approaches to religion

Introduction

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Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology Vincent W. Lloyd

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780823277636 Published to Fordham Scholarship Online: May 2018 DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823277636.001.0001

Introduction

Vincent W. Lloyd

DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823277636.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords Malcolm X introduced a distinction between the black masses, “field Negros,” and black religious elites, “house Negros.” This essay argues that black secularists occupy the role once filled by black religious elites. Drawing together the insights of secularism’s critics and the best insights of black theologians, this essay suggests that new energy could be infused into black theology if black secularism is directly addressed and criticized. It outlines the new task of black theology: to unapologetically embrace blackness and religion.

Keywords:   black theology, blackness, criticism, Malcolm X, religion, secularism

“There were two kinds of slaves,” Malcolm X lectured in a Detroit black Baptist church.1 The house Negro identified with his master: “Whenever the master said ‘we,’ he said ‘we.’” When the master was in danger, the house Negro rushed to protect him. The house Negro enjoyed the comforts that come with proximity to power: better housing, better food, and better clothes. In return, the house Negro managed the other slaves, keeping them “passive and peaceful.” These other slaves, the masses, were field Negroes. Living in flimsy shelters, eating castaway food, and wearing old clothes, the field Negro felt only hatred toward his master. Field Negroes were constantly looking for opportunities to escape. According to Malcolm, the field Negro was particularly intelligent; nonetheless, the revolutionary impulses of the field Negro were repressed by the anesthetic preaching of the house Negro.

Across town from Malcolm, civil rights leaders including Adam Clayton Powell were speaking at the Northern Negro Leadership Conference. The conference organizers had shunned black nationalists, and in protest Rev. Albert Cleage organized a Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference at the same time.2 It was there that Malcolm was speaking, to (p.2) the masses rather than the liberal elites. Indeed, by the end of his speech Malcolm’s account of the house Negro developed into a full-throttled attack on Martin Luther King and other leading civil rights leaders, just months after the March on Washington. Malcolm portrayed these leaders as

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instruments of the white liberals who were invested in maintaining the status quo and who saw the cultivation of black elites as a means of managing the hostile, unruly black masses.

Identifying himself with the grassroots, Malcolm argued that divisions among the masses should be set aside in favor of unity based on a common enemy, “the white man.” At Bandung, colonized peoples from all over the world—“black, brown, red, or yellow,” but all ultimately subsumed under the label “black” in Malcolm’s speech—realized that their struggles had a common cause in the white man. Malcolm suggests that the same conclusion ought to be reached in the United States: “You don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Methodist or Baptist, you don’t catch hell because you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you don’t catch hell because you’re a Mason or an Elk. … You catch hell because you’re a black man.” Malcolm does not say exactly what he means by “black”; it is clearly not a physical description. Its meaning seems to be defined by a common enemy. While Malcolm is quite explicit about who that enemy is—he has “blue eyes and blond hair and pale skin”—Malcolm’s real target is the system of white supremacy, a system in which all whites are complicit.

Once Malcolm has established that he stands with the masses, he shows how the politics of the masses, of the field Negro, differs from the politics of the elite, of the house Negro. The latter want racial integration by nonviolent means. Malcolm cuttingly reduces this to the desire to “sit down next to white folks on the toilet.” “That’s no revolution,” he concludes. The field Negro seeks a genuine revolution that is dramatic and violent, a radical transformation of the ways of the world rather than accommodation with a white regime. Ultimately, what the field Negro seeks is “land.”3 This conclusion derives from the analogy with resistance to colonialism: colonial overlords were being pushed away and land redistributed. What Malcolm seems to mean, in the U.S. context, is not literal land but rather sovereignty. The genuine revolution will only be complete when the sovereignty of the white regime is rejected and the sovereignty of blacks is established—when blackness is expressed in a way that is irreducible to the terms set out by whiteness. What this might look like remains vague in Malcolm’s rhetoric, but it is the motivating goal of his militancy. And house Negroes stand in the way.

