Theology in the Raw - A History of the Black Church in America: Dr. Walter Strickland

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Dr. Walter R. Strickland II (PhD, University of Aberdeen) assistant professor of systematic and contextual theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of several books including Swing Low volume 1 & volume 2. Dr. Strickland is a pastor at Imago Dei Church in Raleigh, NC and is also a co-host of White Horse Inn. He lives in the Raleigh area with his wife and children. -- If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe to my channel! Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw Or you can support me directly through Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Visit my personal website: https://www.prestonsprinkle.com For questions about faith, sexuality & gender: https://www.centerforfaith.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The exiles and Babylon conferences happening again in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 3rd to 5th, 2025. All the info is that theology and the rod.com. We are going to be touching on several important topics, the gospel and race after George Floyd, transgender people in the church, social justice, and the gospel, two different perspectives and a dialogical debate about whether the evangelical church is good for this country. We've also added some breakouts to the conference. We've going to have, we're going to have a killer after party, a pre-conference loads of stuff going on. You're not going to want to miss it again. Register soon at the Algenrod.com. We do have an early bird special. So we do want to encourage you to register early, take advantage of that offer. My guest today is dr. Walter Strickland, a fellow Aberdeen university grad. He got his PhD at Aberdeen

university. He serves as the assistant professor of systematic and contextual theology at south Eastern Baptist theological seminary is the author of several books, including the recently released two volume series, swing low, a history of the black church in the United States. He's also a pastor at a Mago day church in Raleigh, North Carolina, and co-hosts the white horse in he and his wife and children live in Raleigh, the Raleigh area. This whole conversation was really fascinating. I think I asked some stupid questions and he was very gracious and not shaming me for asking about stuff that I should have already known about. But man, I learned so much in this conversation. I know you will too. Please welcome to the

show for the first time, Dr. Walter Strickland. Hey Walter, welcome to theology. Yeah. Yeah. I've been wondering, actually I I've been wanting to have you on for a long time. And then I think your publicist recently reached out about your book that just came out. We're recording this before your book is out. People will be listening after it's out. So the book is swing low, actually two volume series, a swing low, a history of black Christianity in the United States. When did you start working on this book? I imagine it probably took a long time. It did. So there was a section of my dissertation, which was going to be like a 2,500 word introduction

on the history that supported the theology I was talking about, and my professors just kept wanting more and more, and that 2,500 words turned into 40,000 words, and that was the beginning of that process. I think I started that in, I think, 2013, 14, and then my interest in that discontinued to grow because, you know, much like many people who, um, who went to more evangelical leaning divinity schools and seminaries, I didn't learn much about these figures when I was in my formal education. So I feel like I was doing a lot of backfilling, which was really a lot of fun. I mean, that, that was my experience. Um, and I didn't even think about it. You know,

like I, if somebody mentioned to me, like, so what do you know about the history of the black church in the United States? I would say, I literally don't know it. I didn't learn anything about this and seminary. So why don't we let's make this a history of the black church in the U S one on one course, take us back as far as you want to go. Where do you begin in the book? And let's start there. So the began the story, I think it's, it's helpful for me to tell, tell you about the angle of the story that I took. And so there's several tellings of this story that are about denominational

development, about the national Baptist convention, about the progressive national Baptist convention and that split about the African Methodist Episcopal Church and so forth, which those are great ways to tell the story, and they're needed. There's others that would tell the story based upon a sort of like a radicalism perspective, you know, chronicling, okay, the African American church, looking back, you are in this tradition insofar as you rebelled against the status quo. That would be like a Gay Rod Wilmore or like a James Cone looking back and sort of telling the story curated or sort of anchored around that. There's others that would talk about the institutional black church and its public engagement. It would feature figures like Martin Luther King Jr.

public engagement, you know, in a feature of figures like Martin Luther King Jr. going back in the 1900s, you'd have like an Adam Clayton Powell over at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City. Really, they actually ended up moving to Harlem. And so they had a lot of impact in the public square. So you have a lot of stories and tellings of the story based upon those things. But what I wanted to do is dig a little bit deeper under those activities and tell a story, yes, that had historical detail, certainly one that had accuracy as far as denominational development, its impact in the public square, but I wanted to document the theology that undergirded all of that activity as well, which is where a lot of the tellings of the story lacked of lacked in my opinion.

And so in the very beginning, what I've offered are five theological anchors that I think if you understand these five concepts, it'll help you understand the way in which theology developed amongst African-American Christians from the Annabellum period until the current moment. And so just to kind of go over those real quick, the first one is, and by the way, all the names of these anchors are in the vernacular or the nomenclature of like sort of black faith. The first one is Big God. The second one is Jesus. The third one is sort of two sides of the same coin, conversion and walking in the spirit. The fourth one is the Good Book, which is the Bible. The fifth one is deliverance. And so, if you kind of understand those five things, but also understanding that the figures in the story didn't set out to sort of achieve that, it's just a sort of a tradition that

was passed down. And going back and reading all the primary sources of the sermons and the oratory and the poetry, the liturgy, the autobiography and correspondence. These are the things that I sort of gleaned to help somebody who's entering into this big story to be able to understand it better. And so throughout the telling of the story, I sort of talk about how those anchors are developing, how those anchors sort of shift in their emphasis and even at times are reordered throughout this sort of theological narrative. Okay. That's helpful. Yeah. I like that theological narrative. I, I, I got a question. It might be, I hope it's not a dumb question. It might be a dumb question, but I, I asked it. I like to just, my students, there's almost no such thing as a dumb question.

I like that because there are some really stupid questions sometimes, but I don't want to scare people away from asking honest questions. If they don't know something, ask it and we'll shame you if it's necessary. So let's go back to, here's my question. It's kind of, I'll try to be concise. Going back to the very early stages, early years of slavery, did African slaves come over with a Christian faith or did they end up adopting a Christian faith? I mean, this is, I don't know how else to say it, but from their slave masters and from a sociological standpoint, that just seems like, why, how would that

happen unless, or maybe they came over more with a Christianity already. Is that a different question? I mean, I, it's a great question. And in fact, I've not heard much of anybody trying to answer that question. So like one of the, I think it's the second chapter of the book is called a transatlantic faith, I think is what it's called. And I try to answer that question because if you go way back to the Ethiopian Munich in the book of Acts, so basically anything south of the Nile Delta was called Ethiopia. So what we would think about is like sub-Saharan Africa is like the region of Ethiopia.

