[In the following excerpt, Grumbach discusses the views of certain black authors on Christianity, concentrating on the Black Manifesto and its central point of the tremendous wealth of the white Christian Churches and synagogues in America.]

Churchmen in America were astonished when, on May 4, 1969, James Forman arrived at Riverside Church in New York City armed with a copy of the Black Manifesto, drawn up some months before by the National Black Economic Conference in Detroit. It was a shocking document, and the aim was to thrust it upon religious America in a shocking manner. Forman tried to break into Reverend Ernest T. Campbell's communion service, creating high indignation both for the irreligious act and for the uncommon, unexpected demands.

Central to the Manifesto's point is the tremendous wealth of the Church in America, white-Christian and Jewish, and the role it has played in what the Manifesto calls “the colonization of the black race.” The New York Review of Books (July 10, 1969) quoted at length from the document: “We are not unaware that the exploitation of colored peoples around the world is aided and abetted by the white Christian Churches and synagogues. This demand for $500 million is not an idle resolution or empty words. $15 for every black brother and sister in the U.S. is only a beginning of the reparations due us as people who have been exploited and degraded, brutalized, killed and persecuted.”

The specific guilt of the churches is asserted although the Manifesto does not try to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the wealth of the Churches, their passive social role in “aiding and abetting” exploitation of blacks, and the black demand for reparation. But it does say that it is time for the religious community in America to begin to practice the virtues it preached as advisable to the blacks: “We call upon white Christians and Jews to practice patience, tolerance, understanding, and nonviolence as they have encouraged, advised and demanded that we as black people should do throughout our entire enforced slavery in the U.S. The true test of their faith and belief in the Cross and the words of the prophets will certainly be put to a test as we seek legitimate and extremely modest reparations for our role in developing the industrial base of the Western world through our slave labor.”

From the terms of the Black Manifesto it would seem that the Churches were the institutions chosen out of all the available ones in modern society (public utilities, General Electric, the Courts, the Universities, the railroads, Ford, etc.) because first, they are extremely wealthy and the blacks need money for the purposes outlined in some detail in the Manifesto; second, their members have “profited by black people and still exploit them”; third, they have hypocritically preached virtues they must now bring themselves to practice; and fourth, they must put into practice the theoretical Christianity which they profess for themselves. Hitherto the churches “have been sustained by the military might of the colonizers”; now the Manifesto demands that they take the other side and support the colonized. Once the churches “contributed to our oppression by working hand in hand with the military machinery which kept us in bondage and political servitude.” Now, the Manifesto demands that they support the slave grandsons and daughters in their demands for a free and equal life.

I have gone into this recent document in some detail because it represents the culmination of historic black conviction, and it is possible to trace the development of this feeling, whether we agree that there is complete justice behind it or not, through the work of black writers who have recorded their feelings about white Christianity since the early Nineteenth Century.

It is only fair to point out that the Manifesto ends on a compassionate note: “We do not intend to abuse our black brothers and sisters in black churches who have uncritically accepted Christianity. We want them to understand how the racist white Christian church with its hypocritical declarations and doctrines of brotherhood has abused our faith and trust. An attack on the religious beliefs of black people is not our major objective …” Thus, the writers of the Manifesto understood the depth and extent of black-American involvement in Christianity; this truth must be emphasized in any review of its literary critics. A great number of black Americans, for whatever reason historically (a number of studies of slavery show that slave-owners advanced the cause of the churches because they liked the pacific effect they had on slaves, and because of the entertainment value of the services), have been uncritically involved in the worship and social life, including the burial societies, of the churches. Only the exception, the literary artist and critic, have, until the last years of the Sixties and culminating on May 4, 1969, been condemnatory of their role.

In the slave narratives of escape only recently reprinted, the imagery of bondage and the supernatural assistance of God in “coming out” of it is everywhere present. James Pennington, whose story has recently been reprinted in Arna Bontemp's Great Slave Narratives, “the fugitive blacksmith” as the subtitle of his narrative describes him (1849), wrote of his gratitude for his escape to “the blessed Savior who came to preach good tidings unto the meek … to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.” He looked to the true spirit of the gospel to “sicken” the spirit of slavery. William and Ellen Craft, at the start of their journey north in 1848, “knelt down and prayed to our heavenly Father mercifully to assist us, as he did his people of old, to escape cruel bondage.” On their journey, she disguised as a Southern white gentlemen and he as her servant, they talk to a lady who bemoans the loss of her runaway slaves. With the money “those valuable niggers” might have brought her, “what a great deal of good we [she is here speaking of herself and her minister son] could do for the poor, and in sending missionaries abroad to the poor heathen who have never heard the name of our blessed Redeemer.” The Crafts record this conversation with no comment, but it is clear they understand its ironic implications.

