That's right! Religious Freedom in America is a hot topic again. This invariably means that it is a big political topic again.

Of course, our campaign circus 2016 has Trump positioning himself as the champion of Christianity, even though two major conservative news outlets have denounced his positions on religious freedom (National Review and American Conservative). Meanwhile Hilary Clinton, whose husband Bill has an actual track record of controversial advocacy for a Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) last time it was hot (1993, related to Native American traditions, struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997), has bashed the latest round of RFRA proposals, designed mostly to protect conservative Christians from laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. 

In recent SCOTUS history, justices nationalized gay marriage to every state in Obergefell, and in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, they ruled that corporations owned by religious people (counting as religious people themselves) cannot be required to violate their consciences and provide contraceptive health care to employees. According to Gutterman and Murphy, the Hobby Lobby case is dangerous because it allows the possibility for any corporation to violate all sorts of federal labor regulations. The authors don't discuss this, but this case has the power to set such precedent because of a previous case.

​Mid-century, there were many important Supreme Court cases, but in my mind one of the most important was U.S. v. Seeger (1965), which expanded Conscientious Objection status from traditionally religious pacifists to anyone whose "conscience... would give no rest or peace" if they participated in war. According to Phillip Hammond, this case represented a major shift in interpretation. In other words, all sorts of deeply held convictions now "counted" as inviolable under the "free exercise" protection of the First Amendment. Personal "conscience" was the equivalent of "religion."

Thus, even granting that the Affordable Care Act represents government over-reach, Seeger + Hobby Lobby does in fact combine to open the way for all sorts of corporate labor abuses. If a random individual has a strong enough conviction about something (not hiring women, not paying minimum wage, not paying taxes that support x, y or z) they may have a case. The Libertarian end of the political spectrum might think this is all "in bounds" and the market will sort it out. On the other hand, lower courts in Oregon, Texas and Colorado have not upheld the cases of Christian cake bakers who refused to bake cakes for gay or lesbian weddings, but SCOTUS has not had to deal with any such case so far.

How various POTUS and SCOTUS choices will deal with our current milieu over time is hard to tell. I'm fairly confident that politicians will be politicians. George Washington, for all his irenic statements and respect for religion's role in society still valued "the interests of the nation" above "the conscientious scruples" of citizens and expected the citizens to give government "on all occasions their effectual support" (letters to Quakers and Jews respectively, qtd. in Gutterman and Murphy, 1). In other words, don't expect them to do anything that isn't in their own interests.

Around ten years ago, I realized something. American civil religion is the liberation theology of the liberated.

American civil religion - the ritual practice/s and theological discourse/s that attempt to connect the nation-state to God/"the sacred" and citizens to each other in a "sacred bond" (see Emile Durkheim, Robert Bellah, Martin Marty)
Liberation Theology - theological assertion that God is on the side of the oppressed

Recently, I had another realization. American civil religion is also a form of Prosperity Gospel. Essentially, the message is, if Americans have enough of the right kind of faith, the United States will be prosperous and successful. This realization came to me as I was reading Gutterman and Murphy's Political Religion and Religious Politics: Navigating Identities in the United States (Routledge, 2016). In describing the Prosperity Gospel Preacher, Gutterman and Murphy write (quoting Walton) that:

"...ministries are developed around the charismatic authority of a particular [leader] to the extent that the form and function of the ministry often reflects the personal narrative- real or constructed- of its leader." Preachers, in turn, are equally dependent on a receptive and enthusiastic audience. The flashy lifestyles and effusive self-confidence of the prosperity preachers are wholly crowd-dependent... Prosperity ministers often embody a kind of "great man" theory of Christian success... Not only do prosperity preachers offer models of the rewarded faithful person... they also reinforce the this-worldly and consumerist model of individual desire... Religious consumers want to invest themselves in and with winners.

When I started to see Trump as a Prosperity Gospel preacher, asking people to have faith in him and to demonstrate it by "sowing" their vote into his "ministry" in order to become prosperous, a lot of things fell into line. Civil Religion and Prosperity Gospel go together with Trump's rise. So, I did a little searching and found some pretty great resources for those who might be interested in this sort of thinking.

