Black Religious Thought and the Black Religious Intellectual: Foundations For a Black Men's Theology and Religious Studies
By Dr. Zachery Williams
My argument herein is that there is an important relationship between the religious thought of black men religious intellectuals and thinkers on the one hand, and what I would call black men’s theology and what could be called black men’s religious studies. In fact, it is the black religious thought of black religious thinkers, broadly defined, that informs and undergirds both the areas of black men’s theology in the seminary and a black men’s religious studies in the academy. My goal in this essay is to develop a framework by which to link these various entities into a coherent whole. While I will not provide an exhaustive survey of black men’s religious thought or the entire spectrum of black religious intellectuals, I will offer a beginning exploration of the relationship between the two, utilizing the important work of a number of prominent black religious thinkers. Lastly, I intend to provide a brief assessment of the manner by which black men’s religious thought, and the intellectuals who develop that thought, contribute to the formation of both a black men’s theology and a black men’s religious studies.
The notion of who is considered a black religious intellectual and what that represents is an often precarious and frequently debated question. Recent scholars, most notably, Cornel West and Eddie Glaude and Clarence Taylor have argued for a reassessment of the category and definition of what constitutes a legitimate, authentic black religious intellectual. [1]By examining 20th century U.S. culture, one can identify various black intellectuals who are distinct from figures who are predominately clergy and or academicians or theologians. In this essay, I will examine a number of 20th century black intellectuals whose representation surpassed that of solely clergy or academicians to encompass characteristics of both, and even some instances, representations uniquely their own. The focus group of black religious intellectuals that I am examining are those with some religious bent, particularly as outlined in Henry J. Young’s Major Black Religious Leaders Since 1940; this group includes preachers, social philosophers, ministers, activists, educators, and others, be they Christian, Muslim, Christian nationalist, or other. In this sense, I use the term black religious intellectual to distinguish this group of intellectuals who combine various modes of thought and practice distinguishable in clergy, academicians, theologians, and activists but whom are distinct in their unique individual representation of these attributes and who differ in their representation from each individual group mentioned. Not all black clergy have been or identify as intellectuals and not all black intellectuals have encompassed or epitomized “religious” or morally prophetic selves to match accepted scholarly representations and functions. Furthermore, black men, not identified as preachers, pastors, or theologians, have as much of a relevant religious thought and understanding of theology, in their own right. This latter subject must be explored in much more detail at another time.
Among the specific black religious intellectuals that I include in this grouping are Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Howard Thurman, Benjamin E. Mays, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Cleage Jr., C. Eric Lincoln, James Cone, and others. There are too many to name in this one essay. I would also link very closely with this group of thinkers, 19th century black nationalist thinkers, Henry McNeil Turner, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Alexander Crummell. Herein, I will use a number of typologies to aid in my description of the category of these figures, which situates them within the unique category of black religious intellectuals. The primary typologies that I use to develop this analysis include Peter J. Paris’s black religious leadership paradigm found in his work, Black Religious Leaders: Conflict In Unity, Cornel West’s examination of black intellectuals in Prophecy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, and James Cone’s discussion of the genealogy of black nationalist and integrationist leaders in Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream of Nightmare.
As corollary models to discussing the black religious intellectual, it is also necessary to examine three other related phenomena, which impact on the role and representation of these unique figures within the black protest tradition. These models and the previous ones mentioned earlier will also assist me in my analysis of how black religious intellectuals have been and can continue to be effective within doctrinal, pastoral, and ritualistic structures of conventional religious denominations. Lastly, these models serve to allow for a sound examination of how these particular intellectuals have embodied and represented, in diverse ways, the public intellectual who functions as the moral and social conscience of America. The models which I am suggesting here include Gayraud Wilmore’s discussion of the links between black religion and black radicalism in Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Examination of the Black Religious Experience in Religion; Dwight N. Hopkins’s discussion of black religion and black faith as public talk in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power; Cheryl J. Sanders’ depiction of the Black religious intellectual and the exilic tradition in her important work, Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture; and Willie James Jennings’ article discussing the dilemmas of the black religious intellectual in “The Burden of the Black Leader.”
Peter J. Paris, in Black Religious Leaders, establishes four leadership types that he argues can be applied to all black religious leaders, regardless of who they are. The types Paris mentions are the priestly, prophetic, political, and nationalistic. Paris defines the priestly type as being your conventional, conservative black preacher who functions mainly to administer the rituals of the church, safeguard the temple or the church, and attend to the spiritual needs of his or her congregation. He argues that the priestly type is the most prevalent type in America and is characterized by a non-threatening and accommodationist stance toward American society, choosing to stay within the narrow confines of church doctrine and biblical interpretation. [2]
By contrast, the prophetic type is in direct conflict with the priestly type due to its tendency to challenge American power elites to live up to the promises of equality and freedom as expressed in the nation’s most sacred documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Although all black religious leaders and intellectuals, be they prophetic of priestly, originate from the same origins of the black folk tradition as Sanders and West assert, Paris argues that the prophetic type differs in orientation. Prophetic black religious intellectuals and leaders still believe in the American dream but function as biblical prophets, in the spirit of Isaiah, proclaiming God’s truth in the hopes of pricking the consciences of whites, and thereby challenging white supremacy’s legitimacy. The 20th century prophetic type of black religious leaders, including Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesse Jackson, have focused strident attacks on American society’s complicity towards, tolerance of , and support for racism, segregation, and discrimination as the main targets of their admonitions. [3]
In regards to the political type of black religious leader and intellectual, Paris argues that most prophetic types eventually transition to this level of characterization. Political types who encompass prophetic tendencies are dulled somewhat in their criticisms as they are forced, by their expanded role, to embrace a larger constituency beyond the confines of the black church. Here they fall in a place of confinement, one of the paradoxes of the black religious intellectual, as espoused by Willie James Jennings in “The Burden of the Black Leader,” and are pulled at one end by their commitment to black equality and at the other end by their desire to find acceptance and applicability in either American democracy or black nationalism. This is indeed a precarious position to be in as it creates a peculiar double-consciousness on the part of these figures as they seek to balance these seemingly opposing selves. It is difficult for many to be political figures and prophetic figures at the same time. Some figures who most epitomize the political archetype, such as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Jesse Jackson have been, at one time or another, able to navigate through the murky waters of this identity in order to combine priestly, prophetic, and political characteristics into one unique amalgam. Other black religious leaders who have represented the political type that is inclusive of other types are figures such as William Gray III, Floyd Flake, Andrew Young, and Walter Fauntroy among others.[4]
The advantage of the political type is that especially given their prophetic and religious background, they function with the most contacts and networks across sacred and secular lines as well as lines of race, gender, class, nation, religion, etc. While they are confined in many ways to the democratic process, as predominately priestly types are to church laws and ecclesiastical traditions, they still function in a very unique place vis-à-vis most black religious figures. Certainly not a utopian position, as none of these types are, the political type is critical as it engages the black church as the center of the black public sphere, in dialogue and conversation, with the larger American society and global world.
