Televised Redemption

Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment

Carolyn Moxley Rouse, John L. Jackson, Jr., Marla F. Frederick

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479840458
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How Black Christians, Muslims, and Jews have used media to prove their equality, not only in the eyes of God but in society. The institutional structures of white supremacy—slavery, Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, and mass incarceration—require a commonsense belief that black people lack the moral and intellectual capacities of white people. It is through this lens of belief thatracial exclusions have been justified and reproduced in the United States. Televised Redemption argues that African American religious media has long played a key role in humanizing the race by unabashedly claiming that blacks are endowed by God with the same gifts of goodness and reason as whites—if not more, thereby legitimizing black Americans’rightsto citizenship.
If racism is a form of perception, then religious media has not only altered how others perceive blacks, but has also altered how blacks perceive themselves. Televised Redemption argues that black religious media has provided black Americans with new conceptual and practical tools for how to be in the world, andchanged how black people are made intelligible and recognizable as moral citizens. In order to make these claims to black racial equality, this media has encouraged dispositional changes in adherents that were at times empowering and at other times repressive. From Christian televangelism to Muslim periodicals to Hebrew Israelite radio, Televised Redemption explores the complicated but critical redemptive history of African American religious media.

Part I

Redemptive Media Histories

1

Black Christian Redemption

Contested Possibilities

“Black religion,” whether conceptualized variously by whites and blacks as an amorphous spirituality, primitive religion, emotionalism, or actual black churches under the rubric of “the Negro Church,” groaned under the burden of a multiplicity of interpreters’ demands ranging from uplift of the race to bringing an ambiguous quality of “spiritual softness” to a materialistic and racist white culture.

Curtis Evans, The Burden of Black Religion

The central and most enduring feature of Black Religion is its sustained and radical opposition to racial oppression. At bottom, Black Religion is an instrument of holy protest against white supremacy and its material and psychological effects.

Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican

“A young Negro boy” seated “on a stoop in front of a vermin-infested apartment house in Harlem,” “a young Negro girl” seated “on the stoop of a rickety wooden one-family house in Birmingham”—their present is marked by poverty; their future is enveloped by muted possibility. 1 It was the summer of 1963. Paucity smothered hope. Martin Luther King, Jr., evoked their lives in the opening of Why We Can’t Wait to tell the larger story of the civil rights struggles that engulfed Alabama. The book is a crystalized assessment of faith at work in the process of redeeming black lives. A chastisement of white religion not far from King’s lips, the irony of black life trapped in the clutches of a poverty outlined and sanctioned by white Christian supremacy was only too striking. Both the former captor and the formerly captured, landlord and sharecropper, “Miss Ann” and maid, fervently entreated the same God.

Arguably more so than their black Hebrew and black Muslim counterparts, black Christians in the United States shared a God with their white masters in many pre-emancipation settings, sometimes even worshiping in the very same sanctuary as their oppressors. In the early 1960s, in the context of violent and state-sanctioned white supremacy, Martin Luther King, Jr., weary of the suggestion from white clergy that civil rights leaders be patient, took pen to pad and drafted a letter to his white ministerial colleagues explaining why one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the admonition for blacks to “wait” even longer rang so hollow. His “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” waged a searing critique of white Christianity’s complicity in black oppression and undeniable abandonment of God’s mandate for universal justice:

In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.2

To his consternation, biblical injunctions like “Let justice roll on like a river; righteousness, like a never-failing stream” were seemingly long-erased from the bibles of Southern whites, or interpreted in ways that stopped just along the borders of racial community.3 Black and white Christians all too often embraced divergent interpretations of the same texts. For King and other civil rights protesters, justice was not only about voting rights and integrated lunch counters, but ultimately about economic possibility and political agency.

Black redemption in the context of American history has thus consistently been inflected with the need to address both race and class, the two tied together through the long history of black economic exploitation under slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow. The latter, which came only to a slow and dawdling halt in the early 1970s, lived insidiously on in what Michelle Alexander has called “the new Jim Crow” of institutionalized prison-industrial complicity proffered in seemingly race-neutral terms.4 The black church’s response to these challenges varied widely, with different ministries reading the black struggle for freedom against different interpretations of Christian eschatology and then, based on those readings, determining how to respond as good Christians in the service of God and the nation.

Developing a sense of one’s commitment to the nation also meant developing a sense of one’s commitment to the economy. Institutional racism excluded most blacks from participation in the free market, given everything from laws forbidding ownership of land to banks refusing loans to qualified blacks. As a result, blacks struggled to understand these exclusions not only at a pragmatic level in order to navigate them but also at a theological level with respect to the question of whether Christian ideals of social justice are even compatible with what Max Weber described as rational bourgeois capitalism.5 Scholars like C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya characterized the rubric of black church spiritual and civic responses to dialectical tensions between polarities like “accommodation” and “resistance,” “priestly” and “prophetic,” or “otherworldly” and “this worldly.”6 Building on this dialectical framing, scholars like Hans Baer and Mayer Singer went further, categorizing black churches in terms of their articulated relationship to capitalism. Mainstream religious communities, for example, encouraged congregants to participate in traditional forms of schooling, believing that through disciplined self-regulation one earns one’s place within a capitalist economy. For magico-religious spiritualist sects, which waited on salvation in the afterlife, “pie in the sky” wealth was the reward of true faith; for thaumaturgic sects, a believer was thought to attain wealth in this life via supernatural means;7 and for messianic or nationalist sects like the Nation of Islam, it was necessary to reject corporate capitalism for its racism and imperialism, yet possible to embrace capitalism with a little “c.” Notably, many of these sects promoted black-owned businesses, often helping with financing and training for member-owned establishments.