If you're a religion, politics AND superhero geek, then read Jeremy Biles' great article:
"Captain America: Civil Religion (And Why Donald Trump Thinks He's Batman)"

If you want a more straightforward account of Trump and American civil religion, check out these two:
​Bonnie Kristian's "The Idolatry of the Donald" over at the American Conservative.
Shuck and Hitchcock's "Donald Trump and the Bully Pulpit of U.S. Civil Religion" at RealClearPolitics

If you're more interested in the Prosperity Gospel angle, check out these:
Jeff Sharlet's "Donald Trump: American Preacher" on NYTimes
​Blair's article on a critique of Prosperity Gospel through lens of Trump at Christian Post
Sarah Posner's article for the Washington Post (one of many trying to explain the attraction of evangelical voters)
There are MANY more, including some that note the number of prosperity preachers in Trump's corner. 

My enneagram number is 9- the Peacemaker. You can Google it, if you're interested. The point is that in some ways this whole blog theme is an outgrowth of this: as a 9 and an educator, I tend to be a bit obsessed about trying to help people develop empathy and understand perspectives that are not their own, what Yale theologian Miroslav Volf calls "inverting perspectives." For instance, last Fall I spent the first few weeks of a Reformation class I'm teaching at a private Christian school trying to help the 15 Evangelical Protestants understand how Roman Catholics might be right about a lot of things. This is a constant factor for me though. Today provides another example:

I'm reading Alan Thornbury's Recovering Classical Evangelicalism with a group of other Christian guys because, frankly, we tend to read more "progressive" Christian books and I thought it was important to read something anchored in mid-twentieth century evangelicalism to help balance us out, so we don't get stuck in yet another insular way of thinking. I'm not sure what I think or how I feel about the book, but I came across a reference to certain evangelical scholars who had run into employment trouble because they didn't "toe-the-line" of "Classical" evangelical doctrine. One of several scholars listed, and with whose work I was familiar, was Mike Licona, a New Testament scholar and Christian apologist who has dedicated his life to defending the basic reliability of the New Testament account of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (check out one of his talks explaining the differences between the Gospel accounts here). I was curious, so I did a little Google search and found some information on this atheist's blog. Mike Licona had been fired because, in the course of his 700 page defense of the resurrection of Jesus, he suggested that the account of numerous "saints" exiting their tombs in Matthew 27:52-53 might not be historical. I haven't followed up on his reasons for thinking that the resurrection accounts of Jesus are historical but these aren't, but I respect Licona and find much of his scholarship helpful. Then, as befits internet research, I got distracted.

Another post listed on Atheist Jeffrey Jay Lowder's site caught my attention, atheist Neil Carter's review of God's Not Dead 2, which had some interesting outsider perspective on Christian victim-complex culture as well an account of the film that makes it sound like a sort of evangelical-fantasy Scopes Trial (the famous Dayton, Ohio "Monkey Trial") reprise in reverse regarding the resurrection, but that's besides the point. What was even more interesting was Carter's account of the reversal of the reverse: namely, his account of getting fired from teaching in a Mississippi public school for being a (closeted) atheist. I haven't done a big investigation of his claims and don't really intend to (he also has a great link to the site of evangelical bogeyman ACLU, listing of all the cases in which they have defended religious people's rights to free exercise, including rights to publicly evangelize).

I offer this post for those who didn't know that Christians who dedicate their lives to defending the Christian faith can get fired from Christian institutions for their perspective on 2 odd verses in Matthew and to those who didn't know that atheists can get fired from public schools for... well... not being Christians.

​My self-actualization for 4/3/16 is complete.

Here it is in simplicity. I am entirely laying aside any questions about Trump's own faith or morality. Christians hold (at least) two sometimes competing "biblical" values: the nature and mission of the Christian church, the "body of Christ" vs. the prophet Jeremiah's (or rather God's) instruction to the Israelites in Babylon to "seek the peace (shalom) of the city in which live." Now, let's suppose for the sake of argument (wincing here) that 'seeking the peace of the society' would best be fulfilled by "making America great again" in the sense that Trump proposes. And furthermore, let's suppose that Trump actually could do that. In other words, I am here (painfully) giving all the benefit of the doubt to Trump and his supporters on value #2.