(p.3) According to Malcolm, the house Negro is the preacher who praises peaceful suffering while cashing checks from the powers that be. The field Negro embraces “good religion,” “old- time religion,” “the one that Ma and Pa used to talk about.” This is religion aligned with black revolution. It commends intelligence and obedience, but it also commends resistance to those worldly forces that would cause suffering. While Malcolm says he finds this religion in the Qu’ran, it is also the religion of an amorphous black tradition (of “Ma and Pa”), as well as the religion of those Methodists, Baptists, and other Christians who are oppressed; it is the religion of the black masses. In an interview the same year, Malcolm asserted, “A Muslim to us is somebody who is for the black man; I don’t care if he goes to the Baptist Church seven days a week.”4 Malcolm repeatedly singles out his host, Rev. Cleage, as an exemplary Christian minister whose religious commitments are aligned with the masses. At the time, Cleage’s theology was radicalizing; five years later, in 1968, he would publish The Black Messiah, the first book of black theology, released a year before James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power. Just as Malcolm had pointed out that “Christ was a black man,” Cleage retold the Christian story from the perspective of contemporary black oppression.5

On Malcolm’s account, then, the religion of the field Negro is unified by its opposition to white supremacy and its alignment with black revolution, even if the particular form this religion takes varies widely, from mosque to church, Baptist to Methodist—and perhaps outside of an

Introduction

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institutional context altogether. If the revolution claims black sovereignty, the God of the field Negro is similarly sovereign, irreducible to the terms of the white world. To worship that God means to struggle against white supremacy: to challenge the idols (from objects to ideas) that whites elevate to sacred status in order to consolidate their hold on power. In his speech, Malcolm is careful to avoid attributing positive content to God. All he says about God is that God authorizes the struggle against oppression. It is the house Negroes who claim to know who God is, who claim that God wants blacks to follow the rules of the white world and wait patiently for incremental change. The white world puts the black preacher on a podium next to “a priest, a rabbi, and an old white preacher,” all of whom promise that racial justice is right around the corner. The house Negro works with the racial and religious categories that are given by the white world; the field Negro seeks a new set of categories, scrambling the old divisions and allowing for an effervescence of new concepts emerging in light of political struggle.

(p.4) The black masses had the capacity to effect a revolutionary transformation of American society, but house Negro preachers were always holding them back—and so the house Negro became Malcolm’s prime target. On their own, the black masses would naturally rise up against white supremacy, so if Malcolm could outwit the house Negro, the revolution would surely follow. The critical work involved in challenging the house Negro is difficult and painful but essential. Malcolm holds up as exemplary a nine-year-old Chinese girl who shot an “Uncle Tom Chinaman”—her father. In Malcolm’s view, it is only with such violent breaks, turning away from familiar comforts and toward an as-yet-undetermined vision of blackness, that white supremacy can be countered. In religious terms, conversion is necessary: away from the religion of the house Negro, toward the religion of the field Negro, embracing the worship of a God irreducible to worldly, white terms.

Where Malcolm’s contemporaries occupied the role of house Negro with their liberal Protestant preaching, today this role is occupied more often than not through an embrace of secularism. By secularism I mean the exclusion or management of religion by the powers that be. For the secularist, there is nothing beyond the ways of the world; they must serve as our starting point. We can explore, reinterpret, or wallow in these ways or use them as a basis for imagining new ways, but we must not delude ourselves into believing that they may be transcended. Religion is shaped by secularism when it takes a form compatible with the status quo; often this means that religion is confined to the heart, treated as a personal choice, entailing only those normative claims that match ambient values. The black secularist domesticates the revolutionary impulses of black theology—and is richly rewarded by the powers that be. Some black secularists tame the content of black theology while maintaining its radical style. Other black secularists turn away from revolutionary change, toward an exploration of the supposed complexity and diversity of our current racial and religious landscape in order to discern how a coalition might be assembled to affect incremental change. Still other black secularists turn away from religion altogether, leaving themselves with little leverage to separate themselves from the terms of the white world.

Secularism has attracted a wide variety of critics who have called attention to the ways that it is entangled with the disciplining impulses of modernity, with neoliberal ideology, and with Western imperialism. Yet these critics, particularly those on the academic left, are often deeply invested in their critical posture, diagnosing problems but at most gesturing (p.5) in the direction of practices that evade the grasp of secularism—and usually these practices occur in some exotic locale, like Egypt, with little chance of affecting life in elite academic circles.6

Malcolm’s speech is so powerful because he locates himself as an organic intellectual, one

Introduction

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among the masses, challenging the ideas of the elite, of the house Negroes. This is the particular contribution that black theology has to make to intellectual discussions of secularism. It names a perspective that is widely embraced, allowing us to see secularism as an aberration. But taking up black theology as a critical perspective also means grappling with religious ideas and practices for us, not just the shortcomings or potential of ideas and practices held by others. This may be uncomfortable, for the critic is always invested in her object of critique, and the academic critic of secularism often feels uncomfortable around ideas that are too Christian, particularly when they are taken as normative. But we must embrace the masses rather than preach to the masses (a role for the house Negro), and this means grappling with black religious ideas and practices, particularly those that are Christian.

