Could the Black Church Save us All?

Before you click out, know three things about me. First, I’m not Black. Second, I’m not religious in any conventional sense. I was born and raised in a mostly assimilated Jewish family in Los Angeles.

My family and my grammar school were ecumenical. We put up Christmas trees, sang Christmas carols, celebrated Hanukah, played with dreidels, and dabbled (superficially!) in Buddhism and Confucianism.

Third, as an adult, I consider myself a complete rationalist. For me, science and the scientific method, with occasional nods to accurate history, are the only true and reliable bases of human knowledge.

So why do I put some faith in our American Black Church to save our nation and our species from accelerating planetary heating and the risk of nuclear Armageddon, all in an era apparently headed toward replaying the Imperial Age? Read on.

My realization came upon me quite recently, at the end of the first week of Donald J. Trump’s second term as President. I was reading an op-ed in the Washington Post, listing twelve potential Democratic candidates for president in 2028, presumably with a view to carrying on—or resuscitating—American democracy.

All the twelve candidates suggested already have had strong political careers. All are intelligent, most highly so. With the possible exception of John Fetterman (D, PA), I could imagine any of them doing a creditable job of repairing at least some of the damage to our democracy and our economy that another four years of Trump will have done.

But to be frank, they all leave me cold. Pete Buttigieg is one of the most calmly intelligent and rational public servants I’ve ever seen. I could easily vote for him for president, although several commenters opined that a gay man could never get elected. Similarly, Democratic governors like Gavin Newsom (CA), Josh Shapiro (PA) or Gretchen Whitmer (MI) surely have the intelligence and experience to do the job. But I could not and cannot imagine any of them summoning the charisma or moral authority that I think repairing the immense damage of the next four years will require.

The problem is easy to state but devilishly hard to solve. Without resorting to empty negative superlatives, I can say that Trump strikes me as epitomizing most, if not all, of the defects of human character. Whatever you may think of a regime and policies built on lies, numerous (perhaps “honest”) mistakes of fact, retribution, vengeance, hate, disdain, selfishness, narcissism, whim and bullying, they have little in common with the Enlightenment that produced our nation and its Constitution.

Unlike most of my peers, I never read Machiavelli’s The Prince until late in my own middle age. When I did, I was appalled. I had always thought, perhaps erroneously, that it had something positive to teach us. I suppose it does: we are lucky to have left the Middle Ages far behind.

Although I read it less than a decade ago, I now remember only two things about it: really one thing repeated twice. In two separate instances, partisans of a tiny Italian city-state invited emissaries from an enemy city-state for peace talks and, on that pretext, slaughtered the entire visiting crew.

That sort of treachery may have produced a temporary military or economic advantage in medieval Italy, but I can’t see how it would advance our species’ survival in the Nuclear Age, let alone the Age of AI. Wouldn’t automated “fail-safe” controllers of our nukes make sure that no one at all survived?

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that some kindly Father is looking after us from up in the clouds. If we extinguish ourselves as a species, along with most other creatures on our planet, no one will be left to care. After fifty or so half-lives of Plutonium-239—very roughly a million years—the background radioactivity will be back to baseline, and evolution can begin again. Maybe the next intelligent species will be smarter. (Our Sun has 5 billion years of hydrogen fuel, so life can try to get it right again and again, thousands of times!)

Reluctantly, I came to a sobering conclusion. Our next leader will need far more than just superior intelligence and hard work. He or she will require moral authority elevated to the level of compelling personal magnetism.

As the Sun set on the day of Trump’s second inaugural, I was listening to the voice of just such a man. He was MLK, explaining why he had split with LBJ even after that president had gotten arch-segregationist Southern Senators to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

I’ve written twice about this extraordinary speech (here and here). It’s one of the rarest combinations of superior intelligence, moral authority, inoffensive certainty, self-sacrifice and political courage that I have ever had the good fortune to perceive. I replay it periodically to renew my faith in our species.

It it, MLK predicted—quite accurately—how LBJ’s macho obsession with “beating the Communists” in Vietnam would destroy his Great Society, corrupt our democracy, and, in the end, cause our nation’s first, biggest and gravest ever military loss, the precursor to our stalemate in Iraq and our more recent debacle in Afghanistan.

Just a few days more than one year after delivering that speech, MLK was gunned down. How extraordinary a man was he?

In his ability to “turn the other cheek” to outrageous violence, and to attract a great following in so doing, he was reminiscent of another great moral leader: Jesus of Nazareth. And in MLK’s quest to free a whole people without violence, there are only three like him, to my knowledge, in all of human history: Gandhi, he and Mandela (although MLK’s task is not yet fully done).