What about the other value? I am entirely unwilling to equate the basic agenda of the Christian church with American greatness, mostly because the Christian church is a global, transnational body. I am entirely unwilling to suppose that Trump's agenda is consistent with the basic agenda of the Christian church as defined by ANY major transnational stream of Christian thought (individual ideologues aside) in the past 200 years. Here, I am not willing to give Trump the same benefit of the doubt, but let us suppose that a Trump Presidency, in its enacted policy, neither hurts nor helps the most basic agenda of the Christian church (I am presuming that this agenda precludes xenophobia and religious discrimination, even if such agendas did fit with value #2). I am decidedly unconvinced that brutal military response would appropriate or effective to stop (rather than enflame) the persecution of Christians in places where they are vulnerable.

The very moderate question I want to ask is this: will the visible, audible, public support of Trump by Christians (publicly, visibly, audibly representing themselves as representative Christians) help or hurt the agenda of the Christian church, the "body of Christ" in carrying out its mission as defined by ANY major transnational stream of Christian thought in the past 200 years?

I can imagine a convoluted scenario whereby the Christian church ends up repenting of its support for Trump and its public humility and demonstrable repentance ends up helping the basic agenda of the Christian church, but I wouldn't suggest this as a game-plan.

Along with many others, I affirm Paul Wehner's Trump and the debasement of faith. 

Christmas Day, 1914 is celebrated every year as a testimony to many things. You will see inspiring posts about it on social media, and you will be moved, as I am every year. Christians like to think that on this day, the Prince of Peace conquered, because on this day, at several points along the Western Front, British and French troops on one side and German troops on the other, stopped shooting at each other, came out of the trenches and shared food, soccer, cigarettes and the "Christmas spirit." And the war was over! No. They went back to killing each other. It almost makes me want to become a Puritan, because in banning the celebration of Christmas (and other holy-days, since no day was really more holy than any other, they reasoned), the Puritans might have avoided this particular hypocrisy. But maybe we should celebrate it. When one's home is the battlefield, a day of fellowship between enemy soldiers is really incredible. When your world is relatively stable and tranquil (like many Americans, as long as they avoid cable-news), an act of violence on Christmas seems the worst of atrocities. So, I'm posting this early; you might forget about it by the 25th...

Forget about it by the 25th so you can enjoy a nice Christmas with your family, but read on for now. Another Christmas event that Americans like to celebrate is Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas Day 1776. David Hackett Fischer wrote a great big book about it that is quite acclaimed. Did you remember that it was a Christmas event? There's a great (if inaccurate) painting of it that you might have seen. Below is a partial view from pbs.org.
Why did Washington cross the Delaware on Christmas? It sounds like the beginning of a joke. It is not.

 In Joseph Buffington's 1936 biography, The Soul of Washington, Buffington praised Washington’s wisdom in making the “Christmas Day” (actually December 26, 1776) attack on Trenton, NJ.  Buffington wrote that Washington devised the attack because he was “filled with the Christmas spirit himself… [and] knowing the German and British love of Christmas and their joy of Christmas cheer… [they] would, of all nights in the year, be off guard (53f).” Perhaps Washington (the schismatic Anglican?) was strangely Puritan about holidays? Not likely. Buffington went to great lengths to establish Washington’s special love of Christmas. He might overplay Washington’s “Christmas spirit” but surely the General was capitalizing on the British and German celebrations. Reportedly, when Washington was informed by General Sullivan that the weather inhibited the army’s weapons from firing, Washington retorted “Tell General Sullivan to use the bayonet. I am resolved to take Trenton."[i] Apparently the British/German forces suffered 'only' 23-26 casualties to the Americans 4 or 5. Still, this is not what most Americans think of as “the Christmas spirit” in either the religious or secular sense. In 1779, publisher John Bell wrote that Washington was “a total stranger to religious prejudices, which have so often excited Christians of one denomination to cut the throats of those of another.”[ii] And yet, when caught up in a political conflict against other Christians it was, “use the bayonet.” I know some of my fellow American-Christians are equally inspired by this event and by the Christmas Day truce of 1914, but I that is too much cognitive dissonance for me. For me, December 25, 1776 remains the “Real” War on Christmas. With this kind of historical example, I can’t be too irate over “Happy Holidays.” Now, forget about this and enjoy the Holidays. I intend to have a joyous celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ (that’s basically what ‘Merry Christmas’ means right?).

