White Jesus & Black Christianity

By: Vivian Phillips

There are two lines spoken in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi that made me a little uneasy when I first read it. It's in the scene between Kimathi and the Priest. 

PRIEST: Wrong Again. We are Africanizing the Church. We want to see Christ reflected in our culture. Drums in the church. African Bishops. African Moderators. African Cardinals. 

KIMATHI: Slave! Slave! When will you throw off your ill-fitting borrowed gown and create something you can truly call your own? Pastor, tell me the difference between a padre and a settler. Go on. 

I believe I understand what Ngũgĩ is trying to say here, that even with the "Africanizing" of the Christian ministry, it still doesn't cover up the fact that it is a tool used by the colonizer to pacify and control the African population. Then of course, I applied it to African Americans. For the enslaved Africans, when they were brought to America it was illegal for them to worship the religion of their homeland and were also forced to convert to Christianity with the threat of torture or death. Still that was not the death of African religion in the New Americas, with the birth of Afro-syncretic religions like Voodoo, which acted as rebellion against White supremacy and spiritual connection to Africa roots. However, religions like Voodoo are more concentrated in areas like the Caribbean and small pockets in America (like Louisiana). The majority of African Americans in the US are Methodist/Baptist Christians. Which had me asking myself. Are my fellow African Americans and I still wearing our "ill-fitted" gowns?

On one hand, yes. American Christianity (literally American, first and Christian, second), is still fed to African Americans today as a means of pacifying us and brain-washing us towards the Euro-religious mindset. There is  still a large portion of African Americans that have a blue-eyed Jesus on their church fans and art of blond angels pictured in their bibles. The televangelist culture still sells African Americans that they can pray their way out of poverty, especially if they send this TV pastor $9.99 in mail. And many African American churches still uphold patriarchal traditions of the male pastor having a very advertised/praised role in the church while most groundwork done by church women goes unnoticed.

But then I think about the role of the Church in African American communities and throughout history. I think about how African American churches were often ground zeroes for resistance regarding The Underground Railroad, The Civil Rights Movement, and Black Lives Matter. I think about how Morehouse and Spelman College started off in a Church basement. How African American churches created Gospel music. How the community, willpower, & resistance of Black Church collective is still so feared by American racists that black churches are still targets of White Terrorism from the 16th St. Baptist Bombing in 1963 to Charleston church shooting of 2015.

Yes, perhaps we're still wearing the colonizer's gown, but I like to think we're pulling apart the seams thread by thread. But I also try to think in the way my mother does when she goes to church. When I asked her, who does she pray to, she said: "I try to think of my ancestors. The unnamed ones in the plantations, my great great grandma Juile who was a wet-nurse and maid for a rich White family all her life, my grandpa fought in a segregated army digging ditches. Whatever God they prayed to that got them through every single day of their lives, is the one I pray to too."