Although we are only about halfway into 2010, it has already been a year full of rich public conversations about religion in America. Much of the credit can be given to the emergence of several new blogs and web portals that direct concentrated attention to the topic. Indeed, there is much material to mine as we think about “The Future of Religion,” in general, and of The Black Church, in particular.

With regard to the latter, to restate a common theme this year, it must be acknowledged that such a conversation can move once and for all from the singular to the plural. There has always been a range of black churches, in terms of theology, polity, politics, aesthetics, etc. So it is also impossible to speak of any one future for the array of institutions lumped together under the rubric, “The Black Church.” That said, there are several things that should be considered in efforts to forecast the futures of black churches…

To continue reading, go to: Washington Post’s “On Faith”

Also, check out the series of essays from which the above was selected, at: Patheos

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2003 was a pivotal year in the religious history of rap music, if for no other reason than the release of Kanye West’s debut album, The College Dropout, which featured the song “Jesus Walks.” This single signaled a new development in rap music, a genre that in its earlier years was firmly aligned with the visions of racial opposition and religious nationalism articulated by black Muslims, especially NOI and Five Percenters. As much as the song indicated a spiritual shift in hip hop—making Jesus a centerpiece of the culture—it also inaugurated a new (and related) class sensibility. No longer was the voice of “the hood,” as a stand-in for the black underclass, dominant. The College Dropout effused the anxieties of a particular black bourgeois sensibility, and the album put the lie to the myth that hip hop and middle-class identity are mutually exclusive. In fact, on the track “All Falls Down,” Kanye performed an overdose of the proverbial “conspicuous consumption” as he rapped:

I wanna act ballerific like it’s all terrific I got a couple past due bills,
I won’t get specific
I got a problem with spending before I get it
We all self conscious, I’m just the first to admit it

Continue reading “Kanye West’s Critique of Prosperity Preaching” at Religion Dispatches

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Call and Response on the State of the Black Church
by Samuel Freedman
New York Times (April 17, 2010)

In the first decade of the American nation, a former slave turned itinerant minister by the name of Richard Allen found himself preaching to a growing number of blacks in Philadelphia. He came to both a religious and organizational revelation. “I saw the necessity,” he later wrote, “of erecting a place of worship for the colored people.”

Allen’s inspiration ultimately took the forms of Bethel African Church, founded in 1794, and the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, established in 1799. As much as it can be dated to anything, the emergence of a formal African-American Christianity can be dated to Allen’s twin creations.

Over more than two centuries since then, the Black Church has become a proper noun, a fixture, a seeming monolith in American society. Its presence is as prevalent as film clips of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech and contestants on “American Idol” indulging in the gospel style of melisma.

To continue reading, go to: New York Times

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I recently had the opportunity to continue the “post-black church” dialogue with Eddie Glaude on bloggingheads.tv, as part of their new series on religion: “Values Added.” My conversation with Dr. Glaude is embedded below, or you can go directly to bloggingheads.tv

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RZA’s The Tao of Wu: Hip Hop Religion, Spiritual Sampling, and Race in a “Post-racial” Age

You’d think that seven years after the release of Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” that there would be little need to explain the link between Hip Hop music and religion. Yet in a recent NPR interview, I was asked once again what the often profane posture of Hip Hop has to do with the sacred aspirations of spirituality. So perhaps it is still necessary to pause at the outset and offer a few examples as a reminder to readers of rap music’s long tradition of religious ruminations.

In fact, one can trace a trajectory that goes back as far MC Hammer’s 1987 debut album, Let’s Get it Started, which featured the gospel track, “Son of the King.” Such spiritual lyricism continued through the prophetic musings of Tupac Shakur, the biblical (re)imagination of Ja Rule (i.e. Rule 3:16), the Muslim message of Lupe Fiasco, and the messianic aspirations of Remy Ma, whose 2008 album was simply titled, Shesus Khryst.

to continue reading, go to Religion Dispatches

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As we near the end of the first Black History Month in age of the first black president, I want to quickly share with everyone the arrival of an important and timely book:  Watch This: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism, by Jonathan L. Walton.

In case you didn’t already know, President Obama’s road to the White House revealed most clearly that African American religion continues to occupy a most pivotal place in the American cultural imagination.  Moreover, his dramatic falling out with Jeremiah Wright (I know, this conversation is already exhausted) confirmed that the common assertion of the United States as a Christian nation is a claim in need of further clarification.  While African Americans have long inserted themselves into the Christian story, the Obama-Wright show served to illustrate that not all forms of American Christianity (really, protestantisms) achieve equally footing in the public culture of the U.S.