Paris’s characterization of the nationalist type dovetails with James Cone’s depiction of the nationalist tradition inherent in African American intellectual history. Paris characterizes nationalist black religious intellectuals, such as Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, Alexander Crummell, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Albert Cleage Jr., and Malcolm X as being adversely critical of American society, to the point where they advocate segregation from whites due to their belief that there is no serious attempt or possibility for the mainstream culture to grant blacks unequivocal equality and freedom of opportunity. Paris and Cone’s interpretations of the nationalist tradition in black religious intellectual life contrasts, in many ways, with the integrationist tradition that the latter correspondingly discusses. [5]
For Cone, the integrationist tradition dated back to figures such as Frederick Douglass and also include luminaries such as Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin E. Mays, Howard Thurman, and Martin Luther King Jr. The idea that connects these thinkers is their belief in the potential of America to live up to the promises of equality and their strivings to ensure that freedom and equality are realized by African Americans and all people. Another important theme among integrationist black religious intellectuals, as is with their nationalist counterparts, is the significance of education to strivings toward black advancement. In Richard I. McKinney’s critical biography Moredcai, the Man and His Message: The Story of Mordecai Wyatt Johnson and Henry Young’s sketch of Johnson as a religious figure in Major Black Religious Leaders Since 1940, Mordecai Johnson is presented as a prophetic black religious intellectual who boldly holds on to his faith in American society while stressing the value of higher education as necessary to assist in the black acquisition of equality. Correspondingly, Benjamin E. Mays, in his revealing autobiography, Born To Rebel, expresses the importance of black history and culture to his own intellectual formation and uses education and character development as the cornerstones and signature markers of his legacies as Dean of the Howard School of Religion at Howard University and as President of Morehouse College.[6]
Mays’s molding of Morehouse men, support the claim that Young, Hopkins, and Jennings make in regards to the importance of the black church and black education in the character development of black Americans. One last thing must be understood about the integrationist and nationalist traditions and the same can be said for Paris’ black religious leadership typology: understanding of these two traditions entails the idea that one could not exist without the other, and that depending on the particular circumstance, many black religious intellectuals found it necessary to adopt varying degrees pf nationalistic and integrationist stances and approaches. As with Paris’s typology, most black religious leaders held a combination of the four types and only through a comprehensive examination of all four could an accurate assessment of each leader be arrived at.
The question of whether black religious intellectuals can be effective within the doctrinal, pastoral, and ritualistic structures of conventional religious denominations is an issue loaded with challenge and complexity. Dwight N. Hopkins, in Black Faith and Public Talk, accurately observes of his mentor James Cone, that the latter’s theory of black liberation theology gained some adherents during the black power era but has not gained complete acceptance within traditional black communities that operate predominately within the accommodationist and conservative confines of the Negro Church as advocated by E. Franklin Frazier in The Negro Church in America and, correspondingly critiqued by C. Eric Lincoln in The Black Church Since Frazier.[7]
Black theology originated out of the black power movement as its theological arm, as Gayraud Wilmore contends, alongside African American Studies. As Manning Marable eloquently states, in Wilmore’s edited work, African American Religious Studies: An Introductory Anthology, the paradox of the black church in being both progressive and conservative, radical and moderate, at the same time, produces another dilemma for the black religious intellectual in the pursuit of producing insightful and liberating religious thought, while attempting to operate within the confines of traditional religious denominations.[8]
In many ways, black religious intellectuals such as Howard Thurman have carved out a niche within these traditional denominations, assuming a double consciousness as Du Bois articulated and as Cone reasserts. Thurman’ s representation as a black religious intellectual met tremendous misunderstanding and opposition from traditional church leaders of the priestly type, while he simultaneously faced a similar ostracism and marginality from major civil rights organizations and leaders, even as he influenced much of that same leadership. It is this in-between place, characteristic of many black religious intellectuals, as Jennings discusses, that ascribes to them the volatile role as the representatives of black America who are simultaneously left vulnerable to criticism from within and without the black community. This criticism parallels Cornel West’s characterization of the black intellectual’s vocation, in The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual, sacred or secular, as one of “self-imposed marginality.” Certainly, transcendent figures such as Thurman understood this and decided to assume this particular undertaking of identity, regardless of the costs or consequences.
