Settler-Colonial Theology: From Lāhainā to Palestine

By Kieran McKenzie Clark

From grandstanding in the rubble after our fire in Lāhainā to posing on top of a tank in Palestine, Harvest pastor Greg Laurie is the poster boy for white Christianity in occupied lands. I went to Kumulani Chapel for over a decade (through its transition to Harvest). I got my undergraduate degree in religious studies... let me tell you something: this is what settler-colonial theology looks like. The corporate religion espoused by Harvest is performative and littered with internal contradictions; it is quite explicitly a demonstration of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave”. As a friend of mine noted, Laurie “was one of the early Trojan horse pastors that dressed Christofascist bullshit in a hip new package”. His church serves as a superstructure to reproduce Settler-Colonial/Capitalist society.

Harvest Pastor Greg Laurie walks among the rubble in Lāhainā

According to the four accounts of Jesus’ life held by Christians as Scripture, Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God was here (on Earth) right now. It’s what Jesus is recorded to speak on the most. According to the authors of these gospels, Jesus teaches that this Kingdom lives within us (Luke 17.21) and is expressed through our actions and social relation to one another. The preachings on such a kingdom include an active identification and critique of coercive relations of power as well as the call to an alternative community based on a kind of interconnected care and service - a horizontal society of group messiahship. In other words, the gospel of the Kingdom is prefigurative and rooted in material reality; including love of enemies and the subversion of leadership through mutual service. A summary of such teachings is known as the "Sermon on the Mount”.

The gospel of Harvest looks different; their theology is the extraction of souls for the expansion of "heaven". This is because they have inherited the legacy and refinement of imperial theologies from settler-colonialists. It is a theology that is about empire, security, accumulation, and fame. This is why they are anti-intellectual; they have to be. They need to push theologies made up a couple hundred years ago like “The Rapture” because they need the escapism. They need to focus on the amassing of souls for God in relation to the damned to rationalize the inaction they take toward material reality. It is seated in the Capitalist delusion and game of infinite growth. This shows face blatantly. The "Greg Laurie" Bible - all the commodities with his name on it, the grandstands, the movies, the events, the shows, the endless multi-industry marketing; it is not for Jesus, because that's not what Jesus was about.

For Harvest, whether they are playing their imaginary heavenly infinite growth game or wealth-building game, it is about profiteering, growth, and security; and it serves to conceal inaction towards the material conditions of human beings. This is why Harvest at Kumulani will have a Hula show on Sunday morning but will never mutter a word on the diaspora or plight of the Kānaka Maoli. The decline of health, land, population, culture, and language of indigenous populations are of absolutely no importance to them. The motive of their evangelizing is simply the accumulation of imaginary numbers and the assimilation of those willing to conform. Because their theology serves to reproduce a particular kind of society: settler-colonialism. This is why their politics are based on American culture wars and U.S. foreign interests.

Laurie posing on top of a tank in Palestine.

Pastor Greg Laurie, despite frequently bringing up the topic of the state of Israel, has not a muttering word for the Palestinians and the abhorrent treatment they suffer under the Israeli government - not on the apartheid, expulsions, ethnic cleansing, illegal settlements, occupation, and (now accelerated) genocide. He is in unwavering support of Israel, attending nationalistic rallies and endorsing Zionism. Atrocities at the hands of Israel are outshined by a pretend eschatology. Laurie preaches novel dispensationalist theologies of a “rapture” in which there will be a time when Christian believers will literally rise “in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.” A sign of the times for this rapture in Laurie’s words is “the regathering of the nation Israel in their homeland”. Laurie conflates, which obscures, which conceals. He conflates the modern nation-state of Israel with ancient Israel, and he conflates the modern nation-state of Israel with the Jewish people. Thus, creating the illusion that if someone is an anti-imperialist or an outspoken critic of Israel, they must be antisemitic. This tactic produces and maintains the conditions for Zionism. The irony of course is that the kind of conflating being done by Laurie is anti-Semitic. It is in blatant disregard of Jewish anti-Zionists willing to condemn and illuminate the injustices perpetrated by the Israeli state and their policies towards Palestinians.

This theology (along with the normative social influence of the congregation) acts as a reciprocal and circular pattern in reinforcing and perpetuating settler-colonialism. This is why Harvest Riverside or other locations of the Harvest franchise import settlers to Maui from California to preserve their institution. Consequently, contributing to the reproduction of Capitalist structures in Hawai’i, which reinforces occupation, which continues the process of settler-colonialism. Between the 9th and 15th centuries, Christianity serviced feudalism by validating its power structures. The Catholic Church produced the theology of the “divine right of kings'', ultimately maintaining feudalism. Pastors like Greg Laurie and church franchises like Harvest fill this role today as the ideological apparatus supporting Capitalism. The internal structure of Harvest from their theology to leadership is a reflection of the dominant economic-power structures. They commodified religion to sell white culture. Within this business model, they paint their brand's image with the American dream: Greg Laurie. From being Trump's spiritual advisor, to leading tours in Israel, to slapping his name on the Holy Bible and selling it. He is the poster child of American settler-colonial theology.

The United States empire as a settler-colonial project moved from 13 colonies to 50 states by imperial expansion; through ethnic cleansing, indigenous erasure, and the enclosement of lands into private property. The last territory to become a state was Hawai’i. Hawai’i became a territory through a joint resolution in Congress in 1900 prompted by the reactionary forces of nationalism during the Spanish-American War. There was no treaty of annexation because in 1893 the United States conducted an illegal military coup of the internationally recognized sovereign government of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. This overthrow of the constitutional monarchy installed a provisional government that was facilitated by American missionaries and businessmen.

The violence of settler-colonialism that amalgamates the United States and Israel as they both seek to replicate, capture, and preserve structures of Capitalism is what informs Harvest's unwavering support of Israel and their mute dismissal of the material conditions of Kānaka

Maoli. Lāhainā town burnt to the ground on August 8th, 2023; Harvest at Kumulani is less than 10 miles away from the burn zone. While the U.S. occupation secured and maintained the conditions that made the devastation possible, Laurie co-opted the event to rewind his end-times business pitch of escapist eschatologies. As Israel commits war crime after war crime– targeting and bombing churches, mosques, hospitals, shelters, markets, and refugee camps– Harvest has only cranked up the volume on this sales pitch; effectively aiding in the manufacturing of consent for the genocide of Palestinians. They will never speak for the oppressed, not in Lāhainā, not in Palestine. They lavish themselves in the privilege and luxury of being white landowners in the imperial core of expanding empire. They rake in capital and 10s of millions of dollars and give tokens back. It is a scam. Unless you're buying enclosed patches of stolen land as private property from the money of people in your scheme, then it is profit.

Matthew 25.40-45 absolutely applies to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians - and the people supporting their regime. Luke 18.25 absolutely applies to Greg Laurie and his constituents. The Jesus of the gospel of Matthew is recorded to say, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” At the time of my writing this, since October 7th, Israel has killed 1 child in Gaza every 15 minutes. It is the position and belief of Harvest that if these beloved children and families are of the Islamic faith (or anything “other” than Christian), they are getting blown straight to hell. In mid-October, posting about the fulfillment of “biblical prophecies”, Greg Laurie uploaded a photo onto Instagram asking “Are you watching for Christ's return?”. Their theological anthropology projects God as the white man. They would nail Jesus back to the cross if he “came back”.

