Restoring the
Soul of the Church
I
am flattered and relieved, but not surprised, at the description the Rev.
Rosemary Bray McNatt gives to Dr. Martin Luther King’s flirting with Unitarian
Universalism. I’m flattered at just the
idea that here was America’s greatest home-grown theologian thinking about
joining us as Unitarian Universalists; that he respected the movement of which
we are a part so much that he came very close to becoming a Unitarian
Universalist minister. Yet, as Rosemary
says, I am pleased that he didn’t. I am
pleased because at that point in time had he become a part of our faith
community it would have decimated the civil rights movement that changed this
nation forever. That would have been
unfortunate, terrible.
I am not surprised that he chose not to become a Unitarian Universalist. As I understand it from my reading, King was immersed in African American Christianity, the Baptist tradition. Indeed, he was a third generation Baptist preacher. As Rosemary explains it, there are at least three shaping influences in the African American Christian church that appealed to those people who were brought to this nation as slaves and to African Americans since then.
The first one was that Christianity offered African Americans an opportunity for a personal, experiential religion. There was no hierarchy that you had to go through in order to experience God or the Holy Spirit. You could have that relationship yourself. Such an experience is not the case with a lot of Christian traditions. This allowed African Americans, especially those enslaved, to have a kind of freedom that they couldn’t find anywhere else. This became a major shaping influence in the African American Christian identity. It was an influence that King grew to expect, something he would have found appealing in Unitarian Universalism which also affirms the one-to-one relationship that a believer can have with their God.
A second characteristic, similar to the first, is that congregations were autonomous in the Baptist and Methodist traditions, the two denominations that most African Americans became part of early on. Congregational polity is what we call it: Church members make decisions for themselves regarding their institutional, congregational life.
These are two traditions—personal experience and congregational polity (church autonomy)—that we of the liberal faith share with the African American Christian church. These are two traditions that King would have found familiar and appealing in our way of religion.
But there is a third characteristic that we simply could not have offered Dr. King. The African American Christian church strongly identifies with the Jewish scripture story of the Exodus and the Christian scripture story of Jesus’ crucifixion, suffering, and redemption. The African American Christian church has what is called in religious language, a theodicy, which is the relationship between God, suffering, and evil. To put it quite frankly, UUs don’t do evil. We seem to have a hard time with theodicy. I believe there are a lot of socio-economic and cultural reasons for this, but for now let it just stand that Unitarian Universalism’s silence on suffering and evil is something Dr. King would not have been able to tolerate. His church tradition did address theodicy.
Our theological and spiritual silence (though not our physical silence) in the face of evil and suffering as seen during the civil rights movement was probably too much for King, despite the other aspects that he liked about us (individual experience and church autonomy). It was this silence that he addresses in his “Letter From the Birmingham City Jail.” He asked, “Why isn’t the white church speaking out against what is going on?” He says he thought that this was going to be a “no-brainer,” that he would get white people’s support. He was upset at the silence and he didn’t understand it. So he writes a letter to his white colleagues of the south after they were critical of him. He says, “You really surprise me. I am disappointed and hurt. I don’t understand your silence.”
One of the things that I find in reading the Birmingham jail letter, as I do with many of King’s writings, is that he uses words that we don’t use anymore. He writes about Negro integration and Caucasian prejudice. But, of course, the gist of what he is saying is still right on. For example, when he names the white church’s silence. It’s not about prejudice, which I think of as personal belief. What he would be addressing today is institutional racism, which is about power and privilege, and how that causes suffering. Today, King would be naming systemic prejudice, which is racism, not personal prejudice, which is something we all have to some degree, it’s quite nature to operate by prejudice: We all determine what we like and what we don’t like, what we will accept and won’t accept. It’s personal belief. But as one person has said, “I can deal with your prejudice, but when that prejudice is put into structural situations, when it’s put into law, when you enforce it with the power of a police state or the military, then you are talking about racism.” And that is something quite different.
While King doesn’t directly address the issue about white churches’ silence about racism, James Cone does. Cone is a former professor of mine at Union Seminary, and he asks the same questions that King asks in his letter: Why has the white church been silent about white racism? Why haven’t you spoken out? This is what King’s asking. Cone says that there are four reasons why the white church, white people in general, have not spoken out against racism.
One of the reasons is because white people don’t have to talk about racism. Think of how racism affects most of our lives. I will personalize it. For me, it has very little effect, unless I want to make it an effect. How I got called to this church, the relationships I maintain, the schools I sent my children to, where my wife works, we don’t have to consider racism in any of those things, because we are white. We can flow in and out of our society fairly undetected, because our society is largely one of whiteness. Cone says white people won’t speak about racism because they don’t have to. It doesn’t really make a major impact on our lives, unless we choose to let it.
A second reason that the white church and white people won’t speak about racism is because the guilt is so overwhelming that they can’t stand it. All we need is just a little bit of awareness about what the European and North Atlantic white communities have done to African Americans, people of color, indigenous peoples—the rape, the pillage, and the plunder in unprecedented ways. Just a little bit of awareness. When we have a full awareness, the guilt is overwhelming. A lot of people are tired of feeling guilty, so they just don’t deal with it. Again, they can choose not to deal with it. Consequently, white churches and white people, Cone says, don’t address racism, because they are tired of feeling guilty.