In contrast to this use of the stories of the Old Testament as a paradigm for freedom, the white ante-bellum Southern apologists for slavery used Scripture to prove the rectitude of the institution. In 1856 the writer Alfred Taylor Bledsoe in Liberty and Slavery said the abolitionists were mistaken in their claims of immorality of slavery. “We point to slavery among the Hebrews … [it] has been ordained by Him.” Abraham, he noted, had more than 1,000 slaves—“how then could these professing Christians [the abolitionists] proceed to condemn and excommunicate a poor brother for having merely approved what Abraham had practiced?” He agreed with George Fitzhugh in Cannibals, All! (“The Negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and in some sense, the freest people in the world”) and with John Pendleton Kennedy writing in Swallow Barn in 1832 (“At the present stage of his existence … he [the Negro] is essentially parasitical in his nature … in his moral constitution, and dependent upon the white race for guidance and direction.”); he added his own pious conviction that slavery “was not left merely to a tacit or implied sanction. It was sanctioned by the express legislation of the Most High. …”

As early as 1848 the distrust of Christianity, of its white apologists and its practices, the recognition that it bore a dishonorable and symbiotic relation to the established social system within which it dwelled so comfortably, was unequivocally asserted by Frederick Douglass. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he described his master, Captain Auld, who attended a Methodist camp meeting in 1832 “and there experienced religion.” He writes of his hopes that the conversion would lead to manumission or, at the least, to a decrease in his hardness toward his slaves. Neither of these things happened; the Captain became, if anything, worse, more cruel, than he had been before. In fact, “Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty. He made the greatest pretensions to piety.”

The Captain's religious approval for his cruelty is then illustrated by Douglass' story about a young slave woman whom Auld whipped until her shoulders were bloody, all the while quoting Scripture: “He that knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.” Later, in telling of a kindly master, Douglass professes to be pleased because the new master had no religion; this leads him to the claim that the historical alliance between Christianity and American slavery gave sanction to the dehumanization of the black: “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, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity.”

At the end of his book, feeling some remorse at his rough treatment of Southern churches as definitive of Christianity in general, Douglass put an appendix on the subject, in which he hastens to add: “I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” Like the Crafts, he defines this hypocrisy in terms of distance which, in the old saying, lends enchantment to the view: “They [the Southern Christians] love the heathen on the other side of the globe. They can pray for him … while they despise and totally neglect the heathen at their own door.”

Of course it is true that sixty years later Booker T. Washington was able to approve of the Christian churches of the South. One has the uneasy feeling that he saw them as useful agents in the uphill work of civilizing his people, along with manual arts and the toothbrush. In 1901 he wrote in Up From Slavery: “If no other consideration had convinced me of the Christian life, the Christ-like work which the Church of all denominations in America has done during the last 35 years for the elevation of the black man would have made me a Christian. In a large degree it has been the pennies, the nickels, and dimes which have come from the Sunday schools, and the Christian Endeavour societies, and the missionary societies, as well as from the Church proper, that have helped to elevate the Negro at so rapid a rate.”

This praise can perhaps be best understood if one remembers Washington's general charity toward all white persons and institutions which made any monetary contribution toward the vocational education of Negroes; a later writer (Robert Moats Miller) has claimed that, bad as things were for the Negro under slavery and “on the painfully slow road toward integration” it would have been worse without the Church.

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century black poetry, rich in varied kinds of verse although this productivity is never acknowledged by white anthologizers of American poetry, is full of romantic, formalistic, declamatory, and dialectical verse. Here the poet, perhaps because of the essentially personalistic and lyrical nature of his work, tends to see God (Jesus) in traditional, intimate Protestant relationships and rarely acknowledges the existence of a Church. The first black poet to be published in North America, Jupiter Hammon (1760), while still in slavery wrote that “thy captive slave” would be saved by Jesus's precious blood, and that “the humble souls that love His Word” would be chosen by His Son. In 1853 James Whitfield, another of the declamatory poets, saw men as tyrants who stripped the black man “of those rights which Nature's God bequeathed to all the human race,” and Daniel Payne (1835) saw virtue in faith alone: “Hate sin; religion be your prize; / her laws obeyed will surely make you wise.”

