the conventional view — even among some scholars — that the importance of black churches to the civil rights movement was borne of an expediency in which black churches were propitious institutional venues with ready-made infrastructures for mobilization and civic training (in nonviolent protest action). This conceptualization is perhaps more apt for the church-based community organizing more typically associated with Alinsky organizations, in which theological and religious beliefs are disentangled from the principles and techniques of community organizing.
The public lives of the women chronicled by Savage (especially Nannie H. Burroughs) instantiated a form of “protest- and service” oriented Christianity (166). But they also deployed a Christian prophetic voice on two critical fronts: (1) to expose the theological hypocrisy of the particular strand of white Christianity that rationalized racial oppression; and (2) to challenge the gendered privilege of the male-dominated church leadership. Savage notes that the latter found even more formal (intellectual) expression in the womanist theology movement of more recent decades.
In addition to the thoughtful discussion that situates the Rev. Wright/Sen. Obama controversy in the historical debate and tension between black religion and black politics, Savage's review of the strong religiosity in the early years of SNCC is indispensable reading. The discussion undermines any rigid dichotomies between the religiously-inspired, nonviolent philosophy of Southern Christian Leadership Counsel, on the one hand, and the secularized nationalism SNCC's Black Power ideology on the other. Even Stokely Carmichael's embrace of Marxist atheism could not blind him to an ambivalent respect, if not grudging acknowledgement of the power black religiosity demonstrated in inspiring vast numbers of SNCC students and volunteers to launch a frontal assault on America's own version of racial apartheid.
While Your Spirits Walk Beside Us and The Word of the Lord is Upon Me were written for both general and academic audiences, George Shulman's American Prophecy is particularly appropriate for advanced undergraduate courses or graduate seminars. It is an impressively erudite effort by the author to ameliorate what he characterizes as a central paradox in our political culture. While biblical prophecy is a perennial and constitutive idiom of American political discourse, it is not easily accommodated into the canon of American political thought. Schulman's distinctive contribution in American Prophecy is to suggest that by expanding the scope and meaning of biblical prophecy, critics of white supremacy (especially Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr. James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison) have engendered a prophetic language about racial domination and redemption that squarely confronts the abject failure of liberal democratic theory to address the problem of race in America. This is formidable task for Shulman on several fronts. First, as he notes, American political theorists emulate Alexis de Tocqueville's exclusion of race and prophecy from the theorization of democratic practice (230). Moreover, prophetic critics of race have invoked a vernacular (and vulgar) idiom in their prophetic language that is incompatible with the esoteric idiom of political theory.
Second, how is Shulman to secure this elusive rapprochement between vernacular forms of prophetic language and liberal democratic theory? Political Theology! But this, too, raises immediate concerns. As Shulman rightly observes, liberal political theory — from Hobbes to Rawls — presumes a categorical distinction between the private and public realms. Comprehensive doctrines such as theological worldviews pertain to the former, and “public reason” is properly the domain of the latter; and never the twain shall meet. Shulman acknowledges that the absence of moral and ethical criteria impoverishes public deliberation by denuding common purposes of their larger meaning, thereby creating opportunities for fundamentalists, demagogues, and totalitarians to fill the void. Shulman envisions more permeable and shifting boundaries between the private and public realms by re-politicizing comprehensive doctrines (e.g., political theology) and injecting them into the public realm, thereby transforming public theology into “substantive” reason — a concept he borrows from Robert Bellah. Shulman is also intrigued by William Connolly's “theo-political” ethos that pluralizes theologies — to avoid the tyranny of any particular comprehensive doctrine.
Shulman's framework for enabling prophetic language to remake — and ultimately revitalize — democratic politics is highly suggestive, particularly by predicating it on the prophetic voice(s) concerned with racial domination and redemption. However, the viability of Shulman's schema (from prophetic language to political theology to political theory) is predicated on a conceptual transmutation that appears increasingly problematic upon further consideration. Shulman re-conceptualizes religion as culture and theology as rhetoric, without providing much of a rationale for doing so. Consequently, political theology loses a defining characteristic of its capacity to provide the sort of moral grounding — in public deliberation — that is absent from liberal political theory, namely its comprehensiveness. Without such grounding, the injection of prophetic language (qua culture and rhetoric) into the public square may simply engender increasingly pitched and unremitting culture wars.
This essay began with a statement of an ongoing pedagogical concern — the ability of students to engage texts without immediately invoking the often reified and essentialist notions that frequently inhabits their subjective frames of reference. Before merely, and unreflectively, transposing those notions onto the texts they are engaging, it is imperative for teachers to help students anchor their faculties for critical analysis at some (metaphoric) distance from their subjective frames, before their intellectual gaze then pivots to the texts. The books by Rieder, Savage, and Shulman all require students to immediately suspend a range of quite prevalent, yet problematic misconceptions about Martin Luther King, Jr, the character of the “Black Church,” and the canonical status of liberal democratic theory. Rieder creates a stark contrast to the sanitized and uni-dimensional caricature of King — whose essence is reducible to a few lines of his I Have a Dream speech. Rieder's depiction of King as engaging in a “crossover enterprise” is not new, but he does advance the somewhat novel view that King's facility with multiple modes of speech, style, and voice was more than a highly developed set of skills and competencies, but a deeply ingrained and internalized ethic of hybridization — among the various, and seeming disparate, cultural, linguistic, intellectual, and spiritual modes of expression that he deployed.
In a similar vein, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us demands that its readers suspend the a priori assumption that there is indeed an internal cohesion and unity that circumscribes many dimensions of black religion and black politics. Even when students concede the heterogeneity of black religious life, they often invoke the equally problematic corollary assumption that it must be a relatively recent phenomenon. Savage also debunks that fallback position by highlighting the one constancy in black religious and political life — i.e., that serious debates and tensions have proceeded unabated since the early days of systematic inquiry into black religion.
American Prophecy contains a particularly crucial lesson for students, namely that canonical works do not possess the trans-historical and immutable truths that are often attributed to them. Indeed, on some of the more fundamental questions of social and political life, like racial domination and redemption, it is not the canon, but the (prophetic) voices of the marginalized and wherein lies the greatest potential for new paradigms of political thought, more inclusive modes of social organization, and democratic renewal.