Jonathan Walton’s “Watch This” provides a compelling a critical account of the varieties of black Christianity that now dominate airwaves both in the U.S. and around the globe.  I’ve had the privilege of dialoging with the author as the project moved from dissertation to book, and I know him to wield one the sharpest and most insightful interpretations of African American religion, in particular, and religion and culture in America, more broadly.  While I’ve just started to get into the book myself, I am confident that anyone who picks it up will learn something new about religion and race in America.

Kudos, Congratulations, and Thank you, Jonathan!

What follows is the beginning of his discussion of the book on the website ReligionDispatches:

 Ten Questions for Jonathan Walton on Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism

What inspired you to write Watch This?

My interest in African American religious broadcasting came from what I perceived to be the gaps in the fields of African American religion and Religion, Media and Culture. For the most part, scholars of African American religion in general and black theology in particular theorize about Afro-Protestantism in America according to a particular historiography that privileges liberal Protestantism in general, and civil rights motifs in particular. But the prevailing narrative of the freedom fighting “black church” is in many ways inconsistent with a number of African American Christians whose view of the faith is informed by Trinity Broadcasting, the Word Network, and Streaming Faith.com. Just the same, for sociologists and communication theorists who have examined the world of evangelical religious broadcasting, it is predominantly framed as the domain of the white, Religious Right.

This book, then, is my attempt to illumine, unpack and interrogate the theological and social orientations of prominent black religious broadcasters in order to understand them as a source of attraction and ethically evaluate their dominant messages…

To continue reading go to ReligionDispatches.org.

To purchase book, go to www.nyupress.com

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It has been exactly one year since I made my last blog entry – can I still really call myself a blogger?  Anyway, 2009 was quite an eventful year for me both professionally and personally.  With regards to the latter, I entered the land of parenthood as my wife and I welcomed our son into the world on January 26.  As for the former, less than six months later I walked across the commencement stage at Harvard with the university’s first class of Ph.D.s in African American Studies (and thousands of other graduates as well).

As both a black father and a recently-minted Ph.D. in African American Studies there was perhaps no more intriguing event in 2009 than the historic election of Barack Obama.  Personal background aside, Obama’s rise to the presidency was arguably the biggest headline around the world, rivaled only by the economic collapse that serves as the background to this week’s festivities, around the world.  So much has been written about Obama that I’ve been reluctant to weigh in -  Seriously, what more can be said!  As a good friend, and colleague in the study of religion, recently bemoaned, “Since when did Obama become the arbiter of the black religious experience?”  Moreover, given the culture of celebrity and the fascination with the entire Obama family (we love you Michelle, Sasha and Malia!), they have also become the poster image for the African American family.  Want to know about black love, black parenting, etc – there’s sure to be scores of articles available on each topic that begin with an Obama invocation.

Despite being overwhelmed by Obama-mania (how quick does it take to become an empty signifier?), I’d be lying if I did not admit that I too will be celebrating this Tuesday, or acknowledge how often I’ve considered the question, as a new parent, of what it will mean for my son’s first memories of the White House will be occupied by images of a black family.  As a scholar of African American religion, there is still much that can be said of the subtle ways that Obama appealed to, but also superceded, black church traditions in his campaign.  And, as a historian I still wonder, given the current academic interest in re-thinking Black Power, what it will mean that the man who heads the United States—the last super power—is African American.  Can American imperialism also be a form of black power?

Anyway, at this point I will leave these preliminary thoughts as they are, as simply questions. But I do want to direct attention to one article that I recently read that stood out for me in the sea of stories on Obama, blackness, and the so-called “post-racial” era. Hua Hsu, a colleague and friend of mine from Harvard, who teaches at Vassar College and also happens to be formidable behind the turntables, recently examined what the Obama phenomenon says about the current state of whiteness in America.  The header to his article reads as follows:

“The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?”

To read the entire essay, click on the following link to The Atlantic on-line.

This excellent piece is certainly worth reading in its entirety.  Perhaps you’ll turn to it after coming down from the inauguration high, as we celebrate this historic moment and consider the continued promises of American democracy.  Then all of us who live our lives in the many worlds between black and white will begin the difficult work of figuring out what the Obama era will truly offer.  In the meantime, for now I will return to singing “We Shall be Free” with my wife and son, along with Garth Brooks, Shakira, Stevie Wonder and the rest of the pre-inauguration party cast.  GOBAMA!