References:
Howard Peckham, ed.  The Toll of Independence: Engagements and Battle Casualties of the American Revolution (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), 27.
[i] Wright, Kevin. “The Crossing and Battle at Trenton – 1776” An article for Bergen County Historical Society. http://www.bergencountyhistory.org/Pages/crossingatdtrenton.html
[ii] Boller, George Washington and Religion, 118.

"This record keeps skipping. Everyday I read something new about our Crumbling Cultural Christendom. Today it was a throwback article on NPR about Randall Balmer's 2011 book, Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament and Tobin Grant's post of last week on Religion News Service, "Evangelicals (always) fear losing religious liberty and being called bigots; a look at 1950s evangelicalism." Go check them out.

The topic of Grant's post is fairly self-evident, but the main thrust is evangelical concern about public discourse. Grant writes, "such is evangelicalism. It is a tradition that wants to engage in public debates in which evangelical arguments are met with hostility." In the 1950s, evangelicals (represented by the National Association of Evangelicals or NAE) were afraid that the U.S. government's newly friendly relationship with Roman Catholic leadership would erode religious freedom; but more so, they were beginning to feel that explicitly Christian discourse was increasingly unwelcome in these public debates. (This is now kind of ironic given Fr. John Neuhaus' prominence in evangelical circles for the promotion of ecumenical efforts in public theology - check out First Things.) They complained about a "code of platitudes" governing public discourse, in the same way that many leaders today complain about "political correctness." They also pushed for the U.S. to withhold aid from countries that limited religious freedom, which seems somewhat reasonable depending on the circumstances, but runs counter to certain New Testament teachings about loving concern for enemies and persecutors. 

Tobin Grant is making interesting cultural observations, not necessarily critiquing anyone, but his article reminded of atheist Daniel Dennett's challenge from his book Breaking the Spell:
Suppose I have a friend, Fred, who is (in my carefully considered opinion) always right. If I tell you I’m against stem-cell research because “my friend Fred says it’s wrong and that’s all there is to it,” you will just look at me as if I was missing the point of the discussion. This is supposed to be a consideration of reasons, and I have not given you a reason that I in good faith could expect you to appreciate. (From Brian Hines' Church of the Churchless site).

Does this mean that all public dialogue on public policy must be framed in "secular" terms? The debate is ongoing. On one hand maybe Christians shouldn't be so pragmatic. Speak the language of faith and deal with the results. On the other hand, when it comes to ethics, insisting on the language of faith sometimes seems to assume that Christian ethics are totally arbitrary, rather that assuming that Christian ethics stem from a God who may have reasonably discernible human well-being in mind.

Randall Balmer's lament is summarized as follows:
"He says blind allegiance to the Republican Party has distorted the faith of politically active evangelicals, leading them to misguided positions on issues such as abortion and homosexuality.
"They have taken something that is lovely and redemptive and turned it into something that is ugly and retributive," Balmer says.
He argues that modern evangelicals have abandoned the spirit of their movement, which was founded in 19th-century activism on issues that helped those on the fringes of society: abolition, women's suffrage and universal education.
"I don't find any correlation in the agenda of the religious right today," Balmer says.
Balmer's book describes how he discovered that the Religious Right of the late 70s and the 80s was not founded on concern about abortion, but concern about religious liberty stemming from IRS attacks on Bob Jones University for its outmoded "anti-miscegenation" policy that forbade interracial dating. Balmer, a somewhat disaffected evangelical historian was invited to attend a fairly high-level meeting of Religious Right leaders in 1991, in which this reality was clearly stated. He points out that certain prominent Southern Baptist leaders (for instance) welcomed more permissive legislation on abortion in the 70s and he laments that late-20th century white-evangelicals were on the wrong side of civil rights in the 60s in particular.