A third reason, he says, is because white churches and white people don’t want to deal with African American rage and won’t know how to handle it. What is he talking about? Human rights. Cones says:
“Those who talk to me about white supremacy need to be informed and sensitive to the common humanity we all share. All I ask of whites is to put themselves in black people’s place in this society and the world, and then ask themselves what they would say or do if they were in the black person’s place. Would you be angry about 246 years of slavery and 100 years of lynching and segregation? What would you say about the incarceration of one million of your people in prisons, one half of the prison population, when your people represent only 12 percent of the U.S. population? Would you get angry if your racial group used 13 percent of the drugs but did 74 percent of the time for simple possession? Would you caution the oppressed in your community to speak about their pain with calm and patience? What would you say about your sons who are shot dead by the police because their color alone makes them prime criminal suspects? What would you say about ministers and theologians who preach and teach about justice and love, but ignore the sociopolitical oppression of your people?”
Black anger only upsets whites who choose not to identify with black suffering. Cone says whites and white churches don’t want to deal with racism because they don’t want to hear black emotional rage.
The final reason he gives is because white churches and white people don’t want to share. They don’t want to share power, they don’t want to share wealth, and they don’t want to share the abundance of the earth. For me, this is the rub. Of all those other reasons which we all might agree with, I think it’s all about power. It’s when we begin to feel the power pinch—that perhaps we are going to have to share what we have always thought was ours, something that we thought we have inherited, that we are going to have to maybe share some of that—it’s then that many respond, saying No way! That’s where we put the brakes on. Because it could mean structural change, it could mean breaking out of the status quo. I think that there are a lot of white people and white churches that don’t want to go that far in terms of sharing.
What’s at stake if we maintain the silence? What’s at stake I say is the very soul of the church, the very soul of the individual. What’s at stake is what Scott Russell Sanders refers to as the hardening or the calcification of our souls. Sanders says: “It seems to be the fate of religious movements to lose energy over time as direct encounters of the spirit give way to second hand rituals and creeds, as prophets give way to priests, as living insights harden into words and glass and stone.” That’s what’s at stake: How to keep the vision alive. How to keep the dream fluid, how to keep it moving, rather than letting it harden and become part of dogma or creed or embodied in the hierarchy.
The work of any church, the work of this church, is transformation. The transformation of individual souls and people who can then go out and transform society. Every one of our principles addresses this transformation and vision. It’s a part of who we are. It’s the soul of this church. Do we remain silent, or be transformed?
Let me share with you the story of one of my colleagues, Dick Gilbert, who is the minister of our church in Rochester, NY. Let me share his transforming experience with you.
The year was 1965, the height of the civil rights
struggle. I was a graduate student in
social ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. After three years in a suburban Cleveland
church, I had made enough mistakes as an activist that I decided to go to
school to learn how it ought to be done.
I learned almost too late the truth of the Turkish proverb, “If you must
speak the truth, have a fast horse and one foot in the stirrup of the
saddle.” Martin Luther King, Jr. was
conducting a voting rights campaign, and the Rev. James Reeb of All Souls
Church Unitarian in Washington, DC was murdered on those hate-filled
streets. Unitarian Universalists were
urged to gather for a memorial service at which Martin Luther King, Jr. was to
speak. I dropped my studies briefly
and flew to Atlanta from where, in the dark of night, we were led in a car
caravan to Selma. After we arrived
early the next day, we marched through a cordon of Alabama troopers armed with
long clubs, which they pounded into their hands with intimidating force. Despite the fact that we were unarmed and at
their physical mercy, I felt like a member of a liberating army as we
approached the Browns Chapel compound to be greeted by the cheers of black
residents and their supporters. That
afternoon I could not get into the sanctuary, so great was the crush of bodies,
and so I stood in an anteroom behind the pulpit, unable to see, but well able
to hear. Then there was a stir behind
me, and Martin Luther King, Jr. brushed my arm on his way to the pulpit, our
only meeting. His eloquent eulogy and
the singing of We Shall Overcome with
the cantorial descant of the Jewish prayer for the dead was simply
overwhelming, and I was bathed in tears.
It was a mystical moment, calling to mind Theodore Parker’s words that
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I felt myself a participant in the very
making of history. I experienced the
feeling of oneness with those worshippers of every race and religion:
shirt-sleeved farmers with sweat in their faces, nuns in habit, clergy in every
imaginable liturgical garb. I knew then
that my life would never be the same.
And it wasn’t. When I returned
to Chicago, I tried to resume work on an academic paper on the transformative
role of the church and the thought of H. Richard Niebuhr, a gripping
title! But I found it hard to
write. I wanted to speak. I wanted to be in a pulpit to share my
experience. And so when my wife came
home from work that evening, I said that I wanted to end my academic
career. I wanted to go back to the
parish ministry where the action was.
And so I did, never to regret it.
Thus I date my birth as a militant mystic as March 15, 1965.
It may seem strange that a religious humanist uses God language, albeit poetically. Such a problem reminds me of the story of the priest and the peasant. The priest had come calling and admired the peasant’s garden. “You and the Lord have done such fine work here,” said the good father. “Yes,” replied the peasant, “But you should have seen it when the Lord had it alone.”
Dick broke the silence and was transformed. The garden needed tending, his garden, the church’s garden. And so does the soul of this church need tending. So do our souls need tending? We must keep the transformative power alive. We must end the silence and speak out.
So I ask you, 37 years later, how would you answer the questions Dr. King asks the white church. Given what Rosemary Bray McNatt says, do you think Martin Luther King, Jr. would be welcome as a Unitarian Universalist? Would he today be welcome in this church? Are we willing to break the silence and address issues of evil and suffering and social injustice?
We really need each other’s help here. We need to answer these questions. How would you answer Dr. King? How will we restore the soul of this church?
Thank you to Ms. Claire Morgen who transposed this text from a recording.
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