Just as the religion of the house Negro was Malcolm’s prime target for critique, today black secularism must be the intellectual’s prime target for critique. Particularly at a political moment when the grassroots are energized, we can see all the more clearly that it is only white-funded black leadership that is holding back radical social transformation. The religion of the field Negro is religion orthogonal to the ways of the world, claiming sovereignty for blackness. What might that look like?

Black theology has been too modest. It has forgotten its original ambition. All theology, properly understood, is black theology. All social criticism, properly understood, is theological. Black theology is social criticism; social criticism is black theology.

The reason black theology has become so modest is secularism. Secularism confines theology to the status of one among many disciplines, and secularism makes theology’s hold even on that diminished status tenuous. Secularism’s conjoined twin, multiculturalism, confines black theology to one of many ways to pluralize theology. Black theology no longer understands its role as social criticism—yet today that role is more important than ever.

To revive black theology, the question of secularism must be named, and it must be addressed directly. Once secularism is rejected, black theology will return to its origins, will realize its ambition. Black theology will again be social criticism, and social criticism will be black theology. (p.6) Theology means speaking rightly and rigorously about God. It is impossible. If we could speak rightly and rigorously about God, God would not be God. God would be a product of humans, reducible to human terms, conjured by human minds. So theology takes its task to be speaking more rightly and more rigorously about God, acknowledging the distance between the human and the divine. This, however, is not the only response available to theology. The alternative I propose is twofold. First, what theology can succeed in saying, rightly and rigorously, is what God is not. Theology can expose idols as idols, showing how concepts, practices, feelings, and images that purport to be divine are really made by humans, advancing human interests in the name of the divine. Second, theology can hold up examples from those sites where God is most likely to be found, which is to say from those sites where the hold of idols is the weakest. These are sites where the violence and tragedy of the world demystify idols, where the world’s hubristic aspirations to omniscience and omni-benevolence are greeted with scorn. Theology can hold up the wisdom of the weakest, the most marginal, and the most afflicted. This wisdom of the oppressed shows what is right, but it is not rigorous; the critique of idolatry is rigorous, but it does not show what is right. Together, theology comes closest to fulfilling its task.

Introduction

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This is not to say that theology should abandon tradition, or sacred texts, or systematic inquiry. I am describing the stance that should be taken toward the practice of theology. The aspiration to speak rightly and rigorously about God, or just to speak more rightly and more rigorously about God, too often leads to idolatry—whether it is in studying Leviticus, Augustine, or pneumatology. Sometimes this happens directly, in the claims that are made by theologians. More often it happens indirectly, in the self-confidence implicit in theology as a practice of elite academics. This is white theology: white theology is idolatry. The way to challenge white theology, the way for theology to fulfill its task, is for theology to take on the twofold mission of challenging idolatry (which is to say, challenging white theology) and holding up the wisdom of the most marginalized (which is to say, holding up black experience).

These racial categories seem too simplistic. Surely the world is more complicated than black and white. Surely religion is more complicated than black and white. How is labeling God with a color not paradigmatic of idolatry? The fundamental claim of black theology is that God is black. Blackness here must be understood in two senses at once. Blackness names the position of the weakest, the most marginal, and the most afflicted; blackness also names a specific group of people who are the weakest, the (p.7) most marginal, and the most afflicted here and now, in the twenty-first-century United States of America. Neither sense of blackness has to do with skin color; in the most empirical sense, blacks are those subject to the racializing regime of contemporary America, the regime that marks one as black. Whiteness, similarly, refers to the position of the comfortable, the privileged, and the wealthy—whether it is the wealth of financial capital, social capital, or cultural capital. At the same time, whiteness refers to those treated as white here and now, in the current American racial regime. To say that God is black means that God is to be found among blacks, among those who are systematically denigrated. Those who are comfortable, privileged, or wealthy are those most likely to confuse their own interests with God’s will; they are most likely to worship idols.

