The Black Church is a stalwart institution in the African American community, serving as a major hub of spiritual enlightenment, social activism, and economic empowerment for Black people. It’s hard to overstate the impact the Black Church has had on the United States, particularly its artistic culture and politics. It’s the institution that gave us the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as a rich musical tradition that was foundational to popular culture, impacting everything from “blues, jazz, rock and roll, soul and R&B, folk, [and] rock. [...] [E]ven hip-hop bear[s] the imprint of Black sacred music,” as Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes in The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song. It’s also an institution that remains deeply embedded in contemporary politics. This is why politicians—white and Black, Democrat and Republican—are in the habit of visiting the Black Church to secure Black votes in exchange for a sense of solidarity and public policy promises. Addressing Black voters recently in Newsweek, former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner wrote, “It is not just the presidential candidates who run to us; congressional candidates, gubernatorial candidates, mayoral candidates, city council candidates—everybody and their momma comes to us for our votes.”

While officials visit Black neighborhoods, colleges, and radio stations, the most important of these spaces in terms of political strategy is the Black Church. While there are around a hundred Historically Black Colleges and Universities, they represent only one segment of Black voters: the youth vote. Black churches, on the other hand, provide access to thousands of voters across various demographics. A visit to two Black churches in a major U.S. city could reach 5,000 to 10,000 people, an enormous payoff compared to other avenues of outreach. Black radio shows, for instance, have sizable audiences, but their political content may be missed by listeners. And political canvassing, which tends to happen in major cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, or Houston or in Black neighborhoods in gerrymandered Alabama or across Affrilachia, may not reach as many people. For politicians, visiting a high-profile Black church makes sense.

African Americans have traditionally voted Democrat since the New Deal era, so it’s no surprise that President Joe Biden, a deeply unpopular president, has at times needed to solidify his base of support among Black people. In an April Gallup poll, the president had a 38.7 percent approval rating, the lowest of any president at that point in their administration since Dwight Eisenhower. And that was prior to a disastrous June debate performance against Donald Trump in which the president gave rambling and incoherent responses, sparking concern about his cognitive capacity and his fitness to run for another term. Since then, President Biden has dropped out of the race. Vice President Kamala Harris secured the nomination less than two weeks later. Just prior to dropping out of the race, President Biden’s approval rating had dropped to 36 percent.

Just days after the debate, in the midst of Democratic “panic” about his performance, Biden attended Sunday service at Mount Airy Church of God in Christ in Philadelphia and addressed the congregation, saying that he, like the audience members, was an “imperfect being” who would keep the faith. The church’s bishop came to Biden’s defense, and the crowd applauded the president. The scene was strikingly different from earlier in the year, in January, when Biden attended services and gave a speech at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. There, in 2015, nine Black congregants, including pastor Clementa Pinckney, were massacred by a white supremacist gunman. During his address, Biden was met with protest from audience members who questioned his dedication to honoring life while being complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. “Ceasefire now!” they cried out before being removed from the church.

After the visit, criticism continued. One podcaster said that Biden deserved the protest he was met with. CUNY Graduate Center professor Marc Lamont Hill unleashed passionate criticism on the president—referring to him as “Genocide Joe”—for using the pulpit as a “shield” for his complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Bree Newsome Bass, the antiracist activist who famously scaled a flag pole to take down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state capitol grounds in 2015, had similarly critical words for the president:

To use the pulpit at Emanuel AME in this manner, to make it a prop, essentially, for Joe Biden’s reelection bid, to me, is the greatest assault on truth. [...] And this effort to use the church, not just the Black Church, but the site of racial violence, of a mass murder, to deflect from the fact that Joe Biden himself is bombing churches, bombing mosques, bombing places of worship, and murdering many civilians, people who have sought shelter in those places, it just exposes the complete hypocrisy of this entire situation and the vacuum of moral leadership at the top.

The Black Church, as Bass and others understood, is no shield for empire. In fact, the Black Church is a weapon against it because it was forged in struggle against some of the greatest injustices in this country. Those include the injustices of mass incarceration, Jim Crow segregation, and enslavement, the period when the Black Church was born.

