Disruptive Christian Ethics

When Racism and Women's Lives Matter

Traci C. West

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780664229597
• eBook ISBN: 9781646980482
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book brings to the fore the difficult realities of racism and the sexual violation of women. Traci West argues for a liberative method of Christian social ethics in which the discussion begins not with generic philosophical concepts but in the concrete realities of the lives of the socially and economically marginalized.

Part I

Liberating Concepts

Chapter One

Context

Niebuhr’s Ethics and Harlem Activists

Those of us who have been educated in the United States and in many other Western societies have been socialized to depend upon great individual thinkers when seeking moral resources for analyzing social problems in our society. In U.S. history, the majority of those who are designated as great thinkers with important moral ideas tend to be white, male, and Christian. While many ideas from these scholars and leaders can help us to investigate social problems and create change, this socialization teaches us to treat these great thinkers as if they were isolated islands of knowledge, removed from any community context. As a result, ignoring the impact of societal influences on them and their ideas is all too easy. Particular influences such as popular political beliefs or the state of racial/ethnic relations and socioeconomic class conditions that surrounded them are too often seen as having an insignificant relationship to the creation of moral ideas by great thinkers.

These assumptions about isolating great thinkers produce a further misperception. Members of the communities who are most adversely affected by the social problems being investigated are not considered moral agents who also generate ideas about improving society. As black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins asserts, it is not true that only members of elite groups “produce theory while everyone else produces mere thought. Rather, elites possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as theory” as universal and normative.¹ We are trained to accept this understanding of how knowledge is produced. What would it mean to break out of our acceptance of this training and broaden our understanding of what constitutes valuable sources of moral knowledge?

Our tendency to designate certain individuals as great thinkers and then detach them from societal influences allows us to maintain false boundaries between the “great thinkers” and the “everyday people”—especially those who are part of areas commonly identified as problem communities. Attempting to avoid reliance on great individual thinkers by ignoring them is not a helpful correction for this tendency because it could mean ignoring some very good ideas or creating ethical analyses that fail to interrogate problematic assumptions in culturally dominant and influential traditions of thought in our society. A more helpful response is to incorporate ideas from a range of community sources together with those of individual great thinkers to comprehensively analyze the destructive realities in our society. Community sources can hold accountable the ideas of dominant thinkers and traditions, ensuring that those dominant ideas are useful for the common good. One of the major goals of developing social ethics for our society should be to build shared communal values with justice-oriented benefits for people across cultural groupings and with unequal status and power. Sources of knowledge that cross these boundaries of culture, status, and power are the best guarantors for creating public practices that sustain justice-oriented values.

My approach to Christian social ethics is centered on creating a dialogue between individual thinkers and community-based persons who also create valuable moral knowledge. In this chapter I gather insights about how to formulate Christian social ethics by focusing on a particular historical time period, the 1930s and 1940s; one individual ethicist from the dominant religious tradition of Christianity, Reinhold Niebuhr; and a range of coexisting community efforts and experiences by black women in Harlem who shared the same neighborhood with Niebuhr during that time.

In his pioneering work of constructing Christian social ethics Reinhold Niebuhr sought universal moral terms to describe the plight of “man” and the historical conditions of society. When he arrived on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1928, Niebuhr continued to write about many of the troubling social concerns of his time by offering a moral vision for public life based upon Christian theology and scripture. His essays and books from about 1930 to 1943 provide the focus for exploring the relevance of his moral vision for his immediate social context of Harlem, especially the lives and activism of black women.² How might Niebuhr’s Christian social ethics be instructive for addressing the socioeconomic injustice that these women confronted?

During the Depression and World War II, Harlem generated a wide spectrum of religious, political, and literary responses to the social disparities confronting black members of the community. There was intense community organizing and an explosion of writing in newspapers, journals, and books concerning their social and economic problems. How do some of these activist efforts and writings, particularly by black women leaders seeking to challenge socioeconomic injustices, overlap and differ with the ethical approach crafted by Niebuhr during this time? How might these community sources broaden Niebuhr’s Christian moral vision for society? The vantage point of the Harlem women, who were already negotiating and opposing pervasive, dehumanizing moral assumptions related to race and class, could alter certain academic formulations in Christian ethics about what kind of social change is needed.