Rich people do not go to heaven, as the Bible so clearly says, and white people do not go to heaven—when whiteness is understood as comfort, privilege, and wealth. Whiteness can be renounced, and it must be renounced to do theology or to worship God. Renouncing whiteness means giving away the wealth (financial, social, and cultural capital) that comes with whiteness. This is not only a bank transaction. Whiteness is secured by a set of practices and networks, including clothing, style of speech, friends, relatives, neighbors, cultural references, suspicions, affections, and much else. These must be renounced. But are these not necessary for the black theologian to practice theology? Particularly today, with black elites superficially integrated into historically white institutions and cultures, does the black theologian also have to abandon whiteness? There are rich resources for theological work—for the critique of idolatry and the lifting up of marginalized communities—made available by elite institutional settings and academic networks, and these should not be undervalued. But those settings and networks also encourage the forgetting of theology’s tasks. They encourage theology to imagine itself speaking rightly and rigorously about God: they encourage theology to be white theology, idolatry.

We need to change the whiteness of these settings and networks, but this is a seemingly paradoxical task. How can elite institutional settings no longer be white if whiteness is defined as comfort, privilege, and wealth? The answer: those who inhabit these spaces must not live their lives in ways that closely track with the practices and networks definitive of whiteness. There is a problem when all of the professors at the seminary live in the same suburb, shop at the same organic supermarket, send their children to the same private school, and play tennis at the same club. When black professors hired by the seminary move into that neighborhood, go to

Introduction

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that store, send their children to that school, and go to that tennis club, (p.8) little has improved—indeed, the situation has worsened. Blacks who aspire to whiteness offer comfort to whites, reinforcing the idolatry of whiteness. In reality, however, the situation is often more complicated. Blacks in elite spaces embrace some but not all of the practices and networks of whites in those spaces, creating discordance that potentially disrupts the complacencies of whiteness. The more blacks in such spaces, the more varieties of such discordance, and the hold of whiteness on theology is loosened. Theological institutions and networks should not be aspiring to proportionately represent blacks—12 percent, 15 percent. For theology to fulfill its task, for theology to be black theology, we should be talking about spaces where 60 percent or 80 percent of participants are black. Only with those sorts of numbers can the centripetal force of whiteness be curtailed. With those sorts of numbers, the grotesqueness of whiteness, of the tennis clubs, the suburbs, the kale, is obvious. Then, the varieties of black experience, which is to say the varieties of experience of the marginalized, which is to say the varieties of experience of the human, can flourish.

What about our increasingly diverse nation, and about global diversity? What about diversity within the black community? The aspiration to speak for everyone, to speak universally, is an aspiration of white theology. It is an aspiration of the powerful, of the prison guard: to make sure each is accounted for. The aspiration of black theology is to speak theologically motivated by the situation here, now. Theology (like all aspects of the world, and like life) is most certainly accountable to the authority of tradition. Tradition provides the substance of the norms and practices that are the waters in which our lives swim. Ignoring that water, we drown. But how we swim, where we swim, these are questions about the orientation of black theology, and that orientation must take into account concerns of the present and the local. Anti-black racism in the United States in the twenty-first century is pervasive and violent. Its violence involves blood but also the distortion of personality, involves micro-aggression and police harassment but also wealth inequality and limited economic opportunity. There are many social problems, many injustices, but none is so stark, so sharp, so pressing here and now as anti-black racism. In other places around the world, other urgent injustices should inform theology in analogous ways. The struggles of tribal communities in India, of Palestinians, of Sudanese refugees, and of many other groups are pressing, and they are not unconnected with each other and with anti-black racism in the United States. But these struggles must not be subsumed into a global account of injustice, for such an account ultimately only speaks to those concerned with global control— that is, to whites.

(p.9) Unfortunately, we cannot just do black theology, understood as critiquing idolatry and holding up the wisdom of the oppressed. This is because black theology has been systematically distorted by black secularism. We must untangle black secularism from black theology before we can do black theology: Religion of the Field Negro attempts this prefatory work. Secularism is the exclusion or management of the theological. Banning prayer from public schools is a form of secularism; having a moment of silence at the beginning of each school day is also a form of secularism. Secularism acts in a particular domain, such as American political discourse, media, or public schools. Secularism changes what it is possible to say and do in these domains. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, American conservatives and evangelicals were up in arms about secularism. The religious (supposedly Judeo-Christian) ambiance of American culture had quickly transformed in the 1960s and 1970s to the point where mention of God or Jesus became a marker of those outside the mainstream. I am not interested in the question of secularism in the public square. Indeed, I suspect that anti-secularist reactionaries are themselves a product of secularism, and I suspect that the supposed era before secularism was not religious in the

