3 Lessons Dr. James Cone and Black Liberation Theology Have to Teach Unitarian Universalism

Dr. James Hal Cone was a deeply spiritual warrior filled with revolutionary love. He taught me what it meant to be a theologian. I will miss his mentorship dearly. Rest in Power.

Widely considered the founder of Black Liberation Theology, Dr. Cone was a beacon for the marginalized in an ocean of predominately white academic theological discourse. In responses to systematic theologian Karl Barth, Dr. Cone forged a theology that put black bodies and black struggle at the center of the message of the Gospel. Later in his career Cone captured the essence of his powerful liberative theologies in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, a text that argued that the crucifixion of the black Jesus of Cone’s understanding calls all Christians to confront the ingrained white supremacy of our society as epitomized in the history of lynching.

The first day of my second semester of seminary I found myself in Dr. James Cones’ Systematic Theology 102 course at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The Cross and the Lynching Tree had been released two weeks prior.

Dr. Cone, in his signature lecture style, was all fired up. By halfway through the hour and a half lecture he was sweating profusely through his white button-down and he was talking about the purpose of theology. I remember distinctly his high-pitched Arkansas accent ringing loud through the lecture hall like a minister preaching salvation on a street corner. He said: “It doesn’t matter what your theology is unless you’re doing something with it. You’re here, at Union, so I assume you got a theology. Now what are you gonna do with it?”

I spent the next semester pushed to the brink of quitting seminary. I read through The Cross and the Lynching Tree three times and each time it broke my heart further. I was overwhelmed by the question of what it meant to be a white minister in a tradition of white theologians that systemically marginalized, and in some instances actively used faith as a justification to kill, our black sisters and brothers.

Week after week I listened to Dr. Cone lecture and I struggled not to hate my own Unitarian Universalist tradition for all it had contributed to the spiritual and bodily lynching of black people throughout time.

My last paper for the semester tied Black Liberation Theology into Unitarian Universalist History and its future. In the first half of the essay I argued for how Unitarian Universalism can take the mistakes of its past and make amends to the black American experience it has so often silenced. In the second half of the essay I openly discussed my own personal guilt for not understanding how to overcome my own entrenched biases.

Dr. Cone graded the paper himself and on the last day of class I received the hard copy back. There were two pithy comments written in red on each section. In the first section Dr. Cone had written “Great Analysis. But we’re not looking for amends, we’re looking for transformation.” In the second section he had underlined the word guilt three times and had written “Good. But now how are you going to live this?”

Unitarian Universalism has been at an identity crisis point for quite a long time. American Unitarianism, was historically represented by the Harvard white New England elite. American Universalism was historically represented by the Westward Expansion and populist revivals that, while still predominantly white, allowed greater space for non-white folks to come and worship. The two traditions merged in 1961 out of desperation and aspiration.

For the last fifty-plus years the Unitarian Universalist tradition, the tradition I serve as a minister, has struggled to make sense of the discrepancy between its merged traditions. At the heart of this struggle is what to do with class and race. There are essays written by much better historians than I am dictating these tensions. But what is important for me is how the tradition is currently grappling with white guilt and what Dr. Cone may be able to teach us about a way forward.

The issue as I currently see it is that Unitarian Universalism, in its process of making sense of its role in combatting white supremacist culture, has become paralyzed in its own guilt.

In the past year that I have spent preaching at congregations across the country I have experienced many of us as well-meaning well-off white folks who are so focused on naval gazing at what we “should” be or what we “should” be doing that we are not actually doing it. In other words, I have experienced that many of us have gotten so used to identifying with our struggling with whiteness and wealth that when someone who does not match that description shows up in our pews on Sunday we are not sure how to actually welcome them.

My sense is that many of us have become stuck in the “making amends” and “guilt” portions of my essay that Dr. Cone graded and have yet to fully realize that what we need is transformation and a more stringent questioning of how we are going to live our theology out into the world. This is holding us back from living into the fullness of who we aspire to be.

Do not get me wrong, this is also an exciting place to be. It is exciting because it seems like many of us are ready to do the work but are just not sure how to do it. There is a lot of hope in a group of people willing to work but not yet sure how to. I believe Dr. James Cone can help us with that.

Below are three lessons that Dr. Cone taught me that might help Unitarian Universalism work its way out of white shame paralysis and move into fully living the multi-cultural, all-embracing, saving values that we profess from our pulpits:

[As a note, as you do the work of combatting white supremacy culture in your life and in our faith please do take the time/risk to read Dr. Cone yourself]

1. YOU HAVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE BEFORE YOU CAN LIVE IT

Unitarian Universalism casts a wide net of belief. In our pews you can find folks that identify as Wiccan, Christian, Buddhist, and many others. Part of what defines Unitarian Universalism is the belief in an open and free search for individual and communal meaning. Our communities are tethered together by a common history, seven shared principles, six shared sources, and one shared hymnal. This freedom and lack of a central creed is what drives many folks to our tradition.

But in questions of what our role is in combatting white supremacy culture this open and honest quest for truth without creed has left us without a readily accessible central theological tenet for us to draw from. In some ways because the central theological tenet is not readily accessible we have defaulted to equating our theology with our liberal political stance. But just because the theology is not readily accessible does not mean it does not exist and does not mean that we should not seek it out.

The theology of Unitarianism teaches us that God is a singular being that is loving. The theology of Universalism teaches us that all humans are divine and are saved without equivocation. The theology of Unitarian Universalism teaches us that morality, divinity, and social action are interconnected. The history of other traditions we draw from like humanism and process theology also inform our central beliefs. Our freedom of belief does not preclude us having substantive theology.

