The Deaconess Foundation brought a national leader on faith reform in Rev. Jim Wallis to St. Louis on Monday, December 9, as part of its Just 4 Kids Community Conversation series, which has emerged as a touch point for the regional social justice community.
Wallis, president and editor-in-chief of Sojourners, brought a powerful message drawn from his book “Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus.” But the response to his talk by Rev. Earle J. Fisher, senior pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Memphis and founder of #UPTheVote901, was even more resonant for the black community.
From a black perspective, Fisher said, crisis is nothing new.
“Since Jesus arrived in America he has been associated and mostly aligned with the oppression of black bodies and the exploitation of black labor,” Fisher said. “For black folks, Jesus and America has always been a site of crisis.”
For that reason, from a black perspective there is nothing to be reclaimed, just as America can’t be made “great again” when it has never been great for all Americans.
“To that end, I’m somewhat inclined to reject the idea that the Christianity we need to produce, embrace, promote or practice can be ‘reclaimed,” Fisher said.
Instead, he argued, we need to take the latest version of a centuries-old crisis of being black in America – the President Trump version of the crisis – and make Christianity anew.
This is not to say that Fisher does not recognize the election of Trump as an intensification of crisis for black Americans. Indeed, Trump’s election – and the real possibility that Trump could be reelected in 2020 – galvanized Fisher into action.
Poring over the November 2016 election results, he said, he found that there were powerful black churches saving souls (and passing the collection plate) in the very precincts with the lowest voter turnout.
“I wondered how we had disconnected the shouting, singing, dancing and preaching that happened at these hubs of black dignity on Sundays from the need to organize for political power on Super Tuesdays,” Fisher said. “And I vowed to put my faith into political action because the lives of disempowered people (made in the image of God) depends on it.”
So in November 2017 he organized #UPTheVote901; “901” is the area code in the City of Memphis. This is a nonpartisan collaborative that is committed to giving more political power, information and representation to more people and increasing voter turnout in Memphis and Shelby County.
“And despite establishment subversion, being demonized by the mayor, ostracized by white and black clergy and scrutinized by some of the same people we aim to help, we trained pastors to canvas their congregations for increased voter engagement and we helped increase turnout in three of the four elections we’ve had since 2016,” Fisher said.
“And we’ve ushered in a more (potentially) progressive slate of candidates with a group of people more engaged and empowered to hold them accountable.”
Fisher was addressing a crowded room of community organizers (Kayla Reed and Sarah Watkins of Action St. Louis), elected officials (St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones, state Senator Karla May) and activist clergy (Rev. Traci Blackmon, Rev. Starsky Wilson, who also is president and CEO of the Deaconess Foundation). So he hardly needed to justify his political activism as faith-based to this audience, but he did so.
“This is a ministerial calling for me. My theology is political and intentional. Because we do not have the luxury of presuming we can just pray these problems away,” Fisher said.
“We need to put our pocketbooks in synchronicity with our prayers. We must be willing to be moral and militant. We must be willing to disturb, disrupt and deliver. We’re going to have to write, fight, march, mentor, preach, teach, organize, mobilize and whatever else this moment calls for to make justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
The last call to action was drawn from prophetic scripture (Amos 5:24), as remixed by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”). But the ultimate model for his activism is none other than Jesus Christ. This is not the Jesus Christ of the slaveholder or of the prosperity gospel pimp – the debased Jesus of America that Fisher declined to reclaim.
This is the Jesus of the Gospels, whom Fisher described as “a northeastern Afro-asiatic black man who was born to a single parent mother who got pregnant before she got married and people were not certain who the baby’s father was” (adding as a quip: “That sounds much more like Tupac Shakur than Donald Trump”).
This is Jesus the radical revolutionary organizer of the poor and oppressed.
“We need to organize our people for political power – like Jesus did. This is what got him killed,” Fisher said. “Jesus was killed (executed by the state) because he had the audacity to inspire and organize oppressed people and convinced them that they possessed a divine power within them that the seal of the Roman government could not conquer.”
For a slightly edited version of Rev. Fisher’s complete remarks, see the Religion page or The St. Louis American website.
