Pragmatic Spirituality

The Christian Faith through an Africentric Lens

Gayraud S. Wilmore

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780814793961
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479884247
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Gayraud S. Wilmore, an internationally renowned scholar of the history of the African American church, is one of the founders of black theology and author of Black Religion and Black Radicalism. Pragmatic Spirituality brings together some of his most compelling writings to speak to continuing issues in African American Christianity and black theology. The volume makes available for the first time several of Wilmore's previously unpublished essays, including a new chapter on womanist theology written for this book. Each chapter has been thoroughly reviewed and where appropriate reworked for this volume in order to create a coherent work which reveals a consistent "pragmatic spirituality" in African and African American religious practice. This book presents a view of the Christian faith and life at variance with the quest for personal sanctity by emphasizing communal empowerment for humanization and justice.
Pragmatic Spirituality incorporates some of the most engaging of Wilmore's voluminous writings to reinstate a persistent theme: that black or Africentric faith transposes itself from basically numinous and ecstatic elements in African and African diasporic religions to the immediate and practical work of healing and empowering the poor and marginalized. This book transcends a narrow Africentrism to call for a broad acquaintance with a historic motif in black faith that has to do with compassion, justice, equality, and the liberation of all people.
This illuminating volume displays Wilmore's influence on the development of black theology for over fifty years, and introduces his work to a new generation of scholars.

PART I

Teaching African American Religious Studies

1

What Is African American Religious Studies?

African American religious studies refers to a field of research that suddenly burst upon graduate theological education in the late 1960s.¹ Serious inquiry and debate about the religious sentiments of black slaves and free persons in the Americas date from a much earlier period. However, it was not until the black studies movement, part of the artistic and intellectual efflorescence of the civil rights period, erupted on theological seminary campuses where there were critical masses of African American students that we began to hear talk of black church studies or African American religious studies programs.² Because various terms have been used to denote the academic study of the religions of African Americans and the requirements of an effective ministry with black congregations, differences of opinion remain about the precise nature of the field. In this chapter I advance a working definition of what I think the term African American religious studies should imply. But first a few preliminary remarks.

First, while it was inevitable that the earliest serious inquiries into the nature of black religions would occur in the context of scientific research by black scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Ruby F. Johnston, E. Franklin Frazier, and Benjamin E. Mays, it would have been strange had these inquiries remained at an academic level of sheer objective description and disinterestedness. The practical needs of the black church and community were too pressing on African American intellectuals. The extraordinary influence of the church could not but help make the training of pastors in the practical demands of ministry the dominating consideration for shaping courses of religious studies, at least in the black academy. African Americans could rarely afford the luxury of “scientific studies” of religion that were unconcerned about social matters and the preparation of a professional leadership class. After all, with the exception of the family, the church has always been the most important institution in the individual and collective lives of black people in this country.

Second, with the possible exception of the famous Myrdal studies,³ the most serious investigations of African American religions before the 1960s were done over many years by students and professors at an obscure Methodist school for blacks in the South, Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, and the Howard University School of Religion in Washington, D.C. These were the first fully accredited, predominantly African American graduate schools of religion. Most of their pre-1960s dissertations and monographs have either gone with the wind or are buried in neglected archives, having served the eminently practical purpose of “equipping the saints for ministry” in days long past.

Third, the comprehensive cultural and holistic character of African American religion itself militates against the epistemological split that often characterizes much of what is called Religious Studies in the prestigious white theological schools and university departments of religion. The best religious scholarship in the African American academy is, perforce, faith-based or “believing scholarship,” accepting all the risks that such a position entails.

It scarcely could be otherwise. The centuries-old struggle for black humanity in a racist society never encouraged the development of a dispassionate, armchair study of religion for preparing the leadership of the embattled African American churches of America. Whatever titles may have been given to programs designed for the study of the religions of the African diaspora in the New World, most of them have had in common the ultimate purpose of faithful and pragmatic service to a disenfranchised and oppressed people.

The definition that follows will reflect this commonsense attitude toward research and teaching that comes out of the ethos of the historic African American community and its struggle for freedom and equality. African American religious studies, therefore, may be briefly described as an academic area that investigates the religions of people of African descent and their practice of ministry in the segregated and marginalized world in which they live. As we shall see in this chapter, the field takes on richer, interdisciplinary implications and practical uses that involve all levels of education among black believers, that regulate a certain cultural and religious interaction between blacks and others, and that facilitate the deployment of the African American church as an agency of social, political, and economic change. What follows below is a more comprehensive definition that I recommend for critical discussion, especially by church-affiliated scholars.

African American religious studies refers to the investigation, analysis, and ordering of a wide variety of data related to the religions of persons of African descent, for the purpose of authenticating and enriching personal faith and preparing both clergy and laity for a ministry in the African American church and community. Such a ministry is understood to be competent and faithful leadership in worship, evangelism, and nurture, and to incorporate social, political, and economic action on behalf of God’s mission of liberation and justice for all people.