But this patience under God, this view that the Church plays no part in the process of rescue from oppression, disappears with the beginning of the Twentieth Century and is to grow into violent rejection in the poetry of the sixties. William DuBois's works ring with bitterness and irony. In 1918 he begins a poem: “Name of God's Name: / Red murder reigns;” with terrible imagery he accuses God and the Churches of criminal silence:

All the long aisles Of Thy Great Temples, God, Stink with the entrails Of our souls, And Thou are dumb.

Two years later he again addresses a “silent God,” this time about the massacre of blacks in Atlanta. Now he asks the sleeping God to listen: “Our faces dark with doubt are made a mockery in Thy sanctuary.” He wonders if “the God of the fathers” is not dead, if indeed “the pale frenzy of blood-crazed brutes who do such deeds high on thine Altar” will not somehow be avenged by Him. And ten years later James Weldon Johnson, writing on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, wonders whether the freedom for which “millions prayed and sighed,” “tens of thousands fought,” and “so many freely died” would be permitted by God to come to nothing.

In another poem Johnson reviews almost uncomprehendingly the impetus which allowed a slave to resort to Jesus in his travail:

Heart of what slave poured out such melody As “Steal Away to Jesus?” On its strains His spirit must have nightly floated free Though still about his hands he felt his chains. Who heard great “Jordan roll”? Whose starward eye Saw chariot “swing low”? And who was he That breathed that comforting, melodic sigh, “Nobody knows de trouble I see”?

A sense of futility, the gradual loss of patience with prayer and petition, especially with those sounded in spirituals, seems to mount. A year later (1918) the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, in “The Suppliant,” writes:

Long have I beat with timid hands upon life's leaden door, Praying the patient, futile prayer my fathers prayed before, Yet I remain without the close. …

Soft o'er the threshold of the years there comes this counsel cool: The strong demand, contend, prevail; the beggar is a fool:

Now the image of the suppliant and the humble becomes increasingly infrequent. No longer does the black poet petition Christ for his freedom; now he is the Christ, suffering as He did, often dying in His manner. About 1925 Frank Horne writes “On Seeing Two Brown Boys in a Catholic Church,” and the image of the boys is of two small Christs. Their fate will be his; they will be laughed at, spit at, nailed up; they will, indeed, “exceed God / for on this earth You shall know Hell—”

By 1925 the great age of black poetry has begun, with that most talented, most gentle, and seemingly least angry of poets, Countee Cullen. His relation to God in his poetry is direct, unchurched, uncomplaining, and yet he cannot prevent himself from wishing that the Church had offered him a different God:

Lamb of God, although I speak With my mouth thus, in my heart Do I play a double part. Ever at Thy glowing altar Must my heart grow sick and falter Wishing He I served were black. …

For Cullen, the injustice of being black is not only that the black must worship a white God but that, like Milton, another injustice is added to the gift of his poetry:

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
.....Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing.

In the Thirties this gentle questioning of the white-Christian creator's role in the life of the black becomes more urgent. Frank Marshall Davis is an early example; his poem is called “Christ Is a Dixie Nigger”:

Your pink priests who whine about Pilate and Judas and Gethsemane I'd like to hog-tie and dump into the stinking cells to write a New Testament around the Scottsboro Boys.

Subdivide your million dollar temples into liquor taverns and high class whore-houses. … My nigger Christ can't get past the door anyway.

Remember this, you wise guys.

Your tales about Jesus of Nazareth are no go with me. … I've got a dozen Christs in Dixie all bloody and black.