But what gives me hope is that MLK was not just a comet out of the blue. He was product of a great movement—the Black Church—that grew out of four continuous centuries of enslavement and oppression of, and discrimination against, Black people in America. And that movement and the Black Church live on.

As I was reading comments to the WaPo article on possible 2028 Democratic candidates, one struck me. A commenter claimed to “love” Senator Warnock, the Democratic Senator from Georgia who first won office in 2021, in the runoff for a special election a single day before the January 6 Insurrection. Just as the odd verb struck me, so did my memory: Reverend Warnock is a product and a leader of the Black Church and one of those whom I called “Saviors of Democracy” after his special-election win.

Less directly, Wes Moore, Maryland’s Democratic Governor, is also such a product. What compelled me to recommend him as a candidate for president 2020 (prematurely, as he did not seek the job), was what I saw as his unique moral authority. Yes, unlike so many armchair soldiers, he had seen actual combat and in fact had led it. But his real moral authority, in my view, derived from his early acquaintance with the Black Church, and his concise recitation of Enlightenment values in his election-night victory speech. I suppose the latter derived from his Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.

Jesus of Nazareth reportedly penned the two greatest bumper stickers ever, millennia before there were cars. “Love thy enemy,” he advised us. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” That advice might get us through this age of planetary heating, new imperialism and nuclear proliferation. Science and human rationality alone won’t: there aren’t enough of us who follow them willingly, let alone rigorously.

What makes us remember Jesus is not just what he said. It’s that he died willingly, knowingly, sacrificing himself to help us remember and comply.

Just so with MLK. He foresaw his own death clearly, several times. Yet he didn’t change course one iota, knowing that his own death, like Jesus’, might help us remember and heed his good advice.

The Black Church is, in my view, the only durable institution in our nation that carries that sort of moral authority today. It’s the only institution that has stood steadfastly for non-violent change against centuries of slavery, injustice, oppression and discrimination, some of which still pertain today.

In my youth, white leaders, too, once trod the road of sacrifice. JFK famously told us, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Injured in his PT Boat during WWII, he lived much of his life on pain medication and with Addison’s disease, and he died by assassination. So did his brother, RFK. Although no one could foresee it then, these three political murders led directly to the end of the Enlightenment in our country and our desperate times today.

The Black Church and its members know about desperate times. Virtually all of its four centuries of life have been filled with desperation, broken briefly by the joy of Juneteenth, Congress’ passage of the 1960s civil-rights bills, and Barack Obama’s presidency. In my view, there is no rival institution in our nation more fit to take on the stark abandonment of human morality that we now see surrounding and swallowing us, like quicksand, as we sink beneath the muck.

There are questions, to be sure. The Black Church is not just an abstract venue for moral authority. Most of all, it’s a community and a refuge for people who have been systematically excluded from almost everything else. Can it welcome or accommodate others and supplant the Catholic and Baptist faiths that are, even now, sinking beneath waves of pulpit-based pedophilia and right-wing extremism? Will it preserve its unique character and its moral authority if it tries?

These questions are beyond my pay grade. All I know is that, as I survey the moral wreckage of our American social landscape, the only real, consistent, reliable refuge from the Storm I see is the Black Church.

Certainly so-called “technology,” once the handmaiden of Science, offers no solace. Today’s Big Tech algorithmically amplifies lies, hate and extremism, exploiting people’s adrenaline and dopamine rushes to make money, as if they were monkeys in some diabolical online array of Skinner Boxes. We will not recover our moral bearings, let alone a rational society, with help from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.

Next to their pernicious influence, which I hold reponsible (along with right-wing media like Fox and Breitbart) for the astoundingly speedy and catastrophic decay of our politics and national mores, the rare sources of moral authority in our society are few and far between. Venerable institutions focused on the law, such as the ACLU, have put far too much faith in the our deeply flawed Constitution, and too little in basic human values— what’s right and wrong. Not all speech is good, and ever-more speech has proved grossly inadequate to counteract algorithmically amplified online lies.

We need less legal technicalities and abstract theories of how right should prevail even as it self-evidently is failing to do so. We need more focus on basic, obvious human values. We need truths that ordinary people without higher education can feel in their souls. Dare I say "biblical" ones?

So count this essay not as a prescription, far less a request or demand. Who am I to ask yet more of an institution that has given so much to suffering people for so long?

Count this the essay as but a mark of admiration of an institution, seen from afar by an outsider, that has done something no other institution has managed to do so consistently throughout American history. The Black Church has hued to what’s right in the face of the most powerful evil that a society badly in need of moral guidance has been able to throw at it for four centuries. If it can lend some grace to the rest of us, perhaps we all might muddle through.



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