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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

James Cone

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The theology of limitation

I’m rereading a chapter of James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree in advance of a welcoming churches retreat in Washington, D.C. this week.

Chapter 2 discusses White American Christianity’s inability to see Jesus in the Black people that White Christians lynched between the 1880s and the end of World War II.

Cone focuses mostly on Reinhold Niebuhr, who, like Cone, taught theology at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary and was a preeminent scholar of Christian ethics and moral responsibility.

Despite his other contributions to the Church, Niebuhr failed to recognize the abyss that was American racism and genocidal violence. He made excuses for the slow pace of change and wrote that Black people in the United States needed to “exercise patience and be sustained by a robust faith that history would gradually fulfill the logic of justice” (in Cone, p. 39).

The first time I read that line, I nearly threw the book across the room. On my second read, it made more sense, though I still find it repulsive.

The logic key is Niebuhr’s definition of justice: it’s a definition that’s severely limited.

Niebuhr taught that love is the absolute, transcendent standard that stands in judgment over what human beings can achieve in history. Because of human finitude and humanity’s natural tendency to deny it (sin), we can never fully reach that ethical standard. The best that humans can strive for is justice, which is love approximated, a balance of power among competing groups… Since Niebuhr saw justice as a balance of power between groups, whether classes, races, or nations, he saw it always in a state of flux, never achieving perfection in history.” —James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree; emphasis added

There are two things to note here.

First is Niebuhr’s idea that justice is about negotiation and compromise. He presents it as a finite and indeterminate thing that is as imperfect and in-progress as we are. As a matter of compromise, it’s also a matter of how scarce and limited goods are shared. “Democracy,” Niebuhr believes, is the political tool best used to dole those goods out.

Second is Niebuhr’s distinction between infinite love and finite justice. Whereas Cornel West describes justice as manifested love, not love’s real-world step-child, Niebuhr represents justice as the consolation prize for the love that God expresses and that humans can only “reach for” but never arrive at.

The first computer programming maxim I ever learned was “GIGO: Garbage in; Garbage out.”

It applies to theology too.

Niebuhr’s inability to recognize the full humanity of Black people and the extent of the evil they faced flowed from his limited understanding of love, justice, and the righting of the world.

It’s worth asking: what garbage theological premises do I operate with? How might my ethical outputs change if my theology could be more than a justification of scarcity? What else do I need to take into account?

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Faithful ambivalence

The gate to a large plot of land is open. The fencing is wood and low. The trees arch over the middle of the path.
Photo credit: Ashley Knedler

James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree includes haunting accounts of racist violence and religious apathy, and several quotes from Black poets and writers reflecting on Christianity in the United States and the US’ treatment of Native and Black people here.

A chapter on artists’ interpretations of the Christian crucifixion story and its similarities with their social experience includes Cone marveling that “The beauty in black existence is as real as the brutality, and the beauty prevents the brutality from having the final word.” The chapter after it explores how women and womanist theologians have engaged lynching culture and how complicit White and moderate Black Christianity have been in their suffering.

Cone explains the “paradox of Black faith”: doubt, trust, rage, and reclamation mingle together. Given the community’s visceral experience of trauma, the scriptures’ ambivalence on human rights, and the weak witness of a religion that Black people in the West were forcibly grafted into, that blend of renunciation and embrace is appropriate, and honest.

I recently shared my conversation with Blake Chastain. During that interview, I noted that people of color, women, and other minoritized populations have had to be deliberate about how they read, interpret, and apply scriptures and doctrines that weren’t originally written or taught with their full freedom and wholeness in mind.

As I read on the train today, Cone’s explanation of that point stood out to me:

It was not easy for blacks [sic] to find a language to talk about Christianity publicly because the Jesus they embraced was also, at least in name, embraced by whites [sic] who lynched black people. Indeed, it was white slaveholders, segregationists, and lynchers who defined the content of the Christian gospel. They wrote hundreds of books about Christianity, founded seminaries to train scholars and preachers, and thereby controlled nearly two thousand years of Christian tradition. Cut off from their African religious traditions, black slaves were left trying to carve out a religious meaning for their lives with white Christianity as the only resource to work with. They ignored white theology, which did not affirm their humanity, and went straight to stories in the Bible, interpreting them as stories of God siding with little people just like them. They identified God’s liberation of the poor as the central message of the Bible, and they communicated this message in their songs and sermons.” —James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, p. 118

That generation of Black people reclaimed the symbols and stories of a culture and social order that was explicitly and persistently hostile to them. And they used those symbols and stories—both religious and national—to create for themselves a world within the wider world where they could speak not just to common suffering but also to their value, belonging, beauty, and power.

I only moved back to the Western Hemisphere during my mid-teens, yet I also experienced the Black church I grew up in as a world within worlds. Not long before I left for college, an elder and family friend gave me a family-size Bible featuring illustrations of Black Bible characters and footnotes and full-color inserts that filled in the regional histories. It wasn’t a subtle move. Through that gift she declared my worth—me as me, not me as a malformed European. She also sent a strong message about the stories that traditional interpretations didn’t tell us but should have.

