James Weldon Johnson, in his lovely poem about the anonymous authors of the sacred vernacular tradition, “O Black and Unknown Bards,” put this failure of interpretive reciprocity in this memorable way: It is the opium of the people.” Marx could not imagine the complexity of the Black Church, even if the Black Church could imagine him - could imagine those who lacked the tools to see beyond its surface levels of meaning. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. The full quote bears repeating: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. But I do not believe that religion functioned in this simple fashion in the history of Black people in this country.Īs a matter of fact, although Marx was no fan of religion, to put it mildly, this statement, which the Panthers loved to quote, was part of a more complicated assessment of the nature and function of religion. There were those who argued that the Black Church was an example of Karl Marx’s famous indictment of religion as “the opium of the people” because it gave to the oppressed false comfort and hope, obscuring the causes of their oppression and reducing their urge to overturn that oppression. Political activists - including Malcolm X, of course, but especially the Black Panther Party in the latter half of the 1960s - have debated whether the role of the Black embrace of Christianity under slavery was a positive or negative force. Excerpted from “The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song” by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The black church by henry louis gates