The Black Church: 'Birthed out of Struggle'

“No pillar of the African American community has been more central to its history, identity, and social justice vision than the ‘Black Church,’” writes Gates Jr. As he explains, there is no singular “Black Church,” as there is no singular Black religion. The Black Church is a collective term to represent Black Christian congregations in the United States that engage in the work of transforming Black lives spiritually, politically, economically, and socially.

The Black Church is a Black institutional space, meaning that all aspects of the Black Church—how it is operated, including its policies, politics, and priorities—are led by Blackness or Black lived experiences. Contrary to white institutional spaces, Black institutional spaces like the Black Church weren’t forged to exclude whites. Rather, they came to be because Black people were excluded from participation in white spaces. Black Churches are led by Black people, predominantly attended by Black people, discuss matters important to Black people in both spiritual and secular ways, and engage in spiritual and secular activism on behalf of Black people. The Black Church is primarily Protestant, although there are Black Catholic congregations as well.

The Black Church is not simply a religious or spiritual community. It operates as a political, social, and economic entity to bring forth God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. The Black Church mobilizes Black people to vote while producing political and moral leaders, hosts financial literacy and first-time homebuyer courses, and hosts social gatherings across various age groups for congregants to attend the movies, sporting events, concerts, and dances such as sweethearts ball or church prom.

To understand the history of the Black Church, which emerged during the enslavement of African people, we have to go back to the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the society of New World Protestant enslavers. While the enslavement of indigenous people in the New World took forms such as convict leasing or debt peonage, African enslavement was different in that Africans were designated as chattel, or property. In other words, Africans were legally defined as the property of their captors and not human beings, thus they were treated as their captors wished without legal (or moral) repercussions. While the Spanish, French, and Portuguese tended to convert those that they enslaved, Protestant planters in English, Dutch, and Danish colonies did so less often.

In Barbados in the 1600s, for instance, “Christian” became “shorthand for ‘nonslave,’” writes Katharine Gerbner in Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. Protestant enslavers on the island were resistant to converting the enslaved because Christianity was essential to maintaining the slavocracy. To convert an African to Christianity would risk making him human, just like his colonizers, which was antithetical to the policy of the African as chattel. Therefore, the faith was withheld.

The example of one early 18th-century French missionary, Francis Le Jau of South Carolina, illustrates another problem inherent in conversion: the fact that literacy—in particular, reading the Bible—could cause enslaved people to question their station. Gerbner writes that Le Jau “did not want his enslaved congregants to develop their own interpretations of the Bible” and concluded, “those men have not judgment enough to make a good use of their learning.”

As much as Protestants may have resisted conversion of the enslaved, over time, Christianity was introduced to enslaved Africans as a tactic to elicit compliance and quell the spirit of resistance. This came in the form of the “slave bible,” which was created a few years after the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and used as a tool to make enslaved Africans more docile while simultaneously preventing rebellion. This “slave bible” omitted 90 percent of the Old Testament and 50 percent of the New Testament—a curated Gospel.

Nevertheless, African people, when introduced to Christianity, used the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a foundation for resistance to enslavement, white supremacy, racial capitalism, and white settler colonialism. While enslavers determined that the faith would reinforce the slavocracy, African people determined that the faith would dismantle it. Rev. Richard Allen, who was born enslaved and would later become the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, is one example. He was introduced to the faith, taught himself to read and write while enslaved, and purchased his freedom. When confronted with racism while worshiping with whites, he and other Black members defected and created the first Black church in the United States in Philadelphia. There’s Denmark Vesey, a pastor who planned a revolt and escape of enslaved persons in Charleston, S.C. Nat Turner was a preacher who led a revolt against whites with 75 others after receiving a prophecy from God. Lastly, Harriet Tubman, known as Moses for freeing Black people from bondage, spoke of receiving direction from God to help her on her trips to bring Black people to freedom. After the Civil War, Rev. Henry McNeal Turner was inspired by the Gospel to enter politics and promote a message of self-determination that would prefigure Black Nationalism.

The Black Church, of course, also stood at the epicenter of the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a host of other Black clergy served as some of the leaders who fought for the rights of Black people to be treated as fully human in the United States. Their shared leadership, along with that of other spiritual and secular leaders who were part of a larger mass movement, secured landmark legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King’s analysis of the plight of African Americans in the U.S. went even further, though, than advocacy for political and civil rights: King argued for a “radical redistribution” of wealth so that Black people might actually be able to afford a meal at newly-integrated lunch counters. He was also fiercely anti-imperialist, speaking out against the Vietnam War (which made him a target of both the Democratic Party’s and the liberal media’s ire) as well as the violence of neglecting anti-poverty efforts domestically in order to finance the war.

