Dr. Jemar Tisby, a Black evangelical professor and prolific author, was once described by a religion reporter as “a radioactive symbol of ‘wokeness’” in the minds of many white evangelicals.
Pacing about the SRF stage during his keynote address titled “Holy but not Hijacked: The Black Christian Political Witness in the Face of Christian Nationalism,” the historian of race and religion did not pull punches.
“White Christian Nationalism is the greatest threat to democracy and the witness of the Christian church today,” he pronounced. On the other hand, “there is something valuable we can learn from the Black political witness,” a witness rooted not in religious doctrine or creeds, but from a perspective that inclusive “principles informs politics.”
Tisby quoted from Frederick Douglass and Fannie Lou Hamer. Douglass, an antebellum Black Christian minister, blasted white enslavers’ false Christianity as “a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs.” Hamer, a Baptist and civil rights activist earlier arrested and beaten for her freedom advocacy, in 1964 questioned, “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to asleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
Turning to present day Christian Nationalism, Tisby warned that “we need to protect history, to remember the injustice,” for “the kind of religion that the state usually enforces has not been kind to my people.”
Historically, the Black Church exists “because there was racism in the white church,” he noted. More to the point, “the Black Church is a response to white supremacy” in advocating for “the full humanity of personhood” and embodying “the expansion of democracy.”
Amid a new era of white Christian Nationalist oppression of non-white Americans and suppression of the freedoms of minority groups, Tisby charged that “the onus is on faith communities” to stand up to white Christian Nationalism, teach and embrace church-state separation, and demand freedom and equality for all.
“Nobody is free until everybody is free,” he reminded his rapt audience.