Introduction

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way that anti-secularist reactionaries suppose. I am concerned about secularism in the domain of theology or, more precisely, about the effect of secularism on the practice of theology. In this context, the theological origins of the concept of the secular should be remembered. The secular is the worldly in contrast to the divine. Secularism then suggests a supreme confidence in the worldly, a foreclosure of the divine. Secularism suggests an appreciation of the expansiveness and complexity and diversity of the world, but also a refusal to consider that there is any excess. The world is what there is, and we are in the world, solving problems we encounter by worldly means. We must study the situation, assess the options, and then make a decision, knowing that sometimes we will miscalculate, sometimes we will need a course correction. Too often, this is how theologians approach their work.

Secularism infects theology when theology envisions that it can speak rightly and rigorously about God. God becomes an element of the world that humans can aspire to figure out, just like all other elements of the world, like minerals and comets and brain tissue. At the same time, however, secularism takes away the raison d’être of theology because secularism forecloses the possibility that theology has anything unique to say about the world. Everything could be said just as well, probably better, by other disciplines, by other traditions of inquiry. What makes theology distinctive is its commitment to address what is irreducible to the terms of the (p.10) world—that to which the world is ultimately accountable. This is why theology deserves its place of preeminence among the disciplines: it addresses an authority higher than the others, and so it attends to limits and blind spots ignored by the other disciplines. The other disciplines imagine that the world is ours, fully graspable with the right amount of effort and training. Theology reminds us that the world is God’s, that our world (perceivable, knowable) never matches God’s world, and it is God’s world, which is to say the world itself, that matters. It is the latter world that pushes back against us, that frustrates us, that surprises us, and that fuels our desire—it is only theology that speaks to this.

The stories of secularism and racism are entwined. Histories could be written, and have been written, about how religion is thematized at the moment of the colonial encounter, at the moment when race takes on its modern significance. Religion and race come into the world at once, and theology is left behind. The worldly powers that fuel colonialism and empire use both whiteness and religion as tools of conquest and management. Theology at its best, critical and marginal, suffocates under the control of worldly powers. In recent years, when many act as if colonial and racializing legacies have been shed, religion and race become two identity categories, boxes to be checked on forms, categories of classification constructed by and for the powers that be. Once again, theology at its best, critical and marginal, suffocates.

Historical narratives always elide complexity. At any moment the powers that be attempt to control or manage religion and race, and there are ingenious religious and racial forces that contest the powers that be. It is this complexity, these entanglements, that must be unpacked in order to open the space for black theological reflection. In the specific case of black theology in the contemporary U.S. context, secularism has been particularly pernicious. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, whiteness could finally be named for a broad audience as that which distorts racialized lives and theological inquiry. Through probing the distortions of whiteness and exploring unfettered blackness, black theology developed creatively and critically. Time passed, the powers that be regrouped, and black secularism triumphed by splitting black theology into two groups. Secular religious studies scholars examined the history, sociology, and culture of black religion. Scholars of black religion within the theological academy took black experience to be one of many approaches to religious experience, and they took black experience itself to be

Introduction

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multiple and fragmented. Both sides understood blackness in worldly and secular, not theological, terms. Both sides understood religion as essentially one component of worldly (p. 11) life, at most a particularly meaningful one. The original insights of black theology, that all theology should be black theology and that blackness refers to the most marginalized, were forgotten. Those insights need to be retrieved.

Even those original claims of black theologians were too modest, or at least they did not advertise their expansiveness. All theology must be black theology, but once secularism is rejected theology must not confine itself to its role as one discipline among others. All other disciplines, all other modes of inquiry, are accountable to theology. More precisely, all other disciplines are subject to theological critique. This is sometimes the role that critical theory, or more broadly social criticism, assigns to itself. The critic observes and declares the limits of a conversation, the assumptions that have never been interrogated, and the failures that go overlooked. In other words, the critic challenges those who aspire to fully understand the world, to capture the world in thought—which leads to action, which leads to violence, often at the expense of the most vulnerable. The critic challenges idolatry, the affective and rational investment in human-constructed systems that aspire to omniscience, and sometimes to omnipotence and omni-benevolence. The difference between the critic and the theologian is that the theologian does the work of the critic, challenging idolatry, but also something else. From the critic’s perspective, this something else is an illicit belief in God. From the theologian’s perspective, when theology is rightly understood, this something else is a commitment to hold up the wisdom of the marginalized. (From the theologian’s perspective, this is another way to proclaim her belief in God.) The theologian views the critic as ultimately an elitist, one who never really renounces whiteness, its sustaining institutions and networks. The practice of criticism as it is understood in the academy is an elite practice, made possible by elite institutions, practiced by those in the 1 percent—if not of financial capital, then certainly of social and cultural capital. In contrast, the practice of theology is humbled by its extra belief in the authority of the poor. For the theologian, at her best, one foot is in the world of the elite and the other foot is in the world of the afflicted. Her scholarship does not compulsively proclaim the world’s fallenness. Her scholarship always pairs criticism with stories of those on the margins whose wisdom is greater than the scholar’s, those whose capacity to see through the illusions of power has not been dampened by the comforts of the elite.

