What Makes You Come Alive by Lerita Coleman Brown

Author:Lerita Coleman Brown [Lerita Coleman Brown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

JESUS AND THE DISINHERITED

Thurman was convinced that the church’s disregard for the prophetic message of Jesus remained most costly for disenfranchised people. It is not surprising that early Christians failed to promote the social justice aspects of Jesus’s teachings given the atmosphere of slaughter and annihilation. Later, the institutionalization of Christianity by the Roman Empire meant social justice would not play a prominent role. Yet Thurman found in the religion of Jesus answers to his long-pursued questions about how Negroes and other dispossessed people could live with dignity and humanity even under repressive and cruel conditions. He articulated this sentiment in the form of a question: “What do you do with the call in your heart from God if you are living in a situation of oppression?”

In 1949, Howard Thurman published Jesus and the Disinherited, which outlined these powerful insights. Thurman wanted the term “disinherited” to be part of the book’s title, since his intent was to inspire colonized and oppressed people on and beyond American soil, including those embroiled in the anticolonial struggles in Africa, India, and Asia during the 1940s. Disinherited is an apt description for people whom dominant Christianity had literally cast out. The disinherited belonged to a caste, as Isabel Wilkerson brilliantly delineates in Caste: The Origins of our Discontents—one that dominant Christianity had deemed unequal and unacceptable. In Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman returns to that lawyer’s question: how could enslaved or colonized people embrace the same religion practiced by the people who subjugated and denigrated them?

Writing during the Jim Crow era, Thurman poses a set of questions in the preface. What relevance would the disinherited—“people who stand with their backs against the wall”—find in the religion of Jesus? How does the religion of Jesus differ from Christianity, the religion about Jesus? Thurman notes that his considerations are both personal and professional. He yearned to offer hope and resolve to his deeply wounded people, who experienced daily systemic and personal degradation.

Howard Thurman found dominant Christianity unable to cope with issues of discrimination with respect to race, religion, and national origin. He wondered whether this inability was a weakness at the heart of the religion or rather a breach of Jesus’s original teachings. Christianity also appeared to place emphasis on the future—on heaven, where the disinherited would be released from their suffering. White Christian leaders, using the Bible, implored Negroes during the slavery and post-slavery eras to just be patient. Wait until the next life for freedom, human rights, and personal respect, they said. But Thurman knew Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is at hand. The kingdom of God is present now.

What is most brilliant about Thurman’s analysis is his amplification of the stark parallels between Jesus’s context, as a poor, marginalized Jew living in Palestine, and the social, political, and economic milieu of American Negroes. In order to survive, most disinherited people—enslaved people and their descendants, sharecroppers, domestics, farmworkers, refugees, immigrants, and the undocumented—feel compelled to offer unmerited flattery to those in authority.

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