Modern black church shuns King's message
By John Blake
(CNN) -- In a stinging passage from a "Letter from
Birmingham City Jail," the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. condemned white
churches for rejecting his pleas for support.
Popular pastors such as Bishop T.D. Jakes have built megachurches and empires with the prosperity message.
"In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have
watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious
irrelevancies," King wrote from jail during the 1963 Birmingham,
Alabama, demonstrations.
The contemporary white church has
largely accepted King as a religious hero. Yet some observers say there
is one religious community that continues to shun King -- the largest
black churches.
Forty years after his death, King remains a prophet without honor in the institution that nurtured him, some black preachers and scholars say.
They also say King's "prophetic" model of ministry -- one that
confronted political and economic institutions of power -- has been
sidelined by the prosperity gospel.
Prosperity ministers preach
that God rewards the faithful with wealth and spiritual power.
Prosperity pastors such as Bishop T.D. Jakes have become the most
popular preachers in the black church. They've also become brands.
They've built megachurches and business empires with the prosperity
message.
Black prophetic pastors rarely fill the pews like other
pastors, though, because their message is so inflammatory, says Henry
Wheeler, a church historian.Prophetic pastors like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, often enrage people because they proclaim God's judgment on nations, he says.
"It's dangerous to be prophetic," said Wheeler, who is also president
of the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana.
"I don't know many prophetic preachers who are driving big cars and
living very comfortably. You don't generally build huge churches by
making folks uncomfortable on Sunday morning," he said.
The
prosperity gospel started as a fringe doctrine in the black church. It
was pioneered by "Rev. Ike," a prosperity televangelist with a
pompadour who boasted during his heyday in the 1970s that "my garages
runneth over."
Jonathan Walton, author of "Watch This!
Televangelism and African American Religious Culture," says that
although people may have chuckled at Ike's flamboyance, his theology
exerts more influence in the modern black church than King's.
"King got the glory and the history books, but ... [Ike has] got the
numbers," said Walton, who is also an assistant professor of religious
studies at the University of California, Riverside.
Black prosperity preachers say their message is not based on greed, though, but self-help.
Bishop Paul Morton, senior pastor of Greater St. Stephens Full Gospel
Church in New Orleans, Louisiana, says that teaching black people
better money management is the "next dimension" of King's ministry.
"The Bible said that the poor we will always have with us," he said.
"It's up to us to bring ourselves out of the curse of poverty."
Morton was the only black prosperity preacher contacted who agreed to
talk about King's ministry. Many of the black church's most popular
prosperity preachers -- the Rev. Creflo Dollar of Atlanta, Georgia; the
Rev. Fred Price of Los Angeles, California; and Bishop Keith Butler of
Detroit, Michigan -- all declined.
Jakes, the most popular
prosperity preacher (he made the cover of Time magazine in 2001),
declined to talk as well. He did, however, address his views on social
justice in August on "Religion & Ethics," a PBS news program.
"I'm not against marching," Jakes said. "But in the '60s, the challenge
of the black church was to march. And there are times now perhaps that
we may need to march. But there's more facing us than social justice.
There's personal responsibility, motivating and equipping people to
live the best lives that they can."
The debate between self-help and political activism is nothing new in
the black community. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois clashed
over the issue at the beginning of the 20th century. Most black
prophetic teachers teach self-help along with activism.
King was caught in the middle of this debate early in his ministry.
King became prominent after leading the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956,
but he was already gaining a name for himself in the National Baptist
Convention, the largest black church organization in the nation.
King wanted to use the convention as an institutional base for the
movement. But his tactics -- civil disobedience, publicly confronting
segregationists -- were repudiated by convention leaders and the Rev.
J.H. Jackson, the convention president, says Wheeler, the church
historian.
"He thought that if blacks were good citizens, worked
hard and did what was expected, our rights will come; we would prove
out merit," Wheeler said.
In 1961, King tried to orchestrate the
election of a leader to replace Jackson. He and a group of black
ministers attempted to vote Jackson out of office at the convention's
annual meeting. It was a disaster.
According to Taylor Branch's
Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Parting the Waters: America in the King
Years," ministers exchanged blows. One lost three teeth. Another was
killed when his skull was fractured. Riot police were called out to
separate the warring pastors.
Jackson kicked King out of the
convention and held onto power. The pastors who aligned themselves with
King formed their own group, the Progressive National Baptist
Convention. The schism remains today.
Wheeler says the black
church's rejection of King wasn't confined to its leadership. Most
people in the pews didn't want to get involved. The movement was driven
primarily by younger people.
Fear was the primary reason, he says.
"We forget that people were getting killed, churches being burned," he
said. "It was the common understanding that things were not going to
change, that people were getting killed for nothing."
A new
generation of prophetic ministers in the black church is now trying to
do what King once attempted: gain a voice in the establishment.
Four years ago, a group of them formed the Samuel DeWitt Proctor
Conference. Proctor was a scholar and college president who was active
in the civil rights movement.
The annual conference attempts to preserve the prophetic voice of black
churches by bringing like-minded pastors together for support and
advice.
A few prophetic pastors have even talked about taking
another approach to raising their profile in the black church:
television, says Lawrence Mamiya, a professor of religion at Vassar
College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
"Some of them have talked
about the need to get on television and try to counter the
televangelists, but I don't know of any social justice preacher who has
a broad television audience," he said.
At least one young prophetic minister has found a prominent place in the public eye.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in
Atlanta, where King preached, says that prosperity preaching is not
just a distortion of Jesus' message but a betrayal of the black
church's heritage. The black church was formed by slaves who saw Jesus'
message as a tool for social justice.
"The prophetic voice of
the black church is the very reason for its being," Warnock said. "The
only reason that there's such a thing as the black church is because of
the question of freedom, justice and equal access."
Walton, the
University of California scholar, says contemporary black churchgoers
have now embraced another mission: equal access to wealth. "It's the
theological doctrine of American culture," he said.
King's voice
may ring out in the history books, but it no longer rings out in the
black pews. Walton says the battle between the prophetic and prosperity
ministers in the black church is over for now.
The Rev. Ikes have won.
"Many Americans give lip service
to entering the social justice arena and speaking out against the
economic and politically powerful," Walton said, "but very few of us
are willing to pay the price."
"We like to identify with Dr. King in theory, though we emulate Rev. Ike in practice."
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher (1788-1860)