And so that person was from there. So they took the gospel that they received, you know, and we know that they're reading Isaiah 53. How do I interpret this? Oh, that's Jesus. Okay, now I'm going to take that Jesus back with me to where I came from. So we have that sort of biblical sort of textual evidence of people of African descent, accepting and affirming Christianity. But we also have Portuguese rulers who were going down into Africa to trade and so forth. And they chronicled the fact that they run into Africans singing

the Psalter. So you have, you know, in the 1300s, you have people encountering Africans who were singing the Psalms. And so basically all that to say is that transatlantic slavery wasn't like the midwife of Christianity to Africans. So, you know, there's a lot of, I wrote that section or that chapter basically to sort of combat the idea that, you know, Christianity was exclusively a means of oppression for African, people of African descent from the beginning. And I'm saying actually, no, that wasn't the case. Christianity was definitely at play. And if you look at the history of the church, which I give this in that chapter as well, there was a reformation 300 years

before the reformation of Luther and Calvin in Ethiopia. Zahra Ya'Kob is a figure that we all should sort of look at and see what he did down there. And he brought Africa even reforming and refining theology to make sure it was more like the faith once for all delivered to the saints. And so all that to say, there's a variety of evidence there that demonstrates that transatlantic slavery, the slave trade was not the thing that brought Christianity to Africans. And so it's hard because those are oral cultures.

So oral cultures don't have sort of written have written documents that we can do carbon dating on or whatever and to see how old they were to discern what the scope of that was. They don't have sociological data backing that up. Because of all those things and more, which I explained, I'm confident that there was people on the bottom side of that boat in the middle passage who were followers of Christ. We don't know percentage wise or how many were converted to the faith of their slave masters, whatever. Yeah. And it's hard because they weren't keeping any sort of written records because they were

oral cultures. So that information sort of died with the people, besides the fact that they were telling, they're passing that down. But the way in which we sort of track trends in a written culture that documents things was not the way that African cultures did that. So we just don't know. But there's certainly evidence that there was Africans who were Christians prior to transatlantic slavery. What about the tension between African slaves that were Christian and then their slave masters are also going to church and reading the Bible. Like that just seems so like that just seems so disorienting to say that. I don't know how much stronger I could say that, you know, was there that wrestle of like, Hey, we're both quote unquote Christians.

One's a slave. One's a master. This doesn't make sense. Well, you know, if we zoom, if we like move forward a little bit to figure like Frederick Douglas, I really appreciated him. He is remembered in history for a lot of his sort of public facing work, but he was a strong Christian in the, in an appendix to one of his autobiographies, which the man wrote three autobiographies of himself. Why? I don't know. But in one of them, he says, you know what, I'm not for the woman whipping, man stealing, child stealing Christianity, but I'm for the

Christianity of the Christ of Scripture." So, he is a figure that really makes that distinction very keenly. And it's funny because as slaves were hearing of Christianity from their slave masters, the Holy Spirit was at work. There's no other way to explain it besides that. You know, they were receiving the stories told, but then what they would do is that they would reclaim and retell those stories with the purposes, I think, that Scripture intended, not to subordinate, not to oppress or to keep docile, but they're saying, okay, there's a God who delivers. And if we look back at the Annabellum period, there's a sort of paradigmatic story of the Exodus. And the assumption was, well, the

same God who hated slavery then and didn't like the mistreatment of his people then is the same God that's at work now because God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Therefore, the God of the Bible hated slavery then and he hates this slavery. And now it's just a matter of time for when he was going to deliver. And so, because God will deliver. So there was this confidence that they got from the stories that they were told, even though the implication or application of those stories were warped by their slave holders. And so, there was that tension, but it's amazing that I think the Holy Spirit used the scripture. I mean, I think, what was it? Hebrews 4, 12

or 13, that the word is alive and active and sharper than any double-edged sword. So even if it was used for ill, the Spirit still worked through it. And so, I think there's still a very powerful spiritual dynamic going on when you open the Bible, the pages of Scripture, or you tell the biblical stories, people are going to hear what God is saying. Wow. What, what, what did, what did the black church look like in the antebellum period? Again, I'm still ignorant, which is why I'm having none. Like where, where were they allowed to go to church? Were they forming black churches then, or was it more kind of under, under,

underground among slaves? Yeah, it was all the above. So if you look at the American history, you really begin to see a lot of people of African descent becoming Christian around or just after the great awakenings. And there was an interesting thing going on in these revivals. When people entered these revivals, slave and master alike, there was a very egalitarian reality here. Everyone was equal at the foot of the cross. People were repenting, singing, crying together. But then after they walked out of these revival meetings, the sort of social realities of the day would sort of resume in a very weird way. So there was those moments where people were worshiping together in the revivals. But then what would happen is that when a person of African descent would become a Christian, they would have worship services on plantations.

Oftentimes those services were led by the slave master. And you found sort of really sort of crazy stuff being promoted there. For example, they would take the curse of Ham and apply that to people of African descent. They would take 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul encourages people to remain as they are when they got saved to remaining in their servitude. They would also look to the post-Exodus event and say, you know what? In the same way that Israel wanted to go back into Egypt and slavery, even if you go free, you know what, in the same way that Israel wanted to go back into Egyptian slavery, even if you go free, you're going to want to come back here and be with me. And so don't even try to rebel or don't even try to escape because that's going to

be your story. So in those moments at those plantation sort of gatherings, that kind of a theology was being communicated. But then you also had folks who were going to the churches of their masters. So, in these contexts, it was very divisive, even though they were under the same roof. They were in the same buildings, but in different pews. Africans sat in the back or in the balcony. The slave codes were read from the pulpits after the church service was over, they would resume. The supper was segregated. In high church places, they would even sometimes re-concentrate the elements to sort of undercut

the unity amongst God's people that was intended by that ordinance or that sacrament by then doing it in a segregated way. So, they were going to those kinds of contexts but the one that gets the most, and I'm saving this for last because this is the one that everyone loves to hear about, the place where people of African descent worshiped that's just the most intriguing, that's the most fun to talk about is what it's called the invisible institution. And so, this is where slaves, they would worship in the cover of night, in the corners of plantations or in the slave quarters, out of the view of their masters. They would take the stories that they learned, they'd purpose them, trying

to interpret them and apply them to their specific circumstances and live in faithfulness and be encouraged by the scriptures that way. So, I don't know if you've seen the imagery of those pictures of slaves, you know, dancing and singing with that clay pot turned upside down. The idea was that that pot or that kettle would suck up the sound so that the sound of worship wouldn't get back to the master's house and the master would know that they were worshiping the Lord on their own independently. Because the fear was for the slave masters was that the second somebody, slaves would worship, they would not only want, you know, spiritual freedom, but they would want bodily freedom. Because after all,

the Christian faith is a faith of freedom and deliverance. And so essentially they're saying that the slaves were right to want deliverance and freedom, but they were trying to continue pitching this sort of dualistic faith that said, while your soul is free, your body belongs to me. But the slaves were piecing it together rightly, which is why we have a lot of the insurrection movements, because they were putting the pieces together and saying, no, we're actually not going to allow that to be the case. The faith is telling us that we're now free. Wow. Golly. What do we know how the experience of slavery shaped the faith among in the black