The definition is, of course, open for experimentation and revision as we gain greater experience in research and teaching. It also presupposes provisional answers to several questions that need to be addressed. For example, what is an acceptable and useable definition of African American religions? And, incidentally, acceptable and useful by whose standards? What is the place of ethnicity and commitment to special interest groups in theological education? What are the appropriate pedagogical requirements of graduate theological education as opposed to Bible colleges or lay education? What is the relationship between African American religious studies in the seminary and the same area of study in the university or the university-related divinity school? What is the scope of African American religious studies? Should it include, for example, courses in black Judaism, Islam, neo-African religions, and the new urban sects and cults in the black community? Finally, how does African American religious studies intersect with black studies, African studies, and multicultural studies that focus on research which includes adherents of Euro-American, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American religions, and the religions of the Third World or, perhaps better put, the Two-Thirds World?

I do not intend to delve into all these perplexing questions, but I present them here as critical and urgent examples for the African American church and academy. My interest in this chapter is solely to unravel the definition of African American religious studies posed above so as to make a case for (1) an interdisciplinary theory that explains the nature and significance of the African American religious experience in North America; (2) the exploration of some aspects of an experimental model for teaching and researching black religion from the perspective of both the theological and secular disciplines, crafted for use by African American scholars in those fields who want to help revitalize the African American church and community; and (3) a critique of American cultural, political, and economic conditions implicit in an approach that posits African American congregations as agents of change toward a more just society.

What the definition above intends to suggest, therefore, is a prolegomenon and context for understanding the unifying substance and underlying purpose of an Africentric approach to theological studies and pastoral ministry. Many African American scholars of religion widely agree that their vocation is about helping black people think more clearly and productively about God, about who they are as a people in a world that has been dominated primarily by racist white people; it is also about how black Christians can, with the help of their historic religious institutions, participate more meaningfully and effectively in God’s mission of liberation from the power of racism, sexism, classism, and oppressions of every kind.

Let us begin, therefore, by turning to the definition itself to ascertain whether it indeed lends itself to these objectives and what problems we may encounter along the way

African American religious studies refers to the investigation, analysis, and ordering of a wide variety of data related to the religions of persons of African descent.

The emphasis here is on the systematic examination and presentation of what we already know and what we still need to learn about the nature of religion and its relationship to other cultural phenomena in the African American subcommunity. Obviously one of the first tasks is to design a heuristic definition of black religion itself. I am using the singular noun here to indicate that our search is for a definition broad enough to include a variety of experiences that reflect the collective consciousness of a common “ultimate concern” among black religionists, while at the same time specific enough, and sufficiently committed to the Christian faith, to be able to utilize some of what we have received from the traditional disciplines of the American “theological encyclopedia.”⁴

In the quest for such a definition I have utilized the approach of symbolic anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, John Morgan, and Ann Marie Powers. Attempting to break away from an overly narrow functionalist explanation of religion, these writers have sought to penetrate its meaning as a system or mosaic of symbols by which people “communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life,” continuously shaping reality as well as being shaped by it.⁵ Geertz’s paradigm for the study of religion as a cultural system describes how sacred symbols serve to synthesize a people’s ethos with their operative worldview in such a way as to make for a subtle circularity—a reciprocal confirmation or coherence between how they live (i.e., their patterned behavior) and what they actually believe about the world they live in (i.e., their specific belief system or, one might say, their operative metaphysics). Religion, therefore, in Geertz’s understanding is “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men [sic] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”⁶

Such a definition has the advantage of giving us a useful model for developing a more specific grasp of black religion as a particular symbol system, marginal to the mainstream of American culture but characteristically exhibiting an extraordinary relationship to the African American subculture as a whole. For it seems quite clear that religion has played a role in black America that is considerably more holistic and efficacious than its more segmented role in most white American communities. The focus of the symbolic anthropologists on the relationship between religion and culture has helped us to understand how black faith extracts meaning out of the depths and crises of oppression under a dominating culture, and pours it into the cultural molds of the African American ghetto. At the same time African American religion itself is being molded, for both good and ill, for accommodation and protest, and for compromise and resistance, by the social, economic, and political realities of African American existence.⁷

Such an understanding of black religion and culture cannot be validated without reference to a variety of academic disciplines from both the theological seminary and the university. The basic paradigm is anthropological, but history, sociology, psychology, political science, literature, and ethnomusicology are all relevant to what this opening sentence of our definition calls for. When we add biblical studies, church history, theology, ethics, and the “practical disciplines” of the theological curriculum (preaching, counseling, church administration, etc.) it becomes clear what wide-ranging vehicles are needed to traverse the broad landscape of the distinctive beliefs, experiences, and practices that fall within the boundaries of that familiar ethnic designation—“persons of African descent.”

What it actually means to be a person of African descent is not altogether clear. Most of us generally perceive some notable differences as well as similarities between such persons and white people who were born in Great Britain, Germany, or who are of Swedish or Italian descent. But casual perception is not enough for our definition. Nor is the argument about the retentions of attenuated African elements in black culture and religion sufficiently conclusive. Thus the question of the relationship of Africa to African American religious studies remains problematic. But we cannot avoid some tentative hypotheses that open up creative possibilities for exploration and study.

