“It feels like you don’t want to be part of our family.”

I was with a group of friends, two of us African American and one of us white, when our white friend let this slip while explaining why it was difficult for her to take in our comments concerning the painfulness and presence of racism in America. She bore no ill will toward us or any other people, whatever their race, and saw us all as equally American and part of the “family.” This is a genuinely good woman who has led a powerful life of faith and devoted much of her life to ministering to others. But her admission struck at the core of a larger problem that bedevils our communities and our politics today, and that is our cultural inability to hold two contradictory realities in fruitful tension.

This inability is a critical concern at a time when many conservative white Christians, like my friend, feel that their entire way of life and the American project as a whole are under attack. What I want to propose, however, is that two overlapping if distinct traditions hold out hope for preserving the moral integrity of the both/and as it relates to one’s faith and citizenship: the Black Church and the Black intellectual tradition. For all of us seeking to make a home in what can increasingly feel like a “strange land,” their overlapping if distinct riches have much to teach and impart.

What’s in a Name?

Before my daughters were born, I pondered what it would mean to bring two Black children into the world in America. The first decision came in the choice of names. I had in mind two African names taken from the Swahili language but common among African Americans: Nia, which means purpose, and Imani, which means faith. I could not think of two more beautiful names that so seamlessly combine our faith as Christians with our heritage on the African continent.

But the empirical research on race and racism stopped me short. So many studies have shown that being perceived as Black in speech, appearance, and even name cuts short our opportunities. There’s the study by Devah Pager that compares résumés of equal quality between Black and white applicants, with the variable being that some have a criminal record and others do not. Pager found that white men with a criminal record had a significantly higher callback rate for employment than did Black men with no criminal record. Or consider the study where sounding “Black” on the phone—even when one is speaking standard English eloquently and correctly—translates into fewer invitations to visit an apartment for rent. And then there is the study that convinced me not to choose Nia and Imani for my daughters’ names. Titled “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” the answer in the research was a resounding, tragic yes.

For me and my African American friends, decades of living in the United States have shaped us to hold two conflicting realities: our love of America and our sorrow at the ways it can betray us. W.E.B. Du Bois described this tension more than a century ago as “double-consciousness”:

The art of living in this tension is at the heart of both the Black Church and the Black intellectual tradition. On the one side, we hold the mourning of injustice that attended our forced arrival, centuries of enslavement, and decades of striving to overcome the legacies of both. On the other, we hold the goodness and high ideals of the land we have co-created. Holding this tension can only be done within a community and practice built on the unshakable faith that the God of all creation loves us, is in control, and holds all justice in his hands. In this way, our mothers and fathers, our artists and writers, our pastors and teachers have crafted over generations these two traditions that demonstrate for us what it means to be at “home” as sojourners in an often strange and inhospitable land.

Holding Contradictory Truths in Tension

Historians estimate that Phillis Wheatley was about seven years old when she was snatched from her family in West Africa and tossed rudely into the hold of a slave ship. She was missing her two front teeth (the clue to her age), and she was small and sickly. We do not know her true name, which was erased along with the memory of her homeland, but she was purchased by the Wheatley family and renamed Phillis, after the name of the ship that transported her across the water.

Phillis joined a household consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley and their twin eighteen-year-olds, Mary and Nathaniel. Some scholars have speculated that the Wheatleys were drawn to Phillis, despite her slight figure and poor health, because she was about the same age as their younger daughter Sarah, whom they had recently lost to illness. Although Phillis took on some domestic duties in the house, the Wheatleys took an early interest in her intellectual acuity, noting that “without any Assistance from School Education, and by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Time from her arrival, attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her.” Soon, according to biographer David Waldstreicher, she was “endeavoring to make letters upon the wall with a piece of chalk or charcoal.” Following this, a grand-nephew of the family, Charles Stratford, noted that she began to “make rhymes.”

By the age of twelve, Phillis was composing elegies for prominent community members as well as poetic reflections on important events. Her first published poem, in 1767, was a meditation on the harrowing sea journey of Nantucket merchants Hussey and Coffin, who nearly perished. She addresses the two men directly in the poem, asking, “Did Fear and Danger so perplex your Mind, / As made you fearful of the Whistling Wind?”