church? I mean, at this time and in, I mean, both antebellum and post emancipation, I mean, what, what unique aspects of their theology was shaped by their experience with slavery. I guess that longing for deliverance or even thinking like, did it provoke a hatred of their enemy or in a odd way, a love of their enemy. I mean, I just have no category of, of how my shape would be. I think my, my shape would just be shaken for one, you know, but that was, it did the opposite. Right. I mean, there is the strength of the black church in this experience just seems so incredibly strong. Yeah, I would, I would agree with that point. I mean, there's several facets of that. So, let's see, what do I even start? Even me saying that, like, big God, there is a God who is sovereign even over those

who believe that they are the one who is sovereign. So, the slave master thinks that they are sovereign. They think that they can rule the bodies and souls of people, but really there's a bigger, there's a God who's actually at work with whom that they're going to answer to as well. So, they're not the last authority. There's one who's greater. So, that's the putting God in that place, also knowing that, okay, God is against slavery. It's just a matter of when he's going to work. It really put a trust in God and his sovereignty that's really apparent in the primary sources. I mean, it's unbelievable. There was a resolve that was there.

Like God is going to end this. And so what we're going to do, we are going to wait. I mean, some folks like a Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey, they took action. And that was one application of them saying that God hates slavery. So therefore we are going to, in Denmark Vesey's case, style himself after Samson and deliver his people in that way. But it really gave them that resolve. And I think it made deliverance that fifth, and middle of the 20th century scholars would call it liberation, they would say, if you look back, you'll see that that is an essential part

of the faith. And I think if you look back at any sort of faith, I mean, if you look at the Anabaptists, if you look at the other traditions, there was certainly a stream of deliverance in there because that is a part of what the faith is doing. But because of the prominence of that in the African American experience, it really turned up the volume on that biblical and theological theme to where it became the interpretive key for African Americans to understand the Bible itself. And so, the Exodus... The Exodus? Or just... African Americans to understand the Bible itself. And so, everybody has a motif, you

know, that they read the scripture with. So, one that I think is really great is G.K. Beale, Gregory Beale. He wrote a book about the temple and how the temple motif is easy to see from the garden temple until, and it's various, you know, sort of manifestations throughout the biblical story, to the kingdom, which is another eschatological sort of end times eternal temple. But that's a great way to read the Bible. I mean, there's so much content within scripture that you have to have some organizing paradigm to be able to begin to understand it, and then you can sort of expand it from there. And for African Americans, it was the Exodus motif. It was deliverance. And so it shaped their hermeneutic, and it also shaped them

doubling down on a holistic faith, a faith that was not just for the freedom of the soul, but for the freedom of the body as well. So God is one who is for freedom. And then you even see Henry Highland Garnett saying, you know what? God wants us to worship him fully in spirit and in truth. And we can't worship the way God intends for us to worship in freedom, in slavery. So, that's why we have to go and pursue our freedom. So he would say, you know, just, so he would read the Exodus story and say, it's not just for freedom that they're free. It's freedom that they can go worship God.

And so in the same way Henry Hanan Garnett would say, you know, we need to be free now. Resistance, resistance, resistance, is what he would say in one of his speeches. Not just for the sake of freedom as a random thing, but it's freedom for the purpose of living out God's design in a way that is beneficial for the spiritual and physical flourishing of a people. And so, I guess, those are some sort of scattered ideas of how the faith of African Americans and slaves in particular were formed by this. And you

find those themes have really traced all throughout African American Christianity in America. So if you look at even the pastoral role in most African American churches, it's one where the, especially in the Reconstruction era, so that's right after the Emancipation Proclamation for about 10 years, and even beyond that, you'll see that because the pastor was usually the most educated person in the community, but also that person was very eloquent, so they were the mouthpiece of the community to the broader public. And so, you had that person who was spiritually feeding the flock, but they're also advocating for their flourishing in the public square. So in the role of the pastor, you see that the adverse circumstances in which they were engaging even formed how that pastor engaged the flock and the world around them

for the sake of their own spiritual flourishing in the world. And so, I think that's a very, very positive development that we see carried out by Marlowe the King Senior, Charles Octavius Booth, folks in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and so on. Do you feel your energy levels going down the older you get? It could be that your mitochondria is telling you that they need a little help. Okay, so mitochondria are your body's tiny energy factories and they help power almost everything you do. But here's the thing, the older you get, they can struggle to keep up just like the rest

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Hey friends, if the all general has blessed or challenged you in any way, would you consider supporting the show through patron at patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw? We are actually revamping our bonus material that patron supporters get. So we are going to two bonus Q andA's per month for all the different paid levels. Silver level gets access to ask questions for the Q&A episode and also you will get access to Exiles and Babylon archived content which we'll be releasing different videos every month. Also access to bonus research episodes that I'm going to record from time to time, access to rough drafts of certain things I'm working on, which is a little scary for me

to let people look into that because it's a rough draft. Gold and Gold Plus members, we have monthly Zoom chats and all the other perks that the other tiers get access to as well. So again, if you want to support the show, it really, really does help us to flourish as a ministry. Again, patreon.com forward slash theology and I will see you in the community. Wait, was Martin Luther King senior? He was a major figure? Oh yeah. So he was a boss man. So everyone called him Daddy King. So he was a pastor

at almost at Abyssinian Baptist Church, but that was in Harlem, at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. So just to kind of give you a quick snapshot on Daddy King. So, Martin Luther King is a third generation pastor. And that church where his dad was a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church was one of the most affluent and powerful, influential black churches in the city. So for example, when his dad was installed as pastor there, they said, you know what, we want our pastor to see the Holy Land,

we want our pastor to see with his own eyes, the places that were significant in the Protestant Reformation, he can come tell us about those things. It was a very powerful and influential church. And this is a little known story as well. You kind So both Daddy King and Martin Luther King Jr. were born as Michael King. So there was just no name, just Michael King. But then after Daddy King went to Wittenberg, which is where Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door of the church, he came back home and says, I affirm his theology and I affirm

his pushback against the status quo of the church, so I'm going to rename myself and my son Martin Luther to affirm the heritage, this theological heritage. And so you have Daddy King doing that, but you also have him as a part of this generation of pastors who were doing exactly what I was describing a moment ago, who were evangelical in the sense of proclaiming the good news, like in the wake of and in the aftermath of the great awakenings, that sort of proclamation of the good news for salvation. But they also didn't divorce that from, oh, that good news is also good news for our people in their day-to-day lives. And so, there was this Black social gospel,