This is a fascinating excerpt and I have not read the book, but the excerpt misses a couple of things. First, the "pro-choice" (anachronism noted) Baptist leaders of the 70s were about to walk into a brutal maelstrom of ecclesial tension in the 80s. Those guys represented an "old guard" that was on the way out. Second, even if Religious Right leadership came late to abortion as an issue with potential traction to mobilize their base, it might still be the case that evangelicals (ie. church-goers, not politicians) saw in abortion an issue worthy of the legacy of 19-century activism. The methods and ideologies used by activists, then and now, might still be deeply problematic as well, but to dismiss the pro-life movement because of the idiosyncrasies of its foundation, its sometimes crude scientific misunderstandings and uncompromising ideology is to miss the bigger point. People in our country regularly dismantle living humans in the womb, often because women feel they have no other "choice." What kind of choice is that and is this reality unworthy of the attention of Christians? I understand that Balmer is partly frustrated because Religious Right leaders created a false narrative, and it is well worth Balmer's revision to set the story straight. Therefore, maybe his lament should be less concerned with the missed opportunities for heroic activism on the left (this issue, not that one) and more concerned with evangelical truth-telling and power-politics in general.

This post is about the State of the Union/s; our mutual society and my little guild of religion and theology geeks/scholars; The United States of America and the American Academy of Religion (AAR). 

Saturday, at the AAR annual conference in Atlanta, Baptist ethicist/theologian David Gushee gave the following overview of religion in America:

1. the Constitution officially dis-established Christianity (unlike England) in a country where Christianity remained “culturally established” (unlike post-Revolution France) and therefore still influenced legislation such that Christians didn’t feel threatened and weren't concerned to throw their weight around
2. In the 1960s, Christianity divided into Left/Right camps, immigration increased religious diversity and secularization weakened the power of cultural-Christendom
3. Today, roughly 70% of Americans still claim Christianity as their religion, but cultural-Christendom is fading and does not influence legislation in any pervasive sense (it still does in some regions on some issues). The government generally treats Christianity with “benevolent neutrality."
4. Christians with a cultural-Christendom mindset react to the loss of power and deference in a number of ways:   Emotionally - shock, fear and most of all resentment                                                                                   Politically – attempts to “take the country back” which mostly fail, or expansive religious liberty campaigns to     help them “opt-out” of secularization
5. We are now faced with a bewildering array of new religious liberty issues stemming from the collision of secular/liberal and traditional Christian convictions
6. This is all fairly obvious to lots of people, but many secular people can still identify all sorts of religious influence and (they would say) privilege, in American life that imposes on their desire to live purely secular. I personally, tend to see the Constitution and 1st Amendment as establishing a "pluralistic" society, not a secular one.

This is where the story gets interesting. David Gushee is the newly (and controversially) elected VP of the AAR.  In a Friday session of the AAR annual conference, Gushee essentially gave a “testimony” of change in his life: Gushee used to work at Union College in Tennessee and then at Southern Baptist Seminary. He has published numerous books about Christian ethics and global conflicts (I used one volume he edited for a class I taught at Messiah). He alluded to his work in these settings (denominational schools where professors have to agree with the school's statement of faith) in terms of being “captive to power-structures” that don’t really offer academic freedom and stated that it is very hard to think thoughts or come to conclusions that run against the grain of the institution because one's job is at stake, a claim echoed by some other Christian scholars.
 
 In 2007, he was hired at Mercer University in Georgia, which is historically Baptist, but no longer a confessional school. While teaching Sunday School at his local Baptist church, Gushee began to encounter, engage and befriend a number of LGBT people that started showing up there. He hadn’t thought deeply about LGBT issues in his previous 20+ years of teaching Christian social ethics, being mostly concerned with issues of war and racial, religious, and political conflicts. However, these relationships forced him to think, and change his mind. Last year, he published an account of how he came to the following conclusions:

1. Christians need to re-establish their commitment to covenantal unions as the proper context for sexual activity and expression, and:
2. Christians need to welcome LGBT folks into full involvement in every area of the church, including Christian covenantal unions, leadership, etc.

