Reports of The Black Church’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

An article on the supposed decline of black urban churches really, really misses the mark.

First Baptist Church in Deanwood, Washington, D.C. Credit: E.L. Malvaney on Flickr

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“Man just ain’t no abstraction, he’s mixed as a downhome stew and that’s what makes him interesting. Some of the nastiest farts I ever had to smell bloomed during a solemn church service.”

This is one of my favorite quotes from Ralph Ellison, and I’m reminded of it every time I hear people use exalted, monolithic terms in reference to dynamic, if not fallible figures: The Black Community, The Barbershop, The Black Man, The Black Woman, Hip Hop, Touré. My favorite is The Black Church, one of the most mysterious and misunderstood of institutions.

To that end, I was tickled to read “In Changing Neighborhoods, Black Churches Face an Identity Crisis,” a gentrification tale set in Washington, D.C. about the demise of black churches, in The Atlantic earlier this month.

From the headline you’d guess correctly that this is a story about how black churches are in the unenviable position of having to train their identities to match those of white newcomers, or else die. The article fails to treat the black church seriously as a neighborhood or city fixture that helped spawn and shape some of the very policies that made gentrification possible. Instead it clings to a caricature, something of a Civil Rights action figure with a drawstring that, when pulled, will cause it to clap its hands, roll its eyes and begin speaking in tongues.

The author, Alessandra Ram, positions The Black Church as a sitcom (Amen!) that’s about to get cancelled, replaced by some cool, new foodie reality show. But The Black Church is not a program. It is a network, and just like TV networks have changed their format for wider circulation, The Black Church has done the same.

You wouldn’t know that from Ram’s article, though. Black churches deserve serious evaluation and critique, as do the impacts of gentrification, but the piece enlightens readers on neither. Gentrification did not do the black church in; in fact, the black church made it possible for a white woman to move into a previously segregated neighborhood without it being bombed or terrorized.

“Today, the black church is in crisis,” we read. Last I checked, all churches are having problems, but I wanted to make sure there wasn’t some great rebound that enraptured every church except the black ones. I talked to my dad, who has been at the head of black churches as long as I’ve been alive and is currently an executive secretary with the National Baptist Convention.

“The historic Black Church has always been in crisis by virtue of the fact of its birth from the cultural soil of institutional racism and segregation,” he told me. “As long as there is racism and discrimination, the black church will be in crisis because of the push back of those who fight hard against the advancement and empowerment of people of color. A crisis, however, does not mean that the historic black church is virtually dead.”

Ram certainly never addresses these burdens, except in ancient context. But to be clear, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t mistaken that The Great Gentrification didn’t actually do what decades of Black Codes, Jim Crow, KKK bombings, burnt crosses and economic inequity couldn’t do: Kill off black churches. So I asked Bryan Lee, vice president of the Louisiana chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects.

“Gentrification is the resultant to a sum of previous causes, not the cause itself,” Lee said. “The point of departure is a faulty premise and this, for me, negates any direct corollary the author is attempting to make. Granted, gentrification brings new issues with it, but larger issues of planning, urban divestment and lack of internal community advocacy for the built environment trigger the conditions that lead to gentrification. A vacuum has to be formed before it can be filled with something new.”

This would be great terrain to explore, but in the era of Obama, the narrative of blackness begins and ends with a figure like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who according to Ram, “thrust the black church under an intense spotlight it had not faced since the Civil Rights era.”

No, it didn’t. It thrust Rev. Wright’s church under a spotlight. But when the established black institutions in your neighborhood are invisible, what’s the difference between a Baptist church in Northeast D.C. and a United Church of Christ church in Chicago?

The impulse of the privileged, and often The Gentrifier, is to observe the behavior of one part of a group they have deemed The Other, and assign that behavior to that Other’s entire group. It’s just as faulty to think all black churches were in lockstep during the Civil Rights era, of which one only needs a rudimentary understanding to know was not true.

Understanding The Black Church and the Civil Rights era, and what both meant to the urban space, is pivotal. The article cites Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” and it is instructional:

“I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? … Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Here King is addressing white Southern churches and making a direct correlation between the architecture of the church and its mission within the neighborhood where it sits tax-free. And while Ram acknowledges King’s letter, perhaps she missed those long passages addressed to “the white moderate,” when discussing their demonstrations in Birmingham to end desegregation:

But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

Here’s Ram’s alternative to what’s happening today:

Today, with an electorate still bitterly divided over the issue of race, the black church is arguably losing its power. While “white flight” and the Civil Rights movement galvanized the black community, “black flight” (middle-class African Americans relocating to the suburbs) and the rapid gentrification of neighborhoods across America have put the black church on the path to obsoletion. … Many neighborhoods are recovering even today from the 1968 riots, a four-day response to Dr. King’s assassination.

I’m not sure how white flight can galvanize black people. If anything it did the opposite. But Ram thinks it was black flight that stuck the knife in the black church, and that black people twisted the dagger when they had the nerve to riot. So communities aren’t in shambles due to decades of disinvestment, police terror, the decline of labor and the manufacturing industry, systemic racism, lack of access to healthcare, public hospitals screwed by the attack on Medicaid/Medicare, public schools screwed by lack of resources — oh, and white flight. No, they are in shambles because of the riots.

It’s like when people argue that Hurricane Katrina decimated the housing stock in and around New Orleans. The federal government’s poor investment in the levees led to floods that finished off communities that had already been in ruin due to years of accumulating poverty, corruption and neglect.

But Ram’s narrative is that black people did it to themselves, with The Black Church as collateral damage and white gentrifiers as an accidental occupy movement squatting in the carnage. We hear from the author that church members “look back wistfully,” but we don’t hear from these wistful parishioners themselves.

From there Ram inserts herself in the narrative and her courageous voyage into a black church, an experience that seems in conflict with her premise and conclusion. She says the church gave her the message “what you see is what you get,” but apparently she didn’t believe them. No one offered her any data about whether attendance at that church had ever been higher, but she’s sure the church is on its deathbed.

And then her truth emerges:

By and large, black churches in the area are realizing that alliances must be formed if they want to retain their presence in the community. Recently, a petition surfaced via Occupy Our Homes to prevent Bank of America from evicting a beloved reverend from his home in Northeast D.C.

Meaning, if black churches are to remain alive, they better make it right with these new white folks who are fighting for them — the same white folks she defines as “young, educated individuals, most of whom reside briefly in a given urban area before choosing to settle elsewhere.” She includes herself in that group.

The black church is her landlord in many ways. She not only pays it rent, but it also produced the movements and figures who made policies such as the Fair Housing Act possible, meaning no racial or gender discrimination can block someone from living where they want to live. It’s because of this that black people can now move to areas in D.C., Maryland and Virginia that previously were off limits.

Black churches maintain a pivotal role in the urban, suburban and cultural space. They did not grow obsolete. They just grew up, which is why if Ram ever took a trip through Prince George’s County she’d see huge, Walmart-sized black churches. They’ve grown more sophisticated, offering services online and offering exportable products and services. They’ve also merged with other networks and universities. They are still heavily represented in the NAACP, and many played central roles in the movement to fight back voter ID laws in Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin and Texas.

All black churches are not so progressive, but that only goes to reinforce the fact that there is no one “Black Church” — that it has grown, spread and permeated many different spaces, not just the urban one. This narrative, though, might sound jarring to the untrained ear.

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Tags: washington dcgentrificationarchitecturerace

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