Another example is the Deacons for Defense, who during the Civil Rights Movement took up arms to defend Black clergy and congregants alike to ensure the work of protests got done. Today, Rev. William J. Barber II uses activism to shed light on racism, capitalism, and militarism with his Poor People’s Campaign (a social justice movement centering poor and low-income people) and Repairers of the Breach (a group that trains and organizes religious leaders).

The Black Church today continues in the activist tradition by serving as an institution for Black history instruction, particularly in places where Black history is under attack. Black Church clergy and congregations have pledged their support and solidarity with Black Lives Matter despite “creative tension,” as Dr. King called it, between the groups. Additionally, the Church encourages African American voter turnout through its tradition of “souls to the polls.”

Concerning the genocide in Gaza, over 1,000 Black church pastors demanded a ceasefire in Gaza in January, and some leaders even took out whole-page advertisements in newspapers expressing their demand in November of 2023. One of the most prominent Black Churches, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in February called on the U.S. to “end its financial aid to Israel.” And in May, 13 leaders of the predominantly Black Churches of Christ signed a letter calling for a permanent ceasefire.

But there is a tension that exists in the Church due to diverging paths within. For example, while many within the Church speak out against the evils of racism and economic exploitation, which are both key features of capitalism, others promote a gospel of prosperity that says that individual financial prosperity is also the will of God for his people. To manifest such “blessings,” one must name and claim: speak positively about receiving material blessings and donate (sow a seed) into a prosperity ministry, a church where the prosperity gospel is the foundation of its religious work. The contradiction here is substantial: critics of capitalism often wish to dismantle structural racism and establish an entirely different economic system, while prosperity adherents strive for individual success within the current system. Another example is the reticence, if not the failure, to speak on behalf of the LGBTQ community. The “progressive” tenor of Black Church politics hasn’t always included advocating for the civil rights of the LGBTQ community. These examples may contribute to the decline in Black Church attendance among Black youth.

This tension notwithstanding, the Black Church is a beacon of hope at a time when the world faces major problems such as war and genocide, inequality, the climate crisis, police violence, and homelessness (to name a few) and the possibility of change through politics sometimes leaves us feeling hopeless. The Black Church pulpit offers a space where truth and justice are proclaimed in order to encourage and inspire the masses to work for change. However, when politicians make the rounds at church to promote their agenda, they’re generally standing in contrast to what the Black Church has always stood for.

Democrats, always out to court the support of Black voters, have consistently made rounds in the Black Church. Take the Clintons. In the 2016 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton visited several Black Churches in Philadelphia and Detroit, using parables found in the gospel accounts to solicit votes. She also addressed the National Baptist Convention—the largest predominantly Black Church institution in the United States. There, she reminded Black people of her Christian connections to make her campaign pitch against Donald Trump, saying:

I am sure some of you are sick and tired of politicians who just show up at election time... you and your congregations deserve more. […] Across this great country, you've welcomed me into your congregations with open arms and open hearts. […] If [Trump] doesn't respect all Americans, how can he serve all Americans? You know better than anyone that people who look at the African American community and see only poverty, crime, and despair are missing so much.

Hillary’s comments on “poverty, crime, and despair” were notable given that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, had enacted policies that, in the words of legal scholar Michelle Alexander, had “decimated Black America.” Bill Clinton’s signature “welfare reform” bill of 1996, which enacted strict work requirements for welfare recipients, simply reduced welfare rolls and put single women to work without addressing the underlying causes of their poverty. Clinton’s 1994 crime bill increased police funding and helped shuttle African Americans into the country’s vast prison system. Hillary supported this, using her role as first lady to speak out about the need to “bring to heel” youth “super-predators,” a reference to young people who were obviously coded as Black.

Despite these facts, political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry noted during Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign that there was a tendency to think (falsely) that the Bill Clinton years had been “good times for Black America,” particularly on reversing Black-white economic disparities. She wrote that “deep racial affection toward Bill Clinton contributed to many African-Americans’ misunderstanding the continuing economic inequality faced by the race.