Over the next few years, Phillis’s poetic output flowered, and the Wheatleys promoted her work in the community, supporting her in the project of publishing a collection of her verse. This collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in 1773. The book, which was the first collection of poetry published by an African in America, garnered international acclaim, bolstering the work of antislavery activists who used Phillis’s genius as a proof of the humanity of Africans and the evils of slavery.

And so the Black intellectual tradition was born. Originally, it overlapped significantly with the establishment of the Black Church in America. Writers like Wheatley drew much of their societal critique and vision of the good life from the church, reading freedom in the Scriptures where white Americans were more likely to read justifications for slavery. Even in its more fiery incarnations like David Walker’s 1829 “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” writers working within the Black intellectual tradition would, for the next two hundred years, draw liberally from the Black Church and its practice of reading and living the Scriptures in ways that attended to Jesus’s declaration of his ministry in Luke 4:18–19:

Wheatley herself would grow into a woman of profound faith. She sharply denounced the hypocrisy of white “Christians” who felt no compunction about selling fellow human beings as chattel for their own profit. Wheatley was also an ardent patriot who, while living down the street from where the Boston Massacre occurred, decried the denial of liberty to herself and her fellow Africans in America. In 1774, in a letter to Presbyterian minister Samson Occum published in the Connecticut Gazette, Wheatley wrote, “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.” She continued, “By the leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the [Principle of Freedom] lives in us. God grant Deliverance in his own way and Time, and get him honor upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their Fellow Creatures.”

The reference here, of course, is to the Egyptians’ enslavement of the people of Israel before God delivered them from Pharaoh. Wheatley was inviting white American readers to consider themselves not as masters given authority by the apostle Paul, as was becoming increasingly prevalent in the young American psyche, but as “modern Egyptians” who were feeding their greed with the bodies of African captives. She concluded the letter with the acerbic observation that determining how well the “Cry for Liberty” and the “exercise of oppressive power” agree with each other “does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.”

Wheatley saw through white Christians’ corruption of the faith in the legitimization of enslavement.

She exhibited a similar care and subtlety of thought in her disposition toward the American Revolution. She knew firsthand the brutality of the Americans. She had lived it in her body, tossing back and forth in the putrid bowels of the slave ship that bore her to these shores. And yet she sided with these same Americans as the revolution kicked into high gear. Why would she do this, especially given how actively the British were working to woo Africans to their side with promises of freedom should they prove loyal to the Crown? Wheatley dismissed the British, siding instead with the champions of the revolution, her heart resonating with its dogged pursuit of freedom. She was so ardent a supporter that she penned a letter and a poem to George Washington, written in heroic couplets, praising his courage and valour. Washington, who had heard of her fame, was honoured to be the subject of her panegyric and responded in kind.

In today’s polarized context, it’s tempting to be cynical about Wheatley’s choice to embrace Christianity and become one of the foremost literary pens of the American Revolution. Left-leaning readers might conclude that she gave herself over to an anti-African, assimilationist mode of thinking. Indeed, this became the assumption of many Black intellectuals in the twentieth century, who rejected Wheatley as a sellout. Meanwhile those on the right might claim that Wheatley realized and shunned the backwardness of her native Africa and embraced the enlightened, progress-oriented Christian faith and American project. Careful analysis of her writings, however, along with a deeper dive into the development of the Black intellectual tradition that flowered from Wheatley’s pairing of love and accountability, makes clear that neither is the case.

The Birth of Black Classicism

Writing more than a century after Wheatley, education pioneer Anna Julia Cooper proved a similar ability to affirm the country’s ideals while decrying its hypocrisies. Cooper was born during the final years of slavery and was seven or eight when emancipation was secured with the Union’s victory in the Civil War. She was educated by missionaries and achieved a classical education—complete with Greek and Latin—at a time when few other Americans, regardless of colour, were able to do so. She became a powerful speaker and visionary working on behalf of the least among us. In her 1902 speech “The Ethics of the Negro Question,” Cooper dwells at the intersection of censure and praise as she addresses a largely white audience.

