Southern Baptist Convergence by Molly Worthen in the New York Times

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African-American Protestant Christians may share some basic evangelical theology with their white brothers and sisters, but do not share the same socio-political outlook with them..."To many African-American Protestants, evangelical and the Christian Right remain white words, and their voting record proves it...Black Protestants have good cause to eye Republicans warily...At a seminary best known for teaching biblical inerrancy and prophecies of Armageddon, [Tony Evans] wrote his doctoral thesis on James Cone, the dean of black liberation theology, a school of thought that critiques unjust social and economic conditions through the lens of the gospel."  
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via New York Times Blog
Southern Baptist Convergence
By MOLLY WORTHEN

Fred Luter, pastor of the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, delivering a sermon on June 3.

Gerald Herbert/Associated PressThe secular media usually ignores the thousands of pastors, missionaries and church volunteers who gather every summer for the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. This year is different. Everyone from PBS to the Huffington Post is buzzing with anticipation — and not because they are awaiting the tedious discussion of committee reports and budgets necessary to manage the country’s largest evangelical denomination. The reason for all the excitement is this: the 2012 convention, which opens Tuesday in New Orleans, will elect a black man as president for the first time in Southern Baptist history. This is no small thing for a denomination that separated in 1845 from its northern brethren in order to defend the right of Southern slaveholders to serve as missionaries.Fred Luter, the presumptive nominee and pastor of New Orleans’ own Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, said that his imminent election marks “a new day in the Southern Baptist Convention.” The current president, fellow New Orleans pastor David Crosby, called the vote “a great, hopeful, powerful message to our city, our culture, our convention and our country.” No one claims that the election will usher in a colorblind Christian utopia. “We have a long, long way to go in America as far as racial reconciliation,” Luter told PBS, and just last month, Richard Land, one of the S.B.C.’s most prominent leaders, earned a formal church reprimand for calling racism a “myth.”Yet there is a more fundamental question that lurks behind this historic moment. Is a “black evangelical” a contradiction in terms?In recent years, conservative white Protestants have made a special effort to reach out to black believers who share their views on theology and social mores — all the more so as Republicans gear up to woo the “black vote” in November. After all, pollsters have found that black Protestants often agree with white evangelicals on the importance of religious faith and the sinfulness of homosexual behavior. They are no great supporters of abortion rights. They ought to be natural allies in the fight to “defend the family” and preserve America from the forces of secular humanism.Yet to many African-American Protestants, “evangelical” and “the Christian Right” remain white words, and their voting record proves it. Even if we discount the special attraction that Barack Obama held for African-American voters and look back to the 2004 presidential election, we see that 83 percent of black Protestants who attended church weekly voted Democratic, and 92 percent of those who were less observant went for Kerry. Karl Rove’s strategy to mobilize the evangelical vote did not work on them.

Black Protestants have good cause to eye Republicans warily.