Such “deep racial affection” came about in no small part because Bill Clinton was very skilled in the art of building cultural relationships with the Black community. For example, Clinton leveraged his awareness of Black cultural norms and popular trends to appear on the “Arsenio Hall Show” in 1992, where he played the saxophone while wearing a pair of shades. His visits to the Black Church were no less calculated. As Nathan J. Robinson notes in Superpredator: Bill Clinton’s Use and Abuse of Black America, in 1993, Clinton addressed the Church of God in Christ in Memphis, using the opportunity to chastise Black people, saying that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be disappointed in them. The reason? Lack of personal responsibility, lack of adherence to family values, and Black-on-Black crime. Michelle Alexander summed up the two faces of Clinton:

Clinton mastered the art of sending mixed cultural messages, appealing to African Americans by belting out “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in black churches, while at the same time signaling to poor and working-class whites that he was willing to be tougher on black communities than Republicans had been.

On issues of foreign policy and empire, Clinton was responsible for the disastrous U.N.-backed “humanitarian” bombing of Kosovo, which led to 500 civilian deaths; the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan under false pretenses, an incident that is rightly considered a terrorist attack; and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, which put in place the infrastructure for Donald Trump’s later border policies. Both Clintons were involved, during Hillary’s role as secretary of state under Barack Obama, in a series of failed and shoddy “recovery” projects in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake there. The Clintons’ legacy clearly runs counter to church teaching.

One might assume that President Barack Obama was a natural fit in the Black Church because of his identity as an African American. But Obama was raised outside the U.S. mainland mostly by his white mother and grandparents, who were not religious. He discovered the Black church in his mid-20s, around the time that he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. He started attending the Trinity United Church of Christ, where he found a “spiritual guide” in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who delivered sermons bubbling with “righteous anger about oppression and deliberate hyperbole in laying blame, which are common in sermons delivered in black churches every Sunday,” as James Carney and Amy Sullivan wrote in 2008 in Time magazine. This was the Reverend Wright whose controversial 2003 “God damn America” sermon Obama would seek to distance himself from on the eve of his election.

As president, Obama frequently engaged the Black Church by attending services with his family or addressing congregations. At the end of his first year in office, Obama visited and addressed congregants at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., where Dr. King had preached during the Civil Rights Movement, to urge patience while offering honesty about his frustrations with “progress” being slow. During one particularly moving address, Obama calmed the righteous anger of Black people after the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church, leading those in attendance to his rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

As talented an orator as Obama was, there were some cringeworthy moments, such as when, at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church (where both King Sr. and Jr. had been pastors), he chided Black people by saying that if Black people were honest with themselves, they’d admit their role in not upholding Dr. King’s dream by virtue of allowing anti-LGBTQ sentiment, antisemitism, and xenophobia to persist in the Black community. While King would certainly agree with the idea of working to eliminate bigotry and intolerance, it’s quite a stretch to suggest that the Black community itself is the reason that “King’s dream” of, say, economic redistribution and racial equality had not been realized.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that while Obama sometimes sought to link himself with King, he also separated himself from the King-like prophetic preaching of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In one of his most famous speeches, sometimes referred to as the “race speech,” given in Philadelphia in 2008, Obama “condemned” Wright’s language in the “God damn America” sermon and called the preacher's words “divisive.” Wright himself explained the gist of his words as, “You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you.” Wright’s point—that violent U.S. foreign policy was indeed a form of terrorism—is an entirely valid critique of the American empire. But it was still too much of a political liability for Obama. (Years later, Obama would half-heartedly defend Wright—but it was too little, too late.)

As much as Obama was ushered in with promises of “hope” and “change,” and some people even thought his ascension to power signaled a post-racial America, Obama’s record itself—on everything from economics to race to foreign policy—ran counter to the anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist views of the Black Church. Domestically, he bailed out Wall Street during the Great Recession, which hit Black people particularly hard. He failed to call out the racism of the Tea Party because he didn’t want to upset white voters. During the nation’s response to police brutality, namely the murder of George Floyd, Obama said that political candidates should avoid “snappy slogans like ‘defund the police’” because it would lose them support. As president, Obama awarded more funding for police. In a June 2020 blog post, where he advised protestors of the Floyd murder not to engage in “violence,” Obama wrote, “if we want our criminal justice system, and American society at large, to operate on a higher ethical code, then we have to model that code ourselves.”

