Racialized Religion and the Desire For a Universal God

“God is a Negro,” declared Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1898. Or, he suggested, at least African Americans should consider God to be black. People of color, Turner continued, had “as much right Biblically and otherwise” to believe that God was black, “as you buckra, or white, people have to believe that God is a fine looking, symmetrical, ornamented white man.” With words that would echo decades later from Malcolm X, Turner denounced those who believed that God “is a white-skinned, blue-eyed, straight- haired, projecting-nose, compressed-lipped and finely-robed white gentleman, sitting upon a throne somewhere in heaven.” Turner’s anger was not directed at whites for creating God in their image. He fumed at blacks for believing in that white God, for failing to see God in their own likeness, and for generally buying into the tenets of white America.
By calling attention to the race of God and the importance of images of the sacred, Turner spoke to several pronounced and foundational questions in American religious history. Did ideas of the sacred transcend the racial ideas and structures in the United States? Was there a universal God, or did each ethnic, immigrant, and racial group have its own deity or deities? Did God legitimate, undermine, or determine race in the nation? In the twentieth century, the great black intellectual W. E. B. DuBois explored many of the same questions, and in the process pioneered the writing of the religious history of African Americans, a point that Edward J. Blum elaborates on in “Religion, Race, and African American Life.”
Throughout much of American history, whites as the dominant group have tended to associate their race with the sacred. Rooted in a European heritage that not only whitened images of Christ, angels, and God, but also darkened characterizations of the devil, demons, and witches, America’s European colonists seemed to assume, as the pithy phrase went, that “God was an Englishman,” or at least European. Many British colonists also seemed assured that, if they were God’s chosen ones, then Native Americans were “children of the devil.” French Jesuits specifically used whitened depictions of Christ and the Madonna and darkened images of sinners in hell in efforts to evangelize Native Americans. Although New England Puritans largely disdained physical images of God (they considered such iconography to violate the Ten Commandments), many British colonists considered “black dogs” to be signs of the devil. Even those Indians who converted to Protestantism, such as the Mohegan Samson Occom, were objects of scorn. Occom’s spiritual father and the founder of Dartmouth College, the Reverend Eleazer Wheelock (who would have never raised enough money for the college if it were not for Occom’s preaching in England), routinely referred to Occom as his “black son.”
From the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, in efforts to proselytize to enslaved and free African Americans, white Protestants solidified and symbolized racial hierarchy in their churches. Men and women of color were forced to sit in back pews or galleries, to accept physical abuse at the hands of white Christians, and to take communion after white congregants had done so. Then, in the early nineteenth century with technological and print production improvements, the American landscape was flooded with religious pamphlets, picture-book Bibles, Sunday School materials, and other religious ephemera that linked white superiority with God. Images of Jesus; his mother, Mary; Moses; and other biblical characters were made to look white. The Mormon Church, born in upstate New York at this time, took the whitening of the sacred to new levels. Its first leaders, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, imagined that when Christ appeared in the New World after his crucifixion, he came as a bearded white man. It would not be until the 1970s, moreover, that the established Mor- mon hierarchy would ordain black ministers. In the twentieth century, the visual image of a white Christ became fixed in the artistic renderings of Warner Sall man, whose Head of Christ (1941) is probably the most well-known depiction of Jesus in the United States.
Especially in the South before the Civil War, slaveholding whites endeavored to indoctrinate African Americans with a specific and racialized brand of Christianity. Ministers to the slaves shied away from biblical stories that spoke of liberation and instead highlighted elements that lauded submissiveness. Catechisms developed distinctly for men and women of color pushed servility, passivity, and a subordinate work ethic. Black congregants were asked “How are they to try and please their Masters?” and were told to answer “With good will, doing service as unto the Lord and not unto men.” Even if a slave suffers “wrongfully, at the hands of his Master, and to please God, takes it patiently, will God reward him for it?” Of course, the set answer was far less cumbersome than the question: “yes.”
During the nineteenth century, moreover—especially as racial ideas took an even firmer hold—Americans looked to faith to explain the origins of races. The most common explanation for the creation of black men and women was with the biblical “curse of Ham” (or “curse of Canaan”), while one of the most vigorous scientific battles of the nineteenth century was a religious one. In the decades before the Civil War, a growing body of scientists began to claim that there was not one, single moment of human creation, but that somehow a divine figure created the various races of the earth at different moments and in different locations. The battle between the advocates of monogenesis and of polygenesis raged among scientists, ministers, theologians, and abolitionists. After the Civil War, “scientific racism” emerged from this theological cocoon and quickly morphed into numerous varieties of racist ideologies. In this way, the “son of Ham” thesis—derived originally from the mysterious and troubling story of Noah (Genesis 9:18–27), who, lying in a drunken stupor, was covered by his son, who was ashamed of his father’s nakedness—had a long and viciously malignant career in Western thought and in American history. Even after being repudiated by theologians, it remained deeply imprinted in American folklore and was exacerbated by scientists who measured skulls and alleged “intelligence quotients” and, in the process, invariably and predictably reified the existing racial hierarchies.