Dr. Cone never cared what I believed so long as I believed it strongly, could state it clearly, and that it served to liberate instead of oppress. And so for Unitarian Universalism I carry the same challenge. As a Unitarian Universalist Minister I do not care what you believe so long as you believe it strongly, can state it clearly, and that is serves to liberate instead of oppress.

We have some work to do in this area. Especially on topics of race and class our tradition has spent so much time defining what it is against that it has forgotten to do the harder work of defining what it is for.

It is great that we are against white supremacy and racism. Now what? What does our theology teach us about what happens next? Another way to frame the challenge: it is great so many of our congregations have hung Black Lives Matter banners in opposition to white supremacist rhetoric in the public square — now what?

How do we claim our theology not just as a matter of politics but as a religious imperative?

2. YOU HAVE TO LEARN YOUR HISTORY BEFORE YOU CAN RESPONSIBLY CHANGE YOUR FUTURE

Raise your hand if you go to therapy. Put your hand down. Now raise your hand if you have tracked your family tree on Ancestry.com or otherwise. Hands down. Now raise your hand if you have ever asked a family member about what so-and-so was like when they were alive or the town where so-and-so immigrated from, etc.

Why do we do these things? Often times we do these things because we want to learn more about where we come from. Because we intrinsically understand that we are better able to live into the future if we better understand our past. Dr. Cone taught that the same was true about religious traditions: you have to learn your history to responsibly lead the tradition into the future.

Raise your hand if you know the history of slavery in the United States. Now raise your hand if you know the history of lynching in the United States. Now raise your hand if you know what Unitarians or Universalists did in the face of slavery and lynching in their midst. Over the course of studying with Dr. Cone he would regularly invite us to research more about where we had come from. It turned out that Unitarians and Universalists did not do nearly as much about slavery and lynching as I had thought they had.

It also turned out that through my experience polling colleagues it seems that many of our congregations do not regularly teach classes about this time in our history. In my own experiences being born and raised Unitarian Universalist I found that in religious education we also tend to skip from the founding of Unitarianism and Universalism to the Transcendentalists to James Luther Adams in the 20th Century (briefly mentioning Theodore Parker along the way). It is problematic that we want to struggle with white supremacy culture in the 21st century but are not teaching about how we struggled, or didn’t struggle, with white supremacy culture in the past.

In the last few decades efforts have been made by noted historian Dr. Gary Dorrien and others to write this history down and disseminate it, especially as the history pertains to race, but there is still much more that needs to be written and taught in our congregations.

As our faith tradition charts its course into the future it is crucial that we make learning our history a priority, not just for ministers but for all of those who identify as Unitarian Universalist.

We have a rich history that is woven into the fabric of American history with all of its triumphs and pain. One lesson we can learn from Dr. Cone is that learning and making peace with our history with race we will be better able to move past white paralysis into forging a true beloved community.

3. JESUS IS NOT A BAD WORD. NEITHER IS GOD, OR DIVINITY, OR ETC.

Around the time of the merger between the Unitarians and Universalists the idea came about that to be Unitarian Universalist meant you could believe anything you wanted to without exception. On the positive side this idea meant we could draw the circle wider to groups that were seeking faith communities but did not want to attend an explicitly “Christian Church.” On the negative side this idea gave rise to a trend of scorched-earth humanism that taught that atheism was the only true path and wrote off the Jesus of the Gospels as a convenient fairy tale that did not deserve any time in the pulpit except for on Christmas.

Jesus, the poor marginalized man who was reviled and killed by the Roman Empire, is at the heart of Dr. Cone’s liberation theology. For Cone, Jesus is the nexus of transformation and the road to redemption from white supremacy culture. By following Jesus’ path of speaking truth to power, being willing to sacrifice, and being led by humility, Cone sees our own blueprint for salvation.

In The Cross and the Lynching Tree Cone says “God took the evil of the cross and lynching tree and transformed them both into the triumphant beauty of the divine. If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation there is hope ‘beyond tragedy.’” For Cone, what allows the horror of lynching to be at all worked through is the power of God to hold the space for humankind to confront and redeem. We would be doing ourselves a major disservice if we choose to dismiss that power out of hand.

It is wonderful that so many of our congregations have sought out their truth through the humanist tradition. But I believe it is a mistake for us to treat God/Jesus/Divinity as a powerless symbol we only roll out in holiday carols.

If we are serious about redemption from our white supremacy culture like we say we are then perhaps we should take a moment to learn from Dr. Cone and revisit Jesus as a marginalized revolutionary that can show us a bit about our own transformation.

And perhaps we should revisit God as a force that holds space for us to be forgiven that can help us move through our white guilt that has paralyzed us.

Who do Unitarian Universalists want to be in the 21st Century? How do we want to show up to those that exist on the margins? Will those that have been marginalized be seen as whole and holy and wanted and loved in our worship spaces?

What does our theology teach us about how we should faithfully and painfully grapple with the lynching tree? How do we remain humble to the stories of our neighbor and responsibly join them in righteous anger? How do we transform the world instead of simply making amends with it?

These are the questions the late Dr. James Hal Cone asks of us as we carry on his legacy. I have pulled just three pearls of wisdom I learned from Dr. Cone during my time at Union that I believe can help Unitarian Universalism discern its path at this pivotal time in our history. However, Dr. Cone taught me more than I would ever be able to put into words.

Thank you Dr. Cone and may you Rest in Power.