The next decade saw poets like Melvin Tolson, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden writing angrily but still within the bounds of acceptable poetic propriety toward the Church. Tolson, like Frank Horne, identifies the black with Christ: “They tell us to forget / The Golgotha we tread …” He too sees the bitter irony of the slave raising his song to Jesus:

Black slaves singing Steal Away to Jesus In jungle swamps Black slaves singing The Crucifixion In slave-pens at midnight. …

Margaret Walker (“We Have Been Believers,” 1942) rejects, by the repetitive verb tense that recurs through her long poem, all that her forefathers looked to for their salvation:

We have been believers believing in the black gods of an old land. … And in the white gods of a new land … in the mercy of our masters. … We have been believers in a new Jerusalem. …

Where are our gods that they leave us asleep? Surely the priests and the preachers … will hear. … Surely the sires of the people will send us a sign.

We have been believers … in our burdens and our demigods too long. Now the needy no longer weep and pray; the long-suffering arise, and our fists bleed against the bars with a strange insistency.

The Sixties are the years of total rejection of Christ and his home, the Church. Any collection of black poetry will sound the same notes. Charles Anderson, for example writes:

I know Jesus heard me 'Cause he spit right in my eye Said—Go 'way, boy, Don't want to hear you cry.

Waring Cuney reviews the story of the crucifixion and ends in monosyllabic cynicism:

Jesus is your Burden-bearer Oh my oh yes Surely enough so.

And again, the identification, by now a familiar theme, of the brown baby with the Christ child occurs in May Miller's “Calvary Way”:

I should bear a warm brown baby,

But I fear the nails that pierce the spirit, The unseen crosses. …

By the beginning of the Twentieth Century the prose writing of the black, even that which purports to be entirely autobiographical, is characterized by the achievement of genuine literary style which accompanies a hardening view of the role of Christianity. This is most evident in Willam DuBois's semi-autobiographical work, The Souls of Black Folk, a book written in lyrical prose which was to be a forerunner of the great age of black writing thirty years later. The author was in his early Marxist stage of thought; nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of the role of Christianity in the subjugation of his race.

Acknowledging that “the Negro Church of today (1903) is the social center of Negro life in the United States,” he claims: “This social, intellectual and economic centre is a religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven, Hell and Damnation preached twice on Sunday with great fervor” is a force without parallel. He then explains his major objection to the role of the Church in ante-bellum South:

Nothing suited his [the Negro's] condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain bounds. The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements in his character which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission and the exquisite appreciation of the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next; the Avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world … until the Great Day when He should lead His dark children home.

“This deep religious fatalism” led inevitably, DuBois noted, to a religion of resignation, and carried to its extreme, ended in “a philosophy of indulgence and crime.”

DuBois sees the worst Negro characteristics of his time as a result of this period when the home had lost its reality and the entire social fabric of Negro life was destroyed “in the very shadow of the Church … here habits of shiftlessness took root, and sullen hopelessness replaced hopeful strife.” Much later Richard Wright, in “White Man, Listen,” was to recall one of DuBois's prayers:

Doth not this justice of hell stink in Thy nostrils, O God? How long shall the mounting flood of innocent blood roar in Thine ears and pound in our hearts for vengeance? Pile the pale frenzy of blood-crazed brutes who do such deeds high on Thine altar, Jehovah, and burn it in Hell forever and forever.

Forgive us, Lord! We know not what we say!

Thus, by 1912 when James Weldon Johnson wrote his fictional Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, it had been put down unequivocably that the church was both the major social force in the lives of blacks and their chief ideological enslaver. Johnson adds to our knowledge of the form these repressions took in the South, and testifies to the major metaphors which appeared in all the “preaching”: “As far as subject-matter was concerned, all of these sermons were alike: each began with the fall of man, ran through the various trials and tribulations of the Hebrew children, on to the redemption of Christ, was ended with a fervid picture of the judgment-day, and the fate of the damned.”

Johnson describes the powerful preacher, John Brown, who anded each emotion-filled sermon with “a heavenly walk through the pearly gates, along the golden streets, pointing out the glories of the city, pausing occasionally to greet some patriarchal members of the Church … who were clad in robes of spotless white, with crowns of gold upon their heads and harps within their hands.” The promise of a golden kingdom to compensate for the bloody life on earth: this was always the burden of Church preaching, and the image of Moses and the Israelites in bondage, and the risen Christ, served the rhetoric most commonly. Compensation with the glories of Heaven (the Promised Land) for the deprivations on this earth, full citizenship in Zion for dispossession in this world's cities was the constant promise. Christianity's graphic depiction of the Heavenly City served the poor blacks' needs well. In Langston Hughes' first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), the grandmother's lifelong occupation, washing the clothes of whites, is made bearable for her by the promises of the Church. She says she expects to rest in Heaven and doesn't know what the white folks will do “'cause I'm gonna sit down up there myself.” Her hopes for eternity make the present possible, perhaps even guarantee her longevity because of her will to survive until that Day, but her children, whom she is always trying to get to go to Church, find it is “hard to have a Christian mother.”