I have not succeeded in this task, but I have tried to present a taste of what this vision for black theology, and so for theology as such, might look like. This vision is, by necessity, not systematic. I commend systematic (p.12) theologians, and I think their work, at its best, can also be oriented toward the criticism of idolatry and toward the stories of the marginal. It is this orientation I am interested in, and it is how this orientation is forgotten that is the focus of my book. In the chapters that follow, I explore a variety of figures and themes from black religion and culture, probing the ways in which they challenge secularism and the ways in which secularism distorts. The critique of idolatry, understood as the criticism of ideology, has been rigorously developed outside of the confines of black theology and of theology altogether. In the chapters that follow, I use nontheological as well as theological sources, black as well as white sources, to sharpen the critical analysis. My attempt is not to apply “theory” to black religion, but to show how there are resources in critical theory that complement resources in black theology for addressing the problem of idolatry—that is, the problem of whiteness. The chapters are intended as essays: rather than enacting the same critical maneuver over and over in each

Introduction

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chapter, on different subject matter, each chapter approaches its theme differently, demonstrating the variety of forms that theological criticism can take.

I seek a return to the early days of black theology, the days when black theology was unabashedly black and unabashedly theological. These early days have been obscured by black secularism, and black secularism is the antagonist throughout this text. Black theology is the reclusive protagonist, beckoned forth but never fully revealed. My claim is that grappling with black secularism is the prerequisite to black theology, to all theology, and I aim to offer examples of such grappling. What of the passion that so characterized the early days of black theology? What of the anger at white theology, at whiteness? Though I try to smile, I am angry. I feel little else. Oh, the stories I could tell. But we must be wary of the temptation to treat theology, and academic writing more generally, as more than it is. This is not the place for emotional catharsis on the part of writer or reader. My aspiration is not to tell you something about God or about me. My aspiration is to help us attend to those who do have something to tell us about God and to help us learn the rigor necessary to identify and demystify idolatry.

The first set of four chapters takes as its starting point thinkers who can serve as resources for black theology. James Cone is broadly recognized as the founding figure of black theology, but Chapter 1 argues that Cone’s work after the early 1970s takes a subtle secularist turn. In his earliest, most powerful writings, Cone embraces paradox. Blackness is at once empirical reality and ontological symbol. Hope is at once this-worldly and otherworldly. The agent of historical change is at once the human and God. (p.13) These and many other paradoxes echo the central paradox of Cone’s work: Jesus Christ is at once human and divine. This chapter argues that Cone’s early work proposes for black theology an aesthetics of paradox that short-circuits both white supremacy and secularism. However, as the conversation about black theology expanded, and as Cone’s work itself developed, paradox was abandoned in a misguided effort at inclusiveness. As black theologians saw parallels between anti-black oppression and other forms of oppression, and as they explored the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, migration, and other issues, black theology became tethered to worldly concerns. This chapter ponders whether it might be possible for black theology to be responsive to multiple and intersecting oppressions while embracing a decidedly theological idiom that takes paradox as its heart.

The black American writer James Baldwin famously broke with his youthful formation as a preacher, transferring his creative energies from the pulpit to the pen. Chapter 2 argues that Baldwin’s literary endeavors can be read as black theological reflection—not in the sense that they employ theological images and tropes but in the deeper sense that they engage with theological ideas. Specifically, the chapter argues that Baldwin puts forward a black negative theology: he argues that black theology goes wrong when it tries to make positive claims about God; it goes right when it reflects on God’s continuing influence despite our inability to name God accurately. In other words, Baldwin presents a way of doing black theology in a context of secularism, where religion is managed or excluded. The chapter further argues, however, that Baldwin himself falls prey to the dangers of secularism when he does not sufficiently attend to judgment, instead prescribing love to solve the theological problem he diagnoses.