"It is Totally Naive to Want to Humanize Capitalism": An Interview with Frei Betto

[Photo: Frei Betto meets with Fidel Castro in the 1990s]

By Barbara Schijman

Originally published at Internationalist 360.

Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo, better known as Frei Betto, is a recognized Latin American progressive reference and one of the main figures of the Theology of Liberation. A writer, journalist and Dominican friar, he was imprisoned for four years during the military dictatorship in Brazil, which he opposed with body and soul. During his work as a friar he met, in the favelas of Sao Paulo, the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of whom he was an advisor, and in whose government he participated in the Zero Hunger program. He has written more than 60 books, including Fidel and Religion. Conversations with Frei Betto (1985); Mysticism and Spirituality (1997); The Artist’s Work. A Holistic Vision of the Universe (1999); and The Lost Gold of the Arienim (2016).

What thoughts does this pandemic world open up for you?

I believe that the pandemic is nature’s revenge, resulting from years of human domination and devastation. Absolutely everything that we have been doing for the last 200 years, the search for profit and the maximum exploitation of nature’s resources without any care for environmental preservation, results in a lack of control of the chain of nature, which is completely disrupted by human intervention. Many speak of the “anthropocene”, that is, the era of total human intervention in nature; but I prefer to call this situation “capitalocene”. In other words, the total hegemony of capital, of the search for profit, for gain; all of which causes a total imbalance in the natural environment.

This whole process of environmental devastation is the fruit of private capital gain. The problem is not the human being; the problem is neoliberal capitalism. And we must remember that nature can live without our uncomfortable presence; we cannot, we do need nature.

How do you analyze the situation in Brazil?

In my country, the situation is catastrophic because we have a neo-fascist government. I call President Jair Bolsonaro, the “Bagman”, I even gave him this nickname before the Economist Magazine did. Brazil is in a total fire, in the Amazon, and in other areas, and the president has no interest in improving the situation or changing the course of what we are experiencing. Everything that means death suits him. We are living under a genocidal and lying government.

He is so brazen that in his last speech at the UN he said that the culprits for the fires in the Amazon are the peasants, the small farmers of the area and the indigenous people. For this reason there is no doubt that here in Brazil we are living a catastrophic situation managed by a neo-fascist government, which is using more and more religious fundamentalism to legitimize itself. Health matters as little as education. Bolsonaro knows very well that an educated people is a people that has a minimum of critical consciousness. And so it is better for him that the people have no education at all so that they can continue as guides to an ignorant mass. Of course not because of the masses themselves, but because of the conditions of education that are not properly offered to the people. As if all this were not enough, we are now back on a map of hunger, with a tremendous number of people who do not have the minimum necessary of the nutrients provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In short, we are in a tremendous situation. We’ll see what happens in the municipal elections in November.

What scenario do you envision?

I think the elections will be an interesting thermometer to evaluate how our people look at it. But the truth is that, in this, I am not very optimistic. The pandemic has helped a lot so that Bolsonaro has the hegemony of the narrative, because public demonstrations do not exist, they are prohibited, or they are not convenient, so only the voice of the government is heard.

By voting in favor of the political trial against former President Dilma Rousseff, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote to the memory of the Army torturer, Colonel Carlos Brilhante Ustra. His behavior should not be surprising. But what explains that he still maintains a considerable level of popular support?

I have two explanations for this situation. First, the right wing has mastered the electronic system of digital networks, which I prefer not to call “social” because they do not necessarily create sociability. I believe that many people on the left, progressive, have not yet mastered this mechanism. And also, since the owners of these platforms are favorable to sectors close to the government, many use algorithms and other devices to disseminate fake news and all kinds of lies. This has a lot of force because today people find out much more about the news and facts through the digital networks than through the traditional press. This is the first factor. The second factor is related to the mobilization of the poorest people by conservative evangelical churches. And then there are people who have abdicated their freedom to seek safety. That is the proposal of the global right: that each person should abdicate his freedom in exchange for his security.

In the face of the latter, and the hegemonic narrative it describes, what about the voices of the left?

On this we, these who feel part of the left, have a certain responsibility because we have abandoned the work of the base. We have abandoned work with the poorest people in this country. In the thirteen years that we have been in government we have not increased that base work, and this space has been occupied by those evangelical churches and some conservative fundamentalist Catholic sectors. These churches have made a lot of progress. And this also has to do with a project of the United States intelligence since the 1970s. In two conferences that took place in Mexico, the CIA and the State Department already said that the Liberation Theology was more dangerous than Marxism in Latin America and that a counteroffensive had to be made. This counteroffensive comes from the appearance of these electronic churches that were exported to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other places.

Religion is the first system of meaning invented by the human being. There is no other sense more powerful and globalizing than religion. That is why so many people today are seeking to master this system. And we, who are progressives of the Theology of Liberation, have done here in Brazil an intense and very positive work at the base between the 70’s during the military dictatorship and also during the 90’s, but after that have come two very conservative pontificates, those of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. These were 34 years of demobilization of the basic church, of that church of the basic ecclesial communities; they were 34 years of prejudice against the Theology of Liberation. All of this opened space for this counteroffensive by the evangelical right.

Do you argue that “there is no future for humanity outside of socialism?” How do you build socialism at this juncture?

We must not wait for the end of capitalism to build socialism. We have to build socialism within the capitalist system, that is, to begin popular initiatives of economic solidarity, of sharing goods, of strengthening popular bases. That is where we are starting, there is no other way. We cannot return to the Leninist concept of an assault on the Winter Palace. We have to denounce the capitalist system but create effective alternatives to this system, as far as possible from the popular bases. In that way I believe that we can manage to break this system in the long term, but we have to have initiative and pressure and political forces. This is a long-term, essential task, and I don’t see any other way out at this juncture.

What examples of these initiatives do you claim?

There are many initiatives from popular sectors in different places. In Brazil, the Landless Movement has initiatives that are typically socialist. Recently, with the tremendous rise in the price of rice in Brazil, the MST, which is a big rice producer, has not raised its prices and had a terrible sale. Many people were able to discover the advantages of their family farming, where services and profits are shared among the families that are settled or camped. They are small initiatives that we have to strengthen, and look for spaces in the governments again, because it is very important and immense to work from the government, as we have done during the presidencies of Lula and Dilma.

Unfortunately, we have not taken advantage of all the possibilities, and above all, we have not done work, which for me is fundamental, that has to do with the political literacy of the people. We should have invested much more in that. If we have another opportunity to return to the government we will have to face that work, which is fundamental. If on the one hand the thirteen years of the Workers’ Party government promoted many social advances in Brazil – and they are the best in our republican history – but on the other hand, we have not worked on the political literacy of the people, the strengthening of the popular movements, and the democratization of the media.

There are those who argue that capitalism must be humanized. Is that possible?

It’s a totally contradictory idea. Humanizing capitalism is the same as taking the teeth out of the tiger, thinking that this will take away its aggressiveness; it is totally naive to want to humanize capitalism. There is no possibility of that; capitalism is intrinsically evil. Its own endogenous mechanism is a necrophiliac mechanism. It is a system that feeds on those who work, on those who consume, on the poor. It is a question of arithmetic: if there is not so much wealth there is not so much poverty; if there is not so much poverty there is not so much wealth. It is impossible to humanize capitalism; it is a very naive postulation and unfortunately there are still people who believe in this myth.