The reasons for their alienation, rooted in history, are still with us today. Black Protestants may affirm Christ’s divinity, the Bible’s literal authority, and the other basic doctrines that white conservatives preach. But a statement of creed is not the same thing as lived religion. In many black churches, the crucible of slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement has forged these doctrines into a theology quite different from the cocktail of personal moralism, prophecy and Christian libertarianism that has come to preoccupy the Christian right. If conservative evangelicals are serious about making common political cause with black Protestants, they must revise their expectation that a free market and and a population that obeys their particular reading of scripture will correct the injustices ingrained in American society. They must rethink their approach to America’s history and its modern-day problems.Black Protestants have good cause to eye Republicans warily and mistrust the label “evangelical”: the Christian right’s concerns do not match their own experience or priorities. Tony Evans, pastor of the Dallas megachurch Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, is as a good candidate as any to represent “black evangelicalism”: he was the first African-American to earn a doctorate from the Dallas Theological Seminary, a bastion of fundamentalism. There he found that he “was getting evangelical training, but on the other hand, I was in this social reality, and I didn’t see them coming together,” he told me when I visited his church a couple of years ago.At a seminary best known for teaching biblical inerrancy and prophecies of Armageddon, Evans wrote his doctoral thesis on James Cone, the dean of black liberation theology, a school of thought that critiques unjust social and economic conditions through the lens of the gospel. Today Evans spends more time working to keep troubled kids and teenagers in school and drug-free through his ministry, The Urban Alternative, than he does picking fights over classic evangelical obsessions like the theory of evolution. Evans is no liberal — he favors faith-based activism over government intervention and recently criticized President Obama for abandoning the Defense of Marriage Act — but as Evans explains it, “as a black evangelical, I live in two worlds. That’s a tension for me.”Conservative black Protestants and the Christian Right also have different memories of American history. While David Barton and other amateur evangelical historians have baptized the founding fathers as orthodox architects of a new Zion, African-Americans remember them as the authors of the Three-Fifths Compromise. “For far too long Anglo Christians have wrapped the Christian faith in the American flag, often creating a civil religion that is foreign to the way God intended His church to function,” Evans writesin his book, “Oneness Embraced.” For black Christians, American history is not a narrative of decline from an arcadia of Sunday family devotionals andMcGuffey Readers to the godless fleshpots of modern America. It is a narrative of liberation that is not yet complete.These divergent understandings of history have amplified disagreement over what it means to follow Jesus’ and the prophets’ command to “set at liberty those who are oppressed.” There is a cliché that white evangelicals are too busy straining toward heaven to care about social justice here and now. This is unfair. Even the most Apocalypse-obsessed preachers have had a heart for the underprivileged: Dwight Moody — a 19^th-century evangelist and the spiritual grandfather of the “Left Behind” novels chronicling the end times —founded a school for orphans, the children of slaves and other needy students. William Jennings Bryan, the creationist anti-hero of the Scopes trial, was a progressive politician who opposed the laissez-faire policies of his day.In the years since World War II, conservative evangelicals’ commitment to “compassion ministry” has mushroomed. The country’s marquee megachurches earmark large portions of their budgets and volunteer manpower for services to their local communities and relief work abroad. Evangelical charities like World Vision International, Samaritan’s Purse and Compassion International contribute millions to disaster relief, child welfare and economic development all over the world. Habitat for Humanity was partly the brainchild of a Southern Baptist who founded an interracial communal farm in Georgia (although some neighbors — probably God-fearing evangelicals too — were not so fond of the idea). What is all this, if not proof that the supposed foot soldiers of the Christian right are working to liberate the poor and oppressed?It all depends on what you mean by liberation. The conservative media guru Glenn Beck once warned his followers: “I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words.” Beck’s main target was that politically inconvenient liberation theologian, Jeremiah Wright, but he was on to something. In the early decades of the last century, white Protestants who embraced modern science and the latest biblical criticism also began to stress humanitarian work over evangelism. In the 1950s and 1960s, they applauded Washington’s role in expanding the welfare safety net and legislating against discrimination — while many of their conservative brethren lamented the government hubris that removed prayer and scripture from classrooms, upended traditional social hierarchies and “liberated” American public life from the authority of Christianity. To conservatives, such liberation was in fact a kind of bondage: “social justice” became code for “liberals who abandon the Bible and embrace atheistic Big Brother.”

It is fair to say that for most black Protestants — conservative and liberal — “social justice” remains one of Christ’s core commands.

Few evangelicals deny that the Bible has social implications, but “the apostles launched no social reform movement,”writes R. Albert Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the S.B.C.’s flagship seminary. “Instead, they preached the Gospel of Christ and planted Gospel churches. Our task is to follow Christ’s command and the example of the apostles,” he added. Despite the efforts of some evangelicals to combine conservative theology with progressive politics — or at least contest the notion that Jesus opposed the minimum wage — those evangelicals with the most political clout have helped turn the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt into a pseudo-religion with its own Holy Trinity: the flag, the traditional family and the free market.It is always risky to generalize about the so-called Black Church, a wildly diverse faith community whose representatives range from the civil rights hero Andrew Young to the prosperity-preaching televangelist Creflo Dollar. Yet it is fair to say that for most black Protestants — conservative and liberal — “social justice” remains one of Christ’s core commands. Preaching the gospel includes challenging an unjust social order that first condoned slavery and still traps African-Americans in a web of inequality and prejudice. While conservative white evangelicals have tended to focus their compassion ministry on caring for individuals, black Christians are more likely to locate the sources of injustice in social structures as well as in the hearts of sinners.Corporate sins — institutionalized racism and economic inequalities enshrined in tax codes, the justice system and the distribution of social services — demand repentance. Federal law and government institutions have perpetuated great wrongs in the past, and some black Christians, like Evans, believe that the church is the best agent of social transformation. But many others will never forget that the civil rights movement owed as much to Supreme Court decisions and federal legislation as it did to grassroots cultural change. This legacy encourages them to see “big government” as a crucial ally in reform, and to question the Christian Right’s vision of Washington as a socialist hydra that strangles freedom. “It’s not enough to talk about what black folks ought to do,” said Cameron Madison Alexander, pastor of Antioch Baptist Church North in Atlanta (where former presidential candidate Herman Cain  is a member). “We have to also look at what government is not doing to ensure fairness and equal opportunity. God is on the side of the least of these.”Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is not quite “the most segregated hour” that it was in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s time, and white evangelical churches deserve praise for their growing proportion of nonwhite members (the Southern Baptists now claim 20 percent, up from just 5 percent in 1990). At the same time, genuine diversity means more than a polychromatic group photo at the church picnic. It is a matter of ideas as well as color. White evangelicalism would not be the vibrant religious culture it is today if white Christians in the Old South had not borrowed freely from the music and worship style of slaves. Their modern descendants should renew that receptive spirit and take seriously the task of reading the Bible and considering American history through nonwhite eyes. As the scholar C. Eric Lincoln once wrote, “black theology is in some sense what is missing from white theology.”Molly Worthen will be an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this fall.