not to confuse it with Walter Rauschen, but it's a social gospel. This is prior to that. There's a sort of Black social gospel that emerged that was very much this sort of confluence of a holistic faith that had a God that was big enough to speak into the spiritual, the social conditions, the economic conditions, the political conditions of life. Yeah. So social issues as being part of this holistic faith that, I mean, it seems like that's still very much alive and well in the black church today. Like this, this goes deep into the roots of, uh, of the black church in, in, in America. Whereas I feel like, I feel like white dominated churches go through seasons. It seemed like even at the end of the 18 hundreds,

right? With Moody and others, like, like social issues actually were a bigger part of white dominated churches. But then with, as far as I remember with Rousenbutch and some of the social gospel. And then there was a pushback against that. And that seems to have the kind of a pendulum swing of focusing more on just personal evangelism and spiritual issues. But with the black church, it seems to be built in the whole. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And even, even after, you know, the, the fundamentalist modernist controversy, you have a call FH Henry who wrote, who wrote The Guilty Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, and he was saying, look, we've gotten penal substitutionary atonement right, which is basically saying that Jesus died for sin and

rose from the dead so we can be saved. Fundamentalists have that right, but we're missing the implications of that good news for all of life. And so, you have Carl F.H. Henry lamenting that in his little book. And by the way, if you want to read a great book, I mean, it's like 100 pages, probably less than that, but he's lamenting the silence of Christians in this cultural moment where Jim Crow segregation was just ruling. And they're like, we're not even saying anything about this. This is a problem. So you even had, so that again, that pendulum swinging back and forth among sort of white churches, where you had folks speaking out in which that's when the Evan Dalcom movement emerged, but with like Harold Okengay and

Carl F.H. Henry, but even that movement has sort of evolved over time. So, and that's all different conversation. Wow. Okay. Take us to post civil war reconstruction period, late 1800s prior to say Jim Crow, what was some shifts and changes in the black church, I guess, from coming out of slavery with a more widely accepted, was there white and black people worshiping together, or was it still very segregated even after the Civil War? Yeah. So just before, or if we should say before emancipation, in the South, there was not really, there's very few black churches. You had Silver Bluff Baptist Church where George

Lyle was sent to Jamaica out of that church. And that was really an anomaly in the South. But there was black churches and white denominations in the North. But what happened is that after emancipation you had this development of black denominations. You know, it's like crazy. Like the AME Church was established prior to emancipation, but it really exploded in number. The CME Church, which is a colored Methodist Episcopal Church, which then became the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, then later almost to the turn of the...going into the 1900s, you had the development of the National Baptist Convention. And so you really had this sort of invisible... So this is the way the literature says it, especially Albert Rabateau. He says, the invisible institution became visible. So prior to emancipation,

it was invisible, but now it's unmistakable. And so what happened at that point is that you had all these black denominations emerging so African Americans can worship in dignity. And then you had this sort of mass exodus out of white churches of black people. And so, and in the book, I get some statistics about this 10, 15 year span, you had thousands of black Christians who were worshiping in white led churches pouring into black churches so they didn't have to worry about fighting for their dignity in the place where they are learning about the one who dignified them. They could just worship. And so that's really a feature of that. And so after that, you have the development of these denominations. And then soon after that comes the development of universities, black universities, the HBCUs, which is historically black colleges and universities.

They emerge. In a lot of the initial ones, they were all tied to denominations. So if you look at Shaw University, where I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, it's a Baptist school. If you look at Fisk University in Nashville, it's a Methodist school. If you look at name that HBCU that emerged soon after emancipation, it was all tied to denominations, much like the Ivy Leagues were here in the States earlier on. So you have ecclesiastical sort of places, you have academic educational institutions growing up, and they can finally think and write without the scrutiny of their slave master or somebody else over their shoulder. So then you really begin to see a lot of theological

engagement and more writing. And so, a work that I would encourage you to read is Charles Octavius Booth's Plain Theology for Plain People. Plain Theology for Plain People is a handbook on theology. It's like a really beautifully written systematic theology, if you will, that he would use as he taught pastors that were sharecroppers, they were bivocational sharecroppers, as he taught them an organizational account of the Christian faith. So, by the way, I edited and put that book out with a little introduction. I get no money for any book that's bought from that. So that's not me trying to pad my pockets. This is me saying, this was a dope book written in 1890 by a former slave,

who is now educated to the point where he's able to instruct himself. And now this book is finally getting it's due because he should have been up there with Moody and others. But again, the history rejected him for a long time. So is that, yeah, as far as like writing and theological writing, that starts to come out more in the late 1800s? Yes, for sure, for sure. There's another book called The Negro Baptist Pulpit by E.M., which are his initials, E.M. Brawley.

So Brawley was asked by Baptists, so I'll tell about this particular to get together like the best Baptist voices to speak to the doctrine of scripture, sanctification, spiritual formations, whatever important topics that pastors need to be writing about. So what Brawley did is that he went out and he got the best people to write on those topics. And so he had a mixed group of blacks and whites writing on these topics. When he submitted the book, the publisher was like, we're not publishing this. He said, if you're not publishing it, I'm gone. So Brawley, he said, if you don't publish all my folks, then we're not doing this.

What he did is that he took all the essays written by African Americans and he published it under the title, The Negro Baptist Pulpit. And there are some amazing essays in there about all kinds of stuff, you know, major doctrinal categories, you know, practical, spiritual things that every Christian is working through. And there's like African American men and women writing in that book. And so that's another example. And there's like African-American men and women writing in that book. And so that's another example. And because it's edited,

you're getting a whole bunch of different people who are writing in that particular book. So, and that was also in the 1890s. Okay. Who are some other major like leaders, writers, theologians, pastors in this period? I mean, you mentioned Frederick Douglass. He's mid late 1800s, right? And then, yeah, he is. He is. Is that right? 1800s. I mean,

Charles Octavius Booth, Reverend Perry, which is, I'm blanking on his name. This is, this is where you get me on all these things, because all these names. Yeah. So I would just say this. Brawley's book has a whole bunch of them again, because that's why I love that. It's a list. And then you do get into the, by that point, these sort of emergence of Dr. King's sort of family and heritage. There's, Caesar Blackwell is another major figure down in the south that immediately preceded King Senior. And so I would encourage you to look towards him as well as a powerful figure to engage in that way. Another voice is Henry McNeil Turner. Henry McNeil Turner, he actually was Another voice is Henry McNeil Turner. Henry McNeil Turner, he actually was somebody who published a newspaper that was theologically grounded. And so he's a great person there too.

