Jonathan writes a monthly update called ‘Turning Again’ to friends and supporters of School for Conversion, a non-profit organization that works to promote community and reconciliation from the Walltown neighborhood of Durham to NC prisons to local churches and communities around the world.
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Proceeds from Jonathan’s writing and speaking go to support the work of SFC. You can also donate to SFC’s ministries online.
Dear friend,
On the first Sunday of Black History Month, we always sing James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at St. Johns Baptist Church. I remember my first time singing this African-American National Anthem, how I cringed at the communal recollection of a “path through the blood of the slaughtered.” I grew up believing I was white. Who was I to sing the song of those who survived white terror? If this was a song of triumph, it was certainly a victory over the lie of white supremacy.
Leah and I joined St. Johns, the historically black Baptist church in our neighborhood, at 22 years-old because we had some sense that America’s racism was not good news for us. God was present here, and we wanted a life with God and God’s people. Over the past 15 years, I’ve come to love “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as a song that’s every bit as much about my liberation as it is about my African-American sisters’ and brothers’. The God “who has brought us thus far on our way” is indeed my God because people who had good reason not to trust us the minute they saw us opened their arms wide and welcomed us into God’s beloved community.
This is the faith we celebrate at St. Johns during Black History Month. Black history is not a history that has ever aimed to exclude, but a testimony to how true Christian faith offers hope in the face of our very worst sins.
My African-American elders–some of whom were arrested and beaten in the 1960s for challenging Jim Crow laws–tell me they cannot recall a time in our national life when white supremacy was celebrated as it is in America today. For a comparison, historians point to the early 20th century, during America’s “Gilded Age,” when the politics of the Southerners who had defied Reconstruction joined forces with Northern capital. Black communities were terrorized while corporations received massive tax cuts and politicians implemented an “America first” mentality via harsh anti-immigrant laws. The majority of Confederate monuments in both the North and the South were erected during this period.
Among white folks, all of this was done in God’s name. Black history taught me that it’s impossible to understand today’s Christian nationalists and the white Christians who do not see it as their religious duty to oppose them apart from the history of slaveholder religion in the South. “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I see the widest possible difference,” Frederick Douglass wrote after escaping the bondage of the so-called Christian who claimed to own him.
According to the law, of course, the slaveholder was in the right. According to slaveholder religion, he was righteous. So to live into the freedom that the living Christ offered him, Douglass had to transgress unjust laws and false righteousness.
He wasn’t the only one. The 19th century’s moral movement against slavery was a faith-rooted coalition of free blacks and the formerly enslaved, white evangelicals and Quakers. What they had in common was the knowledge that God had set them free from slaveholder religion. Because they were one in Christ Jesus, they could create an Underground Railroad and imagine another America, even as white supremacy was still in power.
This is the black history that gives me hope. The river of resistance that brought Moses out of Egypt’s bondage flows through this land in the black-led freedom struggle. It has always defied the theological lie that some people created in the image of God are not as precious in God’s sight as others. But it has also always been a river welcoming many tributaries. As the Revelation says, its many “streams make glad the city of God.”
This is the good news that’s saving me. In a few weeks, I’m publishing Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom From Slaveholder Religion as a way of sharing this good news with others. It’s the hardest book I’ve ever written, but it’s also—and for that very reason—the truest. I’m grateful that the folks at InterVarsity Press are publishing it and inviting fellow white evangelicals on this journey toward freedom. I hope it can be a liberating resource for you and your community.
As it happened, the first Sunday of Black History month this year was also Rosa Park’s birthday. At morning prayer, we remembered our fiery sister in faith who investigated the sexual assault of Recy Taylor, a black woman from her own home town, defying the norms of the Jim Crow South in the 1940s—a dozen years before she became an icon of the Civil Rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus. As I was still meditating on Parks’ witness, our daughter, Nora, woke up early. She was excited because, after months of preparation, she was getting baptized.
So between recalling the witness of Rosa Parks and singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” with all the saints, I got to baptize my daughter into the river of resistance and joy that is Black History—that is true Christian history—in this place that we call home.
I don’t know any greater joy.