The Cameroon-born political theorist Achille Mbembe has produced a body of work that deeply engages with Christianity: the role of Christianity in postcolonial and particularly African contexts, the role of Christianity in securing Europe’s self-image, and the role of Christian ideas in providing a framework for postcolonial resistance. In Mbembe’s most recent work, he has turned his critical apparatus from postcolonial contexts to blackness more generally, engaging

Introduction

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with questions of race and religion across Africa and the diaspora. Chapter 3 argues that Mbembe’s work offers promising resources for black theology, but it also has crippling limitations because of underlying secularist assumptions. Mbembe helpfully diagnoses postcolonial and black contexts as suffering from what is effectively theological heresy: a distorted relationship with ultimate authority brought about by colonialism and racialization. While Mbembe’s diagnosis deeply engages with theology, his prescription is secularist, embracing plurality that black (p.14) experience is said to model. The chapter juxtaposes Mbembe’s reflections on colonial and racializing heresy with theologian John Milbank’s reflections on secularist heresy to explore the limitations and possibilities of each.

Chapter 4 explores the way race and religion are articulated together in the work of leading critical theorists Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. It probes how these theorists stand on the border between the philosophy of religion and theology, and it argues that it is only because of secularist assumptions that this divide between the outsider’s philosophy of religion and the insider’s theology can be maintained. For Derrida, both religion and race function as loose threads that can be pulled in order to unravel a system of thought. For Agamben, the protagonist of modernity, homo sacer, is both racialized and sanctified. Yet Derrida and Agamben’s accounts are skewed by a Eurocentrism and a failure to take religious ideas sufficiently seriously. The black feminist Sylvia Wynter offers an antidote, similarly linking race and religion but doing so in a way that attends to how racialization is produced theologically and to how racialization, patriarchy, and theology are tied together. Wynter’s work implies that a philosophy of religion that refuses secularism is always black theology and that black theology must engage seriously with questions in the philosophy of religion.

Four questions form the themes of the next chapters. Tradition is a central theological category, and it has also been a central category in black studies as scholars recover, for example, the “black radical tradition.” Yet tradition is particularly fraught in the context of black experience, since a constitutive feature of black experience is the involuntary severing of tradition. Paradigmatically, the Middle Passage detached blacks from families, culture, and language, leaving blacks orphaned in the New World. Colonialism and mass incarceration also have functioned to sever black men and women from their past. In such a context, to speak of black tradition is necessarily theological, and this chapter tracks how theological ideas and images have repeatedly been so employed. The prophetic and the messianic, in particular, are theological means of conjuring impossible tradition. But Chapter 5 also shows how the desire to imagine black tradition too often falls back on a patriarchal desire to create a right relationship with fathers and sons, a result of black secularism contaminating black theology.

The past two decades have seen a rapid growth in faith-based community organizing. Such organizing efforts often understand themselves as “broad-based,” drawing support from a range of religious communities, racial groups, and neighborhoods. In doing so, these organizing efforts often elide the specificity of racial and religious difference. Chapter 6 draws (p.15) on feminist critiques of community organizing traditions to develop a black theological critique—and the beginnings of an alternative approach to community organizing that draws on the longstanding organizing traditions already present in black communities. By bringing together secular and religious traditions of black organizing, and by coupling black organizing with black theological reflection, this chapter shows how black community organizing can move beyond pragmatic appeals that sideline racial and religious identity.

Introduction

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Recent theorizing in black studies, under the label “Afro-pessimism,” argues that hope for ending racial injustice is misguided. Racism is deeply woven into the metaphysics, or onto- theology, of the West—an argument that is made both through readings of philosophical texts and through empirical observation, contrasting the conditions faced by blacks with other ethnic groups. This challenge has not been substantially addressed by black theologians, who often romanticize the hope implicit in, for example, slave spirituals. Chapter 7 points to theological responses to secularization as offering a model for black theological responses to racial injustice. According to Edward Schillebeeckx, secularization purged theology of false hopes while also orienting theologians to the future. This chapter explores what it might mean for Afro- pessimist insights to purge black theology of false hopes, and it asks what might remain of Christian hope after this purgation.