She begins with censure, making it clear that the way the United States treats Black people is shamefully at odds with its proclaimed adherence to Christian principles. In her eloquent if biting prose, we observe a powerful juxtaposition of opposites:

She rounds out her critical portrait by putting into conversation the nation’s insupportable combination of greed, enslavement, liberty, and Christian faith:

Cooper lived for more than a century. Toward the end of her life, she earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne and became president of Frelinghuysen University. Frelinghuysen educated workers at night, after a long day engaged in lowly service, and was established to provide a “moral, social, and religious” education that would cultivate Christian faith and “instill in our students a patriotic love of home and country.” The university’s mission resonated with Cooper’s lifelong dedication to working toward the common good.

Wheatley’s and Cooper’s lives and work embody a refrain characteristic of both the Black Church and the Black intellectual tradition: sin is called out clearly and forcefully, but the call for justice is tempered by grace and mercy. It is this grace and mercy, exhibited by those who have suffered much, that has allowed so many Black Americans to see and embrace the best in what America claims to be, and may still become, despite its many shortcomings.

The Elegance of Earned Self-Togetherness

Cornel West writes,

Personal catastrophe lyrically expressed. This is a powerful way to describe the cultivation of beauty in adversity that characterizes Black American formation at its best. We see this witness in the Negro spirituals that grew out of the mingled beauty and horror of Black life under enslavement. W.E.B. Du Bois believed that the tradition of the spirituals was so central to understanding the story of our suffering people that he headed each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk with musical bars from the spirituals: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” “Steal Away,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and others.

“They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart,” notes Du Bois. “The Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.”

Sorrow songs like “Steal Away” and “Wade in the Water” often functioned as signals to the enslaved to be ready to flee to freedom once arrangements had been made to assist them on their journey north. The white community heard what they perceived as pious and submissive spirituality, while the enslaved heard songs of freedom.

The “home” here is freedom in the North with Jesus at their side. And in the beautiful refrain of “Wade in the Water” they sang,

Water was a protective resource for the fugitive slave because it camouflaged their scent, thwarting pursuit by the vicious dogs set on them by owners determined to recapture their investment. There was also “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” where the enslaved sang of their conviction that it was time for the “chariot” of the underground railroad to “carry me home.”

Perhaps the most influential song of liberation in the African American community is “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is typically called the Black national anthem. With lyrics written by James Weldon Johnson and music composed by his brother Rosamond Johnson, the song recounts the troubled but resilient history of Blacks in America and continues to be a source of succor and pride.

It was to this song, in fact, that I turned in the wake of the Trump victory of 2016. I had gone to sleep in one America and awoken, to my mind, in quite another. How, I wondered, could I be living in a land where my fellow citizens would elect such a profane man who seemed so clearly inimical to the stranger and the marginalized? A man who would go on to refer to those desperately seeking asylum in America as coming from “sh*t hole” countries? It was especially difficult for me to process how white evangelicals—my brothers and sisters in Christ—were so overwhelmingly enthusiastic in their support of him.

The morning after the election, I brought my daughters to the dining room table, where it is our custom to begin each day with prayer, song, and Scripture reading. I could think of no better way to work through the hurt with them than by singing and contemplating the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

What, I wondered, would the future of our freedom and prosperity be in this new incarnation of America?

The poet reminded me that even in the midst of what felt like the dawning of a very dark day, faith and hope are the gifts we have ever treasured, the resources that have helped us survive and flourish when the conditions made this seem impossible.

Here, as I sang, I was reminded that we have endured far worse, that our ancestors had paved a way for us through the darkest of times.

And finally, true to the heart of the tradition with its ability to hold together critique and praise, there is that continued embrace of all the best that America is and can be. There are insights here for the Christian witness in America, which is rapidly deteriorating with a myopic, majority-white lament protesting that “Christian values” are being squashed. This move, I think, is animated more by a misplaced longing for dominion than a true love of neighbour. Again, the Black Church and the Black intellectual tradition have something loving if convicting to say.

Models for Flourishing in Dark Times

In the opening chapter of The Benedict Option, published in 2017, Rod Dreher argues that an epochal shift has occurred in Western Christianity. Declaring that Christians in the West are facing a “thousand-year flood” that threatens to drown out the faith along with the culture nurtured in its bosom, he foretells the “effective death of Christianity within our civilization,” arguing that while it “may not be the end of the world . . . it is the end of a world.” Conservative politicians, he notes, had long told faithful Christians to work the levers of law and politics to stave off secularism, and many had followed this lead, voting Republican in election after election. But the verdict is in: it hasn’t worked. “Hostile secular nihilism has won the day in our nation’s government,” Dreher writes, “and the culture has turned powerfully against traditional Christians. We tell ourselves that these developments have been imposed by a liberal elite, because we find the truth intolerable: The American people, either actively or passively, approve.”

