New York Times Op-Ed: Why I Am Still a Christian, by Esau McCaulley (Wheaton College; Author, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South (Sept. 2023):
Discarding a belief in God can feel like an intellectual rite of passage to adulthood. Just as our bodies develop and change, so can our relationship to things spiritual, leading us sometimes to set aside organized religion. For African Americans, in particular, adult faith is complicated by the way certain understandings of Christianity were used to justify our ancestors’ enslavement. …
In my late teens and early 20s, freshly awakened friends challenged me, declaring Christianity a white man’s religion. …
I spent my college years wrestling with that collision between racial consciousness and spiritual doubt. But ultimately, I have charted a path different from that of many of my literary heroes and friends. What led me to remain in the church?
It is not because I am unaware of this country’s evils. My family’s narrative contains all of this nation’s contradictions. It is a story of dried mud and tough soil, cotton and sweat dripping off Black bodies, and if you let my ancestors tell it, the power of God. …
My ancestors converted to Christianity on a plantation with all the contradictions that have driven African Americans from the faith. Like many other enslaved people, they found God apart from the watchful eye of the slave master when they gathered to worship in secret.
I came to see that the rightness of Christianity, despite the evil done in its name, was not first posed during my strolls around campus or email exchanges with high school friends at different universities. It occurred a century before on the Bone plantation. I believe that my ancestors wrestled with the questions of faith when the evil was not literary or historical, but a material thing of flesh and blood. How did they manage to see goodness in this religion?
I think that for them, the Black church did not just provide an answer. It was the answer. In a world that proclaimed that the enslaver was lord of all, the idea that something more mighty ordered the tide of events that swept up their lives was the hope needed to survive the day. What if belief in the unrelenting love of God combined with trust in his power to bend history was not a tool to make chains but to break them? …
[W]hat use is a religion that only produces characters in history books? Was there not room for more ordinary glory? Civil rights activists inspired me, but the people who changed my life were regular members of my congregation. …
Christianity had a word to say on how the Bones lived as individuals. It did not make them complacent about white supremacy. It made anti-Black racism survivable and surmountable. At the same time, their faith did the small work of making them better people.
That work of transforming the lives of individuals is the seedbed out of which mass movements grow. The organizers did not succeed because they had an army of studied philosophers. Instead, the marchers reasoned that faith in the God who carried them when there was no revolution would do the same now that there was. Put differently, the confidence in God’s ability to overcome slavery, segregation and white supremacy flowed from a belief in his power to overcome sin and death.
The validity of Black Christianity, then, arose from the millions of lives it made viable and even joyful despite the difficult circumstances that have marked our sojourn in this country.
Sometimes the path of intellectual development leads us home to the beginning of things. I remained a Christian not simply because of what the faith might be able to do in the world but because of what it might do in me.
My mother recently purchased about an acre of land on the plantation where many of the Black Bones lived and died. She got it for around $500 because it was the slave burial site. Their bodies, never finding rest on land owned by others, now repose on land purchased by their descendants. We hold it in trust for them as their due. If the hope of Christians is true and there is a indeed a resurrection of the dead, they will emerge from those graves as free people, and their last moments on this side of the new creation will be spent on their own soil. That is a hope worthy of my allegiance.
Other op-eds by Esau McCaulley:
- The Streets Sent Me to the Pulpit (Sept. 24, 2023)
- Frederick Douglass Knew What False Patriotism Was, Especially On The 4th Of July (July 4, 2023)
- My Father Failed Me. Here’s How I Learned To Forgive Him. (June 18, 2023)
- Lent: The Season Of Repentance And Renewal (Apr. 2, 2023)
- There Is Glory And God In Our Struggles (Feb. 12, 2023)
- Does The Meaning Of A Christmas Song Change Depending On The Race Of The Man Who Wrote It? (Dec. 25, 2022)
- MLK's Legacy: Push Past Tweetable Quotes To True Christlike Love (Jan. 17, 2022)
- The Dangerous Politics Of ‘We Will Not Forgive’ (Oct. 3, 2021)
- Why Christians Must Fight Systemic Racism (Aug. 1, 2021)
- MLK's Legacy: Push Past Tweetable Quotes To True Christlike Love (Jan. 18, 2021)
- What The Bible Has To Say About Black Anger: 'The Cross Helps Us Make Sense Of The Lynching Tree' (June 21, 2020)
- The Christian Response to the Coronavirus: Stay Home (Mar. 22, 2020)
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