And in volume two of Swing Low, I do take these different periods and I offer you five primary sources in a variety of genres, including sermons, oratory, theological treaties, autobiography correspondence, and liturgy. So there's a bunch of different figures in volume two that you can look up. And if you're reading volume one, I'll let you know as you're sort of getting to these figures that this figure has a resource in volume, like a primary source in volume two, which is the anthology. Do you have like a primary source in volume two, which is the anthology. Do you have a favorite in all your research,

a favorite figure and why this person? Let's see. I love Fannie Jackson Coppin. She is somebody who was a contemporary with, see, again, the name's getting me. Husky Institute, which is, which is named my heavens. I I'm I'm blanking. Um, Speaker 0 4m 40s 40s man, my memory. Yeah. I'm 40 as well. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. Um, yeah. So, so all I have to say,

I'll, I'll start talking about her and then it'll come to me. But, um, so, so what was happening was, is that she was the first person to develop schools that were really trying to help, you know, African-American women with vocational training, uh, you know, with, you know, just to become not only just maids and to help, but to manage folks, to run schools, to be teachers, to lead in the community. So a lot of what we saw in the Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, there you go. So she actually, yeah, so she actually started an institute like the Tuskegee Institute prior to Booker T. Washington and his Throw Down Your Nets, Your Bucket speech at that Atlanta sort of

universal conference. So anyway, so she was one of the one of the foremost sort of names in that. So Fannie Jackson Coppin is great. I began the whole book with a missionary named Betsy Stockton. And she was somebody who went from Princeton, New Jersey with a family of the Stewart's. She went to the Sandwich Islands, which is now called Hawaii, as a missionary. And so it's interesting because the way I try to explain the book, and I'm sort of ruining this, I try to make it seem like that, okay, this is a black woman who is on a boat who sees the shore. She fearfully runs below the deck. My guess is that many would assume that this is somebody who's arriving in the New World on the Middle Passage. But what's happening is that this is a Black single missionary woman who is going to take

the gospel to the Sandwich Islands. And so really that sets up the book to be one more about African American agency and about the fact that the whole story is not one characterized by what happened to Black people. This is a story about African American Christians and what they did in the world. Yes, it was a particular world that they lived in, but that is not the focus of the book. And for me, I had to go rewrite the book. I mean, it took me a long time to redo it. From the perspective of not just saying, well, this is what happened to African Americans. This is what happened because it makes a story about African American Christianity about

other people. And so from the beginning, I love the story of Betsy Stockton because it helped me to tell the story in a way that featured the beauty of African American Christianity and the agency that is bound up in that story, despite the social circumstances that they engaged in. That was late 1800s, as before Hawaii was conquered by the US? Yeah. That's the 1700s when Betsy Sattin went out there. Oh, 1700s. Oh my word.

This is really early. So yeah, so she was out there very early. A single black female in the 1700s missionary to Hawaii. Oh, I should hear it. I should take it. It was 1823. There you go. I just look at the books. What? Yeah. So you mentioned that you mentioned a few female leaders was that were females accepted as leaders and preachers and pastors and missionaries and stuff within the black church in the late 1800s or was there different views on that or Yeah. So going back, you know, to the pre emancipation period, I mean, you had a lot

of very powerful African-American women leaders. I mean, you had Maria Stewart, you had, I mentioned Betsy Stockton. We hadn't even mentioned sojourner Truth and others who were leading people out of bondage in the South into freedom on the Underground Railroad. So there's all kinds of women who are doing that work. At that time, it wasn't common for a woman to lead a church as a pastor, but there were several women who were commissioned as evangelists and they would go and they would preach the gospel in a variety of churches. And many of them, they actually had exposure in churches that were not just black. So they

had Maria Stewart's one of those. So she would go to a variety of places and preach and speak the gospel to mixed audiences of black and white. And so there were women who were very significant in the story. How was that accepted? A woman at that time period speaking to a mixed setting. I don't know. It's one of those things that she mentions in her autobiography, and the composition of those groups just blew my mind. I mean, I think it does go to show that while the social norm was for sort of white over black segregation or sort of this sort of treating people as less than, we do see pockets that were other than that. And I think that

needs to be said as well, because there were a lot of free men and free women of color in the North prior to emancipation. What's the gentleman's name? Northup is his last name. 12 Years a Slave was written about him. And then the movie came after him. Solomon Northup, there you go. He was a free African American who was a very accomplished musician, but he got mixed up and then ended up in slavery for 12 years and then comes back to the North where his family is. And so, we do see places where there's a lot more social equality, at least to the point where they might not be 100% equal, but a black person and even a woman can proclaim the good news of the scriptures to a mixed audience. It sort of textures the story a little bit, which is kind of beyond our imagination sometimes.

Yeah. It's just fascinating. I mean, you have something similar happening in Iran right now, where extremely patriarchal male dominant culture, but there's an explosion of Christianity there, a lot of it underground with house churches. And these churches are led largely by women. It just doesn't make any sense at all. But it's, it's unbelievable. Growth is just incredible. Yeah. I just, I love it. That just, it just kind of validates it that what we're doing is beyond kind of human explanation. I, this might be another dumb question too. And I get, I'm just not a historian in this time period. I I'm going back just years and years to my high school and college days when I wasn't paying attention

and have, you know, filled in some gaps here and there along the way, tried to be a better historian over the years. But so post reconstruction period, and then when did like Jim Crow officially start the prime start date, but it was at like early 19 hundreds. When, when we talk about the Jim Crow era, is that like, yeah, like 1900 to 1950 ish or? Yeah, you know, it's, it's one of those things. So again, this is all leads you up into Jim Crow segregation. So you had Emancipation Proclamation, 1865. You had about, you know, until 1877, you had this like golden years of reconstruction. You had a lot of African Americans who were in political positions, governors, and the first Senate seat that was held by an African American was a Methodist pastor, Hiram Rebels.

And then you have that sort of deconstruction, which followed that, which is deconstruction is where a lot of the troops that were in, the federal troops that were in the South that were upholding the emancipation amendments to the Constitution that made African Americans equal, those troops were taken out of the South and it was just sort of left to folks to sort of govern themselves. And at that time is when you see the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the rise of the Knights of White Camilla, all these extra legal measures to subordinate blacks. And then eventually in the 1890s, there is a couple of cases, but the most famous of

them is the Plessy versus Ferguson trial in the middle of the 1890s. That is the official legal beginning of the separate but equal doctrine, which is called Jim Crow segregation. The middle of the 1890s is when that really begins to set in, and that becomes just the way it was going you know, going through the early 1900s. And that's really what the civil rights movement in the middle of the 20th century was sort of pushing back against.