It was disorienting to read these words as a Black American Christian. My people had never been at the centre of power. The Republican Party had not felt like home to most of us since the middle of the twentieth century. And the arc of the arrow of Dreher’s argument, of being pushed from cultural dominance into marginalization and defensiveness, was foreign to me. It was hard not to sniff some deeper insecurity at play in this paradigm that resonated with many white Christians while overlooking a vast swath of American Christian experience. Was Dreher really motivated by a concern for holiness, or was he peddling nostalgia for what looked like the good old days from his limited vantage point?

It was fascinating to see Dreher lift up faraway models of Christians coping amid intensifying hostility—Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Russia—while jumping right over his American neighbours in the Black Church. I deeply admire the Christian witness as it has found (and continues to find) its shape and subversive power in communist and post-communist contexts. But it felt as though Dreher (and the subsequent proliferation of hand-wringers like him) was keen on stripping all American believers of an inheritance of Christian integrity under hostile circumstances. This is not just bad history; it betrays a culturally selective understanding of gospel power.

While weathering an American Christian conversation habituated to overlook the Black Church’s centuries-long tradition of faithfulness under oppression, I’ve been nourished in the study of a different Christian intellectual’s formation: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As Reggie Williams narrates in his masterful book Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, before Bonhoeffer became the icon of Christian faith living valiantly under oppression, he was a disillusioned theology student who struggled to envision what an authentic faith might look like. At the nadir of his cynicism, Bonhoeffer received a fellowship in 1930 to study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He accepted it and arrived at the dawn of the Great Depression and the height of the Harlem Renaissance.

Taking seminary classes while attending American churches, Bonhoeffer initially sank into greater disenchantment, noting in his letters home that the mainstream church in America was “in a profound sense not conceived as being tied to the Word.” He was shocked by American shallowness in both theology and practice. In place of a vital, transformative faith, Bonhoeffer found churches that appeared to act as social centres and charity hubs, and “in both cases they have forgotten what the real point was.”

Bonhoeffer’s indictment of and discouragement with American Christianity did not change until he began to attend Black churches. In a letter in December 1930 he wrote, “I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation, and that was delivered by a Negro (indeed, in general I’m increasingly discovering greater religious power and originality in the Negroes).” Thus began a personal odyssey that would transform his faith and fill him with a conviction that would sustain him when he returned to face the evil ascending in his native Germany. He began attending Abyssinian Baptist Church, an iconic African American congregation in Harlem with a storied civil rights tradition. He spent several months of his fellowship time participating fully in the life of this church, teaching Sunday school, conducting a women’s Bible study, assisting with a weekday church school, and frequently visiting the homes of church members. This immersion in the Black community ushered in a time of spiritual refreshment for the young seminarian as he learned to see the world from the perspective of the marginalized and disinherited. He explained to friends and family back home in Germany that it was in the Black Church that “one really could still hear someone talk in a Christian sense about sin and grace and the love of God and ultimate hope.” He was nourished not only by this vibrant faith under oppression but also by the beauty that came out of the community, especially in the Negro spirituals, which he described as a “strange mixture of reserved melancholy and eruptive joy.”

Bonhoeffer learned lessons that too many religious conservatives have overlooked. Dreher’s oversight of the Black Church is telling. Too many conservative white Christians continue to evade the complex but paramount conversations about racial reconciliation, and too many refuse to address the long overdue reflections on the extent to which racism has warped the witness of the American church and the vitality of the American project. More and more, my Black Christian friends and I look askance at the extremes to which some Christians are going to maintain a semblance of the old power: Christian nationalism, widespread book banning that has teachers running scared, a violent takeover of the US Capitol. While these extreme responses do not represent the impulses of all who share Dreher’s concerns out of a commitment to the traditions of the faith, even the milder responses trouble me.

