On Religion - Call and Response on the State of the Black Church - NYTimes.com
ON RELIGION
Call and Response on the State of the Black Church
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: April 16, 2010
In the first decade of the American nation, a former slave turned itinerant minister by the name of Richard Allen found himself preaching to a growing number of blacks in Philadelphia. He came to both a religious and organizational revelation. “I saw the necessity,” he later wrote, “of erecting a place of worship for the colored people.”
Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a religion professor at Princeton, found himself “in the firestorm” with his essay “The Black Church Is Dead.”
Allen’s inspiration ultimately took the forms of Bethel African Church, founded in 1794, and the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, established in 1799. As much as it can be dated to anything, the emergence of a formal African-American Christianity can be dated to Allen’s twin creations.
Over more than two centuries since then, the Black Church has become a proper noun, a fixture, a seeming monolith in American society. Its presence is as prevalent as film clips of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech and contestants on “American Idol” indulging in the gospel style of melisma.
In the conventional wisdom that accompanied the popular imagery, the Black Church was regarded by insider and outsider, by ally and opponent, as a fount of progressive politics expressed through the prophetic tradition of Moses, Amos, Isaiah and Jesus.
Now a young scholar has taken a rhetorical wrecking ball to the monolith, and the reverberations are rippling through religious and academic circles of African-Americans. To mix the metaphor, the broader public has been allowed to eavesdrop on the theological equivalent of a black barbershop, a place of glorious disputation that is usually kept out of white earshot.
The debate took off in February when The Huffington Post published an essay by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. , a professor of religion at Princeton, under the deliberately provocative headline “The Black Church Is Dead.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eddie-glaude-jr-phd/the-black-church-is-dead_b_473815.html
Ficklin Media Note: The Black Church is Dead for some and alive for others. There are more rich Black folks than ever before. There are more Black folks in prison than ever before. There are more Black college graduates living than ever before. The high school drop out rate for black students has possibly never been higher. These are the best of times and the worst of times.
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