First Parish Unitarian UniversalistWhy, Lord? Hearing from Black Humanists
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
February 1, 2004
William R. Jones, a Unitarian Universalist humanist, wrote the lead essay in the book that is the primary source for this sermon, By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism (edited by Anthony R. Pinn). In that essay, Jones argues that Black religion in America is not equivalent to the Black Church, and that though black humanism is a minority religion it is nevertheless a religion, a binding and guiding faith—not in God, but in humankind. He wants it to be understood that humanism of any color is a part of the religious spectrum in the United States, not an opposite of it.
He acknowledges that black humanism lacks the institutional underpinning enjoyed by the Black Church. But, he asks, [does] black theism’s “affirmation of the slave master’s religion [create] a theology of survival rather than a theology of liberation?” (p. 49). In other words, does believing in a God whose own son suffered and was killed, the slave-holders, religion, lead African Americans to endure without protest their own suffering at the hands of, first, slavery and then racism, rather than empower them towards liberation? Why, Lord, did you let us suffer so long?
Another African American Unitarian Universalist minister and author, who is decidedly not a humanist, the Reverend Rosemary Bray McNatt, minister of Fourth Universalist Society in New York, whose memoir Unafraid of the Dark we read in our Adult Religious Education program a few years ago, sees God very differently than Jones, not at all as a co-conspirator against African Americans.
Some of you may remember her provocative article a year ago “To Pray Without Apology: Why Martin Luther King Jr Wasn’t a Unitarian Universalist” in the UU World, our denomination’s bi-monthly magazine sent to all First Parish members. In it she describes a conversation with Corettta Scott King who told Rosemary that she went to Unitarian churches many times, even before she met Martin, and that the two of them went to Unitarian churches when they were in Boston. King said something that “surprised and saddened” Rosemary, who remembers the gist of it to be,
“We gave a lot of thought to becoming Unitarian at one time, but Martin and I realized we could never build a mass movement of black people if we were Unitarian.” (UUWorld, November-December, 2002, pp. 30-32.)
There are at least three ways to think about this. First, the track record of Unitarianism in accepting people of color as ministers was terrible at the time of the Kings’ decision and even into the 1970’s. It’s definitely possible that he would not have been granted fellowship as a Unitarian minister, and even if he had been, he well may have waited a mighty long time before a congregation called him as their minister.
Second, even if Martin Luther King Jr. had received the encouragement other ministers of color had been denied, and had found a pulpit, he would have been serving a largely if not completely white congregation, not the best place from which to launch a movement of black people.
And, thirdly, which relates to our topic today and is the point Bray McNatt wanted to make in her article, as a liberal Christian and theist, King would have been fighting against not only racism but also the rising tide of humanism in Unitarianism. Indeed, Bray McNatt’s message was a plea, a hue and cry for Unitarian Universalists in the twenty-first century to become not only racially inclusive but theologically inclusive of the “many” people of color who, like Dr. King, call upon a higher power in their everyday lives and in their times of deepest need.
I was encouraged by Bray McNatt’s use of the word “many” there because it recognizes that there is a minority, as William R. Jones would want, if you recall. In that minority would be the black humanists, about whom I have long been interested, because I wondered, if proclaiming oneself as a humanist makes a white person a minority in the prevailing American culture, even more so would a black humanist be a minority, and perhaps be looking for a community of like-minded, like-spirited folks, even if they were mostly white. So, how do Unitarian Universalist congregations reach out to and welcome these African American co-religionists?
Let’s start by knowing which leading African Americans were or are humanists. In the 19 th century, we find the abolitionist Frederick Douglas and the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs who is known to us through her compelling autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In the 20 th, we find many familiar names: James Weldon Johnson who wrote the words to our opening hymn this morning “Lift Every Voice and Sing;” the poet Langston Hughes; the scholar W.E.B. DuBois; the labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, one of the few African Americans to sign the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II; civil rights leaders James Farmer (also a signer) who was known as one of “the big four” (with King, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and our own Whitney Young); author Richard Wright; James Forman, leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee; exiled author James Baldwin; and the novelists Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker.
Now let’s listen to what they have to say.
Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave in Virginia in 1818 escaped to New Bedford, soon was lecturing against slavery, and became a leading figure in the abolitionist movement. Early on, he spoke of his Christian faith and with confidence of God’s commitment to the cause, but events in the 1850’s were so discouraging that he abandoned that belief. Furthered by the brutality of the Civil War, his conclusion was that “nature with the aid of free discussion would set herself right in the end. Great is truth, great is humanity, and they must prevail.” (Pinn, p. 91).
So, it should not have been surprising that in March 1870 when the Fifteenth Amendment was finally signed, in his statements at the gatherings held to celebrate the success of the movement, Douglass failed to thank God for any part of it, unlike the other leaders who shared the podiums with him.
At the first of these gatherings, in New York City, his words sound mild to me but were taken with offense, “I want to express my love to God and gratitude to God, by thanking those faithful men and women, who have devoted the great energies of their soul to the welfare of mankind. It is only through such men and such women that I can get a glimpse of God anywhere.”
A few days later in Albany, he thanked the other leaders by name but not God. A ruckus was stirring among the clergy, especially the black clergy. So, on April 26 th, at a well-attended meeting in Philadelphia, he made himself plain, “I dwell here in no hackneyed cant about thanking God for this deliverance.” He explained, for too often in the heat of the battle against slavery was he told to leave it all to God; there were some people “always holding us back by telling us that God would abolish slavery in his own good time.” Not so, said Douglass. God has endowed man with great powers, but man “is to work out his own salvation.” Therefore, he continued, he wanted to thank those men and women, and only those men and women, who “labored in the beginning, amid loss of reputation, amid insult and martyrdom, and at immense peril of life and limb.”
Within weeks, Philadelphia’s Negro clergymen met and passed a resolution saying, “We will not acknowledge any man as a leader of our people who will not thank God for the deliverance and enfranchisement of our race, and will not vote to retain the Bible, the book of God, in our public schools.”
Douglas replied with an open letter in the Philadelphia Press, “During forty years of moral effort to overthrow slavery in this country, this system with all its hell-black horrors and crimes, found no more secure shelter anywhere than amid the popular religious cant of the day. One honest Abolitionist was a greater terror to slaveholders than whole acres of camp-meeting preachers shouting glory to God.” (Pinn, pp. 79-81).
Don’t you love a good fight?!!
Listen to these eloquent words of James Weldon Johnson written in 1933, “As far as I am able to peer into the inscrutable, I do not see that there is any evidence to refute those scientists and philosophers who hold that the universe is purposeless; that man, instead of being the special care of Divine Providence, is a dependent upon fortuity and his own wits for survival in the midst of blind and insensate forces. But to stop there is to stop short of the vital truth. For mankind and for the individual, this state—what though it be accidental and ephemeral—is charged with meaning. Man’s sufferings, his joys, his aspirations, his defeats, are just as real and of as great moment to him as they would be if they were part of a mighty and definite cosmic plan.” (Pinn, p. 142).
And Zora Neale Hurston, preacher’s daughter, “It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me.” (Pinn, p. 181).
Then, hear these words from the autobiography of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard, “[Death] is the end and without ends there can be no beginnings. Its finality we must not falsify…We know that Death is the End of Life. Even when we profess to deny this, we know that this hope is mere wishful thinking, pretense broidered with abject and cowardly Fear. Our endless egotism cannot conceive a world without Us, and yet we know that this will happen and the world will be happier for it.
I have lived a good and full life. I have finished my course. I do not want to live this life again. I have tasted its delights and its pleasures; I have known its pain, suffering and despair. I am tired, I am through. For the souls who follow me; for that little boy born Christmas day before last, my great-grandson and his compeers, I bequeath all that waits to be done, and Holy Time what a task, forever!” (Pinn, p. 222)
James Baldwin, who was a boy preacher in Harlem before he started his writing career, was more fiery in his 1963 book The Fire Next Time. “It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” (Pinn, 235).