I have been active in the movement for classical Christian education, a tradition that, following in the footsteps of Anna Julia Cooper, I support with joy and passion. But my alliance with this movement has forced me to walk an often-uncomfortable line between my convictions, born out of the Black Church and Black intellectual tradition, and that of a white evangelical majority that often, it seems, sees classical education as a place of retreat within which they can reload their ammunition to wage the culture war. As I have visited classical schools across the country, I have heard from heads of school who express concern that growing numbers of parents are coming to them not so much because they crave the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty that lies at the core of classical education at its best, but because they are beleaguered outcasts seeking shelter for themselves and their children from the ravages of critical race theory, “wokeism,” DEI initiatives, and more.

This retreat to the perceived safety of classical Christian education is relevant to the “Benedict Option” that Dreher asks us to embrace, for he devotes much of one chapter to promoting this kind of education. He advocates that all Christian parents pull their children out of public schools in order to educate them in classical Christian schools. Those who cannot afford the private school version of classical education can take advantage of homeschooling or hybrid forms of classical schooling. Having homeschooled my own daughters classically before enrolling them in a classical Christian school, I am the last to recommend against such a beautiful, rich education. I, too, want all our children to have the opportunity to benefit from the best this kind of education can offer. But what we miss from Dreher’s recommendation is a sense of deep solidarity with and concern for the least advantaged. What about all the children who will, inevitably, be left behind in under-resourced public schools? What about children outside the Christian tradition who also deserve the kind of heart-tutoring, mind-expanding education that both Dreher and I provide for our children? Other than suggesting that classical schools take in some less advantaged students, his answer is unclear.

The history of the church demonstrates that radical hospitality can move mountains of despair, even if it provokes elite hostility. In the fourth century, when Saint Basil the Great promoted the establishment of poorhouses by providing tax exemptions and personal immunities in his function as bishop, everyday Christians followed suit, providing famine relief, care for lepers, and food for the poor. Non-Christian rulers were indignant at the scope and selflessness of Christian charity because it drew believers and non-believers alike into the orbit of the church. In his Epistle to Pagan High Priests, Julian the Apostate writes of

Let the powers scream! The church is to be a field hospital, extending a welcome that does not discriminate between believers and non-believers. It is not enough to pull our children out of public schools. We must engage in a robust effort to love and serve all young people, especially the least advantaged, providing the kind of education that points them toward truth, goodness, and beauty.

The Black Church has been willing to pay this price over and over again. W.E.B. Du Bois set up a school in the wilds of rural Tennessee post-emancipation. Anna Julia Cooper classically educated Black and working-class adults at Frelinghuysen University in the 1930s. Marva Collins laboured sacrificially to bring classical education to the lowly and forgotten in inner-city Chicago in the late twentieth century. These and other figures have so inspired me that eight years ago I co-founded Nyansa Classical Community, offering to the children in my low-income, largely Black New Orleans neighbourhood the kind of classical and Christian education I was privileged to provide my own daughters at home. When you learn to inhabit the language of the poor, and you pair it discerningly with rich, morally formative literature, history, art, and rhetoric, something truly culture-shaking can emerge.

As I draw to a close, I want to acknowledge that the Black Church is not perfect. It has its own challenges demographically and politically. But it is staying the course in holding hard truths together. Yes, the cultural and political dominance of Christianity in America is fading fast; we are living in fundamentally new times. And, yes, God is in control and will see us through. Being at the margins of power is not the end of the world. Although white folks claiming the Christian label have managed to hold the reins of political and cultural power since the founding of the United States, this represents a small blip in the larger history of the global church. There is, in fact, a richness of vision to be had at the margins that is difficult to attain for those who are comfortable at the centre. And so often we find the power of a God whose glory emerges most stunningly in and through our weakness.

What might we accomplish if we unclench our fists and live more fully into the power of our faith? What vision and strength might we find as we dig deeper into the spirit that sustains us? In the words of Frederick Douglass, as musically interpreted by the incomparable beauty of African American artist Ruth Naomi Floyd, we must “press on.” We must press on through the challenge, and press on through the fear, standing for what is right, while being marked by grace and mercy under trying circumstances. We must be witnesses to the truth, while never losing sight of the imperative to exhibit toward those who oppose us that perfect love that casts out fear.