Often misunderstood, the burden of the black religious intellectual, whether one speaks of Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Albert Cleage Jr., Malcolm X, or Thurman, or any black theologian, signifies a situation where these leaders and thinkers press forward clutching to their belief that God ordained their visions, leadership, and theology. Ironically, as Jennings professes, it is this chaotic trial by fire that makes these leaders distinct in that it exists as their lives do in the public eye, be it the black public or the larger American or global public, elucidating their role and representation as public intellectuals. Many of these figures accept their fate relying on their individual relationship to God, even if others within their denominations and throughout various black communities question their legitimacy.[9]
As Henry Young denotes some black religious intellectuals such as Howard Thurman and Malcolm X discovered that they could not exist within traditional confines of the traditional black church, be it Muslim or Christian. Both Thurman and Malcolm had very diverse religious origins but soon found that their unique visions could not fit within the traditional confines of the religious denominations, which they had operated in and were similarly nurtured in. Thurman, grounded in the Black Baptist tradition, found that his visions of transcending the confines of racial segregation, sexism, and religious intolerance of the traditional black church required him to found his own interracial and interdenominational church in San Francisco in 1944. Furthermore, other influences such as mysticism and Gandhian nonviolence and pacifism indicated to him that he needed to move to higher ground so to speak.[10]
Malcolm, on the other hand, after absolving his connection with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, went on to found the Muslim Mosque Inc., in addition to the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Due to the Nation of Islam’s stance against involvement in politics, during the lifetime of Muhammad, and his own evolving global Pan-Africanist ideology, Malcolm realized that he could no longer be restricted by the boundaries firmly entrenched by the Nation of Islam, during that period. Malcolm’s abiding interest in Pan-Africanism as well as radicalism related to the radicalism of Cone and Albert Cleage Jr., creating a radical Pan-Africanism and laying the foundations for a radical critique of Christianity, which Cleage and Cone would advance. This interest in black radicalism and Pan-Africanism was not new to the black church. In terms of continuity, as Wilmore argues, black radicalism was inseparable from black religion since the nation’s founding and many 19th century black nationalists including Garvey, Turner, Crummell, and Blyden were adherents of some form of Christianity. This fact demonstrates that Black Christian Nationalism, and the apparent emphasis on manhood rights, bespeaks of a nascent form of Black Men’s Theology and opens the door to mine the literary texts of these figures which will in turn paves the way for serious intellectual and spiritual engagement with a Black Men’s Religious Studies. Furthermore, any variant of nationalism, such as radicalism or Pan-Africanism, could not exist without the influence of the black church. Within this context, as Louis DeCaro Jr., in On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X discusses, Malcolm established significant relationships with Christian nationalist thinkers such as Rev. Albert Cleage Jr., founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit. Some could arguably say Malcolm, and his protégé, the Hon. Louis Farrakhan, were as influenced by Christianity as they may certainly have influenced its development within black publics. [11]
These renewed relationships with Christian nationalists and proposed ones with civil rights leaders further distinguished Malcolm as a unique black religious intellectual, along the lines of a Gramscian “organic intellectual.” A challenge facing many black religious intellectuals today, particularly within black Christian denominations is the difficulty in navigating amidst the increasing levels of continuity and change existent between the Negro and the Black Church. This statement is presupposed by the idea that the contemporary Black church continues to exist in a state of “double consciousness,” unable to emerge with a clear identity as an institution. The closest likeness of some uniformity comes with the Mega-Church phenomena. The problem with the Mega Church is that it also faces an identity crisis as many pastors within its confines attempt to distance themselves from the social justice tradition so deeply ingrained in the black Christianity.
Lincoln and Young argue that the presence of aspects of the Negro Church within the emerging black church, which arose during the 1960s suggest that a close but tenuous relationship exists between the two. Taken a step further, the presence of remnants of the conservative and accommodationist Negro Church, at times competing with the direction and function of the black church, as represented through members and some preachers who are more inclined moreso to the priestly type, often caused conflict for unique black religious intellectuals such as Thurman and others. Although highly critical of the conservative nature of the black Christian church, the Nation of Islam experience of Malcolm X revealed the same conclusion: that conservatism was not the sole preserve of black Christian churches and that it contradicted the otherwise radical representation projected by that body. Discovering this contradiction as well as other questions concerning the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X set his sights on establishing an independent black religious and cultural vehicle and expanding his influence and platform as a viable and autonomous public intellectual.[12]
In addressing the role of black religious intellectuals as the natural embodiments of the public intellectual, who functions as moral and social conscience of America, Paris, Hopkins, and Wilmore argue that the black church has produced numerous types of black leaders, sacred and secular. Among this list include politicians, intellectuals, educators, and others. As one example of a black religious leader who represented a public intellectual and served as a bridge between the 19th and 20th century black protest traditions was Alexander Crummell. As William J. Moses’s Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History and Alfred Moss’s The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth, Crummell, an Episcopalian minister, spearheaded the founding of one of the first African American think tanks in the nation, the American Negro Academy. The ANA, located in Washington, D.C., represented an impressive collection of black public intellectuals including W.E.B Du Bois and had some continuity with 20th century religious historian and intellectual Vincent Harding’s Institute of the Black World, founded during the height of the black power era in 1969. Although there is more change than continuity between Crummell’s ANA and Harding’s IBW, the fact that these two black religious intellectuals had a huge impact on black public intellectual life, both in their participation in these groups and the influence they projected on subsequent generations of black public intellectuals, is one that must not go undocumented.[13]
Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber in A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious and Public Life demonstrate Thurman as being one of the prototypical black religious intellectuals who were truly public intellectuals. Despite popularly held and arguably accurate notions that there exists a crisis among black intellectuals leaders, Fluker and Tumber argue that Thurman never deserted his role as a public intellectual. Correspondingly, as Alton B. Pollard demonstrates, in his essay chapter, “Magnificient Manhood: The Transcendent Witness of Howard Thurman,” Thurman not only served as a bridge between the integrationist goals of the civil rights movement and the nationalist goals of the black power movement, he also nurtured numerous generations of civil rights leaders and black religious intellectuals such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and countless others.
Similarly, Jennings argues against the claim that there is a crisis within black public leadership. To this end, Jennings argues that most black public religious intellectuals are born in crisis and nurtured by it as Wilmore states with respect to the black church at large. Furthermore, as C. Eric Lincoln asserts in The Black Experience in Religion, since black preachers are the main figures within the black church, there is an incredible symbiotic relationship between the evolution of the black church, the emergence of the black preacher, and thus, the evolution of black religious intellectuals and the thought, and theology which is produced of them.[14]
In regards to the idea of black religious intellectuals as being the most representative public intellectuals in American society, Cone, Hopkins, Sanders, and West offer four important characterizations that can help bring about more understanding of this relationship between black religious leadership, black religious thought, public intellectuality, and black men’s theology and religious studies. Cone argues that both integrationists and nationalists are important so as to project the drive for black advancement to its greatest levels. He adds that if only one exists, then it will tend to be less effective. Both categories are needed to represent a comprehensive picture of black reality and life. There are three sides to the truth and the truth is usually found somewhere in the middle. The truth in terms of the black religious experience comes by using a comprehensive approach that demonstrates how nationalism and integrationism impact upon one another to depict more of a total picture of the black experience.[15]
Hopkins argues that black faith is public talk and that there is no separation between the secular and sacred as one discusses black religion, the activities of the black church, and black religious intellectual thought. Throughout the history and evolution of the black church and its preachers and religious intellectuals, the idea of using the church as a public faith institution has been ingrained since the inception of the black church in the days of the invisible institution. Before President Bush’s new “faith based initiative,” the black church and its leaders and intellectuals, historically performed every social, cultural, economic, political, and scholarly function that the black community needed. The black church, and the Negro church before it, provided for its members education programs such as the Boy Scouts and Rites of Passage programs; voter and economic assistance; marched against the injustices of segregation and police brutality; developed the cultural needs of the black community through plays and other mediums; produced leaders for the community of a secular and sacred nature, and performed many other vital functions. It has been in this environment that black men religious intellectuals, as well as women, have articulated religious thought and in the process espoused the rudiments of a relevant and multi-varied black men’s theology and religious orientation. In this manner, black men religious intellectuals have used the church as a platform and springboard for their roles and representations as public intellectuals.[16]
Cheryl J. Sanders’s essay, “Black Intellectuals and Storefront Religion in the Age of Black Consciousness,” in her larger work, Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture, sets up a method of characterizing black religious intellectuals by examining them through an exilic experience. Sanders argues that most black religious intellectuals, are perpetually conditioned by the fact that they are exiles in a strange land. This exilic experience she argues, conditions their relationship to mainstream American society as well as their relationship to various black communities. Furthermore, as Cone demonstrates, black religious intellectuals have usually taken one of two roads in their attack on racism and discrimination in American society: the integrationist path that affirms that black Americans can be both an American and a Negro or the nationalist approach which asserts the need to create a greater attachment to the exilic experience through separatist means.[17]
Similarly, religious philosopher Cornel West’s characterizations of black intellectuals in Prophecy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, is very applicable to the present discussion. West establishes four categories of black leadership, each grounded in the black religious tradition. Also, Sanders uses this typology to support her explanation of the exilic experience of black religious intellectuals. The first type West establishes is that of the exceptionalist who lauds black culture above all other cultures. The second type, as represented by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, is the acommodationist type who views black culture as pathological. The third type, represented by James Baldwin, illustrates the marginalist camp who view American society as oppositional and limiting. Lastly, West defines the humanist, which he places writer Ralph Ellison within, as a type that praises the contributions of black culture but fails to raise the culture above or beneath others, adopting a somewhat neutral stance.
