BLACK THEOLOGY IN AMERICAN RELIGION

Abstract

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,-an American, a Negro; souls, thoughts, unreconciled strivings; warring in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.' The two warring ideals that DuBois described in 1903 have been at the center of black religious thought from its origin to the present day. They are found in the heated debates about integration and nationalism and in the attempt to name the communitybeginning with the word and using at different times such terms as Colored, Negro, Afro-American, and Black. In considering black religious thought in this essay, let us give clearer names to the two warring ideals-clearer, that is, from the point of view of religion. I shall call them and Christian. Black religious thought is not identical with the Christian theology of white Americans. Nor is it identical with traditional African beliefs, past or present. It is both-but reinterpreted for and adapted to the life-situation of black people's struggle for justice in a nation whose social, political, and economic structures are dominated by a white racist ideology. It was the side of black religion that helped African-Americans to see beyond the white distortions of the gospel and to discover its true meaning as God's liberation of the oppressed *Charles A. Briggs Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in