​This story isn’t about that, but regardless of what my readers think, I think it is fair to say that:
1. Gushee gave a calm, moving and provocative account of the suffering of LGBT people, the cruelty of the church, and the way he saw the Fruit of the Spirit in LGBT Christians.
2. If Gushee was not LGBT affirming, I doubt that he would have been elected VP of the AAR; not that he isn't qualified, but because he is an ethicist. If he was a historian, it's possible that no one would care about his personal position on this unless he was very vocal about it (also; I'm not at all  saying the change of mind was politically motivated for professional advancement. Gushee is nothing if not sincere.).

As it was, Gushee’s election was controversial because some people in the AAR think the organization should represent scholars who study religion using disciplines like history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. Theologians are “doing” religion, and therefore they don’t really belong in the leadership. This election was especially controversial because the VP will become the President and this year both nominees were theologians. So, for some people in AAR, this is like having a research-subject (psychiatric patient) as the head of a psychiatric research association. It’s okay for religious people to be scholars of religion as long as their scholarship is not itself a form of religious practice. Religious scholars can (and do) have their own guilds. This is where the State of the Union and the State of the AAR converge. Even though a LOT of Christian seminarians, theologians, biblical scholars and other religious people are members of AAR and many AAR sub-groups are “religious” in nature, AAR has recently tended to reflect a post-Christendom context (the last 3 Presidents were not theologians of any religious tradition). But does it now? Is this a "victory" in some sort of culture-war?
 
I don’t know how Gushee feels about the resistance to his election or if he feels any resentment coming at him. He seems like a very gentle, reasonable person who would not hold any grudges, but after all he was elected, and maybe that indicates that AAR isn’t as post-Christendom as some people think. I anticipate a movement of non-religious scholars to "take back the AAR" in future elections. For conservative Christians in the AAR, Gushee's stance on LGBT folks in the church (still a clear minority opinion in Christian institutions) is still indicative of post-Christendom society or even secular ideals of individualism creeping in to the church. I don't know if Gushee feels any resentment coming at him from that corner of the AAR either.

However, I did run across one group of scholars at AAR who clearly felt resentment about being slighted in the religious development of Western post(?)Christendom.  More about this in the next post.

Yesterday, in my World Religions class, two students gave presentations about Satanism (one about the philosophy and one about the Church of Satan). Students had been given the assignment to make presentations about either a religion we had not covered in class OR an undiscussed aspect of a religion that we had covered ("covered" being used loosely here). For the record, the kinds of Satanism discussed here are not technically "devil-worshippers" and generally disdain those who are. The Church of Satan was founded in 1966 by Anton LaVey and is atheistic; using "Satan" in a symbolic/mythic fashion to stand for their own form of humanism. While it retains some ritual elements, these are interpreted psychologically for the most part, do not make sacrifices and are fairly strict about not harming children, consensual sexuality, personal responsibility and minding one's own business. Fairly libertarian stuff. And, while listening to these presentations, something struck a bell. It reminded me a great deal of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, which is so popular with political conservatives.

This is the Satanic statement (#4 out of 9) that caught my attention: "Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates!" In my mind, this resonated with the general tendency in contemporary conservative rhetoric to judge and distinguish between the "deserving poor" and some other class of poor that are viewed as societal parasites (Satanism refers to these kinds of people as vampires) that is the most dogmatic in Ayn Randian "Objectivism". As it turns out, Anton LaVey was greatly influenced by Ayn Rand, and I wasn't the first person to notice this (surprise).

Other similarities include: the aforementioned atheism; radical individualism or "egoism" and hedonism; a certain kind of rationalism/empiricism, and ruthlessness towards enemies.
If you want to learn more: Google it. Check out "What is Objectivism?" on The Objective Standard; The Nine Satanic Statements, Nine Satanic Sins and Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth on the website for The Church of Satan; or Google "Anton LaVey and Ayn Rand" and check out what turns up.