After the Civil War, as African Americans acquired greater religious freedom, whites shifted their arguments from pro-slavery to pro-segregation. Now, instead of declaring slavery the heaven-ordained place for African Americans, white Protestants claimed that organized and legalized racial separation was God’s mandate. By the end of the nineteenth century, the white Protestant linking of faith and whiteness was promoting violence. Extra-legal mob lynchings had all the trap- pings of religious rituals, while a host of northern and southern white Protestants suggested that they had been wrong all along to try to save the souls of black folk.

People of color had no souls, some white supremacists maintained; or, as other writers believed, they had souls but were forever cursed to be subordinate.
Religious arguments and leaders also played a role in immigrant exclusion. From the Know Nothings of the antebellum era to the second Ku Klux Klan of the twentieth century, the claim that Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Italian, and other non–western European immigrants were not Protestant Christians and therefore could not be true Americans resounded from anti-immigrant groups. Moreover, Protestant reform organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) singled out immigrants, especially immigrant men, as immoral drunkards who needed to be controlled or kept out.
Of course, African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, Irish Americans, and the host of other groups that have been discriminated against never capitulated fully to white Christianity. In the colonial era, Native Americans often rejected the Christianity of the British settlers and turned with renewed vigor to their own traditions and visionaries. African Americans, who had largely adopted Protestantism by the middle of the nineteenth century, converted to the Christian God less than they converted the Christian God to themselves. In their own congregations in the North, formed in response to white church oppression and to the growing organizational needs of black communities, new “African” denominations became centers of spiritual nourishment and social uplift. In the South, enslaved men and women at times openly rebelled against pro-slavery Christianity. One white missionary recorded in his diary how slaves in South Carolina rejected a gospel of social control and oppression. After a preacher instructed them against fleeing, one slave responded: “That is not Gospel at all; it is all Runaway, Runaway, Runaway.” Another retorted, “The doctrine is one-sided.” Nat Turner went even further. Believing to see black spirits and white spirits fighting in the sky, he heard the Holy Spirit tell him to rise up, kill all the whites in Southampton County, Virginia, and lead local slaves to victory. Turner died for his failed revolution, but not before he and his crew killed more than fifty whites. More often, though, slaves crafted their own distinctive faith by fusing Christianity with West African traditions to create a vibrant, albeit underground, belief in their humanity, their chosen status with the divine, and their eventual liberation. Newly crafted black spirituals suggested a God who cared, with toil that would be recompensed someday, and with a future time of liberation and jubilee.
In ways akin to the practices of African Americans, other groups outside the American mainstream have used religious institutions to reinforce group bonding and protection. Irish Catholics, Russian Jews, Japanese Buddhists, Chinese Taoists, Pakistani Muslims, and Mexican Catholics created group enclaves (in part because of social, cultural, legal, and extra-legal disdain from established white communities) where they could carry on their faiths. Taoist temples became places for individual prayer and communal celebration for embattled Chinese men and women in California, while Catholic rituals established links to the Old World for many new Italian Catholics. In the American context, beliefs and rituals were transformed. Jewish Americans in the nineteenth century, for instance, established places for women’s activism to parallel the reform efforts of Christian women. At the same time, Jewish Americans invested Hanukah with new meaning, especially with a focus on gift-giving to mirror America’s consumer-centered Christmas season. Some Buddhists, moreover, accepted Christ into their pantheon of role models.
During the second half of the twentieth century, especially following the civil rights movement, racial struggle continued to have decidedly religious overtones. Depictions of black Christ figures, first crafted during the Harlem Renaissance, found new life in the crusades of the 1950s and 1960s. The liberation theologies of African Americans like James Cone, Albert Cleage, and J. Deotis Roberts, of Peru- vian Catholic priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, and of Indian scholar Vine Deloria Jr. associated the sacred with oppressed minority groups. From the streets of Detroit (where African Americans repainted white Christs and Madonnas with black paint) to the Catholic barrios of southern California, to the reservations of South Dakota, women and men of color stood against the whitening of the sacred with new strength and vitality. By the end of the twentieth century, even though other aspects of American society had integrated, churches and synagogues remained segregated by race far more than by any other factor.
Even amid such racialized religious diversity, however, religion at times served to undermine racism in the United States. Conversion from one faith to another was often an act of racial exchange and contact. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a sizable group of British settlers who had been captured by Indians chose to remain part of Native American society, becoming full members of Indian communities and faith. Then in the late nineteenth century, with growing numbers of Asian immigrants to the United States, spiritualist whites took up yoga, Buddhist meditations, and sometimes Japanese Buddhist paraphernalia. Hymns, spirituals, and gospel tunes were the creation of dynamic interplays between white and black Christians from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Sometimes religion could serve as a binding tie against others. In the nineteenth century, many white and black Protestants, for all of their disagreements, found common ground in their distrust of Catholics, Jews, and Muslims. Finally, religious language and morals—especially those built on Jewish and Christian traditions— have served to challenge racial divisions and violence. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the biblical assertion that God made all men “of one blood” has been a key argument against slavery and racial discrimination. At the same time, the “Golden Rule” has been a rallying cry to oppose racism and the mistreatment of immigrant groups. Finally, the moral arguments of many in the civil rights movement, from the Reverend C. L. Franklin of Detroit to Ralph Abernathy of Alabama, were presented to all Americans as rooted in universal dreams for justice, fraternity, and love.