By Sikivu Hutchinson
From Religion Dispatches
These days, a standard
caveat from some religious black folk is that errant souls just “need Jesus” to
straighten them out. From white
Christian missionaries to inner city street corner evangelists, “getting Jesus”
and going to church have long been touted as the great antidotes to criminality
and “bad behavior”. In their new book Soul
Mates: Religion, Sex, Love and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos,
white Family Studies’ researchers Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger use this thesis to draw sweeping conclusions
about churchgoing and recidivism rates among African American men, arguing
that faith plays a key role in helping black men “flourish”. In a recent article
in The Atlantic, entitled “How the
Church Allows Black Men to Thrive”, the authors cite the higher levels of
religiosity among African American men, claiming that “compared to their less religious peers, these 6 million or so
black men are significantly more likely to thrive.” But it’s unclear who
these “less religious peers” are (other black men? Non-black men?), because in
the previous sentence Wilcox and Wolfinger note that non-black men are
significantly less religious than black men. However, although African Americans as a whole
are overwhelmingly
religious, black men have disproportionate rates of homicide, unemployment, incarceration
and homelessness. In their data, the authors found that “only 4 percent of young black men aged 22
to 26 who attended church earlier in their 20s ended up in prison, compared to
6 percent who did not regularly attend church, again after controlling for a
wide range of social and economic factors.”
Yet, the 2% difference between
those who did and did not recidivate is hardly a ringing endorsement of faith
or churchgoing. And the suggestion that there is a causal relationship between faith and lower recidivism rates is
simply not supported by the data. One
might ask— how is “faith” being defined? Is it “faith” in biblical literalism
with its rigid gender roles and prohibitions on female sexuality and autonomy? And
what social supports and employment options did the two groups of men have?
What crimes were they convicted of? Presumably those who attended church were
also beneficiaries of prisoner reentry programming and structured initiatives
provided by church institutions, resources that were unavailable to those who
did not attend church. If this is the case, then “faith” did not curtail
recidivism—job training, educational counseling, mentoring etc. were, in all
probability, more responsible.
The authors appear to
confuse “faith” with social welfare provision, an institutional benefit that
does not require religion or Christian morality. Because of the intersection of
racial segregation, wealth inequality and capitalism, black churches are often
the most prominent providers of social welfare in working class and middle
class African American communities. Given these disparities, some churches may
in fact provide a path out of recidivism because they are literally the only accessible
avenue for cultural and communal connection in neighborhoods devastated by
economic depression. But to suggest that recidivism is the most salient measure
of black male “flourishing” ignores the insidious harm caused by cultures of
sexual abuse, homophobia and transphobia which male-dominated churches often
prop up and enable.
Further, recent
studies have reinforced the secular thesis that religiosity does not
determine moral behavior. Indeed, a study
published last year in Current Biology
concluded that Christian and Muslim children were actually less moral than
non-religious children due to a phenomenon dubbed “moral licensing”. Moral
licensing entails
“doing something that enhances one’s positive self-image and
makes them less worried about the consequences of immoral behavior.”
Another claim the
authors make is that “regular religious practice helps make black men more marriageable—a term social scientists use to explain
why some men are more likely to get married than others.” Churchgoing, we’re
led to believe, transforms offenders into upstanding, law-abiding citizens. In this missionary scenario, the sinners get
Jesus—some even converting to Christianity in prison—and foreswear a life of
crime (as one of their interview subjects noted, God “met me when I was selling
drugs in prison. So, you know, that was a big thing for me, knowing that I have
a relationship with God.”).
The authors’ conclusion that churchgoing makes (presumably
heterosexual) black men more marriageable is laughable—it would certainly do so
if only because of the high numbers of single black women who go to church
seeking eligible bachelors (Deborrah Cooper chronicles the downside of this phenomenon
in her scathing critique
The Black Church: Where Women Pray and
Men Prey). The moral argument that
church converts “disreputable” black men into respectable, marriageable patriarchs
assumes that being in a straight marriage is the most desirable endgame and
outcome for black men. According to this
logic, black churches mold “successful” black men because they impart certain
moral and ethical values. But, again, the cold reality is that while African
Americans remain the most solidly
churched group in the U.S., our communities are plagued with some of the
highest national rates of intimate partner violence, sexual
abuse, sex trafficking (the majority
of domestic minor sex trafficking victims in the U.S. are black girls) and HIV/AIDS
contraction. Not only has the Black Church failed to adequately address
these issues but it has often sanctioned
the sexism,
misogyny and homophobia
which drive these ills. Thus, the
authors’ endorsement of hetero-normative respectability is both an offensive
caricature of social conservative bootstraps arguments and an insult to black
LGBTQ folk who have been victimized by homophobic and transphobic religious discrimination.
Simplistic cause-and-effect valorizations of “faith” without critical analysis
of how organized religion can be complicit in structures of oppression that
hinder black America are insidious.
Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral
Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars and White
Nights, Black Paradise , a novel on Peoples Temple
& the Jonestown Massacre