James Forman, who is remembered for marching down the aisle of Riverside Church in New York City to read his "Black Manifesto," a demand that white churches pay half a billion dollars to blacks as reparations for previous exploitation—this was 1969— declares that the time indeed had come to get rid of God,
“St. Thomas Aquinas has said that there is a point when one can no longer prove the existence of God by logic. One has to make a leap of faith and accept that there is a God… It is that leap of faith which I now refuse to make. I reject the existence of God. He is not all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere. He is not just or unjust because he does not exist. God is a myth; churches are institutions designed to perpetuate this myth and thereby keep people in subjugation… As a Negro who has grown up in the United States, I believe that the belief in God has hurt my people. We have put off doing something about our condition on this earth because we have believed that God was going to take care of business in heaven.” (Pinn, p. 272-3)
Finally, I want to turn to Alice Walker whose character Shug in her novel The Color Purple says, “I believe God is everything that is, ever was or ever will be.” The American Humanist Association named Walker its “1997 Humanist of the Year” and in her acceptance speech she said, “There is a special grief felt by the children and grandchildren of those who were forbidden to read, forbidden to explore, forbidden to question or to know. Looking back on my parents and grandparents’ lives I have felt overwhelmed, helpless, as I‘ve examined history and society, and especially religion, with them in mind, and have seen how they were manipulated away from a belief in their own judgment and faith in themselves….What a burden to think one is conceived in sin rather than in pleasure; that one is born into evil rather than into joy…”
Of her own beliefs she said, “In day-to-day life, I worship the Earth as God—representing everything—and Nature as its spirit… All people deserve to worship a God who also worships them. A God that made them, and likes them. That is why Nature, Mother Earth, is such a good choice. Never will Nature require that you cut off some part of your body to please it; never will Mother Earth find anything wrong with your natural way. She made it, and she made it however it is so that you will be more comfortable as part of her Creation, rather than less. Everyone deserves a God who adores our freedom: Nature would never advise us to do anything but be ourselves…
It is as if one truly does posses a third eye, and this eye opens. One begins to see the world from one’s own point of view; to interact with it out of one’s own conscience and heart. One’s own… Earth spirit. We begin to flow, again, with and into the Universe. And out of this flowing comes the natural activism of wanting to survive, to be happy, to enjoy one another and Life, and to laugh. We begin to distinguish between the need, singly, to throw rocks at whatever is oppressing us, and the creative joy that arises when we bring our collective stones of resistance against injustice together. We begin to see that we must be loved very much by whatever Creation is, to find ourselves on this wonderful Earth. We begin to recognize our sweet, generously appointed place in the makeup of the Cosmos. We begin to feel glad, and grateful that we are not in heaven but that we are here.” (Pinn, p. 298).
I would be glad for any of these African American humanists to join us for Sunday worship! Bill Jones, James Farmer, James Forman, Alice Walker, and the many others whose names we do not know. It’s no wonder to me that we don’t. In the current political climate, with even Howard Dean feeling pressured to reveal his theism, it may be especially unlikely that African American leaders would reveal their humanism.
Near the end of By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism, the editor Anthony Pinn comments, “readers may also find the connection between African American involvement in humanism and the Unitarian Universalist Association interesting. The UUA has long been, although this may change, a “safe haven” for humanists, and roughly one percent of its membership is African American.” (Pinn, p. 320).
I note his qualification that “this may change” with alarm, and sadness, and a note of irony. At the same time that some, like Reverend Rosemary Bray McNatt, are advocating that we embrace more openly the Christian roots of our heritage so that the many African Americans who are theists will feel more at home, the African American humanists are anticipating that they will feel less so. And, of course, the same is true for whites.
A unique and wonderful challenge faces Unitarian Universalism in the 21 st century. It must remain a “safe haven” for humanists who are, after all, the minority in our God-believing country—where else will they (of whatever race or ethnicity) find a religious home but here? Yet it must also open its hearts and minds to, in Bray McNatt’s words, “not only a theological but a cultural understanding of the divine that travels with people of color into our sanctuaries.”
I’m convinced this is a challenge we will face and meet, and enjoy doing so! As a “spiritual humanist,” I, and many of you who are of like mind and heart, move in the space between humanism and theism, bridging it with our words of memory and hope, our laughter and our mourning; living our lives from that space between, not by creeds but by deeds and covenants.
So let us join with the prophet Micah who let it be known: what is there to do but do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with each other and with our God, if such a one we worship. Amen.