How do you generate democratic awareness? How do you work on the democratization of society in times like these?

By means of communication systems -digital, printed, audiovisual, etc.-, translating into popular language many of the concepts disseminated in the mass media. Simple people often do not understand concepts such as public debt, foreign investment, exchange rate fluctuations, and market mechanisms. This requires methodology – which Paulo Freire teaches – and popular education teams.

Can you imagine Lula being the president of Brazil again?

Maybe he will have the opportunity because they are reviewing his judgments and convictions, filled with so many prejudices. Hopefully, he will have the possibility to be a candidate again; it is our hope here.

Can you imagine a less conservative Catholic Church, attentive in fact to the proclamations it defends?

As I said, the Catholic Church has spent 34 years of conservative pontificates that have demobilized much of that popular work of the ecclesial base communities, the raw material of Liberation Theology. This does not come from the heads of theologians, it comes from the bases. All of this has been demobilized. It may be different times since the changes proposed by Pope Francis, but still the intermediate hierarchy between the bases and the people who have power in the church has not been totally changed. We still have a large number of bishops and priests who are very conservative and who do not want to get involved in the popular struggles, are afraid or in search of their comfort, their convenience, and do not want to put themselves at risk. There is a lot of work to be done, but there are sectors of the Catholic Church and of Latin America that are very committed to these struggles for the defense of the rights of the poorest, of human rights; this is very strong in many sectors.

How do you think about the immediate future?

I believe that in the immediate future there is going to be an exacerbation of individualism. The pandemic has required cutting off face-to-face relationships, so people are going to be increasingly isolated, with fewer opportunities to connect with each other and to come together in the streets, in the unions, in the social movements, at least until a vaccine comes to take us out of this situation. And here again the importance of knowing how to manage the digital networks appears. We, the progressive left, have to learn more and more to manage these networks and to change them, because we know that many of them are there only to favor consumption or even linked to services of espionage, intelligence, control of the people. There is a lot of struggle to be done around this because it is a factor that came to stay. Many people are informed through these digital networks. We have to create groups with the ability to dominate these networks, to disprove the fake news and disseminate the truth, the real facts. This is the only way we can do a virtual job of political education.

Is there a Liberation Theology today?

Yes, of course. Liberation Theology has opened its range to other topics that are not only social struggles, but also addresses the issue of ecology, questions of nanotechnology, astrophysics, cosmology, and bioethics. The problem is that we have rather lost the popular foundations, which were the basis of the Theory of Liberation. These foundations have been lost during these 34 years of conservative pontificates. Our main task is to return to the bases, to return to the slums, to return to the peripheries, to return to the poor people, to the oppressed, to the excluded, like black people, the indigenous, the LGBT. We all have to be in this struggle; that’s where we have to walk.

Are you optimistic?

I have a principle and that is we have to save pessimism for better days. We can’t play into the hands of a system that wants us to be quiet, depressed, discouraged; we have to keep fighting. History has many twists and turns. I have been through a lot of things, some very tremendous, others positive. The prison under the Vargas dictatorship, the strength of the popular movements, the election of Lula, the election of Dilma… I am optimistic, yes. We cannot consider any historical moment as definitive.

Translation by Resumen Latinoamericano, North America Bureau

Unifying Organized Labor and Organized Religion

By Werner Lange

A union of progressive forces, one with the potential to transform America as well as defeat the Trump regime, announced its long overdue arrival in late summer of this turbulent years. On the 57th anniversary of the barbaric murder of four African-American girls by white supremacists at a Baptist church in Alabama, faith and labor leaders joined together in a nationwide AFL-CIO broadcast, as expressed in its title, “to forge partnership for social, racial and economic justice.” That is, of course. a vitally important goal, and all the expected calls for massive voter mobilization along with condemnations of institutionalized racism were invoked passionately, but the question remains as to why organized labor and organized religion in America have not yet forged an effective and enduring alliance to overcome the myriad institutionalized evils and social sins plaguing our deeply troubled society for so long.

The very mention of social sin provides part of the answer. For most religious folks, even liberal ones, sin is something committed by individuals, not institutions. It took hundreds of years for a paradigm shift from the seven deadly sins[1] of the medieval church to the seven deadly social sins[2] of a modern-day Gandhi to be announced, but most religious folks did to get the memo or make the shift.  Similarly, labor, especially in its non-union form, typically restricts its thought and action to improved working conditions rather than a radical transformation of society. Both worship and work, still mostly locked into a cave of individuality and false consciousness, deny themselves their natural unity and potential power for radical social transformation.

The September 15th broadcast may, however, mark the dawn of a new day, one that can finally unleash a united front of organized labor and religion potent enough to soundly defeat the Trump regime in November but, more importantly, forge an enduring social base for justice “in itself” to an enlightened one “for itself” so that the looming threat of fascism never again rears its ugly head in America. For that to happen it is necessary for both organized labor and organized religion, especially Christianity, to fully recognize and objectively embrace the inherent commonality of their social theory and praxis. Similarly, it is necessary for the Left to overcome long-standing prejudices against religion as a progressive force, potentially and materially.

Given the utterly obnoxious extent to which right-wing evangelicals have hijacked Christianity and operationally allied it with fascist forces, it is understandable that many on America’s Left view religion not only as the opiate of the masses, but as  a deadly toxin threatening us all. However, authentic Christianity from its very origin has manifested itself to be a potent stimulant of progressive social movements, a fact recognized by none other than Frederick Engels.[3] In modern times the revolutionary potential inherent in authentic Christianity emerged as the Social Gospel and Liberation Theology.

In his classic work, A Theology for the Social Gospel, Walter Rauschenbusch succinctly summarizes the nature of the social order based upon Christian ideals:

“Our chief interest in any millennium is the desire for a social order in which the worth and freedom of every least human being will be honored and protected; in which the brotherhood of man will be expressed in the common possession of economic resources of society; and in which the spiritual good of humanity will be set high above the private profit interests of materialistic groups. We hope for such an order for humanity as we hope for heaven for ourselves”[4]. Jon Sobrino, one of the founders of Liberation Theology, echoes that call with a more theological focus on the resurrection of a crucified people: “Jesus’ resurrection, understood as the first fruits of the universal resurrection, would sure be an apt candidate for the function of the ultimate symbol. It is absolute fulfillment and salvation, and thereby absolute liberation - liberation from death. It is the object and pledge of a radical hope, a death-transcending , death-defeating hope…Thus, we can say that the resurrection of Christ is not only a revelation of the power of God over nothingness, but a ‘partial’ partisan hope -although one that can thereupon be universalized - for the victims of this world, the crucified (like Jesus) of history”[5]. Another Liberation theologian, Elsa Tamez, explains that “when the element of hope is present, even though oppression may be at its most intense, there is the expectation of the emergence of a new humanity. Yahweh is revealed as hope which makes possible the struggle for a new order of things.”[6]