I see minoritized people doing this all the time: women reclaiming the writings attributed to Paul to affirm their varied calls to ministry; LGBTQ people diving into community texts, values, and practices to motivate relationships of support. These groups, like enslaved Black American believers, work creatively with the symbols and stories available to them, despite the discouragement of mainstream religion and despite the suspicion or outright rejection of other minoritized people.

I was also struck by Cone’s account of journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells visiting an African Methodist Episcopal conference in Philadelphia and finding no encouragement there. “Under God,” she said, “I have done work without any assistance from my people.” The implication was that she had the wherewithal to continue doing it whether they got on board or not.

Of course, “without any assistance from my people” was as hyperbolic from Wells as “I am the only one left” was from Elijah. Wells couldn’t have done her investigations, touring, or speaking nationwide had she been truly isolated; racists would have suceeded in murdering her many times over. Nevertheless, it was the symbols and stories that she’d reclaimed from the “frauds” of the violent and silent Church that gave her a sense of refuge even as social violence and peer criticism continued.

The way symbols and stories have been used in the past doesn’t constrain our creativity today. We can use them differently than our predecessors and oppressors if we so choose. We can abandon these symbols if a reclamation project turns out not to serve us well. But just as our ancestors did, we can divest of whatever meanings fail to support us, and create new meanings that are strong enough to support whole and healthy lives. It’s imperative we do.

The distinction between pathological and healthy religion cuts across all denominational boundaries. Any given denomination or sect can elicit pathological or healthy responses from its members…

Good theology will result in good psychology, and vice versa. Accordingly, bad theology will have negative psychological consequences. This is nothing more than an application of the biblical norm: ‘You will be able to tell them by their fruits’ (Mt. 7:16). If, as St. Irenaeus proclaimed, the glory of God is humans fully alive, then clearly a belief system that results in the destruction of human health cannot serve the glory of God.” —John J. McNeill

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(CN) Moderate and neutral

Content note: descriptions of anti-Black lynching and White terrorism. This post is related to yesterday’s comments on torture.

I’m at that point in The Cross and the Lynching Tree where James Cone asks how Reinhold Niebuhr, one of 20th Century America’s leading Christian theologians, managed to live through the heyday of anti-Black lynching but never mentioned it as an ethical concern.

How could he have taught the church during the era of W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph, yet failed to cite any Black philosophers, activists, or writers? How could he have read the newspapers during the years that White mobs kidnapped and killed Mack Parker and Emmett Till, but failed to engage the conditions or communities that produced their murders? How could he have insisted that Black people be “patient” with White crawls toward a just society yet promoted a gospel that inspired economic justice throughout the South?

Cone explains this Laodicean dissonance as a failure of empathy.

It was easy for Niebuhr to walk around in his own shoes, as a white man, and view the world from that vantage point, but it takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans…

Niebuhr knew that denying membership to persons merely on the basis of race was also a denial of the Church’s Christian identity. Yet he also knew that white churches were not prepared to include blacks, a minority they truly despised, and he was not prepared to deny the Christian identity of white churches on that basis.” —James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree

So Niebuhr understood that Christianity called followers of Jesus to social equity, and he acknowledged that churches were failing to embody that standard. But he wasn’t willing to challenge the churches for failing their own faith’s standards, and he also literally encouraged a congregation to abandon its attempt to integrate.

The camera looks up at a tower of the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C. The tower is scaffolded for repairs. In the background a deep blue sky is filled with white, fluffy clouds. The tower is in shadow. Photo by Keisha E. McKenzie.
The National Cathedral, like the nation’s faith, needs work. Photo credit: Keisha E. McKenzie

This morning I read a fantastic extended article on the only person known to have survived a race-based lynching in the United States, James Herbert Cameron.

Cameron, born in 1914 and therefore just a year older than my still-living grandfather, was one of three teenagers arrested by local Indiana police and then set upon by a mob of White vigilantes. Cameron’s friends were beaten, tortured, and hung in the middle of town, but someone interrupted his hanging—his memoir and others’ accounts conflict on who—and he was able to escape from town.

Cameron died in 2006, after years he’d filled with family, manufacturing jobs and store management, writing and book sales, and founding, funding, and curating America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee. At that museum, he walked visitors through exhibits on slavery, segregation, lynching, and his own experience.

Read his story.

Even with stories like Cameron’s, “White theologians, then and since,” Cone writes, “have typically ignored the problem of race or written and spoken about it without urgency, not regarding it as critical for theology or ethics.”

This moderate neutrality is uncomfortable to recognize. It should be uncomfortable to recognize. And it’s part of the “profound moral failure” that people of faith today must be willing to resolve.

I see no way to be moderate or neutral when it comes to human flourishing. I believe moral leadership requires more from us, even and especially those of us in faith subcultures that “aren’t prepared” to move forward.

The bad news:

The will-to-survive is so strong that it transmutes easily in to the will-to-power… Groups use both religion and reason to advance their own interests and find it nearly impossible to ‘feel the pain of others as vividly as they do [their own].'”

The good news: “Nearly impossible” is not impossible! I still believe that empathy, reason, and faith can support us in subverting dangerous and violent expressions of our drive to survive.

And I take encouragement from James Herbert Cameron’s lifelong resilience despite a community that nearly beat him to death while both the police and the church looked on.