If Heaven was a possible dream to cushion the terrible now, Hell and the devil were equally real and vivid in the preaching. Arna Bontemps recalls, in his study of Negro folklore, that guitars were looked upon superstitiously as a device of the devil; the grandmother in Not Without Laughter warns her daughter and her shiftless husband, as they sit singing and playing in the front yard that they're “bound straight fo' de devil, that's what they is.” And when the young children say they like the guitar-singing, she says, “Naturally you would—none o' you-all's converted yet,” and then asks her son-in-low to sing something “right decent … play some o' ma pieces like ‘When de saints come marchin’ in' or ‘This world is not ma Home’—something from de church.” Pleasure, the present, the delights of the here and now are the devil, and Heaven is all that cannot be had by blacks on this earth.

The church preached the doctrine of a future home, blessed with leisure and rest, cleanliness and material rewards. It was redolent of expectation and honey and harps, not so much as a matter of doctrine as economics, a guarantee that endurance of the state of things on earth would be rewarded with exactly those things denied here; impatience and the search for pleasure would surely end in Hell. At this stage in the literature (and if the creative literature is to be trusted to be a true reflection of the mood of the people) there was no serious challenge to these absolutes except the younger generation's tendency to ignore the promise of Heaven for present pleasure. Because they resisted Church, they tended to hold less hope for salvation, and trusted more in immediate sensual rewards; for their grandparents, in the literature before the Depression, it was the Lord in his Heaven who might act in their behalf. Randolph Edmonds, in Breeders, has a character say: “Lawd, Ah don't want tuh question Yo' justice and mercy, but Ah kan' help but axe how long Yuh will let Yo chilluns be sold down de river lak horses an' cows. … Stop it soon, Lawd! … an' let Yo chilluns drink of de water of freedom an' put on de garments of righteousness.”

Dependence was a virtue inherited from pre-Civil War days; the Church was to recognize its usefulness and to apply it to the Lord: rely on Him, depend on him as you once did on your master, and He will lead you home, after death. This simplified theology, of special use in the subjugation of the Negro long after slavery had been abolished, is attacked violently in the writings of contemporary blacks. The ministers of God are seen as figures of fun (as in a recent play, “Prayer Meeting or The First Militant Minister” by Ben Caldwell), the church on earth is an object for satire, the praying masses are shown to be deluded, the basic tenets of Christianity lead only to disillusion. In the poetry of the Sixties, the Christ-God becomes the oppressor because he goes hand-in-hand with the white oppressor.

Even a cursory review of the literature of this period shows an aesthetic dismissal of concepts of salvation, the healing and comforting role of Christianity, a complete distrust of its pretensions, a new irritation with its whole canon of practice and belief. In the seminal novel of the second black renaissance, Native Son (1940), Bigger Thomas' mother pleads with him in jail to trust in the Lord, to look to a reunion in Heaven where they can all “live without fear,” but Richard Wright's Big-Nigger cannot believe this and later tells his lawyer: “I wanted to be happy in this world, not out of it.” Ignorant and having been driven half-mad by discriminations he cannot understand, having murdered a white girl in order to feel like a man and alive for the first time in his life, he comes to understand that “the whites like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want with us.” And seven years later black novelist Willard Motley in Knock on Any Door has his hero, Nick Romano, proclaim a life-motto that many disillusioned blacks are now willing to subscribe to: “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.”

Fifteen years ago James Baldwin began his compassionate yet mordaunt analysis of black religion and the Church as they contributed to the development of black social conscience. His father was a minister; in Go Tell it on the Mountain Baldwin describes the role of the Harlem store-front churches, and of the large number of Harlem citizens who belonged to one or another of them. In Notes of a Native Son, written in 1950, he sees this attendance, however, not as a testimonial to “the Negro's essential simplicity and good-will” but rather as a display of desperate emotionism and, even further, as providing the black congregation with a place where they can practice imaginatively getting back at the whites. “… religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; the bad will be punished and the good rewarded, for God is not sleeping; the judgment is not far off.”