So there was, I guess my, my, my, where I was going with that, it was it, it's from my limited advantage point. It seems like there was a, a short period of time when things were really getting a lot better. And then they just kind of took a turn South. I mean, both literally, literally, even figuratively. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was that, that period between, uh, 1860, 65 and 1877 were like these golden years of the country putting itself back together. There were certainly some challenges there, but it was going the right way. Some of the challenges were sharecropping, and people

promising that they would receive certain wages, but those promises were not delivered. There was a common leasing system where you would rent, trying to replace slave labor, you would rent convicts in a block. So you rented 10 convicts and then one dies, you just get another one. So you didn't treat them that well because you're not really owning people. You're just leasing a block, a certain number of prisoners. And so that was a very vicious thing that was going on in the South to try to backfill the labor that slavery freed up. But despite those things, on the whole, there was a lot of progress. Because if you think about African American voters, there's places where the slaves outnumbered

the slaveholders by a lot. And so now those men are able to vote. Well, who's going to carry out? Well, the one who's voting like 10 to one. So because of that, you see in some counties and some States that you see a lot of progress that was made by African Americans between 1865 and 1877. Then the bottom fell out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What caused the bottom to fall out? Was it kind of, yeah, there's this, there's this, it's called the compromise of 1877 and there is, it all happened, you know, in the, in the, in the

halls of the, of where like laws were made and you know, really in the, in the federal government, there is some details in an agreement that the conclusion was that, you know, it's just like politics today. If you do this, we get this. If you do that, we get this. And one of the things that was going on is that, well, if, you know, and I forget exactly what it was, but if this happens, then you'll pull the federal troops out of the South who are upholding the reconstruction amendments, the Constitution. And when those federal troops were pulled out, then it was people in the South were just asserting their interpretation of those Reconstruction Amendments.

And so at that point, like Bull Connor, which was that infamous governor down there in the South, people like him were putting in place a bunch of measures to subordinate African Americans, having to be able to read the Constitution and answer a bunch of questions to be able to vote. And so it was stripping African Americans with a vote down there. And so there was lots of very discriminatory things that became typical after the federal troops were pulled out in that compromise of 1877, which I write about in the book.

So if you're interested in more details, that's when it really began to change that trajectory that was gained soon after the Emancipation Proclamation. mission. So as a parent, one of my greatest desires is to help my kids understand the Bible. But as your parents know, this is no easy task. Okay. So this is why I'm so excited about the Bible Recap for Kids by Tara Lee Cobble. Oh my goodness. This is an awesome resource. The Bible Recap for Kids is a young reader's edition of the bestselling, The Bible Recap, and is adapted for kids ages 8 to 12 years old. It follows along the same 365-day adult reading plan, but the recaps are adapted to this younger

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before November 12th. This will give you plenty of time to get it and then maybe even make a family plan to be going through the Bible together come January 1st. But I want you to order it from BakerBookHouse.com. Okay, so don't go to Amazon. Let's avoid Amazon for this one. Go to BakerBookHouse.com because there you will receive 40% off the book and free shipping and you'll get a free downloadable set of 50 scripture memory verse flashcards. So just click on the link in the show notes to get the Bible recap for kids. When you think about businesses that are selling through the roof, like Allo or Allbirds. Sure,

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash into, yeah, post-Plessy, post-Plessy, Jim Crow era. I mean, you start to have a lot more like lynchings, right? In the early 1900s, you know, you're like, oh, I'm going to be a real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real,y, Jim Crow era. Um, I mean, you start to have a lot more like lynchings, right? And the early 19 hundreds. Um, what was, how was that period of time? How did that shape the theological imagination of the black church in the early 19 hundreds? Yeah. So, at this point, a lot of stuff began to happen, theologically speaking. In 1906,

you had the Azusa Street Revival with William Joseph Seymour. And that was a crazy phenomenon. I mean, and I think it was this sort of, you know, I'm not a Pentecostal, but I can see the hand of God at work when the hand of God is at work. And so you had a man by the name of Charles Fox Parham, who's a white man from Kansas, who started a school in Topeka, Kansas, then came down to Texas. He had William Joseph Seymour was a student because he wasn't invited into the classroom, but he listened to the lectures from outside through a cracked window. And then he took that theology and popularized it through the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. And so you had

the emergence of the Pentecostal movement. That was kind of akin to the sort of sociological realities that marked the Great Awakenings. You had a lot of folks who were coming to see what was going on. They stayed and they received prayer for salvation. They would get saved. So, a lot of reporters, news reporters, they would come and they would end up staying to pray, not to report. And in that environment, you also had a lot of African American women who were praying with and leading sort of powerful bankers and people who were of social standing, white men in particular, to Christ. And so, it was a very, it's this very crazy time when a lot of folks were... That was a very sort of upside down sort of dynamic from the rest of society. It was very

powerful. So, you had the beginning of Pentecostalism, and then you have it sort of emerging into the Church of God in Christ, Kojic, which so anybody who was ordained, who was Pentecostal, was ordained through the Kojic church through Bishop Seymour. And that's even sort of African Americans and white folks, which is crazy. So you had the first body of churches ever led by a person who was of African descent. But then eventually, unfortunately, white Pentecostals broke off and then they started the Church of God in Christ. No, no, sorry, Assemblies of God is where that came from. So then you also had black fundamentalism that was emerging at that time, you know,

early 1900s. That's also in response to that Scopes Monkey Trial and all that was going on there with the teaching evolution in schools, a lot of the impact in the Ivy League schools. Now, evolution impacting how the Scripture was taught. And I know you know more about this than I do because this is your background as far as dealing with the biblical text. They're teaching evolution in schools. They were talking about the higher criticism, historical criticism of the biblical text, and so prayer in schools and stuff like that. So there's a lot of African-Americans who were really becoming more emphatic about how their doctrine was articulated, not only in their churches, but also in public. And so those folks sort of broke off and started

black Pentecostalism, but it was in, but it was sort of independent of white Pentecostalism because a lot of, I'm sorry, sorry, fundamentalism because white Pentecostalism was a lot of the institutions tied up with it were still very segregationist in their disposition. the black church. So if you go back to those major denominations that I mentioned before, they're, they're like, dodgeable statements are what they were in the beginning. And so I would say that there was a, a more or less explicit, um, sort of trajectories of the black church. So, uh, if you go back to those major denominations that I mentioned before, they're, they're like, dodgeable statements are what they were in the beginning. And so trajectories of the Black church. So, if you go back to those major denominations that I mentioned before, their like, dodgy statements are what they were in the beginning. It was like,

it's like basically conciliar orthodoxy, like the Nicene Creed and things like that, were and are still the dodgy statements of those institutions. And so it wasn't that they were liberal, they affirmed that, especially if you're talking about the early 1900s, but it was more about how explicit they were doubling down on that in the face of these new attacks on historical Adam, the nature of the biblical texts, and so on, if that makes sense. So it's more about how hard they beat that doctrinal drum. So those who wanted to be more explicit with that, they became black fundamentalists.

