One day I’ll write about my journey to a loving Black church in southern Middle Tennessee, but not today. My only preliminary today involves what a white man is doing in the pulpit of an otherwise Black church.
When I started going to church here, I never dreamed of preaching or teaching. But you know how the Lord speaks? The Lord spoke to the pastor that I should preach. But I told her and the Lord no. Way too much bad historical precedent. People need their own spaces.1 She’d pause, taking in what I said, and respond, “No, the Lord told me . . .”
So here I am, preaching to my friends at a beautiful church.
Doing it fulfills, in a small and unexpected way, a longstanding dream. Why do almost all churches resist learning about and implementing at least some of the great political theology that has come out in the past almost hundred years? Are we still intent on ceding to oppressive governments the political callings that Jesus and his first disciples embraced?
But dangerous times can lead us in new directions. My talk two Sundays ago focused on Louisiana v. Callais, decided less than a month earlier. We went over the Supreme Court decision’s effects: the immediate gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the longer-term eradication of Black officeholding. My focus was on St. Paul’s approach to the same kind of covenantal backsliding among the Galatian churches.
In this video, I tie my recorded talk to the slideshow I was presenting then to demonstrate those parallels better. My talk distills my article on this subject and modifies it for the pulpit—and for an informed and practicing Christian audience.
In truth, I didn’t really preach much the other Sunday. I taught. As I wrapped up, I knew that the pastor would need to give the call to prayer, to faith, and to action in response to the Court’s wholesale attack on African-American voting rights, and the congregation would need to discuss it. And that’s what we did.
Above: a photo from my time at the May 16 All Roads Lead to the South rally in Montgomery, Alabama.
See gen. Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, (Princeton University Press, 2006).