To consider only one illustration: it would be helpful to discover the extent to which a three-year seminary curriculum should give a student the ability to trace the movement of Egyptian, Ethiopian, and Nubian Christianity from the East to the West, its decay, diffusion, and Islamization among several African Traditional Religions in the cultural areas from which the majority of slaves were brought to the Americas. Should African American religious studies include investigating the course of West African religion through Americanization in the United States under the pressure of slavery, ghettoization, and secularization? These are difficult academic problems, but they illustrate the magnitude and complexity of any search for a comprehensive, interdisciplinary theory of the origin, evolution, and present structure of the belief systems and ritual patterns of adherents of the historic African American faiths.

Difficulties notwithstanding, the task of collecting, sorting out, and analyzing all kinds of data related to religions that are embedded in the social-structural and personality systems of the average African American will require an unparalleled collaboration between subject matters as diverse as the archaeology of West and Central Africa and the hermeneutics of three centuries of African American music, rhetoric, dance, and literature. Out of the welter of evidence, both ancient and modern, we may be able to verify the multiform character of black belief and—more important to activist scholarship—catch a glimpse of the common thread of ethnic suffering and struggle by way of migrations, slavery, decolonization, detribalization, and gender conflict and injustice that binds together, for good or ill, black believers in Africa and the diaspora in a seamless garment of pragmatic spirituality. It should be mentioned that white and other ethnic group scholars, as well as black scholars, have been at work on these problems since the 1970s. All people who are committed to correcting years of neglect and distortion in the study of African American culture are more than welcome to join this worthy enterprise.

To conclude the discussion of the first clause in our definition of African American religious studies let us propose the forthright proposition that the field involves, at the very least, an analysis of data—from an interdisciplinary perspective—dealing with the systems of sacred symbols that people of African descent have passed down from generation to generation, and which have given essential meaning and direction to their lives in this western hemisphere for more than four hundred years.

. . . for the purpose of authenticating and enriching personal faith and preparing both clergy and laity for a ministry in the African American church and community.

Here we come upon a highly debatable question that will separate African American religious studies, in the white and black seminaries where I have taught, from religious studies in most predominantly white seminaries and universities. Our focus unabashedly seeks to authenticate and enrich personal faith. This is critical and will be a stumbling block for many colleagues who will consider it inexcusably subjective. We mean, nevertheless, to assist students who need assistance to move, in due time during a three-year program, from academic conceptualization to experiential appropriation. This requires taking the student’s personal faith and life experiences, and the life and faith of the local congregation she or he may be serving during the seminary years, with utmost seriousness. The objective is to contribute to the development and enhancement of personal faith not only by the acquisition of abstract knowledge but by the appropriation of meaningful faith about life and vocation. This means not only the “reconversion” of some students but also concern about the process by which his or her faith is developed, tested, corrected, and verified by the gospel and the church. We want, in other words, to subject academic conceptualization to both the authority of Christ and to the priority of the religious and cultural experiences of the people. I believe that theological education will have failed, despite having expertly decoded the black experience, if there is no faith decision, no new and enriching sentiment embraced by the student. The seminary always fails to fulfill its mission, in my opinion, whenever what it teaches is left untouched by the faith and experiences of those it purports to educate, both students and the churches in which they minister.

The discussion thus far has suggested two dimensions or levels of African American religious studies. On the first level the question is, what do these academic disciplines teach about the origin, nature, development, and influence of religion in the culture of persons of African descent, particularly in the United States? The question on the second level is, what precisely does this knowledge have to do with the personal conviction (or lack thereof) that Jesus is Lord and that his salvific messiahship is consistently made manifest in the affirmations, yearnings, and striving of the church and community that certain persons are called to serve?

The latter question is inescapable for black Christian scholars who insist on the appropriation, authentication, and enhancement of faith as one of the objectives of African American religious studies. We are obliged to be what we are—black or Africentric Christians. We begin with the assumption that the gospel itself stands in judgment on all human knowledge and endeavor, including that which is Africentric, and that we must permit it to certify our academic enterprise. Second, we assume that there is an important work of translation and interpretation to be done in two directions—from the theological academy to the African American community, and from the African American community to the academy. It is important to note that inherent in both these assumptions is the recognition of the equal relevance of the black religious experience for the education of white people who are preparing for ministry. It is, in other words, important for everyone involved in this field that the religious experience of black people—to whatever extent possible—be translated into the language and thought forms of the academy. But of equal or greater import is that scholarly judgments and valuations be first communicated to ordinary black Christians in such a way that the folk recognize the essential integrity between what they believe and practice, by the authority of the Scripture and the Holy Spirit, and what their half-educated, ostensibly sophisticated but inexperienced student preachers espouse. This does not mean that what the folk already believe and celebrate should always be the final authority. Rather, it means that the burden is on gradua...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Teaching African American Religious Studies
• Part II The Quest for an Africentric Cultural Identity
• Part III Black Theology: History and Major Motifs
• Part IV Africentric Pastoral Ministry
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author