Martin E. Marty reviews Mark A. Noll’s new book:
We’ve heard the current debates about African-American preachers and politicians, the fiery language of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and the questions about Barack Obama’s faith. Mainstream pundits uninformed by history often reduce black religious rhetoric to slogans about “black liberation theology.” That theology, with its concern for the oppressed, did represent an episode in history in the late 1960s and 70s in America and South Africa. Noll mentions that stormy moment, but takes a longer look at African-American rhetoric. He quotes early biblically based preachers whose cadences are still audible in the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and many less-recognized black ministers along the way to today.
For one tradition in black speech about religion, rooted in the sting of color, listen to Daniel Walker in 1829: “Can the American preacher appeal unto God, the Maker and Searcher of hearts, and tell him, with the Bible in their hands, that they made no distinction on account of men’s colour?” Or Frederick Douglass in 1861: “Color makes all the difference in the application of our American Christianity.” As for the Bible, Douglas wrote, “The same book which is full of the Gospel of Liberty to one race, is crowded with arguments in justification of slavery of another.”
Read the full review here.