Calling the oppressors to account for four centuries of terror

God is not dead--nor is He an indifferent onlooker at what is going on
in this world. One day He will make requisition for blood; He will call
the oppressors to account. Justice may sleep, but it never dies. The
individual, race, or nation which does wrong, which sets at defiance
God's great law, especially God's great law of love, of brotherhood,
will be sure, sooner or later, to pay the penalty. We reap as we sow.
With what measure we mete, it will be measured to us again. (1)

This 1902 statement by Francis Grimke, an ex-slave and Princeton Theological Seminary graduate, is an apt summary of the major themes of justice, hope, and love in African American religion from slavery to the present. These themes were created out of the African slaves' encounter with biblical religion (via the white missionaries and preachers) as they sought to make meaning in a strange world.

To make meaning in any world is difficult, because human beings, like other animals, are creatures of nature and history. We can never be what we can imagine, but to be slaves in a foreign land without the cultural and religious support of a loving family and a caring community limits human possibilities profoundly. Because Africans were prevented from freely practicing their native religion, they merged their knowledge of their cultural past with the white man's Christian religion. From these two sources, Africans created for themselves a world of meaning that enabled them to survive 246 years of slavery and 100 years of segregation--augmented by a reign of white terror that lynched more than 5,000 black people.

The black religious themes of justice, hope, and love are the product of black people's search for meaning in a white society that did not acknowledge their humanity. The most prominent theme in this trinity of divine virtues is the justice of God. Faith in God's righteousness is the starting point of black religion. African Americans have always believed in the living presence of the God who establishes the right by punishing the wicked and liberating their victims from oppression. Everyone will be rewarded and punished according to their deeds, and no one--absolutely no one--can escape the judgment of God, who alone is the sovereign of the universe. Evildoers may get by for a time, and good people may suffer unjustly under oppression, but "sooner or later, ... we reap as we sow."

The "sooner" referred to contemporary historically observable events: punishment of the oppressors and liberation of the oppressed. The "later" referred to the divine establishment of justice in the "next world" where God "gwineter rain down fire" on the wicked and where the liberated righteous will "walk in Jerusalem just like John." In the religion of African slaves, God's justice was identical with the punishment of the oppressors, and divine liberation was synonymous with the deliverance of the oppressed from the bondage of slavery--if not now, then in the "not yet." Because whites continued to prosper materially as they increased their victimization of African Americans, black religion spoke more often of the later than the sooner, more about justice in the next world than in this one.

The theme of justice is closely related to the idea of hope. The God who establishes the right and puts down the wrong is the sole basis of the hope that the suffering of the victims will be eliminated. Although African slaves used the term heaven to describe their experience of hope, its primary meaning for them must not be reduced to the pie-in-the-sky, otherworldly affirmation that often characterized white evangelical Protestantism. The idea of heaven was the means by which slaves affirmed their humanity in a world that did not recognize them as human beings. It was their way of saying that they were made for freedom and not slavery.

    Oh Freedom! Oh Freedom!
    Oh Freedom, I love thee!
    And before I'll be a slave,
    I'll be buried in my grave,
    And go home to my Lord and be free.

Black slaves' hope was based on their faith in God's promise to protect the needy and to defend the poor. Just as God delivered the Hebrew children from Egyptian bondage and raised Jesus from the dead, so God will also deliver African slaves from American slavery and will "soon" bestow upon them the gift of eternal life. That was why they sang:

    Soon-a-will be done with the trouble
    of this world;
    Going home to live with God.

Black slaves' faith in the coming justice of God was the chief reason they could hold themselves together in servitude and sometimes fight back, even though the odds were against them.

The ideas of justice and hope should be seen in relation to the important theme of love. Theologically God's love is prior to the other themes. But in order to separate love in the context of black religion from a similar theme in white religion, it is important to emphasize that love in black religion is usually linked with God's justice and hope. God's love is made known through divine righteousness, liberating the poor for a new future.