Jointly examining these historical sources allows us to investigate how Christian moral claims about society might be meaningful across gender, racial, and cultural boundaries. We can analytically probe and venture across these boundaries by comparing the ideas of a son of German immigrants as he taught and lived in an all-white, predominantly male, seminary community, with the ideas and experiences of daughters and granddaughters of former slaves and free Negroes. These women were the progeny of Africans and worked as leaders of religious community organizations, journalists, fiction writers, and domestics, and lived in predominantly African American and Caribbean American communities.

Finally, analyzing historical sources from this Depression-era urban setting and the theo-ethical vision produced in its midst provides broader training for understanding Christian religion. Skills for understanding history are of central importance to Christian faith and theology. For Christians, routine practices that rely upon an ability to decode history can range from New Testament Bible study, where there is a need to understand how the activities of Jesus were interpreted by first-century writers, to Sunday worship where ancient creeds are regularly recited and there is a need to interpret those theological references. The theological meaning of core tenets of Christian faith, like the Trinity and the divine/human nature of Jesus, expressed in those creeds are bound up with the proceedings of ancient church councils and the power struggles between the communities that were represented there. To practice thoughtful expressions of Christian faith, Christians have to be dedicated and skillful interpreters of history. Deciphering how Christian ethics might be connected to varied historical and cultural realities not only aids in cultivating these skills for Christians, but it can also encourage all of us in the general public to challenge the common tendency to overgeneralize about the role of dominant Christian voices in shaping contemporary societal values.

Niebuhr’s Ideas and Their Relevance to Harlem

There are many ways in which an ethical inquiry that is focused upon a certain historical time period and empirically based upon Harlem is especially fitting for a discussion that features Reinhold Niebuhr’s work. Concern for history and empirical realities could not be more strongly reflected in his body of writings.³ Though not precisely concerned with Harlem, nor always consistent, his thoughtful engagement of his social context was explicit.

Niebuhr is a premier example of a public intellectual, that is, an intellectual who embraced the opportunity to study and participate in public affairs and to make academic ideas accessible to a broader public audience. John C. Bennett, social ethicist and his faculty colleague, observed, “To understand Niebuhr’s thought we must move back and forth between his books, which provide the theological frame for his thought, and his articles and editorials, which show his response to contemporary events.”⁴ Besides publishing five books on Christianity, morality, and society during the 1930s, he wrote almost two hundred articles in journals with widely ranging audiences, including the Evangelical and Reform Church denominational publication the Messenger, the interdenominational church publication the Christian Century, the labor movement journal the New Leader, political affairs journals like the Nation and the New Republic, and Radical Religion, the socialist Christian journal that he helped to found. He had been a full-time faculty member at Union Theological Seminary for barely four years when he ran for Congress in 1932 on the Socialist ticket (to resounding defeat), despite the fact that “the seminary board of directors had expressed grave concern” about it.⁵

Reinhold Niebuhr’s ideas of the 1930s and early 1940s do not necessarily typify his vast canon of writings, which spanned more than fifty years. As we would expect with anyone’s work over a lifetime, there are important shifts and contradictions, as well as some uniformity in his thought. In many ways his identification with socialism during the Depression contrasts considerably with his conservative cold-war perspectives of the 1950s and 1960s.⁶ When studying Niebuhr one must closely examine the contradictions and shifts in his work; offer qualified, historicized observations of the consistencies; and refuse to erase certain “extremes” in his thought. Nonetheless, Niebuhr’s quest to address questions about the public role of Christians in society remained constant throughout his life. Some of his responses to those questions were modified and varied with transitions in world affairs and U.S. social conditions. Locating his thought in a particular time period and social context invites us to be attentive to details that can get lost when his ideas are evaluated for the sake of a “master narrative” about his contributions to Christian ethics or to the tradition of twentieth-century public intellectuals.

