Staying in Church by Walking with Visionaries

“Do you walk with the church or walk away from it?” 

Prof. Letty Russell wrote this on the chalkboard in the first session of a Feminist Theology class at YDS in the early 1990s. As a student in the class, I was startled by the blunt honesty of the question. Letty had named the elephant in the room. 

God’s love has the first and the final word, and we are invited to be part of it in our time and place.

The vast majority of the class was made up of women seeking master’s degrees in order to serve the church. And yet, Letty knew that each of us would need to wrestle with the fact that the Christian church has done, and still does, great harm to women. She knew we needed to face the possibility that the church is so profoundly patriarchal that by serving it we were supporting our own oppression. Letty brought those concerns out in the open and forced us to address them directly.[1]

God’s Love Affair with the World

After the class had discussed the question for some time, Letty revealed her own position: she walked with the church because she still found liberation in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Letty places the church in the much broader arc of God’s love for all creation and the future that God intends and is bringing into being. Letty served the church her entire adult life, and she recognized it as a “postscript to God’s love affair with the world.”[2]

In the decades since that day in Letty’s class, I have had to answer this question for myself again and again, in light of the church’s complicity not only in sexism but also in  racism, colonialism, and so many other wrongs. I still choose to walk with the church. But I can only make that choice because of the faithful and creative answers handed down to me by others.

One of those is theologian Howard Thurman. In the mid-1930s, a question similar to Letty’s was posed to him in accusatory form, when a man in India indicated that by embracing Christianity, Thurman was being “a traitor to all dark-skinned people of the earth.”[3] Thurman faces this head on: given that Christianity has been part and parcel of slavery and colonization, is being Christian supporting racial discrimination? His answer is to “make a careful distinction between Christianity and the religion of Jesus.”[4] By studying the biblical texts closely, Thurman sees Jesus as a poor, Palestinian Jew living under Roman occupation, who was also a beloved child of God. Jesus teaches that we are all beloved children of God. Accepting that identity opens up a life of freedom for those who participate in the religion of Jesus. Thurman writes: “Wherever [Jesus’] spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.”[5]

A Demeaning Double Whammy

Another professor who taught at YDS in the early 1990s was M. Shawn Copeland. As a womanist theologian, Copeland faces an intersectional version of Letty’s question. Christianity has and does demean both women and people of color; Black women suffer a double whammy. Several womanist theologians have had to rethink doctrines in order to address Christianity’s complicity in oppression. 

For example, womanist theologian Delores Williams makes a strong, logical, and compelling argument that understanding salvation as enacted on the cross legitimates the harms done by society to Black women. A brief sketch of Williams’ brilliant argument goes like this: many Christian theologies understand Jesus as standing in for humanity on the cross. He suffers for our sins, is punished in our place, is sacrificed on our behalf. This implies that God is totally fine with having one person suffer so other people get the benefit. And if God’s chosen method for dealing with problems is to have one suffer to make things better for others, then why would Christians do any differently? Historically, Christians in the U.S. have been only too happy to have Black women stand in the place of others and suffer on their behalf. During slavery this surrogate suffering was legally mandated, in the Jim Crow era it was enforced through other legalized means, after the civil rights movement it was enforced by societal norms and limited opportunities. This analysis leads Williams to focus her understanding of salvation through Jesus Christ not on the cross but on the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.[6]

I am giving this theological overview—both too brief to do Williams justice and rather long for an essay such as this—in order to underline how intense the intersectional form of Letty’s question is, as well as to set the stage Copeland’s own answer. In one of my favorite bits of theology from the entire 20^th century, Copeland asserts that Black women redeemed the cross of Christ. More specifically, she writes, “Black women under chattel slavery freed the cross of Christ. Their steadfast commitment honored that cross and the One who died for all and redeemed it from Christianity’s vulgar misuse.”[7]

Upholding Truth

Yes, Christianity was used by white people to justify horror and to preach submission and yes, the logic of surrogate suffering might influence and ease the minds of dominant groups in tyrannical hierarchies. And yet, even when the faith was used as a weapon against them, Black women under slavery found Good News in the stories of Jesus. Black women experienced God’s love, knew themselves to be beloved children of God, and found ways to resist. By hearing freedom in the Gospel, even when it was intended to produce bondage, Black women redeemed the cross of Christ. They took it back and embodied a truth-telling, freedom-loving Christianity that acted in solidarity with all those whose bodies are marked by systems of domination and diminishment. These women handed down this embodied faith to other Christians over the years. 

Letty frequently reminded us that “tradition” means “handing over” or, as we might say colloquially, “handing down.” The Black women whom Copeland honors became part of the Christian tradition that I was taught at YDS, part of what was handed down to me by the foremothers of the faith.

After my time at YDS I went on to become a professor of theology, first at Yale and then at Louisville Seminary. Over the years I have walked alongside many students as they sought to answer their own version of Letty’s question. It is important for every mature Christian to do this work. Lately, however, I’m getting calls and emails from people who have been in ministry for years, former students who are chaplains or pastors or work in social justice ministries. They have changed their mind about Letty’s question: “Do you walk with the church or walk away from it?” Some are leaving the church; some are renouncing their ordination. The reasons vary a bit, yet they all involve the current state of Christianity in the U.S. They do not want to be a part of a body that is, in a significant measure, embracing the blasphemy of white nationalism. 

Rebuke to Empire

I still choose to walk with the church. I can do so because of Letty Russell, Howard Thurman, Delores Williams, and M. Shawn Copeland. These theologians handed down a Christian tradition that is a rebuke to every empire. Their writings affirm and expound the transformative power of Jesus Christ, which still offers freedom for each of us and a wholeness for all of us. For anyone feeling disillusioned with the church today, for anyone facing their own version of Letty’s question, consider this an invitation to revisit these brilliant thinkers.

From Letty, I learned that God loves creation and intends a future of goodness. We know what that future looks like when we remember Jesus, and when we work toward liberation in solidarity we can participate in the mending of creation. From Thurman, I learned that Jesus—a poor, Palestinian Jew who lived under Roman occupation and died at the hands of the empire he resisted—is the beloved child of God. We are also beloved children of God. In an age of misinformation and lies, we can hold fast to the truth. In a time when fear is generated for power and profit, we need not fear anyone but hold only God in holy awe. And in a time of cultivated hatred, we can choose love. From Williams, I learned that critical reassessment of inherited doctrines is an act of profound faith. And from Copeland, I learned that even when Christianity has been used for horrific ends, there have been Christians who upheld its truth of incarnational love and enfleshed freedom. 

When I take the bread and cup on Sunday morning, I am part of the body of Christ, kin to all those whose bodies are broken by myriad forms of empire today. I, with all baptized Christians, have a vocation to attend to bodies marked and wounded, to resist oppression and embody God’s freeing love. God’s love has the first and the final word, and we are invited to be part of it in our time and place. This is the tradition that was handed down to me.

Shannon Craigo-Snell ’95 M.Div., ’02 Ph.D. is a constructive systematic theologian at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, where she has been on the faculty since 2011. She taught in Yale’s Department of Religious Studies from 2001-11. Her books include The Empty Church: Theater, Theology, and Bodily Hope(Oxford University Press, 2014) and Silence, Love, and Death: Saying “Yes” to God in the Theology of Karl Rahner (Marquette University Press, 2008).