Added to such a characterization of black religious intellectuals is the recent work of historian Clarence Taylor, Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight For Equality From Jim Crow To the 21st Century. Taylor offers a reassessment of the way we characterize who is a black religious intellectual, in an attempt to expand traditional notions to incorporate those black men intellectuals who held some sort of religious standpoint, even if they were not integrated within the black popular press or accepted within the traditional black church. This revisionist work, focusing on black men religious intellectuals such as Bishop Smallwood Williams and A. Phillip Randolph, appropriately leads us into a concluding discussion of how the black religious thought, of black men religious intellectuals, functions as the source-bed for the articulation of a relevant black men’s theology and black men’s religious studies[18]
This essay is only a beginning attempt to document the importance of black men religious intellectual’s thought to the development of black men’s religious studies for the academy and community and black men’s theology for the seminary and church. Both the similarities and differences between the religious study of black men and the study of their theology must be advanced and examined in greater detail. The necessary next step in this process involves continuing to unravel the complicated and multi-varied contours of the religious thought of all black men, regardless of class or status, sexual orientation, or political perspective. As this work is continually undertaken, the fields of black men’s religious studies and black men’s theology will take form and receive the intellectual and spiritual breath needed for life.
Bibliography
Cone, James. Malcolm & Martin & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. New York: Orbis
Books, 1992.
DeCaro, Louis, Jr. On The Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. New
York: New York University Press, 1996.
Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Church in America and C. Eric Lincoln, The Black
Church Since Frazier. New York: Schocken Books, 1974.
Hopkins, Dwight N. Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s
Black Theology and Black Power. New York: Orbis Books, 1999.
Jennings, Willie James. “The Burden of the Black Leader,” Christianity Today. 1988.
Lincoln. C. Eric. The Black Experience in Religion. Garden City, New York: Anchor
Books, 1974.
McKinney, Richard I. Mordecai, The Man and His Message: The Story of Mordecai
Wyatt Johnson. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1997.
Mays, Benjamin E. Born To Rebel: An Autobiography. Athens: University of Georgia,
2003.
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Moss, Alfred A. The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
Paris, Peter J. Black Religious Leaders: Unity in Conflict. Louisville: Westminister/
John Knox Press, 1991.
Sanders, Cheryl J. Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African
American Religion and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Taylor, Clarence. Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight For Equality From Jim Crow
To the 21st Century. New York: Routledge, 2002.
West, Cornel and Eddie Glaude, ed. African American Religious Thought: An Anthology.
Louisville: Westminister/John Know Press, 2003.
___________. “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” Cultural Critique. No. 1.
Autumn, 1985.
Wilmore, Gayraud. African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1989.
Young, Henry James. Major Black Religious Leaders Since 1940. Nashville; Abingdon,
1979.
Endnotes
[1] . Cornel West and Eddie Glaude, ed. African American Religious Thought: An Anthology. (Louisville: Westminister/John Know Press, 2003). xi-xxvi.
[2] . Peter J. Paris. Black Religious Leaders: Unity in Conflict. (Louisville: Westminister/John Know Press, 1991). 17-18.
[3] . Paris, Black Religious Leaders, 20-21.
[4] . Paris, Black Religious Leaders, 21-22.
[5] Paris, Black Religious Leaders, 22-28; James Cone. Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. (New York: Orbis, 1992). 1-17.
[6] . Richard I. McKinney. Mordecai, The Man and His Message: The Story of Mordecai Wyatt Johnson. (Washington, D.C: Howard University Press, 1997); Benjamin E. Mays. Born To Rebel: An Autobiography. (Athens: University of Georgia, 2003). 139-148; 234-236.
[7] . Dwight N. Hopkins. Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power. (New York: Orbis, 1999). 1-7; E. Franklin Frazier. The Negro Church in America and C. Eric Lincoln. The Black Church Since Frazier. (New York: Schocken Books, 1974).
[8] Gayraud Wilmore. African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989)
[9] . Cornel West, “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” Cultural Critique . No. 1 (Autumn, 1985). 109-124; Willie James Jennings, “The Burden of the Black Leader,” Christianity Today (1988).
[10] Young, Major Black Religious Leadersr Since 1940. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979), 46-53.
[11] Young, Major Black Religious Leaders, 73-80.
[12] . Louis DeCaro, Jr. On the Side of my People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
[13] . Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alfred A. Moss. The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).
[14] . C. Eric Lincoln. The Black Experience in Religion. (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1974).
[15] . Cone, Malcolm & Martin & America, 13-17.
[16] Hopkins, Black Faith and Public Talk, 1-3.
[17] Cheryl J. Sanders. Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 106-122.
[18] . Clarence Taylor. Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight For Equality From Jim Crow To The 21st Century. (New York: Routledge, 2002). 1-10.