Moreover, a contextualized approach to Niebuhr provides an arena for constructing Christian ethics in which universal moral concerns are tethered to particular ones. (I explore this connection between the universal and the particular in chapter 2.) Ethical principles that Niebuhr posits as universal for Christians, because, supposedly, they are not culturally bound, can be usefully engaged with and sometimes contested by particular historical and cultural realities in Harlem.

It is impossible to address the realities of socioeconomic injustice and exploitation without understanding power relations in society. Niebuhr interpreted certain historical and political problems by focusing on how the need for power is part of human nature and sinfulness. As Christian social ethicist Robin Lovin formulates it, Niebuhr gave such interpretations “a more nuanced, universal form, so that motives and actions were never pure manifestations of good or evil, and every fault of the evil or the enemy could be related to some more basic form of pride or will to power that all people share.”⁷ Would Harlem activists and exploited workers agree with this approach to the “enemies” that they confronted? Would they share his assumptions about human nature and the use of power?

The treatment of Harlem sources that I am proposing differs from Niebuhr’s treatment of the sources he selected. Niebuhr articulated universal moral principles to “cast light upon particulars” of unjust social conditions that he observed.⁸ For him, particular historical and empirical circumstances served as examples for ethical principles, exemplifying, for instance, a universal human proclivity toward pride and a “will to power.” In contrast to Niebuhr, my own liberationist approach does not assume that the experiences of oppression by Harlem women and their activist responses to that oppression merely present us with examples for predetermined moral theories about natural human proclivities.⁹ Harlem is not just a place to find illustrations for ideas about social morality as preconceived by theologians and other great thinkers. Certainly, the moral knowledge of and actions by these Harlem women sometimes exemplify and give deeper insight into ethical principles that are already known or convictions already held before encountering their stories. However, one must also take note of the ways that their voices and ethical actions offer alternatives and challenges to what is assumed by Niebuhr (and us?) to be the essential terms for describing human moral behavior.

Certain generalizations may be tempting when constructing ethical analysis based upon Niebuhr’s work but are actually pitfalls that could be avoided by connecting Niebuhr’s thought with his Harlem context. For instance, Niebuhr described how dominant groups can make use of non-violent force to maintain their power. He also appreciated the ways that oppressed groups might use nonviolent force to resist dominant groups. Christian social ethicist Larry Rasmussen explains Niebuhr’s understanding of nonviolent resistance as a coercive use of power, but one that is “likely to do good . . . Niebuhr’s 1932 volume, Moral Man and Immoral Society, practically laid out the full strategy later used in the Civil Rights Movement.”¹⁰ And if we look up this intriguing reference we find an extensive list in Moral Man and Immoral Society of tactical suggestions that he says we are waiting for Negroes to carry out, including boycotts against banks that discriminate by refusing Negroes credit, stores that refuse to employ Negroes “while serving Negro trade,” and public service organizations that practice racial discrimination.¹¹ After reviewing this statement by Niebuhr, we might return to Rasmussen’s comment linking such suggestions to 1960s civil rights tactics, and conclude that Niebuhr was indeed an extraordinary visionary. He appears to be uncannily prophetic in devising a tactical strategy for resistance that black leaders would not think of implementing until twenty-five years later in the civil rights movement.¹²

Except . . . in Harlem, throughout the 1920s, organizations like the NAACP and the New York Urban League had been steadily working to change discriminatory practices by white employers against blacks. In 1930, one of the groups at the forefront of these efforts was the Harlem Housewives League.¹³ By 1931 it claimed over a thousand members and met every Monday night at the Urban League building. In their campaign, these black women visited department stores like Woolworth’s and the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P), urging them to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Liberating Concepts
• Part II Liberating Practice
• Notes
• Index