So, expect this song/video from Gungor (Michael) to be the next lightening rod for rants against redefining Christianity around love.  I'll not argue one way or the other.  I like the song!  Catchy.  Happy. Seems true enough to me.  My only beef is with the video depicting God's "love" turning vegetables into candy and easing a man's road rage by giving him a pogo-stick with which to hop over offending traffic. That's some SICK privileged theodicy.  But, I'm more interested in helping people explore the ongoing question of the color of God.

In 1974 (the year of my birth), William R. Jones (a Black Unitarian Universalist minister) published "Is God a White Racist?" in C. Eric Lincoln's The Black Experience in Religion. It has since become a book (which I haven't read), but his answer in 1974 was that if we stick with our traditional (even traditional Black theology) answers to the problem of evil and suffering, we have to answer, "Yes!" Suffering in the world seems disproportionately inflicted upon dark skinned people.  Our traditional theologies also suggest that the majority of these same people will go to hell, while a more sizable proportion of White people will go to heaven. The growth of the church in the global south might help remedy the latter complaint in the long run as far as traditional theologies go.  Having rejected the deist God and the God of many traditional theologies, Jones goes on to suggest a humanocentric theology that basically leads to secular humanism (God is love and manifest exclusively in humans being humane).  It is massively unclear to me how this is a better option.  I suppose people who accept this view stop blaming God for the problems of the world??  If we have a humanocentric deity, doesn't "God" ultimately just become a symbol for the people with power?  In my view then, it seems like Jones' "God" would STILL be a white racist, given his assessment of the world.

In 1925 Countee Cullen published Color.  Cullen's poetry includes a great many poignant and pained theological poems, I limit myself here to some famous lines from "Heritage" from the aforementioned collection.

Quaint, outlandish heathen gods
     Black men fashion out of rods,
     Clay, and brittle bits of stone,
     In a likeness like their own,
     My conversion came high-priced;
     I belong to Jesus Christ,
     Preacher of Humility;
     Heathen gods are naught to me.     

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
     So I make an idle boast;
     Jesus of the twice-turned cheek,
     Lamb of God, although I speak
     With my mouth thus, in my heart
     Do I play a double part.
     Ever at Thy glowing altar
     Must my heart grow sick and falter,
     Wishing He I served were black,
     Thinking then it would not lack
     Precedent of pain to guide it,
     Let who would or might deride it;
     Surely then this flesh would know
     Yours had borne a kindred woe.
     Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,
     Daring even to give You
     Dark despairing features where,
     Crowned with dark rebellious hair,
     Patience wavers just so much as
     Mortal grief compels, while touches
     Quick and hot, of anger, rise
     To smitten cheek and weary eyes.
     Lord, forgive me if my need
     Sometimes shapes a human creed.

It does seem to me that the needs of (nearly?) every person to sense that God can empathize with us drives us to imagine God in our own image. Cullen later imagined Jesus as a lynched Black man in his 1922, "Christ Recrucified."
On the other hand, echoing the dominant strains of American masculinity, the pastor of the "other" Mars Hill Church (Seattle) once famously intoned:   "In Revelation (the last book of the New Testament), Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is the guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up."  Problems with hippie-diaper-halo-Christ aside, wasn't this the basic problem of the zealots?  Never mind.

I'm sure no one will ever get this quite right.  I know I don't.  It's much easier to do some of this via negativa.  I can tell you what's WRONG about our God-images easier than I can give you one that is right.  This might be the point of that old commandment, though the incarnation (my favorite doctrine) fouled that up a bit, and now everybody is into icons (myself included).  Let's see if doing things via negativa might lead us to a positive statement.  God IS not a white man, not a boxer, not a Jewish Che Guevera, not a Christian Che Guevera (William Wallace), not a sum of the good in humanity... not "a ninja fighting off evil samurai" (thanks Talladega Nights)... Oh, I know!
God is an unprejudiced white-hipster!!  Like me!  I feel great.