This article examines the significance of the Reverend Jesse Jackson's bid for the Democratic party's presidential nomination. Jackson's candidacy represents a new use of political revivalism, an old evangelical political praxis recast in the modalities of African American Christian culture. This praxis is an aspect of American political culture that has often been overlooked because of past misunderstandings of American folk religion in general, and black Christianity in particular, as captives of an otherworldly and privatized spirituality. This article contends that black Christianity has an identifiable and coherent political style with both passive and active moods. The dominant manifestations of these moods are, respectively, political cynicism and political revivalism, which are the consequence of the correct folk perception that it is impossible to reason with the purveyors of the absurdities of racial injustice. A critical assessment of black Christianity's political symbolic capital seems appropriate.
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References
1.
1. Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans. James Luther Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 230.
2.
2. I shall use interchangeably the terms “black church movement,”“black Christianity,”“black Christendom,” and “black Protestantism.” These terms all signify this general phenomenon that is simultaneously both religious and political. I believe it indeed constitutes a religious political culture in its own right.
3.
The best discussion of the idea and development of political revivalism is John L. Hammond, The Politics of Benevolence: Revival Religion and American Voting Behavior (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1979), esp. pp. 1-19.
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4. The usual date given for the founding of this convention, 1880, is erroneous. The first incorporated black Baptist convention with a national constituency was the American Baptist Missionary Convention, which was incorporated in New York State in 1840. See James Melvin Washington, The Origins and Emergence of Black Baptist Separatism, 1863-1897 (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1979), pp. 35-42.
5.
5. Roger Bastide, “Color, Racism, and Christianity” in Color and Race, ed. John Hope Franklin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 37-38.
6.
6. Anthony F. C. Wallace, Religion: An Anthropological View (New York: Random House, 1966), esp. pp. 30-39.
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7. See an extensive discussion of the meaning and goals of black spirituality in James Melvin Washington, Afro-American Protestant Spirituality (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, forthcoming).
8.
8. The progress of this alliance in the post-Civil War era is shown in James McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
9.
9. See Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, The Emergence of a New Order: God in the Age of Scarcity (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1979).
10.
10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 2:11.
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11. James Rawley, Race and Politics: “Bleeding Kansas” and the Coming of the Civil War (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1969), p. ix.
12.
12. Time, 6 Apr. 1970.
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13. Quoted in Daniel Day Williams, The Spirit and the Forms of Love (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1981), p. 269.
14.
14. The best account of the history of Operation Breadbasket is the excellent master of divinity thesis by Gary Massoni, “Perspective on Operation Breadbasket” (Thesis, Chicago Theological Seminary, 1971).
15.
15. Quoted in Susan Bloch, “A Continuing Climate of Racism,”Duke, 71(2):14 (Nov.-Dec. 1984).
16.
16. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The American Dream,” a speech given at Lincoln University, 6 June 1961, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Voice of Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in the United States, 1797-1971 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), p. 934.
17.
17. Jesse Jackson, “The Rainbow Coalition Is Here to Stay,”Black Scholar, 15(5):72 (Sept.-Oct. 1984).
18.
18. Maulana Karenga, “Jesse Jackson and the Presidential Campaign: The Invitation and the Oppositions of History,”Black Scholar, 15(5):62 (Sept.-Oct. 1984).
19.
19. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 214.
20.
and Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).
21.
21. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy and Society (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 195-214.
22.
22. Peter J. Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), pp. 83-105.
23.
23. Paul L. Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 131.
24.
24. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 231.
25.
25. William Stringfellow, The Politics of Spirituality (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984).
26.
see also Cheryl Townsend Gilkes's excellent article, “The Black Church as a Therapeutic Community: Suggested Areas for Research into the Black Religious Experience,”Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center8: 29-43 (Fall 1980).
27.
and West, Prophesy Deliverance!
28.
28. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 1-25.