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The final season of HBO’s The Wire is set to begin in about 10 minutes.  Enough Said!  As they say, if you don’t know, you better ask somebody!

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In recent years, references to Creflo Dollar, arguably the most popular black prosperity preacher of the day, have become a visual and verbal fixture in Hip Hop music. Such instances include a cameo appearance in Ludacris and Jermaine Dupri’s “Welcome to Atlanta” video, an invocation in a song by Fifty Cent, a professed pastoral affiliation by Mase, and a shout-out from Lupe Fiasco in his underground re-mix of Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks.” This would seem to suggest, at least within the culture of the bling, that Christianity has become as much a signifier of wealth and power as it is evidence of any specific type of theological vision. Evidently Dollar – for whom wealth is a core spiritual value – seems to embody, for many Hip Hop artists, the essence of Hip Hop’s hustle doused in holy water. Interestingly, Pastor Dollar also has a rap video in the works, performed a by a group of rappers, the Ziklag Boyz, who belong to his church and record on his Arrow Records label. A surprise to no one, the song’s refrain is simply, “Money, money, coming down!” (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFyMEnXDG4g ). While the video draws much resemblance to Lil’ Wayne and Fat Joe’s tale of the strip club, “Make It Rain,” – with dollar bills floating across the screen – noticeably absent from the Ziklag Boyz’ video are the bodies of scantily clad black and brown women. For male rappers, it is the bodies of black females that often make their rap videos so profitably seductive, but Dollar insists that the power to get “bling” can just as easily be achieved dropping bible verses like they’re hot. The mutual resonance between much of rap music and Dollar’s prosperity ministry is but one instance where Christianity seems to function as an explicit form of social capital in popular culture . . .

For the entire article go to: http://faithinmotion.net/

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It has been impossible to ignore the shouting match that has taken place over the past couple years between Michael Eric Dyson and Bill Cosby, but their debate - which many others have weighed in on - is part of a much longer dialogue regarding class divisions among black people living in the United States. On the one hand, the black “elite” and middle class have complained that poor black folks need to hold up their end of the bargain (read: y’all are making us good negros look bad); while, on the other, poor and working class blacks have insisted that Du Bois’ so-called “talented tenth” have willingly left the rest of the race behind in exchange for their share of the American dream (read: y’all do the same stuff we do, but money covers a multitude of sins).

This debate is also closely tied to a similar academic conversation regarding whether the issue of poverty (often linked to a history of racism) is best addressed through structural (read: social policy change) or cultural (read: behavioral change) interventions. This debate has gone on just as long and has been equally rife with shouting matches where one side labels the other as victim blamers (cultural) and hand-out givers (structural).

Cornel West’s classic 1993 text Race Matters straddled this debate - holding culture and structure in tension - and much scholarship and social criticism has since moved in this direction. The following article by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - whose recent work on race and genetics has been the subject of much heated debate on issues of both race and class - seems to capture some of the complexities and contradictions of each of these conversations while highlighting the reality of an increasing class divide that exists not only with Black America (Gates’ focus), but in the United States, generally, and between the so-called “first” and developing worlds more broadly. Discussions of DNA aside, the issue of CLASS certainly deserves a deeper dialogue that moves beyond the perceived mutually exclusive categories of culture and structure….

Op-Ed Contributor

Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth

By

Published: November 18, 2007

Cambridge, Mass.

LAST week, the Pew Research Center published the astonishing finding that 37 percent of African-Americans polled felt that “blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race” because of a widening class divide. From Frederick Douglass to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most fundamental assumption in the history of the black community has been that Americans of African descent, the descendants of the slaves, either because of shared culture or shared oppression, constitute “a mighty race,” as Marcus Garvey often put it.

“By a ratio of 2 to 1,” the report says, “blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have grown more dissimilar over the past decade. In contrast, most blacks say that the values of blacks and whites have grown more alike.”

The message here is that it is time to examine the differences between black families on either side of the divide for clues about how to address an increasingly entrenched inequality. We can’t afford to wait any longer to address the causes of persistent poverty among most black families.

This class divide was predicted long ago, and nobody wanted to listen. At a conference marking the 40th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous report on the problems of the black family, I asked the conservative scholar James Q. Wilson and the liberal scholar William Julius Wilson if ours was the generation presiding over an irreversible, self-perpetuating class divide within the African-American community.

“I have to believe that this is not the case,” the liberal Wilson responded with willed optimism. “Why go on with this work otherwise?” The conservative Wilson nodded. Yet, no one could imagine how to close the gap.

For the entire article click on the following link to the New York Times

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