That emergent expectation of a new humanity and new order to things is embraced with the current anticipated liberation from the Trump regime, so much so that it has become a material force. For as a young Marx insightfully articulated, “ruling ideas are nothing more that the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships”, and once ideas grip the mind of the masses they become material forces[7]. Likewise, Engels expressed a favorable view of early Christianity with its partisanship towards the poor (Liberation Theologians would later call it a “preferential option for the poor”), and called attention  to the commonality of early Christianity and modern labor movements.[8]  Furthermore, Engels notably highlighted “the essential feature that the new religious philosophy [i.e. Christianity] reverses the previous world order, seeks its disciples among the poor, the miserable, the slaves and the rejected and despises the rich, the powerful and the privileged”[9]. And in one of his last publications, Engels makes a striking comparison between the historical experience of early Christians with the labor movements of his day seeking socialism:

“The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and the workers’ socialism preach forthcoming salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society. Both are persecuted and baited, their adherents are despised and made the objects of exclusive laws, the former as enemies of the human race, the latter as enemies of the state, enemies of religion, the family, the social order. And in spite of all persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously, irresistibly ahead.”[10]

In this context of an underlying unity of thought between labor and religion, it is very revealing that in his September 15th presentation, AFL-CIO Trumka explicitly cited a notable biblical passage from Matthew 25, one that is inscribed on the stained glass of the church in which the Black girls were murdered: “For whatever you did unto the least of these brothers [and sisters] of mine, you did unto me”. A full exegesis of this remarkable passage reveals that the Son of Man, the eschatological Christ, is incarnated today in the community of need, the poor and imprisoned and marginalized. That is a revolutionary revelation, one that, if ever fully known, has the potential to turn this moribund and immoral society of ours upside down, “so that the last shall be first and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16), and help create the new social order prophetically announced by the mother of Jesus: “He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53) . If and when that ever happens the 11th thesis by Marx on Feuerbach[11] will be as commonly known as John 3:16, the favorite verse of evangelicals often displayed these days on sheets behind football goalposts, a symbolic tribute to the success of a viable and vibrant unity of organized labor and organized religion determined to liberate the oppressed from false consciousness and false prophets.

Notes

[1] pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth.

[2] politics without principle; wealth without work; pleasure without conscience; knowledge without character; commerce without morality; science without humanity; worship without sacrifice.

[3] “Christianity, like every great revolutionary movement, was made by the masses.” Frederick Engels from “The Book of Revelation” in “Marx and Engels on Religion”, Progress Publishers, 1957, p. 184.

[4] “A Theology for the Social Gospel” by Walter Rauschenbusch,  Westminster John Knox Press, 1997, p. 224.

[5] “Central Position of the Reign of God in Liberation Theology” by Jon Sobrino, in “Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology”, Orbis Books, 2001, p. 41.

[6]”Bible of the Oppressed” by Elsa Tamez, Orbis Books, 1982, p. 27.

[7] “German Ideology”, originally 1846; “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, originally 1844, in “Essential Writings of Karl Marx”, ed. by David Caute, Collier Books, 1967, p. 89-92.

[8] “On the History of Early Christianity” and “Bauer and Early Christianity”, orig. 1885, 1882, cited by Herbert Aptheker in “From Hope to Liberation” Towards a New Marxist-Christian Dialogue”, ed. by Nicholas Piediscalzi, Fortress Press, 1974, p.31.

[9] “Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity” by Frederick Engels, in “Marx and Engels on Religion”, Progress Publishers, 1957, p. 175

[10] “On the History of Early Christianity” by Frederick Engels, originally 1884, in “Marx and Engels on Religion”, Progress Publishers, 1957, p. 281.

[11] “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Liberation Theologies: Decolonizing the Masters' Tool

By Gregory Stevens

On August 21st, 1831 Baptist preacher, Nat Turner, lead one of the largest slave insurrections in the history of the United States. In an explosion of prophetic and apocalyptic rage, Turner overthrew his legal owners ruling by fighting back, killing the elite colonial slave-owning families who had subjugated his life to a hell on Earth. With more than 70 other liberated slaves, Turner's insurrectionary self-defense sparked brutal repression from local white vigilante militias and the State. After six weeks of freedom, he was caught and brought back to Southampton County, Virginia to be put on trial; his revolutionary actions were recorded by white lawyer, Thomas R. Gray, later titled, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

And on the 12th of May, 1828, I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first! (Gray)

Being Born into slavery as the chattel property of Benjamin Turner, Nat or Nathaniel (the Hebrew meaning, "gift from god") Turner inherited two conflicting yet syncretized versions of religious expression; the first, and most obvious, being his Christian identity as a Baptist preacher, sharing the religion of his slave masters (he was bought and sold between 4 legal owners); the second, being his Mother Nancy's African folk-traditions brought directly over in the year 1799 when she was purchased by a Methodist slave owner. Further in his recorded confession he details multiple mystical experiences: talking to spirits, having flash backs to previous lives, practicing divination through tree leaves, and deciphering hieroglyphic characters all of which direct his passion toward revolt. In an act of religious syncretism Turner used knowledges from Baptist Christianity (individual freedom and soul freedom), the Hebrew prophets (histories of prophetic witness), and past-life ancestral mysticism (possibly informed by indigenous African traditions) to act upon his direct liberation from slavery. In this way Turner used the religious tool of his master and the indigenous traditions brought over from Africa by his Mother to subvert and challenge the legal slave-system for collective emancipation. For Turner, God had judged the materiality of slavery as demonic and condemned the institution to exorcism; it was God who actively directed him through revelation, signs, scriptures, visions, and dreams to defend himself from slavery. Turner embraced the counter-violence of God against slavery and dehumanization, igniting violent insurrection to advance the Kingdom principles of freedom, equality, liberation, justice, and salvation for the common good. "It was not motivated by hatred, racism, fanaticism, or evil. His revolutionary violence was the self-defense of the oppressed slave and God's counterviolence against the inherent barbarism and violence of slavery" (Lampley 3).

To understand the use of colonial religion as a strategy of liberation it is important to understand the severity of oppression and the overwhelming violence that colonialism brings to a people. The psychological, emotional, physical, spiritual, and social distress brought on by slavery creates an existence defined by perpetual trauma, abuse, and objectification. The opium of the masses loses its mind/body-numbing affects in the face of endless violence against black and brown bodies and becomes the methamphetamine advancing insurrectionary resistance.