On foreign policy, Obama presided over a drone strike program that killed hundreds of civilians, saying in his memoir, A Promised Land, that he did not want to look soft on terrorism. For his immigration policy, he earned the moniker “Deporter in Chief” as his administration successfully removed 2.7 million immigrants from the country.

Obama solidified his place in the Black Church space as a congregant. There is where he experienced impactful moments of his life, including his wedding. Like others before him, Obama utilized the Black Church for his political purposes; the difference is that he was an insider. But his overall standing with the Black Church is tainted—and not simply because of his use of the Church for political cover. He sold out his own pastor in exchange for securing the presidency while calming white sensibilities and continuing to “proselytize” to Black Church congregants the “gospel” of neoliberal policy. Although the cuts from the Rev. Wright controversy and Obama’s patronizing and chastising comments have healed somewhat, the scars remain.

Republican politicians have made the rounds to the Black Church as well, including Donald Trump. In June of this year, Trump visited the 180 Church on the West Side of Detroit. The church was, as Marc Lamont Hill explained, “for real in the hood, it’s not a fake Black Church.” Even so, Trump’s visit saw the church “packed with white crowds” and suspiciously few Black people. The church’s pastor praised Trump’s supposed agenda for the Black community and would go on to speak at the Republican National Convention the following month. True to Trump fashion, the event seems like it was a setup designed to make people think that Trump has more support among African American voters than he does.

Other Republicans who have visited the church include George Bush, who had the support of a handful of Black Church leaders when he was up for reelection in 2004, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In 2019, just ahead of his announcement that he would be seeking the Democratic nomination for president, Bloomberg visited the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn. In a cynical move, he apologized for stop and frisk, using the visit to renounce a policy he had consistently defended until he decided to run for president, the New York Times noted. Bloomberg also visited Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, to gain some support—at a commemoration for Bloody Sunday, the day that police brutally attacked peaceful voting rights protestors crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge in 1965. There, he was met with Black congregants who turned their backs in protest.

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley visited the Black Church the year after the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in order to deflect from the racism at the root of the massacre. She, along with other conservative politicians, including Republican U.S. Senator Tim Scott, chose to organize a day of prayer to focus on South Carolinians coming together rather than talking about the sin of white supremacy.

When running for president, Tim Scott visited New Beginnings Church in Chicago to gain support from Black voters. Some saw through his attempt, one person saying that, “the bottom line is any person that comes through these doors, any other door where they meet the public, they’re trying to win votes. Period.”

Joe Biden visited Black churches during his run for the White House in 2020, as did many of his opponents. I am unsure whether Joe Biden is familiar with the Church as a site of struggle for justice. President Biden said in 2019 that he was “raised in a Black Church.” However, that cannot be substantiated. Even the president’s record of activism during the Civil Rights Movement has come under question (so has his claim that he was arrested in South Africa during apartheid). President Biden’s policy legacy speaks for itself: his stance against bussing, his role in creating the crack-powder cocaine disparity, his failure to act in good faith concerning the charges of sexual harassment made by Anita Hill, and his authorship of 1994 crime bill.

In May of this year, President Biden served as the commencement speaker at Morehouse College, one of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).¹ While not part of the Black Church, HBCUs are in many cases Black Church-adjacent. His speech was a campaign pitch to Black America while a defense of his politics, namely the genocide of the Palestinian people. Like Clinton and Obama before him, Biden invoked the name and legacy of King to portray himself as a champion of Black causes while positioning himself as having the interest of the Palestinian people in mind in the oval office.

The irony of Biden linking himself with King runs deep. Morehouse is the alma mater of King, who, of course, led disruptive protests toward the federal government in the name of civil rights. Biden is essentially the “white moderate” that Dr. King once warned about in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” someone who is “more devoted to order than to justice.” Biden, after all, called for law and order on college campuses during the pro-Palestinian encampments, which goes directly against the spirit of protest called for by King. During Biden’s Morehouse speech, “a handful of students, some wearing keffiyehs, turned their chairs around to face away from the president."