And those who were less explicit, yet would affirm those anchors that I talked about in the very beginning, they were still in those historic African-American denominations. So it's theological liberalism. I know that's a big, big term, but like the, the, the black church, I mean, it seems like some correct me if I'm

wrong, but some denominations that would be traditionally African-American do have a lot of the logically liberal tendencies in some cases. And when did that happen? Or is that maybe a misunderstanding of, I think, I think that's a misunderstanding. So I'll say it this way. There's several pieces to tease out. So if you think about the way that pastors were trained in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and even until now, but especially at early on, African Americans weren't able to go to those places where liberalism was being promoted. So, you know, the places where they were challenging the historicity and the accuracy and the authority really of the biblical text, they weren't being educated in those places. So, they were schooled by what they would call a father

in the ministry. So, it's a pastor who would take them on, mentor them in what it means to pastor, what it means to do theology, what it means to interpret the scripture. And that's how they would pass a baton of faith from one generation of leaders to the next. So if you're talking about African Americans being at Princeton during that spat over the Bible with Jake Gresham-Machin and B.B. Warfield and that stuff. They were like, that's not even our conversation. Y'all over here doing this crazy stuff and we're over here just trying to be Christians. And so, that was not their fight. But if you fast forward a little bit, what begins to happen is that the institutions of higher education that were more commensurate

with the average African-American Christian would not allow them to enter into those schools. So the more historically orthodox seminaries and divinity schools would not match the theology of the average African-American church because, again, it was very revivalistic, it was very spirit-filled, it was very...istic. It was very spirit filled. It was very, because the spiritual reality was like, Hey, we have to have the spirit carry us because we're going to go into out of these church doors into a world that wants to crush us. What is going to sustain us from now until next time? Well, it's the power of the Holy Spirit. And so you have these Christians who are affirming that who wanted their leaders

to be trained into understanding the faith in that way, but the schools that actually affirm that, that were white led, they couldn't get in. And so what happened eventually is they ended up going into schools that didn't affirm their theological convictions. And at times you had folks who came out more theologically progressive than they came in. But I would say if you look at a person like Benjamin Elijah Mays, who was a PhD at the University of Chicago, a Baptist minister or Dane Baptist minister, he was the president of Morehouse College when Martin Luther King Jr. was there. He is a historic Orthodox Christian even though

he was at the University of Chicago. If you look at someone like a George Kelsey, who was a professor of Martin Luther King Jr., PhD from Yale, he was the one that was calling, you know, young Martin Luther King back to a historic understanding of the authority of the biblical text when he was, you know, first hearing about German liberalism. If you look at someone also like Howard Thurman, who's a very, very interesting figure. So you have to take early, mid, and late Howard Thurman

because he was on a trajectory. But early Howard Thurman, when he was a professor of one of the King Jr., he was a Baptist minister who was also very historic in his faith. He ended up a mystic, so he's not a great test case. But Kelsey and Mays and Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University, had a very powerful stake in Howard Divinity School. Those were folks that were in the academy, but they ended up, they stayed Orthodox, but you don't really see much theological liberalism in the African-American sort of theological imagination until after like black liberation theology sort of came and begin to rule the roost under the, the, the engagement and leadership of James Cone. That was, that was my next question. Okay. Oh, that, that makes so much unfortunate sense. Look.

Cause yeah. Cause I King, I mean, King did a lot of people don't realize he did it. He pursued an earned PhD from Boston college in theology. That that's not, I mean, people know him as a pastor preacher and oh yeah. He was really smart too. I'm like, no, this guy was like a primarily, he wanted to be a theologian. Like he was dragged into the civil rights stuff, you know, but he was, I mean, I couldn't get into Boston college. I mean, yeah. So you're saying, so something like that, like like Boston college would be traditionally pretty liberal, but that's because the other conservatives places wouldn't accept them. Yeah. So, so he, he started his journey academically. You know, he was, I think he was 15 when he started college,

at Morehouse College, which that was like an in-town place. Again, Daddy King was very prominent. And so he was friends with Benjamin Elijah Mays, who was the president at Morehouse College. He said, hey, I'm sending my young son there. Can you look after him? And so Mayays mentored King Jr. while he was there at school. Then, you know, when he went to go to seminary, King was looking to go to a seminary that sort of was more of his own theological leanings, but he didn't get into those schools because of his ethnic background. So, he ended up going to Crozier Divinity School, which is the home of the social gospel with Walter Rauschenbush. And then he began to be introduced to a lot of liberal scholars. And he was this person who was trying to figure out, is the faith

of my father's my own or is this more sort of progressive faith mine. And so there was a time where he swung towards that sort of left, theological left, progressive side, because he was saying, you know what, I've seen the abuse of emotionalism, I've seen times when there's not the emphasis on thinking that I want to see in the church, and so these folks seem to be thinking more rigorously. So he was sort of enthralled by that intellectual rigor. But then even so, and by the way, he wrote a bunch of papers at that time where he was questioning the bodily resurrection of Jesus,

where he was questioning the historicity and the authority of scripture. And a lot of folks want to use those against him, but that's not where he landed. So he even later in his time at Crozier said, you know what, I'm a victim of theological eclecticism, where he says, you know, the theology of my upbringing is not all wrong, but there's aspects of theological, I appreciate the rigor of thought amongst the logical liberalism. And he was trying to sort of figure out who he was as he was navigating those two streams. So, uh, but as he went to, and it was actually a Boston university, not Boston college, but he went to Boston university. Yeah. And he studied,

um, under, uh, under, um, uh, he's, well second, personalism under Edgar Breitman. under, well, second, personalism under Edgar Brightman. And so, personalism was basically a way of applying the ethic that he learned under his dad and other pastors that were in Atlanta vying for the spiritual and social sort of flourishing of black people. But it was a philosophical, ethical framework that sort of upheld that. And so it was basically like the intellectual way of him applying this sort of understanding of the faith and of the world that he got as a child. So he studied under Brightman. Before he finished that degree, he ended up pastoring at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

And then at that point, when he was still this doctoral student that nobody knew in a brand new place, we see the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement happening. And just to get into that real quickly, he was kind of like, so here, just before I did that, though, theologically speaking, I liken King to somebody like Karl Barth, schooled in German liberalism. But when he got into the pulpit and was speaking to and preaching to people during the World Wars, he says, this book has to be much more than just some literature that we read and

we just happy the hearts of people. There's something spiritual about this. Jesus is more than just this figure that we should emulate. There's some salvation here. So, we see King sort of doing a similar sort of trajectory, and we see his most final theology in his sermons that he preached at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, but also at Ebenezer Baptist Church because he then went back home to pastor under his dad there because he was also carrying the load of the Civil Rights Movement and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference there.