The structural repercussions exacerbate conditions of trauma on a local and global scale through what Anibal Quijano theorizes as, the coloniality of power. Quijano argues that the development of the colonial project begins with the fabricated notion of race as a "supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to others" (533). The conquered and dominated peoples of Africa and the Americas were racialized as "other;" they were "situated in a natural position of inferiority and, as a result, their phenotypic traits as well as their cultural features were considered inferior" ultimately determining racialized categorizations as the "fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world, population into ranks, places, and roles in the new societies structure of power" (Quijano 535). With the development of newly racialized historical identities, a foundation was created for the global structuring of social roles, geohistorical places, and the unequal planetary phenomenon of transmodernity (Mignolo 57). This social hierarchy of racialized bodies and knowledges forms the crucible of eurocentrism, modernist epistemologies, and the Westernizing project of the North through a coloniality of power that also controls the labor force, the means and lands of production, and the flow of capital itself. In this Western expansion, ideas from the colonized peoples were expropriated or ignored, often stripped of their ability to be re/produced from below. This equates to the destruction of cultures through the racialization, alienation, and commodification of peoples. Resistance lead to the hanging, burning, and murdering of millions of people for the promotion of an "evolved, modern, and civilized" society (it was an evolved, modern, and civilized Methodist pastor who first bought Nat Turner). "The expansion of Western capitalism" Coloniality theorist Walter Mignolo writes, "implied the expansion of Western epistemology in all its ramifications, from the instrumental reason that went along capitalism and the industrial revolution, to the theories of the state, to the criticism of both capitalism and the state" (59). This Western supremacy was crafted in suppressing other- and non-scientific forms of knowledges, and was especially suppressive to the subaltern social groups whose social practices were informed by such alternative epistemologies (Santos ix). Portuguese scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos sees the suppression of indigenous peoples of the Americas and of the African slaves as a form of epistemicide - the other side of genocide. The epistemological foundation that the global world capitalist economy is structured on is the imperial ordering of knowledges with the North at the top and the South at the bottom. This North/South divide is metaphorical and geographical in Santos' use, consisting of systems of visible and invisible distinctions that have material and cognitive ramifications. "The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms;" in the creation of "the other" as inferior, "the other side of the line vanishes as reality, becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced nonexistent" (Santos 118). This non-existence is a radical exclusion, deeming all that is produced by the other as inferior, incomprehensible, and unworthy of serious consideration. Thinking from above abyssal-line, from the North, is the foundation on which modern theologies, sciences, and everyday societies are situated and are therefore in need of radical uprooting, decolonizing, and re-envisioning.

The cognitive supremacy of the Western expansion chose Christianity as its divine right to domination. The Christianity of the Spanish Empire used Theologies of Domination to "disseminate a characteristic ideology through all segments of society, propounding a set of fundamental values and principles which, while expressed in terms of lofty abstraction or eternal truth, nevertheless serves to further the interests of those who hold power" (Lincoln 269). These religions of the status quo replicate and co-produce the ideologies of capitalism: competition, hierarchy, racialization, epistemicide, and patriarchy. If Christianity was the religion of the colonial project, is a decolonial Christianity even possible? Is it possible to develop a Christian theology that subverts, challenges, and decolonizes its recent historical use in crafting the Western expansion of colonialities of power?

Audre Lorde's well-known declaration that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" proves helpful in this integration of the colonial religion of choice. The immensity of the coloniality of power through Western expansion and the development of the United States as a force of global Empire by the blessing of a majority of Christian authorities, institutions, and lay persons alike, brings many to a frightening conclusion: "if the master's tools cannot be appropriated then, in an age where our capitalist masters claim ownership over everything, only resignation is possible." Do we give up on our faith and spiritual tradition forfeiting our theologies to colonial powers as we seek material emancipation? Do we give up on our Christianities as the masters' tool to colonize, modernize, and under-develop most of the world? Or do we use the masters' tool against the masters by re-shaping the tool itself, after all it was the Hebrew prophet Isaiah who wrote, "They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks" (2:4)?

The masters did not pluck their tool out of an ahistorical revelation but co-opted the religiosity of Christ-followers (the pejorative 'Christian' translated directly) to transform the world by thinking-with religion to bless their oppressive colonial project. Lorde was not making her argument to squash revolutionary determination, but rather attempting to articulate a similar message to that of the decolonial project that is attempting to open epistemology up to other ways of knowing and being, as valid, and co-equals in the production of our various worlds. Speaking from her experience as a black lesbian feminist, she refused to replicate the modes of racist patriarchal white-feminisms that honored her oppression through their ambivalence toward the continuing colonial project.

The question remains, can our Christianities be used as a tool to destroy the masters' house? Activist and co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, Michael White, complicates our answer with this insight: "If we learn anything from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's exceptional, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, it should be that the dominant powers appropriated from us first." He uses the example of war, which most associate as a tool of the master, to demonstrate his point, "based on anthropological, archeological and philosophical evidence, they hold that warfare was originally developed by nomadic anti-State forces and was only later appropriated and turned against its developers" (White).

Christian theology has not always been a colonial project. Based on anthropological, archeological, and philosophical evidence, Christian theology began in Roman Occupied Palestine, from within a peasant's movement inaugurating the Commonwealth of God in direct confrontation to the Kingdom of Caesar. It would be a mistake to think we could reverse 1700 years of Christian world-making to discover a pure first century form, rather early Christinaities are a reminder that the "masters' tools" have not always been in the hands of the masters, he stole them.

The convoluted histories of Christianity defy the simplistic conclusion that the entire tradition is a product of the coloniality of power. Exilic, resistant, and silenced voices have glittered Christian theological praxis for its entire history. And in the same way "religion" seems impossible to define, Christianity can be equally difficult "not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes" (Asad 29). If we take Talal Asad's critique of religion seriously, we must refute any notion of a monoculture of theological discourse and seek to resurrect the various historical elements of Christianities worth saving. In this way, our theological reflections can reclaim stolen tools, blending cultural and social multiplicities that defy the homogeneity of dominant culture, and forming something altogether new. For liberal theologians, this kind of syncretism is often rejected as "cafeteria style" consumer religion, but for the colonized, syncretism is their mode of survival. By reclaiming and recreating the masters' tool the possibilities of collective liberation are opened wide.

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui troubles indigenous notions of identity by theorizing hybridity as a potent mixture of coexisting multiplicities of cultural difference that do not collapse in on one another but "antagonize and complement each other" each giving the other a possibility to "reproduce itself from the depths of the past and relates to others in contentious ways" (Cusicanqui 105). Theology from below is not a sterile mule without an ability to reproduce, but a motley trinity of indigeneity, de/coloniality, and critical theory with the ability to birth something quite different "merg[ing] features of its ancestors in harmonic and as yet unknown blend[s]" (Cusicanqui 105). This decolonial hybridity, a mixing of knowledges that are not limited by their original logics, is a defining character of Liberation Theology, for it is the reclaiming of our stolen tools for the purpose of emancipation/salvation.

In the 1960s the redemption of the Christian tradition was attempted again by using the masters' tool for emancipatory soteriology. Liberation Theology birthed out of the historical struggles of epistemicide and genocides in the Global South (Gustavo Gutierrez), and from persons within the heart of the United States empire who were racialized others and deemed inferior (James Cone). This mixology of Marxism, (de)colonial theologies, and indigenous traditions for the sake of liberatory emancipation created an entirely new decolonial theological discourse. The shift Liberation Theology brought to the larger conversation was a much stronger reflection on the matrix of material conditions creating poverty and dependence on capitalist economic social formations. It was Karl Marx's social and critical theories, along with the Marxist guerilla movements birthed out of the early 20th century, that greatly influenced the priests and theologians expressing theologies of material soteriology from below. The liberatory theologies developed by Latin American and Black American scholar-activists of the radical 60's were syncretic for the sake of survival, the oppressed were also using the master's tools without replicating the masters' epistemic coloniality.