Baldwin goes further. Over the fiery sermons of these churches he senses only a thin coating of spirituality. In reality the themes are social wrongs “to illustrate the injustice of the white American and anticipate his certain and long overdue punishment.” As yet he hears no active incitement to rebellion against these religiously-condoned white evils; but Baldwin recalls that his father's favorite text was not “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” but instead, “How can I sing the Lord's song in a strange land.”

Writing in the late fifties about the folk-songs of working-class blacks, Richard Wright uncovered strains of religious America in those songs he calls “the dirty dozens”: “They jeer at life, they leer at what is decent, holy, just, wise, straight, right, and uplifting. I think that is because, from the Negro's point of view, it is the right, the holy, the just, that crush him in America.”

At about the same time, in one of the most notable and least noticed novels of this period, A Different Drummer (1962), the young black writer William Melvin Kelley uses the character of the Reverend Bradshaw, a Harvard-educated Northern black, to express his view that the “miscreant ministry” (William Craft's term, not Kelley's) has no longer a utility, that the activists have now taken over the old function of the priests and ministers: “They've made me obsolete,” he says, and the conclusion of Kelley's powerful work, in which the working-class blacks turn heel and leave the South forever and the black minister is murdered by furious whites, underscores the truth of this.

The Church as locus of dreams of heaven, escape from bondage, persecution and terror, escape from reality to peace, rest, freedom, and reunion of separated persons by death—these themes are still repeated in the songs sung in churches today: “Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world,” “Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home,” “O Lord, I want two wings to veil my face, two wings to steal away,” “Steal away, steal away to Jesus,” and “Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt Land.” These are “the litany of reaffirmation and escape,” but Louis Lomax points out: “It was inevitable that, in time, those churches would produce militant opponents of the white power structure … ministers who would—as Dr. Martin Luther King proves—stand ready to die for their race.” On the other hand, as late at 1964, Dr. King felt certain that “the religious tradition of the Negro has shown him that the nonviolent resistance of the early Christians had constituted a moral offensive of such over-riding power that it shook the Roman Empire.”

We come at last to the present: the writings of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and LeRoi Jones, as well as the other poets and playwrights and novelists of the late Sixties whom we cannot deal with here. Now we see that the patience with what is, the reliance upon Christian justice of what will be in the world to come, are totally exhausted. Malcolm chose a new church, a new city of God, Islam, from which to proclaim his separatist thought. His Autobiography is full of long quotations from his own sermons to his fellow Muslims. The burden of most of them is that Christianity is only for the white, and more particularly, for the white to use as a weapon of supremacy over the black:

Our white slave master's Christian religion has taught us black people here in the wilderness of North America that we will sprout wings when we die and fly up into the sky where God will have for us a special place in Heaven. This is white man's Christian religion, used to brainwash us black people! We have accepted it! We have embraced it! We have believed it! We have practiced it!. … This blue-eyed devil has twisted his Christianity, to keep his foot on our backs … to keep our eyes fixed on the pie in the sky and heaven in the hereafter … while he enjoys his heaven right here … on this earth … in this life.

Malcolm can no longer find consolatory values in Christianity, not even in the catharsis of deep emotionalism which Baldwin saw; to him it is a vicious and moribund fairy-tale. Thus he adds a new note to the writing we are reviewing: “If the so-called ‘Christianity’ now being preached in America displays the best that world Christianity has left to offer—no one in his right mind should need any greater proof that very close at hand is the end of Christianity.”

Christianity's failure is attributed to its support of racism, its preachment of true brotherhood of man while blacks endured only Christian cruelty, its disguise of the miserable economic present with promises that “if he [the Black] had no shoes and was hungry, we gonna get shoes and milk and honey and fishfries in Heaven!”

