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Heart of what slave poured out such melody

As Steal away to Jesus? On its strains

His spirit must have nightly floated free,

Though still about his hands he felt his chains.

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, O Black and Unknown Bards

In a recent essay, the writer Darryl Pinckney notes that [Ralph] Ellison opposed the notion of black life as a metaphysical condition of irremediable agony because that made it seem as though it either took place in a vacuum or had only one theme. No cultural institution formed within the African American experience gives the lie to such a simplistic, despairing view more than the Black Church. Political activistsincluding Malcolm X, of course, but especially the Black Panther Party in the latter half of the 1960shave debated whether the role of the Black embrace of Christianity under slavery was a positive or negative force. There were those who argued that it was an example of Marxs famous indictment of religion as the opium of the people because it gave to the oppressed false comfort and hope, thereby obscuring the causes of their oppression and reducing their urge to overturn that oppression. But I do not believe that religion functioned in this simple fashion in the history of Black people in this country.

As 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. 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. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Karl Marx could not imagine the complexity of the Black Church, even if the Black Church could imagine himcould imagine those who lacked the tools to see beyond its surface levels of meaning. 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:

What merely living clod, what captive thing,

Could up toward God through all its darkness grope,

And find within its deadened heart to sing

These songs of sorrow, love and faith, and hope?

How did it catch that subtle undertone,

That note in music heard not with the ears?