By Sikivu Hutchinson
In the midst of the prayers, vigils and misguided national
calls for forgiveness, theodicy’s question of the
ages resounds—if God(s) exists why does he/she/it permit unspeakable evil like
the white terrorist massacre at Emanuel AME church? Atheists point to Epicurus’ paradox
about the impotence of “God” in the face of evil, arguing that last week’s murders
tragically affirm his centuries-old caveat to the faithful.
While black folk are the most
religiously devout group in the nation, “God”, it seems, has never had to
answer, nor be called to account nor be indicted for black suffering.
So as a black humanist atheist I often get asked
by white atheists playing ethnographer, “why are black people so religious?
Don’t they know Christianity was used
to justify slavery?” It’s been reported that the murderer deliberately targeted
Emanuel because of its rich history of resistance to white supremacy. As a terrorist assault on an activist black
institution in the heart of the Confederacy, the massacre was
not just an individual act but a manifestation of state violence. Founded in 1816 by black parishioners who
broke from the racist white Methodist Episcopal Church, Emanuel was a platform
for the revolutionary leadership of founder Denmark Vesey, who was executed in
1822 for plotting a massive slave uprising. It was a church that was prohibited, reviled
and burned to the ground because black people were not supposed to have spaces
to congregate and organize in.
Radical black humanists, most notably Frederick Douglass and
A. Philip Randolph, have
challenged
black religiosity under slavery while acknowledging the crucial role activist churches
played in black self-determination.
Randolph’s critique of organized religion and the god concept was always
coupled with a critique of capital and the imperialist occupation of black
bodies and African countries. Churches
dominated black communities because of the nexus of racial apartheid and
capitalism. Yet, ignorant of the socioeconomic and secular roots of slavery,
and how they inform the privileges whites enjoy today, some white atheists
marinate in smugness about the glories of Western rationalist traditions. Black folk, it’s implied, should consider
themselves lucky to have benefited from the vaunted secular freedoms offered by
the U.S., the world’s most prolific jailer of black people.
Nearly two centuries after the foiled Vesey revolt, African
Americans remain at the bottom of a capitalist plutocracy built on our slave
labor. Due to economic apartheid, wealth
inequality and residential segregation, activist black churches are still
pivotal in many communities. Yet, as an
atheist I can value their role while believing that it was not—as Christians
rationalize—the Charleston victims’ “time”, nor a perverse example of “God’s
will” that they were slaughtered. I can value
the profound fellowship that the Emanuel family displayed in welcoming the murderer into
their bible study yet believe that a just god would not have allowed this
parasite in their church home to begin with.
No loving god would allow a twenty six year-old in the prime of his life
to be mowed down in cold blood, nor abide by a five year-old having to play
dead to avoid being murdered. No moral
god would demand forgiveness for a crime for which there has never—since the
first African was stolen, chained, exploited and “imported”—been any
reparations.
Where, then, was “god” in that church? In the human agency,
deeds and consciences of the victims, standing on the human shoulders of all
the ancestor slave revolutionaries, known and unknown, who defied the lyncher regime
of the U.S. government, a secular Constitution that branded Africans as 3/5s of
a person and a “just” God who remains at large; un-indicted.