Pushing back against some of these more binary and rigid mappings of the religious, sociologist Omar McRoberts posits the notion that where church parishioners live—locality and proxemics—is a better indicator of their commitments to urban renewal than an exact reading of scripture or denominational affiliation. For parishioners in the churches that McRoberts studied, whether or not one lives, shops, eats, and goes to school in a community determines how and whether one gets involved in its transformation. Such attention to the lived reality of people’s lives complicates professed ideological commitments. Thus, one’s relationship to the street, that is, to particular local streets and neighborhoods, more accurately reflects one’s commitment to social uplift work in poor urban areas than the strict rubrics of theological or denominational orientation articulated by Lincoln and Mamiya or Baer and Singer.8 Each of these neatly crafted frameworks inevitably abut piercing questions about the possibility of black redemption in America. Regardless of how black church communities respond, the question always lingers whether or not black Americans can achieve economic and social parity in a system built upon the very idea of the economic exploitation of black and brown bodies. For leaders and participants in the Civil Rights movement, such social and economic realities demanded a response, and not one of despair. King’s admonitions to create the beloved community represent deep faith in the possibility of black redemption in America. Importantly, such black protest religion has not died. It resides in movements like the Moral Mondays campaign, which admonishes North Carolina legislators to advocate for the needs of the poor and marginalized and see their budgets as “moral” documents, not simply economic plans, and elements of the Black Lives Matter campaign, which began as a movement against violence toward black people.

This chapter explores changes over time in redemption narratives within black Christian communities. How have they understood themselves and their faith in the context of over three centuries of institutionalized racism? Using so-called new and old media as a focal point for such narratives, this chapter pays particular attention to how changes in media formats, platforms, institutions, and distribution channels—from print to radio to television to the Internet—illuminate how redemption is crafted and understood. More specifically and pointedly, how did the most high-profile forms of black religiosity move from political protest to prosperity gospels? What role did electronic mass media play in this development? And how might we understand media’s role in prosperity faith becoming the most popular and seemingly hegemonic form of institutionalized black religion at the millennium?

The transformation from calls for abolition and equal protections, to civil rights and social justice, to prosperity and free market salvation mark dramatic turns in how the narrative of black redemption has been cast. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, not only were newspaper and journal editors using their platform to address Americans, but writers like Ida B. Wells-Barnett also traveled abroad to showcase black suffering before largely sympathetic audiences in Europe and Africa. With the introduction of radio and television, sounds and images could do the traveling and impassion people in their living rooms through visceral appeals for social justice predicated on aural and visual evidence. And for much of the twentieth century, civil rights was articulated as the need to fundamentally transform the conditions of black life.

Following the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, attempts at social and economic integration, and changes in Federal Communication Commission regulations, the redemptive narratives began to change. Black religious programming began to advance a more individualized message of self-help and redemption, most noticeably through the distribution of prosperity gospels. Such gospels have been propelled from once quaint, seemingly heretical teachings on wealth and Christianity into transnational proclamations of God’s intention of creating prosperity for every believer—from those of King’s Alabama ghettos to contemporary Brazilian favelas and South Africa’s infamous shantytowns. The ascendancy of this prosperity gospel teaching, as a now transnational model of economic uplift, is a story best grasped through an understanding of the contestations taking place within American economic and social history.

Redemption through Protest

The history of mediated messages of redemption rendered by black Christians extends far beyond the civil rights movement. Since its founding in the United States, African American religion, tied as it has been to white Christian ideals and the “American Dream,” has had to orchestrate a counternarrative of what redemption might look and feel like for Africans in America. “Black” Christianity was thus nurtured as a critique of the status quo, a referendum on American Christianity proper. Black leaders from the earliest days of the republic—women like Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Maria Stewart, as well as men like Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and David Walker—took pen and pencil in hand to mark on paper their profound disappointment with Christianity’s role as handmaiden of torture, and with America’s failure to live up to its founding promise.

Such communications find their earliest expressions in the production of slave narratives and abolitionist newspapers. Scholars have emphasized the value of the autobiographies, pamphlets, and sermons that exposed the brutality of slavery in such piercing terms as to help fuel the antislavery movement. From the oldest slave narrative ever penned, Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African Written by Himself (circa 1745–1797) to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Written by Himself, we have received tales lamenting both the callousness of chattel slavery and the arduous struggle for post-chattel liberty.9 The appendix to Douglass’s narrative crafts, in the most striking way, both the redemptive possibility of “the Christianity of Christ” as well as the oppressive nature of the “Christianity of this land.” The distortion of Christianity made by white Americans through their support of race-based slavery rendered American Christianity not only invalid, but also relatively useless, without profound recalibration, to the project of political and existential redemption for African Americans. White Christianity in its crudest form was, after all, a state-sanctioned and state-deployed tool for oppression.10 It was the peculiarity of white Christianity that made America’s “peculiar institution” of racial slavery possible in the first place. Douglass’s addendum thus explains both black affinity to and aversion from Christianity:

What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.

Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. . . . We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. . . . The w...