(RNS) — “Oh I would not be a liar, and I’ll tell you the reason why. I’m afraid the Lord might call my name and I wouldn’t be ready to die.”
African American spirituals and songs of the folk rural tradition don’t spend a lot of time focusing on particular sins and sinners. Liars, however, do get special attention, as the verse quoted above, from “Jesus Is a Rock in a Weary Land,” and other spirituals, show.
I’ll admit, I never reflected on why liars came in for scrutiny until late in the 2024 election season. Allies of Donald Trump had called Vice President Kamala Harris “Jezebel” and the “anti-Christ,” and as the GOP’s campaign went along, she was subjected to unprecedented racist and sexist name-calling. But in the final days before the vote, a popular white evangelical Christian preacher, Donnie Swaggart, lashed out at Bishop J. Drew Sheard, presiding bishop of the historically Black Church of God in Christ, and the Black church generally, for supporting Harris.
Black church leaders responded with a rejection of racism and a biblical critique of racists that is embedded in the Black Church tradition. It was the racial hatred evinced by Trump and his followers — a hatred partially responsible for his success at the ballot box — that places him in that category of a liar.
A vote for Harris, whom Swaggart could only manage to refer to as “that woman,” meant a vote for a host of sins, most of them forms of LGBTQ+ sexuality. Swaggart said that in endorsing her, the Black Church failed to adhere to biblical values, and its support of the Democratic Party, he said, showed it was “anti-God.” Swaggart acknowledged the outrageousness of his remarks, prefacing them by admitting, “I’m going to be called a racist.”
Pastor Donnie Swaggart preaches at Family Worship Center Church in Baton Rouge, La., in Oct. 2024. (Video screen grab/YouTube/SonLife Broadcasting Network)
Almost immediately after becoming the Democratic nominee, and then consistently since, Harris has been called a Jezebel, an idolatrous biblical queen and an apocalyptic false prophet and seductress. The queen appears in what biblical scholars identify as “texts of terror”: stories of violent punishment that have been used to foster violence against women for so long that many churches now avoid these in their Sunday Scripture readings precisely because of the risk associated with them.
Applied to Black women in America, the term Jezebel, historically suggesting a morally loose woman, also taps into racist name-calling traditionally aimed at Black women. Such women could be freely sexually attacked by white men without fear of criminal accountability.
Naturally Swaggart’s sermon triggered a response from the leaders of several Black church denominations. The Board of Bishops of the Church of God in Christ, known by its acronym, COGIC, defended its leader in a statement, and many prominent pastors both issued their own statements and responded in sermons.
In COGIC’s official response, Bishop Albert Galbraith, calling Swaggart’s words “a device of Satan,” pointed to “the history of this nation, including the specific history of the Church of God in Christ, and the disunity that was the result of Jim Crow and the evils of systemic racism.”
Some Black clergy felt COGIC’s response was too mild. Calling Swaggart’s sermon “Biblically and theologically unsound,” the African Methodist Episcopal Church was prompted to deliver some “Christian education” to the white racist “far-right and alleged evangelical church, which again demonstrates the hypocrisy of many and proves itself neither evangelical nor Christian.”
The bishops then accused white evangelicals of perpetrating idolatry through what sociologist Michael Emerson calls “the religion of whiteness.” The failure of white evangelicals to take seriously Trump’s shortcomings and lack of faith, especially compared to Harris’s active profession of faith (Baptist) and church membership, further amplifies the charge of hypocrisy.
The Rev. Willie Bodrick preaches at Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston, Sunday, Nov. 10, 2024. (Video screen grab/YouTube/Twelfth Baptist Church)
In a fiery sermon, the Rev. Willie Bodrick, pastor of the historic Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston, also raked Swaggart for condemning the Black Church while keeping silent about Trump’s racism, xenophobia, felony convictions and religious ignorance, much of it on display at Madison Square Garden in late October.
Bodrick said a similar “white toxic theology” has supported racism throughout the history of the United States. “There has always been a hypocrisy with the white evangelical church and Christian nationalism because they have aligned whiteness with goodness and anything ‘other’ with evil.” Bodrick went on to point out that despite conservative xenophobia, “The Black Church will always be!”
The Trump campaign and the Swaggart episode reminded the Black Church of its very old spiritual warfare in America. For most Black Christians, white racists who claim to be Christians are “liars and the truth is not in them!”
Deeply embedded in what ethicist and church historian Peter Paris calls “the social teachings” of the Black Church, most African American Christians take very seriously the passage in the New Testament’s First Letter of John that says, “If a man say, I love God and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”
Many of us, including myself, conflate that verse with an earlier passage in John’s letter that is embedded in a longer meditation on love and hate: “He that saith, I know him (Jesus) and keepeth not his commandments (to love) is a liar and the truth is not in him.”
The Black Church, even in its criticism, affirmed the primacy of love in opposition to hate. In his sermon Bodrick insisted that “the love you have for God should translate into the love you have for people. … When we center love … we realize we are closer together than we are far apart.”
Love was also on display as COGIC’s leadership upbraided Swaggart. In demanding a formal apology, the Church of God in Christ wrote, “we, as a body of believers may hold varying political views, (but) we are not each other’s adversaries.” However, the Bishops also pointed out, “Our faith and commitment to God transcend political affiliations and we believe that our unity in Christ is far greater than any of our political differences.”
Throughout the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders were emphatic about the importance of love. King was inspired by the work of Howard Thurman, the Black theologian whose volume “Jesus and the Disinherited” declared the importance of love and the rejection of hate. The religion of Jesus, according to Thurman, was a religion that commanded love over hate, fear and — here’s that motif again — deception.
Thurman’s theology was inspired by his formerly enslaved grandmother’s insistence that he occasionally read aloud to her the Apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, specifically what we know as the 13th chapter, which famously begins, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity (love), I am become as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.” We hear it again: the empty words of a liar.
Beyond Swaggart’s and white evangelicals’ racism is their falseness in calling themselves Christian. A political campaign whose supporting preachers traffic in this level of hate and vitriol, or a presidential campaign whose T-shirts say “Joe and the ho must go” and whose candidates themselves use words that refer to their opponents as “garbage,” “vermin” and “trash” read to Black Americans, if not to all, as hate. They are liars and the truth is not in them.
(Cheryl Townsend Gilkes is an assistant pastor for special projects at Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor Emerita of African American Studies and Sociology at Colby College and a visiting Distinguished Professor at the Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)