Revised book highlights religious freedom for African Americans

The Black church and community must band together to bring ancestral wisdom to bear against white Christian supremacy, said William Lamar, pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., which recently won a court judgment against the Proud Boys.

Unity also must be forged with other marginalized groups in the U.S. and around the world to combat authoritarian assaults on religious liberty, Lamar said during a hybrid panel discussion celebrating the Feb. 28 re-release of African Americans and Religious Freedom: New Perspectives for Congregations and Communities.

“We have to hold geopolitically that what is happening here is happening elsewhere,” he said. “Religion is being used in Russia and South Africa and elsewhere” to demean and oppress those not in power.

President Donald Trump’s recent offer to grant refugee status to white South Africans is a glaring example of the racism driving the trend, said Lamar, a contributor author to the book.

“Trump says to Afrikaners, ‘Come on in,’ descending into another kind of tribalism where white colonial nations of the world are banding together out of anxiety,” he asserted.

Black perspectives are essential in fully understanding religious freedom in the context of centuries-old, state-sanctioned racism and discrimination, said Sabrina Dent, co-editor of African Americans and Religious Freedom and director of Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty’s Center for Faith, Justice and Reconciliation.

“African Americans of all religious identities and of none continue to struggle with the realities and the implications of religious freedom in a society that continues to try to keep us on the margins of life,” she said. “We find hope and determination in this moment to propel us forward to save democracy, our communities and the people we love.”

Now in its second edition, the collection of essays represents the culmination of work by activists, community members, pastors and policy officials to broaden the democratic experience for people of color, said co-editor Corey D.B. Walker, dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity.

The inescapable fact is that American culture, politics and religion are inextricably bound to issues of race, he said. “In our discourse, we are reminded that race constitutes America, and America is constituted by race. That is neither a revolutionary nor revelatory statement.”

But the connection between conservative Christianity and the dominant interpretation that religious freedom is something not really open to all is all too clear in the MAGA era, Walker said. “The Trump presidency makes explicit what has long been whispered in hushed tones for years in American public life. Christianity, particularly white evangelical Christianity, is not only the religious orientation, it is the bedrock upon which populist authoritarianism can live in.”

Assumptions that religious freedom is available to all people, regardless of race or religion, when it is not, are perpetuated by racism, he added. “This appeal allows religious freedom to exist in a space largely untouched by racial critique, despite the ways it is deeply bound with America’s racial history. As we move into Trump’s second presidency, we must not merely reflect on this history, we must mobilize new conceptions and fresh orientations and deeper understandings of how it structures our political fields and our political imagination.”

That requires far more than an academic exercise, Walker said. “The political struggle we’re witnessing today is not simply one over policy but one that involves the very meaning of community, the very meaning of citizenship and the very meaning of solidarity. If we are to achieve the democracy that speaks meaningfully to our collective lives and our collective future, we must first recognize the profound entanglement of race and religious freedom.”

The hypocrisy of claiming religious freedom is open to all Americans was painfully obvious Dec. 12, 2020, when members of the right-wing Proud Boys scaled a fence and destroyed property at Metropolitan AME Church en route to a pro-Trump rally in downtown Washington D.C., Lamar said. “They were not just tearing up a Black Lives Matter sign, but they were engaging in spectacle, they were engaging in political violence designed to quiet us and to keep us from asserting our rights to protect ourselves and to worship.”

The church won a civil suit against the Proud Boys in early February, granting them ownership of the all-male hate group’s trademark and blocking it from selling or licensing T-shirts, hats and other products without the congregation’s approval.

But attacks against Metropolitan AME and other churches that day were meant to loudly communicate that religious freedom and democracy are not available to all, Lamar said. “They came to Metropolitan to breach our property, to destroy what was out, to holler and say all manner of reprehensible racial epithets and to record and send it out on social media platforms.”

Contributing author and attorney Rahmah Abdulaleem said she frequently hears religious freedom bandied about in courtrooms as if it were a fact for all. “But who’s religious freedom are we really talking about?” said Abdulaleem, former executive director of KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights.

The truth is, talk of religious freedom is used by white evangelicals to deny services to same-sex couples and to use discriminatory hiring practices against LGBTQ people, she said. “When a Muslim man prays at work or at the airport, it’s seen as security concern, but when a white person does the same thing its seen as religious liberty.”

Even the nation’s founders did not have Black people in mind when they enshrined religious freedoms in the Constitution, she added. “When slavery ended, African Americans were denied full admission, churches were bombed, our places of worship were desecrated, and yet we are expected to believe that religious freedom in this country has been a universal right for us. We must acknowledge that religious freedom was built on the foundation of exclusion before we begin to rebuild it as a true right for all people.”