Theologians of the North, those above the abyssal line, were debating classical philosophical ideas about the Kantian "priority of concepts versus things," while ignoring the structural and physical violence brought to marginal communities around the globe (Cone 56). Theologies of material soteriology interested a colonized people, for what was 'real' for them was the very presence of oppression and the dire to end the brutality. The problems of the auction block, Jim Crow Laws, Neoliberal developmentalism, and the prison industrial complex will not be solved through philosophical and theological debates void of the materiality of demonized peoples' intersecting oppressions. In this way liberation theologies break from dominant colonial discourses on Christianity by embracing radical subjectivity and rejecting theology as a universal Western language that never spoke with oppressed peoples, only down to them (or completely ignored them all together). Reflecting on theological epistemicide Lampley writes, "Euro-American and European theologies have tried historically to claim objectivity and universality while black theology and other liberation theologies have exposed their Eurocentric tendencies and worldview" (33). Christian theologies that do not rupture the colonial suppression of alternative knowledge production continue to reproduce the logics that uphold world-systems of planetary devastation and should be discarded to the fires of Hell.

Black Liberation Theology in the United States emerged alongside Latin American Liberation theology as a way for black Americans to assert their dignity as God's beloved and fight for their freedom and self-determination. In the same ways academics and activists have ignored the Global South they have ignored Liberation Theologies birthed out of the colonial distress of life on the margins of empire. The father of Black Liberation theology, James Cone [1], argues black Americans have been systematically ignored and removed from legitimacy, their oppression and marginalized ignored by liberal protestants and Catholics alike leading to a Liberation Theology as a rupture within the abyssal line of colonial theologies. Cone writes,

Whites debated the validity of infant baptism or the issue of predestination and free will; blacks recited biblical stories about God leading the Israelites from Egyptian bondage,…White thought on the Christian view of salvation was largely "spiritual" and sometimes "rational," but usually separated from the concrete struggle of freedom in this world (Cone 54).

Black Theology uncovers the "structures and forms of the black experience," creating emancipatory theologies through "the thought forms of the black experience itself" (Cone 17). Black Liberation Theologies, much like the decolonial project of subaltern studies/activism, arises out of alternative epistemological formations centered on the experience of blackness, the experience of dehumanization, the experience of the Global South. The theological discourse of the North, of the West, and of Liberal academia centered on the White experience and White logical systems re/produces the colonial subject.

There is a striking similarity between the oppressed racialized communities in the Unites States with those below the abyssal line in the Global South fighting for cognitive and social justice, fighting to be heard, to be recognized, and to be validated. Blackness is produced through modernity, it is created and shaped by coloniality. Whiteness in Cone's context is the colonial project as expressed in the United States, the racialized ideas of the West - where everyone has to look, think, and act the same. Whiteness is for Cone the capitalist economic structure and way of organizing society into slaves and owners, producers of knowledges and those subjected to them. The creation of emancipatory knowledges from the black experience, was and is the purpose of Black Liberation Theologies. This too is the purpose of decolonization and the only hope for Christian theology if it is to matter today.

As a product of decoloniality, Liberation Theologies are "undertaken by the oppressed people themselves" and stem "from the values proper to these people," that is, the logics and grammars of anti-capitalist decolonial world making through which a "true cultural revolution comes about" (Gutierrez 91). We see this in the life of the Baptist revolutionary Nat Turner, his rejection of the theologies that bless racialization, colonialism, and economies of slavery; we also see it in his recreated theological imaginary emerging from his direct experience of all three. He reclaimed the stolen tool of Christian religiosity to remove the nails driven through his life and climb off the cross of coloniality. A hundred years later Liberation Theologies are attempting to further this work: these alternative ways of knowing and shaping the god-world-relationship reject the myth of progress and the myth of historical evolution into a modern state of abundance. Locating the site of hermeneutical reflection for decolonial theology in the experience of colonized bodies necessitates this rejection. Out of a motley mixology of theological, social, and critical knowledges from below a strategy for liberation and revolution emerges without replicating the logics of the colonial masters. Theo-knowledges birthed out of liberatory struggles can and do refuse to replicate the masters' use of tools. The tool of religion in general, and decolonial Christianity in particular, can be used to articulate an egalitarian, life-affirming, ecological society, one that stands in direct contrast to the religious tool used to develop the coloniality of power. In this reshaping, the masters' stolen tools used for domination are queered for collective and self-determined decolonial liberation.

This originally appeared on Gregory's blog .

Works Cited

Asad, Talal. 2009. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. 2012.

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. 2012. "Ch'ixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization." . South Atlantic Quarterly. 111 (1): 95-109.

Cone, James H. 1975. God of the Oppressed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Gutierrez, Gustavo. 1979. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation. London: SCM Press.

Gray, Thomas R.; Turner, Nat; and Royster, Paul (Depositor), "The Confessions of Nat Turner" (1831). Electronic Texts in American Studies. 15. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/15

Lampley, K. 2016. Theological Account of Nat Turner: Christianity, Violence, and Theology . New York City: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lincoln B. 1985. Notes Toward a Theory of Religion and Revolution. In: Lincoln B. (eds) Religion, Rebellion, Revolution. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mignolo, Walter. 2002. "The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference." South Atlantic Quarterly. 101 (1): 57-96.

Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. 2000. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America." Nepantla: Views from South. 1 (3): 533-580.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2008. Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies. London: Verso.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2016. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. New York: Routledge.

White, Michael. The Wisdom of Audre Lorde. Web. https://www.micahmwhite.com/on-the-masters-tools/

Notes

[1] James Cone passed away on April 28, 2018 just five days before the presentation of this paper. I am forever indebted to his work. May he rest in Black Power.

A Liberation Theology as Black as Malcolm X: The Uncompromising Vision of James Cone

By Ewuare X. Osayande

"If the church is to remain faithful to its Lord, it must make a decisive break with the structure of this society by launching a vehement attack on the evils of racism in all forms. It must become prophetic, demanding a radical change in the interlocking structures of this society." So begins what is one of the most controversial and consequential works of theology in the history of the United States. Black Theology and Black Power stands as a work of theological passion that sought to break the stronghold of white supremacy that lies at the foundation of the ivory towers of Christian thought. From this theological torrent would emerge an entire new canon of theological interpretation of the Christian message in the modern world.

A work wrought against the backdrop of Black rebellions across America in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. King, Cone's Black Theology and Black Power gave theological voice and justification for the rage that marked the Black liberation movement at that time. A new testament from one of our own. Who never denied us. Who never betrayed us to his last breath. As King himself said, "A riot is the language of the unheard," Cone's tome was a wake-up call that was received by a slumbering Christian church as a slap in the face. Cone channeled every ounce of anger and communal pain experienced by Black America and called for atonement on the part of a white Church establishment whose theology justified slavery, made peace with segregation and rendered Black people an aberration of God's creation. His challenge was clear. His charge unequivocal. Cone dared declare that "in twentieth-century America, Christ means Black Power."

As one would suspect, Dr. King loomed large in Cone's theology. But for Cone, it was Malcolm that made his theology Black. And Cone further stated that it was Malcolm's "angry voice that shook [him] out of [his] theological complacency." And like Malcolm, Cone had little patience for Black apologists for white liberal appeals for reconciliation. According to Cone, "black people cannot talk about the possibilities of reconciliation until full emancipation has become a reality for all black people." But Cone didn't stop there. He went on to offer a radical reinterpretation of reconciliation as an experience of Black people being reconciled to an acceptance of our Blackness as made in the image of God and a shedding of the shame that has been imposed on us by a racist society that would address us as "some grease-painted form of white humanity."

