The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song, is scheduled to publish February 16th 2021.
A little background/ethical disclaimer about my distant connection to and bias towards Henry Louis Gates Jr. There was, at the dawn of the Internet and before Google existed, Africana.com, started by Dr. Gates. It was through that site that I had the opportunity to freelance online before it became the main way writers wrote digitally, and an assignment to write about the anniversary of Kindred that gave me the humbling experience of interviewing Octavia Butler. Subsequently, I went on to contribute dozens of biographies to the Oxford African American Biographies Online, also spearheaded by Dr. Gates. So, we don’t know one another directly, but I think it’s important to make clear and transparent ways in which I might be inclined to be gentle toward an author, whenever that inclination might pop up.
That said, the Black Church is an anchoring heartbeat of Black America, even for the atheists, and this book points to all of the reasons why. The rhythms of our songs, the sanctuary from our unpaid labor, the source of replenishment and visits from the Holy Spirit -- The Church (yes, capitalized) has remained throughout our time in the Americas the one institution that reminds us of ourselves. It gathers us, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, and returns us back to one another in one piece.
You could be forgiven for tiring of a kind of Black history that brushes over the contradictions and ugliness that is wrought by the Black Church. I would also understand if you were bored by reading about Black folks and religion, since it was our oppressors who introduced us to Jesus, and then some of us turned right around and tried to persecute each other in the name of the Messiah. Just because the Black Church is bound up in us and we are bound up in it doesn’t make the Church perfect. All the more reason, Gates seems to note, for us to examine its flaws and its beauty.
In the span of 227 pages, this companion book to a four-hour PBS series of the same name (which apparently Oprah came up with) The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song gathers some of the most pre-eminent scholars of religion and history and religious history to give a concise and comprehensive overview of the African-derived aspects of the faith (like speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, or catching the Holy Ghost/Spirit), the political and social influences of Black Christianity from Barack Obama’s singing of Amazing Grace at the funeral of Reverend Clementa Pinckney (“Cheryl Townsend Gilkes recalls, ‘Obama did what was Black tradition: he ‘raised’ Amazing Grace and the musicians picked him up, and the church stood with him. The kinesics of that moment were very significant and very traditional.’”) to the many singers, including Queen Aretha Franklin, who brought the sounds and soul of the church to the masses through song.
There is, of course, a solid history that includes some Blacks converting to Catholicism in order to win their freedom, which I was curious about for my own personal reasons, wondering about what could have influenced my South Carolinian mother and grandmother to convert from the steadfast stronghold of Black Protestant faith to the far more mystical faith of Catholics that I was brought up in. In this book, I think I found a seed of an answer. That answer, unfortunately, was followed shortly thereafter by discovering that Catholics were, just after the Jesuits, the largest slave-owning bodies in America.
There is also the ugliness of bias that continues to plague the church in terms of intolerance towards the LGBTQ+ community, addressed by Cornel West: “Homophobia and transphobia are as evil as white supremacy, but most Black churches have not embraced this prophetic witness.”
It was delightful to read, as a former religion reporter, a book that documented a diversity of religious leadership -- not just Black men, but Black women -- in photographs and in sourcing. A revisiting of the centrality of the church not just in mourning but also activism for voter registration and empowerment also served as a reminder of something Anthony Pinn is quoted saying related to church burnings. “Church burnings in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries provide the same message as church burnings in the 1800s provided. These church burnings are a way to reinforce white supremacy. If you are Black, there is no safe space.”
Finally, there is a lovely, poignant personal reflection on conversion and faith from Gates at the end. I’m not sure what or how a completely, 100 percent satisfying end to such a book could be, particularly since it, along with the PBS series is meant to be a celebration of a physical and psychic gathering space that has transcended and persevered through all manner of destruction, though it remains to see how our new socially-distanced realities will reorient this incredible institution. What you can be sure of when the book is done is that The Black Church will survive. It’s a beautiful, empowering, eternal testimony.