And so anyway, that's a kind of a word about King's final theology. I really wish he had three or four more decades, maybe five more decades, you know, cause he was killed at in his thirties. I wish he had, you know, four or so more decades to sort of finish his theology. Cause you know, I think, I think he was definitely on a journey back towards his father's faith when he was killed. Well, his sermons, even all the way up to the night before he was killed, the mountain top sermon, I mean, it doesn't feel like he didn't believe in the authority of scripture. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, he was leaning into it. It's kind of grounded everything. Oh yeah.

And so that's the thing I was going to say. I mean, he leaned into the metaphors of scripture. He leaned into, this is the sort of guiding principles of Scripture as it sort of informed his public facing ministry. And then also, if you look at his sermons at Abanader Baptist Church, I mean, he's saying, you know, God is a God who is not going to leave us. He's going to carry us. He's going to keep us and be present with us in suffering. I mean, God is with us. And Christ is our exemplar in that, being with us, and He's our comfort. And so, there were several ways in which we see King's faith in God. There was a night that's sort of now made famous where he was in his kitchen late at night. There was a rally, he gets back late, he would get several voicemails

from people making all kinds of threats and saying crazy things to him. That particular night, someone threatened to kill him. Said, if you don't get out of our town, inward, we're going to kill you. We're going to blow your brains out. And so he was shaken that night. And he tells the story of, you know, I tried to logic myself to being okay with the problem of evil that I learned in seminary, like basically theodicy, some like theological ideas. He says, I tried to, you know, think about my parents and what they would do. And he says, you know what, That night I brewed some coffee and I had to make my faith my own. So he leaned into the help of the Holy Spirit to help him through those times. And so again, is that a articulation

of penal substitutionary atonement? Is that a sort of renouncing the Christological sort of issues that he had when he was considering German liberalism or just liberalism in general, renouncing the body of the Lord Jesus. No, it's not a renunciation of those per se, because people don't go back and correct the papers that they wrote in their seminary years. But he did exemplify the fact that there was genuine faith there. And so I wish he had more time to articulate more about the content of that faith, even beyond his sermons. How do you, how do you explain if, I mean, you obviously know a lot about King and his

work. He had multiple like affairs, right? I mean, that's been pretty well documented. Is that, I mean, what do we do with right? I mean, that's been pretty well documented. Is that, I mean, what do we do with that? I guess. Yeah. So he seems to have such a strong, I mean, I know he was on the road like 28 days of the month. I mean, he was just had to create his and this is not as justification, but I mean, yeah, I don't, yeah. Yeah. You know, like with that, that's, that's a, you know, there's, there's scattered sort of like documentation of that. There's like some, there's some people who are disputing those claims. But, but let's just say, even if they were true, this is how I think through

that. I'm not looking for a savior in Martin Luther King Jr. I already have one. What the Bible says is true of humanity is true of Martin Luther King Jr. He's not perfect. I mean, if you go back in Genesis and read about Abraham, that dude was a mess. Go back and read about David, the man of the God's own heart. Also a mess. So all that to say, I'm grateful for the social progress that emerged from his work. I'm grateful for the man that God used to do that. But again, insofar as he's pointing us to the Lord Jesus, insofar as he's helping people flourish in a way that is consistent with what the Word of God says, people being treated like image bearers. I mean, people, like he would say, when we're responding to violence, we have to remain

nonviolent because redemptive suffering is the way of Christ. He was insistent about that even after his house got bombed. So when his house got bombed, he was, so it was as if, you know, like, it was, I see a lot of biblical figures who were just people, and they would make boneheaded mistakes, yet the Lord would still, by the Lord's mercy, not because of their own strength or their goodness. Use

them. And so, I think about King in that way. And so, I'm not going to cancel Abraham. I'm not going to cancel David. I'm not going to cancel some biblical figures and chop up my Bible like somebody who wants to read back the biblical text just because somebody wasn't perfect. But what I'm going to do is understand that in the same way that those figures were pointing to Christ in any way that we are able to, you and I as well, Preston, we're to point people back to Christ, not to us, because we're a dead end. And so I take those accusations or ideas and I just, I just say, you know what? He was a man just like anybody else. I'm not trying to deify him. I don't need

him to be a DD for me. I just, I'm just, I'm just grateful that, uh, the world that he walked into is not the world that I was born into in America. And for that, I'm grateful. Yeah. I got, I mean, I, I read, uh, I don't know if you read a David Garrow's pulled surprise winning book, bearing the cross 1987. It's like a 600 page tons of, Oh my gosh. I, yeah. I waited through it several years ago, but it was so good. But I mean, cause I always heard the claims about him having affairs. Like, I dunno, is that, is that true? It's pretty, at least in that book, it's pretty well-documented, but what I love about Garrow is he even says, you know, he's like, I'm going to give you the full picture of King so that, so that we have, we could still have a hero that's more, that's touchable.

He's a flawed hero, like any hero. And we're all flawed. And I just love the way he kind of framed it. So I'm not going to,'m not gonna, I'm not gonna just slam, I'm gonna tell the whole story. There's obviously so much to celebrate and other things that we don't need to celebrate, but that's what fragile humans are, you know? Well, you know what? So something I think is important that I think about too,

with that discussion about his affairs or whatever, is that any, you know, most times when we see a person under a tremendous amount of pressure, there's like buckling. And so it's just a matter of what that is. Unfortunately. I mean, again, we're all sinners and need of grace. And, and that's an area that, you know, I pray that he was repentant about Walter. This has been so fascinating man, but I gotta let you go. Thank you so much for the history lesson. I feel like I owe you some money or something for, like I just got a free class. If you want to send a check, I'll give you an address offline. How about I just point people to your book? How's that? Well, we'll get you some books., again, the book, the two part, it's a two part volume, one volume, two swing low, a history of black

Christianity in the United States. Really appreciate you, man. And loved, loved the conversation. Yeah. I appreciate it too. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Hey friends, Rachel Grohl here from the Hearing Jesus Podcast. Do you ever wonder if you're truly hearing from God? Are you tired of trying to figure it all out on your own? The Hearing Jesus Podcast is here to help you live out your faith every single day, and together we will break down these walls by digging deeply into God's Word in a way that you can really understand it. If this sounds like the kind of journey you want to go on, please join us on the Hearing Jesus podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Hi, I'm Haven and as long as I can remember, I have had different curiosities and thoughts and ideas that I like to explore, usually with a girlfriend over a matcha latte. and thoughts and ideas that I like to explore, usually with a girlfriend over a matcha latte. But then when I had kids, I just didn't have the same time that I did before for the one-on-ones that I crave. So I started Haven the Podcast. It's a safe space for curiosity and conversation. And we talk about everything from relationships

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