By Dr. Zachery Williams
My argument herein is that there is an important relationship between the religious thought of black men religious intellectuals and thinkers on the one hand, and what I would call black men’s theology and what could be called black men’s religious studies. In fact, it is the black religious thought of black religious thinkers, broadly defined, that informs and undergirds both the areas of black men’s theology in the seminary and a black men’s religious studies in the academy. My goal in this essay is to develop a framework by which to link these various entities into a coherent whole. While I will not provide an exhaustive survey of black men’s religious thought or the entire spectrum of black religious intellectuals, I will offer a beginning exploration of the relationship between the two, utilizing the important work of a number of prominent black religious thinkers. Lastly, I intend to provide a brief assessment of the manner by which black men’s religious thought, and the intellectuals who develop that thought, contribute to the formation of both a black men’s theology and a black men’s religious studies.
The notion of who is considered a black religious intellectual and what that represents is an often precarious and frequently debated question. Recent scholars, most notably, Cornel West and Eddie Glaude and Clarence Taylor have argued for a reassessment of the category and definition of what constitutes a legitimate, authentic black religious intellectual. [1]By examining 20th century U.S. culture, one can identify various black intellectuals who are distinct from figures who are predominately clergy and or academicians or theologians. In this essay, I will examine a number of 20th century black intellectuals whose representation surpassed that of solely clergy or academicians to encompass characteristics of both, and even some instances, representations uniquely their own. The focus group of black religious intellectuals that I am examining are those with some religious bent, particularly as outlined in Henry J. Young’s Major Black Religious Leaders Since 1940; this group includes preachers, social philosophers, ministers, activists, educators, and others, be they Christian, Muslim, Christian nationalist, or other. In this sense, I use the term black religious intellectual to distinguish this group of intellectuals who combine various modes of thought and practice distinguishable in clergy, academicians, theologians, and activists but whom are distinct in their unique individual representation of these attributes and who differ in their representation from each individual group mentioned. Not all black clergy have been or identify as intellectuals and not all black intellectuals have encompassed or epitomized “religious” or morally prophetic selves to match accepted scholarly representations and functions. Furthermore, black men, not identified as preachers, pastors, or theologians, have as much of a relevant religious thought and understanding of theology, in their own right. This latter subject must be explored in much more detail at another time.
Among the specific black religious intellectuals that I include in this grouping are Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Howard Thurman, Benjamin E. Mays, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Cleage Jr., C. Eric Lincoln, James Cone, and others. There are too many to name in this one essay. I would also link very closely with this group of thinkers, 19th century black nationalist thinkers, Henry McNeil Turner, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Alexander Crummell. Herein, I will use a number of typologies to aid in my description of the category of these figures, which situates them within the unique category of black religious intellectuals. The primary typologies that I use to develop this analysis include Peter J. Paris’s black religious leadership paradigm found in his work, Black Religious Leaders: Conflict In Unity, Cornel West’s examination of black intellectuals in Prophecy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, and James Cone’s discussion of the genealogy of black nationalist and integrationist leaders in Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream of Nightmare.
As corollary models to discussing the black religious intellectual, it is also necessary to examine three other related phenomena, which impact on the role and representation of these unique figures within the black protest tradition. These models and the previous ones mentioned earlier will also assist me in my analysis of how black religious intellectuals have been and can continue to be effective within doctrinal, pastoral, and ritualistic structures of conventional religious denominations. Lastly, these models serve to allow for a sound examination of how these particular intellectuals have embodied and represented, in diverse ways, the public intellectual who functions as the moral and social conscience of America. The models which I am suggesting here include Gayraud Wilmore’s discussion of the links between black religion and black radicalism in Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Examination of the Black Religious Experience in Religion; Dwight N. Hopkins’s discussion of black religion and black faith as public talk in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power; Cheryl J. Sanders’ depiction of the Black religious intellectual and the exilic tradition in her important work, Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture; and Willie James Jennings’ article discussing the dilemmas of the black religious intellectual in “The Burden of the Black Leader.”
Peter J. Paris, in Black Religious Leaders, establishes four leadership types that he argues can be applied to all black religious leaders, regardless of who they are. The types Paris mentions are the priestly, prophetic, political, and nationalistic. Paris defines the priestly type as being your conventional, conservative black preacher who functions mainly to administer the rituals of the church, safeguard the temple or the church, and attend to the spiritual needs of his or her congregation. He argues that the priestly type is the most prevalent type in America and is characterized by a non-threatening and accommodationist stance toward American society, choosing to stay within the narrow confines of church doctrine and biblical interpretation. [2]
By contrast, the prophetic type is in direct conflict with the priestly type due to its tendency to challenge American power elites to live up to the promises of equality and freedom as expressed in the nation’s most sacred documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Although all black religious leaders and intellectuals, be they prophetic of priestly, originate from the same origins of the black folk tradition as Sanders and West assert, Paris argues that the prophetic type differs in orientation. Prophetic black religious intellectuals and leaders still believe in the American dream but function as biblical prophets, in the spirit of Isaiah, proclaiming God’s truth in the hopes of pricking the consciences of whites, and thereby challenging white supremacy’s legitimacy. The 20th century prophetic type of black religious leaders, including Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesse Jackson, have focused strident attacks on American society’s complicity towards, tolerance of , and support for racism, segregation, and discrimination as the main targets of their admonitions. [3]
In regards to the political type of black religious leader and intellectual, Paris argues that most prophetic types eventually transition to this level of characterization. Political types who encompass prophetic tendencies are dulled somewhat in their criticisms as they are forced, by their expanded role, to embrace a larger constituency beyond the confines of the black church. Here they fall in a place of confinement, one of the paradoxes of the black religious intellectual, as espoused by Willie James Jennings in “The Burden of the Black Leader,” and are pulled at one end by their commitment to black equality and at the other end by their desire to find acceptance and applicability in either American democracy or black nationalism. This is indeed a precarious position to be in as it creates a peculiar double-consciousness on the part of these figures as they seek to balance these seemingly opposing selves. It is difficult for many to be political figures and prophetic figures at the same time. Some figures who most epitomize the political archetype, such as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Jesse Jackson have been, at one time or another, able to navigate through the murky waters of this identity in order to combine priestly, prophetic, and political characteristics into one unique amalgam. Other black religious leaders who have represented the political type that is inclusive of other types are figures such as William Gray III, Floyd Flake, Andrew Young, and Walter Fauntroy among others.[4]
The advantage of the political type is that especially given their prophetic and religious background, they function with the most contacts and networks across sacred and secular lines as well as lines of race, gender, class, nation, religion, etc. While they are confined in many ways to the democratic process, as predominately priestly types are to church laws and ecclesiastical traditions, they still function in a very unique place vis-à-vis most black religious figures. Certainly not a utopian position, as none of these types are, the political type is critical as it engages the black church as the center of the black public sphere, in dialogue and conversation, with the larger American society and global world.