Eldridge Cleaver's conclusions about white Christians in Soul On Ice are much like Malcolm's. They represent, at this moment, the thinking of the extreme left and, it would seem, most of the literate writing blacks. If black churches are still usually full, and their congregations still relying upon the ultimate promises, the more visible, articulate, and literary blacks seem to have now lost faith themselves, and further, feel a vocation to disillusion believers who still remain. To Cleaver Christ is as phony as the rest of the power structure of which He is a part, or “bought” by it. From jail he writes: “I had come to believe that there was no God; if there is, men do not know anything about him. Therefore, all religions were phony—which made all preachers and priests, in our eyes, fakers. … They could usher you through the Pearly Gates after you were dead but not through the prison gate while you were still alive and kicking. … Such men of God are powerful arguments in favor of atheism.” And LeRoi Jones in “Black is a Country” cries out against the unholy alliance of church and cash: “The Christian Church cannot help us. The new nationalists all over the world have learned to be suspicious of Christianity. Christianity and the Dollar have gotten mixed up in their minds. …”

An added blame, a sexual one, is now laid to the influence of white Christianity on blacks. Cleaver gives to Lazarus, a character in “The Allegory of the Black Eunuch,” an explanation of this: “He who worships the Virgin Mary will lust for the beautiful dumb blonde. And she who yearns to be rocked in the arms of Jesus will burn for the blue eyes and white arms of the All-American boy.”

So it comes now to this point. To the black writer, Christianity is a repressive and dangerous white-man's land. No longer serving, as it once did, the outcast black as valuable, sustaining, visionary experience, it is now seen to be delusive in nature (but no longer deluding), degrading because it is a denial, in the color of its central figures, of black selfhood, the cause of black spiritual and psychic sickness, sexually misleading in that it offers confusing images to black minds. Psychiatrists William A. Greer and Price M. Cobbs discovered in their 1968 study (Black Rage) that

Religion plays a role in the cancer of black self-depreciation … it is designed to evoke guilt … the unfortunate result is generally an acceptance by black people of their sinfulness in order to feel some relief from guilt, … sinfulness and evil as defined by white America in regard to black men. … The religious structure has thus reinforced the view that white men are superior and black men inferior. … Christianity is the greatest offender, but any religion which elevates guilt-stimulating attitudes about sin and debasement to the level of the supernatural would echo this nation's attitudes toward Negroes for any black man who in that religion sought comfort.

Except in the church bulletins of black churches, one can find few optimistic views about the future of Christianity among blacks. In December, 1969, Thomas A. Johnson, a New York Times religious journalist, wrote this précis of the Sixties:

For many, the decade sparked more meaningful change than a century of politeness and prayer as “freemen.”

“You can keep the whole world, just give me Jesus,” many black families had said of discrimination. But during the 1960's, the young black reaction was “just keep on keeping on.”

The answers of the Churches to the Black Manifesto's demands for reparations have been, on the whole and with one notable exception, the Episcopal Church, complete and horrified rejection. Even black ministers, like the Reverend Stephen G. Spottswood, have denounced it. But, if the literature is to be believed, the demands may have come too late. There is a greater danger to the Christian churches than a demand for money; there is the very real danger that, ultimately, the identification the blacks make of Christian with “white,” with humility and passivity, with capitalism and power, with dual morality and the theology of repressive promises, will be replaced by a violent black theology with no place in it for Christianity.

Black theology at this point in time is experience not dogma. Mayor John Lindsay of New York City may be able to provide the churches of his city with police protection against the National Black Economic Conference's threats of disruption of services in the churches; it is doubtful if there is any available protection against the loss of the blacks to traditional Christianity itself.

To end on a more literary and less pessimistically political note, it is of interest to remember that the concept that the whites in America owe the blacks more than visions of golden streets and promises of heavenly rest was advanced as far back as the first decade of this century. William Dean Howells writes in My Mark Twain that Twain told him once that “he held himself responsible for the wrong the white race had done the black race in slavery … in paying the way for a Negro student through Yale, he was doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every black man.”

Note

Since this article was written I've come across a serious study of the subject which suggests an approach to the absolute rejection of Christianity made by the writers I have quoted. James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power is a revolutionary treatment of black theology as “biblical theology seeking to create new value-perspectives for the oppressed … (a theology) which confronts white society as the racist AntiChrist.” Cone sees a solution to the problem of racism not through dialogue between liberal religious whites and middle-class religious Negroes, but through action. His is a theology which demands that “Christianman is obligated by a freedom grounded in the Creator to break all laws which contradict human dignity,” and which echoes Camilo Torres: “Revolutionary action is a Christian, a priestly struggle.”