Meanwhile, on the election front, Vice President Kamala Harris is now the Democratic nominee. This came about due to pressure from Democratic funders and allies who no doubt feared the president’s worsening approval ratings in the aftermath of his poor debate performance. While most will point to his debate performance and age, the president’s funding of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and his response to anti-genocide protests on college campuses around the country had initially placed his political future in doubt. According to a poll conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in April of this year, the majority of African Americans want a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, believe that military assistance to Israel should be conditional, and believe that the U.S. should impose sanctions on Israel if it is convicted of genocide by the International Court of Justice. (The ICJ ruled in January of 2024 that it is "plausible" that Israel has committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention.) 

The Black Church pulpit is a place where people committed to faith, justice, and truth can challenge power, not the place where they make excuses for it. Take, for example, a sermon given by Rev. Barber in April of this year:

This is why today’s religious nationalism is so dangerous. It always embraces violence and war—whatever faith tradition it exploits. In this country when we see it, they say more guns, more military spending, hating gay people and immigrants, and tax cuts for corporations is God’s agenda. It’s heretical, but it’s there—paid for by big money. We see it in Putin, we see it in Trump, we see it in Netanyahu. They all insist that God is on the side of violence and vengeance. And it is contrary to the Gospel. [...] We must question how fast our government can move to fund defense. [...] The moral question is, if the will and the money are there when lives and democracy are on the line, why can’t the same political forces act when 800 people right here in our own country are dying every day from poverty?

In January, President Biden thanked the Black Church, saying that the world would be “a different place” if the Church hadn’t shown people the “‘power of faith’ during dark times.” The world, including the United States, would indeed be different without the Black Church’s resistance to injustice. But Biden is clearly committed to war and empire—the very things Black Church leaders have spoken about for decades.

The truth is that Biden and other politicians have reduced the Black Church pulpit to a space to win or win back Black votes for elections. In President Biden’s case, the Black vote would have been no guarantee—not because Trump is an appealing alternative, but because Biden has failed to protect Black voters at the polls.

The Biden Administration—including Vice President Harris—didn’t make voting rights a priority during the administration’s first hundred days. This was unfortunate in light of the ongoing assault on the Voting Rights Act. Court cases such as Shelby v. Holder (2013) and NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment (2023) have struck back portions of that law meant to protect minority voters from policies that could harm their ability to vote, particularly African American voters. As a result, many African Americans willing to vote for Kamala Harris could face serious challenges in doing so, especially in the former Confederate states, where conservatives have enacted voter ID laws and absentee ballot limits.

We’ve yet to see Kamala Harris’s approach to engaging with the Black Church as a 2024 presidential nominee. Like President Obama, Vice President Harris attends a Black Church and identifies as a Black Baptist. In January, while stumping for President Biden when he was still in the race, the Vice President encouraged a Black Church women’s organization in South Carolina to vote for President Biden while touting the accomplishments of the administration for the Black poor. My hope is that if she visits a Black Church in the remaining months before the election, she stumps for justice rather than empire. Sadly, the history of policy and political campaigns gives me little confidence she’ll actually do that.

It also appears that the genocide-related political pressure on Democrats from the Black Church may have lessened, as some leaders are rallying in support of Harris. Reverend Barber recently praised her campaign in a co-written op-ed for MSNBC. Curiously absent was any mention of the genocide. However, any apparent lessening is due to the necessity of the Black Church leveraging its political power to tackle more than a single issue.

The Black Church pulpit or lectern has historically been—and continues to be—a vehicle to advocate for truth, justice, and antiracism by way of the gospel of Jesus Christ, not a shield for empire. No matter how many appearances or speeches politicians make in Black churches, they cannot simply wish away their records in order to win Black votes. When politicians convert the transformative space of the pulpit into a self-aggrandizing space to sustain power and find affirmation for their often destructive and unjust policies, the pulpit is cheapened. In this political moment, as the Democrats continue to aid Israel’s genocide in Palestine, the words of Dr. King remain as true as ever: “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” To stop the nation’s march toward “spiritual death,” ordinary people should take inspiration from the moral clarity of one of its most important institutions: the Black Church.

Notes

1.

Biden promised he would cancel student loan debt for people who attended HBCUs, something he has yet to do. He also should address the funding disparities faced by HBCUs due to racism.

Photo: Joe Biden speaking at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., 2024. (AP Photo/Mic Smith.)