Paris’s characterization of the nationalist type dovetails with James Cone’s depiction of the nationalist tradition inherent in African American intellectual history. Paris characterizes nationalist black religious intellectuals, such as Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, Alexander Crummell, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Albert Cleage Jr., and Malcolm X as being adversely critical of American society, to the point where they advocate segregation from whites due to their belief that there is no serious attempt or possibility for the mainstream culture to grant blacks unequivocal equality and freedom of opportunity. Paris and Cone’s interpretations of the nationalist tradition in black religious intellectual life contrasts, in many ways, with the integrationist tradition that the latter correspondingly discusses. [5]
For Cone, the integrationist tradition dated back to figures such as Frederick Douglass and also include luminaries such as Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin E. Mays, Howard Thurman, and Martin Luther King Jr. The idea that connects these thinkers is their belief in the potential of America to live up to the promises of equality and their strivings to ensure that freedom and equality are realized by African Americans and all people. Another important theme among integrationist black religious intellectuals, as is with their nationalist counterparts, is the significance of education to strivings toward black advancement. In Richard I. McKinney’s critical biography Moredcai, the Man and His Message: The Story of Mordecai Wyatt Johnson and Henry Young’s sketch of Johnson as a religious figure in Major Black Religious Leaders Since 1940, Mordecai Johnson is presented as a prophetic black religious intellectual who boldly holds on to his faith in American society while stressing the value of higher education as necessary to assist in the black acquisition of equality. Correspondingly, Benjamin E. Mays, in his revealing autobiography, Born To Rebel, expresses the importance of black history and culture to his own intellectual formation and uses education and character development as the cornerstones and signature markers of his legacies as Dean of the Howard School of Religion at Howard University and as President of Morehouse College.[6]
Mays’s molding of Morehouse men, support the claim that Young, Hopkins, and Jennings make in regards to the importance of the black church and black education in the character development of black Americans. One last thing must be understood about the integrationist and nationalist traditions and the same can be said for Paris’ black religious leadership typology: understanding of these two traditions entails the idea that one could not exist without the other, and that depending on the particular circumstance, many black religious intellectuals found it necessary to adopt varying degrees pf nationalistic and integrationist stances and approaches. As with Paris’s typology, most black religious leaders held a combination of the four types and only through a comprehensive examination of all four could an accurate assessment of each leader be arrived at.
The question of whether black religious intellectuals can be effective within the doctrinal, pastoral, and ritualistic structures of conventional religious denominations is an issue loaded with challenge and complexity. Dwight N. Hopkins, in Black Faith and Public Talk, accurately observes of his mentor James Cone, that the latter’s theory of black liberation theology gained some adherents during the black power era but has not gained complete acceptance within traditional black communities that operate predominately within the accommodationist and conservative confines of the Negro Church as advocated by E. Franklin Frazier in The Negro Church in America and, correspondingly critiqued by C. Eric Lincoln in The Black Church Since Frazier.[7]
Black theology originated out of the black power movement as its theological arm, as Gayraud Wilmore contends, alongside African American Studies. As Manning Marable eloquently states, in Wilmore’s edited work, African American Religious Studies: An Introductory Anthology, the paradox of the black church in being both progressive and conservative, radical and moderate, at the same time, produces another dilemma for the black religious intellectual in the pursuit of producing insightful and liberating religious thought, while attempting to operate within the confines of traditional religious denominations.[8]
In many ways, black religious intellectuals such as Howard Thurman have carved out a niche within these traditional denominations, assuming a double consciousness as Du Bois articulated and as Cone reasserts. Thurman’ s representation as a black religious intellectual met tremendous misunderstanding and opposition from traditional church leaders of the priestly type, while he simultaneously faced a similar ostracism and marginality from major civil rights organizations and leaders, even as he influenced much of that same leadership. It is this in-between place, characteristic of many black religious intellectuals, as Jennings discusses, that ascribes to them the volatile role as the representatives of black America who are simultaneously left vulnerable to criticism from within and without the black community. This criticism parallels Cornel West’s characterization of the black intellectual’s vocation, in The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual, sacred or secular, as one of “self-imposed marginality.” Certainly, transcendent figures such as Thurman understood this and decided to assume this particular undertaking of identity, regardless of the costs or consequences.