Cone's first articulation of Black theology was not without its holes, gaps and outright contradictions. But, unlike, the white theologians he challenged, Cone was open and receptive to the challenges of his peers and students as they helped him hone his theological outlook into one that would come to move beyond the strict confines of a Black nationalism that was male dominant, homophobic, classist and US-centered. The debates that followed would usher forth a host of Black and Third World theologies that, together, would be united in two volumes of works Cone co-edited with his long-time friend and comrade Gayraud Wilmore.

One of the most critical and prophetic essays collected within those pages that would aid in the development of Black Feminist and Womanist theologies was Jacequlyn Grant's "Black Theology and the Black Woman." She targeted the issue squarely, "In examining Black Theology it is necessary to make one of two assumptions: (1) either Black women have no place in the enterprise, or (2) Black men are capable of speaking for us. Both of these assumptions are false and need to be discarded." Later, she concluded, "The failure of the Black Church and Black Theology to proclaim explicitly the liberation of Black women indicates that they cannot claim to be agents of divine liberation. If the theology, like the church, has no word for Black women, its conception of liberation is inauthentic."

Cone came to terms with this prophetic indictment when, writing in the Preface to the 1989 Edition of the book, he confessed:

"An example of the weakness of the 1960s black freedom movement, as defined by Black Theology and Black Power, was its complete blindness to the problem of sexism, especially in the black church community. When I read the book today, I am embarrassed by its sexist language and patriarchal perspective. There is not even one reference to a woman in the whole book! With black women playing such a dominant role in the African American liberation struggle, past and present, how could I have been so blind?"

He went on to discuss his temptation to rid the 1989 edition of the book of its sexist language and add references to women that are missing in the original edit. He would leave it as it was stating that, "It is easy to change the language of oppression without changing the sociopolitical situation of its victims. I know existentially what this means from the vantage point of racism."

Cone's desire to change the sociopolitical situation was evident in his sustained commitment to being in conversation with other Black theologians invested in the project of developing a Black Theology that spoke to the aspirations of all Black people to be free, not only from white supremacy, but from the oppressions that plagued the Black community from within as well.

In addition to Black Feminist and Womanist theologies, Black queer theologies would also emerge during this period as a criticism of the entrenched forms of homophobia that remain embedded in many Black churches and Black communities. Speaking about the radical inclusivity of an "in-the-life" theology of liberation in the second volume of Black Theology: A Documented History, Elias Faraje-Jones clarifies that "an in-the-life theology of liberation would be one that grows out of the experiences, lives, and struggles against oppression and dehumanization of those in-the-life. It understands our struggle for liberation as being inextricably bound with those of oppressed peoples throughout the world, as we all struggle against racism, classism, imperialism, sexism, ableism, and all other forms of oppression. Such a theology also offers to other theologies a liberation from the strictures of homophobia/biphobia, as well as liberation from heterosexism which creates the climate for homophobia/biphobia with its assumption that the world is and must be heterosexual, and by its display of power and privilege."

These Black theologies are, in themselves, an expression of the undying will of Black people to be free by any means necessary. The very expression "Black Lives Matter" that has captured the imagination of organized Black struggle all over the world is - in itself - a theological statement that is as poignant and prophetic as any text written since Cone first penned Black Theology and Black Power. Written on the bodies of Black people marching in the streets, it is stating unequivocally that Black existence is sacred and complete and whole without need for apology or compromise in the face of a white supremacist assault that continues with renewed vigor and violence. It is the fundamental theological text written on the dark-hued faces of unarmed Black youth staring into the blue wall of violence. They come untutored in the Testaments. Yet, no Bible required to show what must be done. Here Cone's Black Theology is born anew in their defiance to injustice; their self-love and love for the living and the dead. With arms outstretched in a show of surrender. But not to the authority of this land. They walk in the valleys of death, fearing no evil. Unintimidated. Undaunted. Undeterred. As Gospel as it gets.

The promise of Black Liberation Theology lies in its potential to awaken churched Black people in the same way that Malcolm's rhetoric shook Cone out of his slumber to an awareness of the need for revolutionary struggle against the forces of white supremacy. The promise of Black Theology uncompromised by a Black church operating within the dogmatic confines of middle class aspirations or stuck within the ideological blinders of a Black intellectual class more concerned with dissertations and divinity degrees is the development of a theology that presents itself as a challenge to the very foundations of the system of capitalism that is profiting from and predicated upon the exploitation of Black people worldwide. If Black Liberation Theology is to have a future, it will be found here.

As the spiritual forebearers of Cone's Black Theology, Dr. King and Malcolm X both would come to this understanding in the final year of their lives. In his speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," King makes the clear the relationship of racism to the global structures of economic inequality:

"… the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

Malcolm, for his part, also was in the process of making clear connection between racism and capitalism. In an interview conducted shortly before his death Malcolm says, "… all of the countries emerging today from under the shackles of colonialism are turning toward socialism. I don't think it's an accident. Most of the countries that were colonial powers were capitalist countries, and the last bulwark of capitalism today is America. It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism."

Cone, himself, articulated the need for a deeper understanding of socialism, indicating his disbelief that capitalism could solve the problems Black people experience in the United States. At a seminar addressing "Religion, Socialism and the Black Experience" in 1980, Cone said the following, "Although the socialist tradition among Black church people is small, it is still present and we black theologians and historians should rediscover it in order to enhance our vision of liberation." He goes on to state, "The Black Church cannot simply continue to ignore socialism as an alternative social arrangement. We cannot continue to speak against racism without any reference to a radical change in the economic order. I do not think that racism can be eliminated as long as capitalism remains intact. It is now time for us to investigate socialism as an alternative to capitalism."

Cone is envisioning a Black Theology that is truly revolutionary in that it is committed to the restructuring of the very socioeconomic order that profits from the oppression that Black people have faced since those first Africans were sold as property on the shores of the colony of Virginia. Such a Black Theology is most necessary if it is to take seriously the work of Black liberation today.

Such a Black Theology can no longer be confined to the white-funded walls of academic conferences. It can no longer just write or preach about the problems of the poor. It can no longer be a Black Theology that, like white theology, appeases the Black poor with neoliberal acts of charity and affirms philanthropy and mission as the Gospel's answer. It must become a Black Theology that is responsive to and affirming of Black workers and the Black poor marching not just in the streets of Ferguson and Flint in the United States, but those in the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of Soweto. As Cone asserts in God of the Oppressed, "… who Jesus Christ is for us today is connected with the divine future as disclosed in the liberation fight of the poor. When connected with the person of Jesus, hope is not an intellectual idea; rather, it is the praxis of freedom in the oppressed community."

In the last years of his life, James Cone said it was the cry of Black blood that called out to him as he wrote Black Theology and Black Power. That cry of Black blood has only grown louder and more insistent in recent years as the bruised bodies of Civil Rights activists at the bully clubbed hands of a Bull Connor have been replaced with the bullet-ridden bodies of random Black people murdered by police across this nation. Like Malcolm before him, Cone's criticism was not only reserved for the white Christian church and white society at-large. That cry of Black blood urged him to call out the contradictions of a Black church that is all too often reluctant to defend the defenseless.