Before directly addressing its titular question, for what are whites to hope?, Chapter 8 examines how secularist conceptions of hope lead us astray. In analytic philosophy, hope is often understood as a desire that is not entirely justified with reasons. In cultural studies, hope has recently been looked upon suspiciously, as an affect, the circulation of which is intensified by neoliberal economics. In mid-twentieth-century German theology and theory, hope is viewed as other-worldly. In liberation theology, the object of hope is identification with the poor. This chapter argues that each of these views grows out of concealed secularist premises, and each of these views ends up perpetuating the status quo: white supremacy. After exploring the antinomies of hope, the chapter urges that whites are to embrace these antinomies. They are to hope for despair.

The final set of four chapters focuses on figures from twentieth-century culture whose work has relevance, expected or unexpected, for black theology. Chapter 9 focuses on the dramatic change effected by the South African anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko. The apartheid regime had used racial labeling to divide Indian, African, and mixed-race communities, preventing them from seeing their shared interests. Rather than reading Biko (p.16) as a secular militant in the black power tradition, this chapter argues that Biko is best understood as rejecting a pragmatic, secularist understanding of politics. Through a seemingly simple practice of relabeling, grouping all nonwhites under the label “black,” Biko was able to transform not only political language but also political practice and ultimately political possibilities. This transformation is best understood in theological terms, as revelation that solicits fidelity; understood thusly, whiteness is identified with heresy. The chapter concludes by comparing Biko’s work of revelation with the reactionary, secularist racial labeling in a U.S. context, where words are tied increasingly tightly to worldly referents (from “Negro” to “black” to “African American”).

While the Black Panther Party has often been presented as the secularist reaction to the politically ineffective religiosity of the civil rights movement, religious histories, symbols, and concepts are closely connected with the Panthers and particularly with their photogenic leader, Huey P. Newton. Reading the iconography of Newton along with Bobby Seale’s hagiography, Seize the Time, and Newton’s own Revolutionary Suicide, Chapter 10 suggests that the Panthers offer a black theological aesthetics that has political implications. Moving between an analysis of Newton and attempts at political reflection made by white critics, this chapter makes a case for black theology that takes political practice seriously, that takes political practice as a form of theological practice, in contrast to those who would simply apply abstract theological concepts to political problems.

Introduction

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All saints are, in a sense, postracial. By definition, saints transcend worldly concepts and categories, but in doing so they draw on the specificity of their worldly features. During the 2008 election campaign and in the early days of his presidency, Barack Obama was represented as saintly. Was this merely a metaphor, or is there something about the theological structure of sainthood that captures Obama’s representation (and self-presentation)? By moving back and forth between analysis of Obama’s image and a reflection on sainthood, Chapter 11 attempts to move conversations about black politics and about sainthood forward, helping us racially inflect our understanding of saints and helping us theologically deepen our understanding of the first black president.

Chapter 12, the final chapter, focuses on the British social theorist and Jewish convert to Christianity Gillian Rose. What lessons can we learn about the difficulties of theorizing blackness from Rose’s reflections on her Jewishness and her gender? The chapter argues that Rose points to useful resources for challenging racializing logics but that Rose’s blindness to the racialized soul limits the possibility of struggle growing out of racialized (p.17) communities. I reflect on my own experiences as a scholar “too black to be white and too white to be black” (Rose considered herself “too Jewish to be Christian and too Christian to be Jewish”) to explore the complications of black theological reflection when the boundaries of race blur at the same time the boundaries between the secular and the sacred blur.

The book concludes with a reflection on the meaning of black religious community in light of the critique of black secularism performed throughout the book. When paradox and tradition, sainthood and messianism, hope and love, and most of all blackness and theology are understood in the ways I develop in these pages, how are we to live together? Put another way, once again, what is the religion of the field Negro? (p.18)

Notes: (1.) See the transcript in Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots,” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 3–17. Manning Marable notes that the audio recording and transcript both are edited to remove references to Elijah Muhammad; see Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 265. This speech was before Malcolm’s break with the Nation of Islam, but strains were showing.

(2.) See Angela D. Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 273–74.

(3.) “Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality”; Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots,” 9.

(4.) G. Barry Golson, ed., The Playboy Interview (New York: Playboy Press, 1981), 41.

(5.) Ibid., 44; Albert B. Cleage, The Black Messiah (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1968).

(6.) See especially Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Critics of secularism from the right rarely

Introduction

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interrogate the way secularism and white supremacy are entangled, turning instead to a romanticized version of Judeo-Christian community that never existed.