Often misunderstood, the burden of the black religious intellectual, whether one speaks of Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Albert Cleage Jr., Malcolm X, or Thurman, or any black theologian, signifies a situation where these leaders and thinkers press forward clutching to their belief that God ordained their visions, leadership, and theology. Ironically, as Jennings professes, it is this chaotic trial by fire that makes these leaders distinct in that it exists as their lives do in the public eye, be it the black public or the larger American or global public, elucidating their role and representation as public intellectuals. Many of these figures accept their fate relying on their individual relationship to God, even if others within their denominations and throughout various black communities question their legitimacy.[9]
As Henry Young denotes some black religious intellectuals such as Howard Thurman and Malcolm X discovered that they could not exist within traditional confines of the traditional black church, be it Muslim or Christian. Both Thurman and Malcolm had very diverse religious origins but soon found that their unique visions could not fit within the traditional confines of the religious denominations, which they had operated in and were similarly nurtured in. Thurman, grounded in the Black Baptist tradition, found that his visions of transcending the confines of racial segregation, sexism, and religious intolerance of the traditional black church required him to found his own interracial and interdenominational church in San Francisco in 1944. Furthermore, other influences such as mysticism and Gandhian nonviolence and pacifism indicated to him that he needed to move to higher ground so to speak.[10]
Malcolm, on the other hand, after absolving his connection with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, went on to found the Muslim Mosque Inc., in addition to the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Due to the Nation of Islam’s stance against involvement in politics, during the lifetime of Muhammad, and his own evolving global Pan-Africanist ideology, Malcolm realized that he could no longer be restricted by the boundaries firmly entrenched by the Nation of Islam, during that period. Malcolm’s abiding interest in Pan-Africanism as well as radicalism related to the radicalism of Cone and Albert Cleage Jr., creating a radical Pan-Africanism and laying the foundations for a radical critique of Christianity, which Cleage and Cone would advance. This interest in black radicalism and Pan-Africanism was not new to the black church. In terms of continuity, as Wilmore argues, black radicalism was inseparable from black religion since the nation’s founding and many 19th century black nationalists including Garvey, Turner, Crummell, and Blyden were adherents of some form of Christianity. This fact demonstrates that Black Christian Nationalism, and the apparent emphasis on manhood rights, bespeaks of a nascent form of Black Men’s Theology and opens the door to mine the literary texts of these figures which will in turn paves the way for serious intellectual and spiritual engagement with a Black Men’s Religious Studies. Furthermore, any variant of nationalism, such as radicalism or Pan-Africanism, could not exist without the influence of the black church. Within this context, as Louis DeCaro Jr., in On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X discusses, Malcolm established significant relationships with Christian nationalist thinkers such as Rev. Albert Cleage Jr., founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit. Some could arguably say Malcolm, and his protégé, the Hon. Louis Farrakhan, were as influenced by Christianity as they may certainly have influenced its development within black publics. [11]
These renewed relationships with Christian nationalists and proposed ones with civil rights leaders further distinguished Malcolm as a unique black religious intellectual, along the lines of a Gramscian “organic intellectual.” A challenge facing many black religious intellectuals today, particularly within black Christian denominations is the difficulty in navigating amidst the increasing levels of continuity and change existent between the Negro and the Black Church. This statement is presupposed by the idea that the contemporary Black church continues to exist in a state of “double consciousness,” unable to emerge with a clear identity as an institution. The closest likeness of some uniformity comes with the Mega-Church phenomena. The problem with the Mega Church is that it also faces an identity crisis as many pastors within its confines attempt to distance themselves from the social justice tradition so deeply ingrained in the black Christianity.
Lincoln and Young argue that the presence of aspects of the Negro Church within the emerging black church, which arose during the 1960s suggest that a close but tenuous relationship exists between the two. Taken a step further, the presence of remnants of the conservative and accommodationist Negro Church, at times competing with the direction and function of the black church, as represented through members and some preachers who are more inclined moreso to the priestly type, often caused conflict for unique black religious intellectuals such as Thurman and others. Although highly critical of the conservative nature of the black Christian church, the Nation of Islam experience of Malcolm X revealed the same conclusion: that conservatism was not the sole preserve of black Christian churches and that it contradicted the otherwise radical representation projected by that body. Discovering this contradiction as well as other questions concerning the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X set his sights on establishing an independent black religious and cultural vehicle and expanding his influence and platform as a viable and autonomous public intellectual.[12]
In addressing the role of black religious intellectuals as the natural embodiments of the public intellectual, who functions as moral and social conscience of America, Paris, Hopkins, and Wilmore argue that the black church has produced numerous types of black leaders, sacred and secular. Among this list include politicians, intellectuals, educators, and others. As one example of a black religious leader who represented a public intellectual and served as a bridge between the 19th and 20th century black protest traditions was Alexander Crummell. As William J. Moses’s Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History and Alfred Moss’s The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth, Crummell, an Episcopalian minister, spearheaded the founding of one of the first African American think tanks in the nation, the American Negro Academy. The ANA, located in Washington, D.C., represented an impressive collection of black public intellectuals including W.E.B Du Bois and had some continuity with 20th century religious historian and intellectual Vincent Harding’s Institute of the Black World, founded during the height of the black power era in 1969. Although there is more change than continuity between Crummell’s ANA and Harding’s IBW, the fact that these two black religious intellectuals had a huge impact on black public intellectual life, both in their participation in these groups and the influence they projected on subsequent generations of black public intellectuals, is one that must not go undocumented.[13]
Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber in A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious and Public Life demonstrate Thurman as being one of the prototypical black religious intellectuals who were truly public intellectuals. Despite popularly held and arguably accurate notions that there exists a crisis among black intellectuals leaders, Fluker and Tumber argue that Thurman never deserted his role as a public intellectual. Correspondingly, as Alton B. Pollard demonstrates, in his essay chapter, “Magnificient Manhood: The Transcendent Witness of Howard Thurman,” Thurman not only served as a bridge between the integrationist goals of the civil rights movement and the nationalist goals of the black power movement, he also nurtured numerous generations of civil rights leaders and black religious intellectuals such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and countless others.
Similarly, Jennings argues against the claim that there is a crisis within black public leadership. To this end, Jennings argues that most black public religious intellectuals are born in crisis and nurtured by it as Wilmore states with respect to the black church at large. Furthermore, as C. Eric Lincoln asserts in The Black Experience in Religion, since black preachers are the main figures within the black church, there is an incredible symbiotic relationship between the evolution of the black church, the emergence of the black preacher, and thus, the evolution of black religious intellectuals and the thought, and theology which is produced of them.[14]
In regards to the idea of black religious intellectuals as being the most representative public intellectuals in American society, Cone, Hopkins, Sanders, and West offer four important characterizations that can help bring about more understanding of this relationship between black religious leadership, black religious thought, public intellectuality, and black men’s theology and religious studies. Cone argues that both integrationists and nationalists are important so as to project the drive for black advancement to its greatest levels. He adds that if only one exists, then it will tend to be less effective. Both categories are needed to represent a comprehensive picture of black reality and life. There are three sides to the truth and the truth is usually found somewhere in the middle. The truth in terms of the black religious experience comes by using a comprehensive approach that demonstrates how nationalism and integrationism impact upon one another to depict more of a total picture of the black experience.[15]
Hopkins argues that black faith is public talk and that there is no separation between the secular and sacred as one discusses black religion, the activities of the black church, and black religious intellectual thought. Throughout the history and evolution of the black church and its preachers and religious intellectuals, the idea of using the church as a public faith institution has been ingrained since the inception of the black church in the days of the invisible institution. Before President Bush’s new “faith based initiative,” the black church and its leaders and intellectuals, historically performed every social, cultural, economic, political, and scholarly function that the black community needed. The black church, and the Negro church before it, provided for its members education programs such as the Boy Scouts and Rites of Passage programs; voter and economic assistance; marched against the injustices of segregation and police brutality; developed the cultural needs of the black community through plays and other mediums; produced leaders for the community of a secular and sacred nature, and performed many other vital functions. It has been in this environment that black men religious intellectuals, as well as women, have articulated religious thought and in the process espoused the rudiments of a relevant and multi-varied black men’s theology and religious orientation. In this manner, black men religious intellectuals have used the church as a platform and springboard for their roles and representations as public intellectuals.[16]
Cheryl J. Sanders’s essay, “Black Intellectuals and Storefront Religion in the Age of Black Consciousness,” in her larger work, Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture, sets up a method of characterizing black religious intellectuals by examining them through an exilic experience. Sanders argues that most black religious intellectuals, are perpetually conditioned by the fact that they are exiles in a strange land. This exilic experience she argues, conditions their relationship to mainstream American society as well as their relationship to various black communities. Furthermore, as Cone demonstrates, black religious intellectuals have usually taken one of two roads in their attack on racism and discrimination in American society: the integrationist path that affirms that black Americans can be both an American and a Negro or the nationalist approach which asserts the need to create a greater attachment to the exilic experience through separatist means.[17]
Similarly, religious philosopher Cornel West’s characterizations of black intellectuals in Prophecy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, is very applicable to the present discussion. West establishes four categories of black leadership, each grounded in the black religious tradition. Also, Sanders uses this typology to support her explanation of the exilic experience of black religious intellectuals. The first type West establishes is that of the exceptionalist who lauds black culture above all other cultures. The second type, as represented by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, is the acommodationist type who views black culture as pathological. The third type, represented by James Baldwin, illustrates the marginalist camp who view American society as oppositional and limiting. Lastly, West defines the humanist, which he places writer Ralph Ellison within, as a type that praises the contributions of black culture but fails to raise the culture above or beneath others, adopting a somewhat neutral stance.