"The black church must ask about its function amid the rebellion of black people in America. Where does it stand? If it is to be relevant, it must no longer admonish its people to be 'nice' to white society. It cannot condemn the rioters. It must make an unqualified identification with the 'looters' and 'rioters,' recognizing that this stance leads to condemnation by the state as law-breakers. There is no place for 'nice Negroes' who are so distorted by white values that they regard laws as more sacred than human life. There is no place for those who deplore black violence and overlook the daily violence of whites."

That question posed fifty years ago has now become a condemnation of a Black Church establishment that has grown sinfully silent in the face of the wholesale state-sanctioned slaughter of Black youth. That condemnation is echoed in the sound of Black youth leading themselves in a confrontation with the American Empire. By the multitudes, in the streets across this nation and around the world, there is a generation of Black people that are the living, breathing embodiment of Cone's Black Liberation Theology who are saying with their feet what Malcolm made plain: "I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion."

The crisis of Black survival in a world run over by a white supremacist order, in a country led by the likes of an ungodly crypto-fascist capitalist, cannot be overstated. Such should become the challenge and inspiration for advancing a Black Liberation Theology that is wholly Black in all the expressions of our shared humanity and determination to be free. A Black Theology as uncompromisingly Black as Malcolm. A Black Theology as courageously Black as Fannie Lou. A Black Theology as Black in aspiration and articulation as the Black working class that gave birth to them both.

Ewuare X. Osayande is an activist, essayist and author of several books including 'Whose America?: New and Selected Poems' and 'Commemorating King: Speeches Honoring the Civil Rights Movement.' Learn more about his work at Osayande.org.

How to Go On: Do We Have the Stomach for What's Required

By Luke Bretherton

Watching the election results come in, and as the dawning realization of what was happening began to become apparent, the following quotation from Henry James came to me:

Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly ever apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion … we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

I learned this quotation from reading Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, a book penned in 1971 when the 60s were going sour. Richard Nixon was in office, the Weather Underground had issued their "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States and were in the midst of a bombing campaign, and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers had revealed a long history of the U.S. government deceiving the American public about the war in Vietnam. The scandal of Watergate was yet to come. This quote seems as fitting now as it did to Alinsky in 1971.

But, theologically, the quote is always fitting. This is the world as it is: a world that a robust doctrine of sin should teach us to expect but which idolatry seduces us into forgetting. The chasing after idols is always foolish, but some have the luxury to indulge such foolishness at no physical cost to themselves. The election of Trump is a wake-up call to remember what those who are black, brown, queer, disabled, or a religious minority can only forget at their peril: that oppression is likely to get worse, but the struggle goes on; that the absurd becomes normalized, but must nevertheless be ridiculed even to the point where ridicule feels absurd; that love is more real than hate, but real love means hating what is evil; that the space between the world as it is and the world as it should be must be grieved in order to find the hope to go on; that a truly good, happy and meaningful life cannot involve leisure built off the domination of others. No form of life can be good if it does not have in its institutional forms and ends justice and generosity for all, and pursues this in such a way as to foster the agency of everyone, especially the vulnerable and dependent.

The temptation is not to abide with the truth of what Henry James is saying so that we might more fully confront the reality of the world as it is. The temptation is to blame others before we accept our responsibility for this situation and the judgment of God on us. Falling prey to this temptation to blame others by white Christian men and women, and the racial and religious scapegoating it generated, is partly what propelled Trump to victory. But his victory is also partly the responsibility of the left and the failure to confront its own failures.

A mood of nativist discontent and racial scapegoating married to actual economic displacement among a broad cross section of American society has up to this point lacked a determinate and focused ideological articulation. It is a mood that is easily captured by a demagogue like Trump. The only way to counter this kind of capture are forms of organizing that intervene to disrupt the sense that only Trump is speaking into and giving voice to this mood. Such organizing helps dis-identify potential supporters from either a right-wing populist like Trump, or explicitly fascist groups, through creating alternative political scripts that disarticulate the reasons for discontent from the interpretative frameworks the likes of Trump provides. But the kind of engaged, relational organizing that does not begin by denouncing people as a "basket of deplorables" requires leftists to stomach building relationships with people they don't like and find scandalous.

Yet this is exactly what successful anti-fascist organizers did in the 1930s in the U.S. and Britain, unlike on the continent of Europe. For example, Alinsky, who explicitly saw his work as anti-fascist, was a secular Jew organizing anti-Semitic Catholics, yet who was also able to recognize these same people as not wholly reducible to that and as potential renewers of democratic life. It was difficult and threatening work but the likes of Alinsky had the stomach for it, as did many others in the British and U.S. labor movements. And it worked. The question is, do those on the left have the stomach for it today?

In the wake of Trump's victory, fascist groups will be on the ascendency. They have the potential to move beyond Trump's vague populist message to ideologically capture the mood and turn it to directly fascist ends. This is seems to be happening in Europe. There is a crucial distinction to be made between potential supporters of and actual fascist groups. The latter needs vehement, agitational, uncompromising opposition. And it is incumbent upon whites to do this work, and especially white Christian men like me, as a form of atonement and repentance for the ways other white Christian men helped create this problem. We need to "come get our people."

Part of this organizing work is to help potential supporters of fascists reckon with a hard truth of building any form of just and generous common life: that is, everyone must change and in the process we must all lose something to someone at some point. This is part of what it means to live as frail, finite, and fallen creatures. Sacrifice and loss, and therefore compromise and negotiation are inevitable. The temptation and sin of the privileged and powerful is to fix the system so that they lose nothing and other always lose, no matter how hard they work. The fight is always to ensure that the loss is not born disproportionately by the poor and marginalized. And that is a Christian fight. It is part of what it means to love our neighbor.

Folded into loving our neighbor is the call to love our enemies. But Christian enemy love tends to fall into one of three traps. Either we make everyone an enemy (the sectarian temptation to denounce anyone who is not like "us"); or we make no one an enemy, denying any substantive conflicts and pretending that if we just read our Bibles and pray, things like racism and economic inequality will get better by means of some invisible hand (the temptation of sentimentalism that denies we are the hands and feet of the body of Christ); or we fail to see how enemies claim to be our friend (the temptation of naiveté that ignores questions of power). In relation to the latter trap, we must recognize that the powerful mostly refuse to recognize they are enemies to the oppressed and claim they are friends to everyone. A loving act in relation to those in power who refuse to acknowledge their oppressive action is to force those who claim to be friends to everyone (and are thereby friends to no one) to recognize the enmity between us so that issues of injustice and domination can be made visible and addressed. This involves struggle and agitation - something Christians are often reluctant to do because of a desire to appear respectable.

In place of these three traps we must learn what it means to see enemies as neighbors capable of conversion. This is simultaneously a missiological and political orientation. Agitational democratic politics is a means of "neighboring" that goes alongside actively building relationship with people we don't like or find scandalous in order to "seek the welfare of the city" (Jer 29.7) so that it displays something of what a just and generous common life might look like.

This article originally appeared at Sojourners.

Luke Bretherton is Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. Before that he taught at King's College London. His books include: Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship & the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), winner of the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing. He has extensive involvement in community organizing and has worked internationally with numerous churches, mission agencies and faith-based organizations.