Added to such a characterization of black religious intellectuals is the recent work of historian Clarence Taylor, Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight For Equality From Jim Crow To the 21st Century. Taylor offers a reassessment of the way we characterize who is a black religious intellectual, in an attempt to expand traditional notions to incorporate those black men intellectuals who held some sort of religious standpoint, even if they were not integrated within the black popular press or accepted within the traditional black church. This revisionist work, focusing on black men religious intellectuals such as Bishop Smallwood Williams and A. Phillip Randolph, appropriately leads us into a concluding discussion of how the black religious thought, of black men religious intellectuals, functions as the source-bed for the articulation of a relevant black men’s theology and black men’s religious studies[18]
This essay is only a beginning attempt to document the importance of black men religious intellectual’s thought to the development of black men’s religious studies for the academy and community and black men’s theology for the seminary and church. Both the similarities and differences between the religious study of black men and the study of their theology must be advanced and examined in greater detail. The necessary next step in this process involves continuing to unravel the complicated and multi-varied contours of the religious thought of all black men, regardless of class or status, sexual orientation, or political perspective. As this work is continually undertaken, the fields of black men’s religious studies and black men’s theology will take form and receive the intellectual and spiritual breath needed for life.
Bibliography
Cone, James. Malcolm & Martin & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. New York: Orbis
Books, 1992.
DeCaro, Louis, Jr. On The Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. New
York: New York University Press, 1996.
Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Church in America and C. Eric Lincoln, The Black
Church Since Frazier. New York: Schocken Books, 1974.
Hopkins, Dwight N. Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s
Black Theology and Black Power. New York: Orbis Books, 1999.
Jennings, Willie James. “The Burden of the Black Leader,” Christianity Today. 1988.
Lincoln. C. Eric. The Black Experience in Religion. Garden City, New York: Anchor
Books, 1974.
McKinney, Richard I. Mordecai, The Man and His Message: The Story of Mordecai
Wyatt Johnson. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1997.
Mays, Benjamin E. Born To Rebel: An Autobiography. Athens: University of Georgia,
2003.
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Moss, Alfred A. The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
Paris, Peter J. Black Religious Leaders: Unity in Conflict. Louisville: Westminister/
John Knox Press, 1991.
Sanders, Cheryl J. Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African
American Religion and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Taylor, Clarence. Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight For Equality From Jim Crow
To the 21st Century. New York: Routledge, 2002.
West, Cornel and Eddie Glaude, ed. African American Religious Thought: An Anthology.
Louisville: Westminister/John Know Press, 2003.
___________. “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” Cultural Critique. No. 1.
Autumn, 1985.
Wilmore, Gayraud. African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1989.
Young, Henry James. Major Black Religious Leaders Since 1940. Nashville; Abingdon,
1979.
Endnotes
[1] . Cornel West and Eddie Glaude, ed. African American Religious Thought: An Anthology. (Louisville: Westminister/John Know Press, 2003). xi-xxvi.
[2] . Peter J. Paris. Black Religious Leaders: Unity in Conflict. (Louisville: Westminister/John Know Press, 1991). 17-18.
[3] . Paris, Black Religious Leaders, 20-21.
[4] . Paris, Black Religious Leaders, 21-22.
[5] Paris, Black Religious Leaders, 22-28; James Cone. Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. (New York: Orbis, 1992). 1-17.
[6] . Richard I. McKinney. Mordecai, The Man and His Message: The Story of Mordecai Wyatt Johnson. (Washington, D.C: Howard University Press, 1997); Benjamin E. Mays. Born To Rebel: An Autobiography. (Athens: University of Georgia, 2003). 139-148; 234-236.
[7] . Dwight N. Hopkins. Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power. (New York: Orbis, 1999). 1-7; E. Franklin Frazier. The Negro Church in America and C. Eric Lincoln. The Black Church Since Frazier. (New York: Schocken Books, 1974).
[8] Gayraud Wilmore. African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989)
[9] . Cornel West, “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” Cultural Critique . No. 1 (Autumn, 1985). 109-124; Willie James Jennings, “The Burden of the Black Leader,” Christianity Today (1988).
[10] Young, Major Black Religious Leadersr Since 1940. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979), 46-53.
[11] Young, Major Black Religious Leaders, 73-80.
[12] . Louis DeCaro, Jr. On the Side of my People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
[13] . Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alfred A. Moss. The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).
[14] . C. Eric Lincoln. The Black Experience in Religion. (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1974).
[15] . Cone, Malcolm & Martin & America, 13-17.
[16] Hopkins, Black Faith and Public Talk, 1-3.
[17] Cheryl J. Sanders. Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 106-122.
[18] . Clarence Taylor. Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight For Equality From Jim Crow To The 21st Century. (New York: Routledge, 2002). 1-10.
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