1 The origins of African American pastoral theology: ‘We shall live and not die’
African slaves who were transported to the United States possessed robust theological traditions that informed and sustained their religious lives before, during, and after the Middle Passage (the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas; Raboteau 1978: 6–7). These religious expressions are still evident, to varying degrees, in the current African American religious landscape, especially in the African American communities’ most cherished institution: the Black church. In Slave Culture, for instance, historian Sterling Stuckey notes that the ritualistic practice of the ring shout serves to illustrate ‘that long-forgotten Ashanti influences animate the Christianity of large numbers of black Americans today’ (Stuckey 2013: xxii). The slave ships transferred peoples from Senegal, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Male, Congo, and Gabon, but also brought a variety of precious African religious practices. Stuckey shares that ‘slave ships were the first real incubators of slave unity across cultural lines […] fostering resistance thousands of miles before the shores of the new land appeared on the horizon […]’ (Stuckey 2013: 1). Despite the dehumanizing conditions of the slave ship, many of the captives remained committed to maintaining a sense of community, an unbreakable oneness, despite their differences. Christian social ethicist Peter Paris points out that, for African peoples, ‘community is a sacred phenomenon created by the supreme God, protected by the divinities, and governed by the ancestral spirits’ (Paris 1994: 51). There were countless times, however, when the ability to maintain this sense of oneness was threatened by the deleterious conditions of the slave ship, and it was during such times that a supernatural word, an extra-ordinary utterance, was needed to provide comfort, hope, and liberation to the slave ship community. Their lives depended on the word.
In traditional African societies, the monarch served as the community’s priest, and therefore this person represented ‘the authoritative moral, political, and religious center of the tribal community’ (Paris 1994: 58). Priests, though a part of the slave ship community, were often unrecognized by white slave traders, and it was to be expected that, because of the fracturing of communal bonds before, during, and after the Middle Passage, many of these priests were separated from their communities. Daniel Black’s novel The Coming (2015) provides a vivid account of a slave community’s unceasing attempts to find spiritual strength and combat hopelessness on a slave ship. This was a community, unfortunately, that did not have an official priest (or a spiritual leader) to provide healing, sustaining, and guidance. All they had were one another. No longer could they rely on the priest, the person, according to Black, ‘who could usher life back into our souls […] who could reassure us that Death had not come to stay’ (Black 2015: 23–24). Rather, new voices would have to provide the care this community so desperately needed. Throughout the novel, as the suffering intensified in the bowels of the slave ship, the ears of the community became sensitive to emerging voices of hope that, though not holding any priestly office, rebuked the angel of death by speaking life: ‘A woman from our village […] bellowed, “We shall not all die. We shall live again […] we shall prosper and teach the souls of men the ways of God”’ (Black 2015: 93). After the Middle Passage, also referred to as the ‘voyage of death’ (Mallipeddi 2014: 236), this slave community accepted the fact that it would never return home, and as it watched in horror while the community’s numbers declined, other voices began to speak life amidst death. Now it was the strange voice of Temitope, an unusual man who walked across ‘spittle, vomit, and mud, dragging chains behind him, declaring “We shall live and not die”’ (Black 2015: 148). In both instances, and several others not retold here, Black’s novel depicts common slaves filling a priestly role, if only for a spirit-filled moment, in deleterious situations that called for a life-giving word.
A vital function of the priest was to regulate the life force, which historian Janheinz Jahn categorizes as nommo. Jahn defines nommo as ‘the life force, which produces all life, which influences “things” in the shape of the word’ (Jahn 1994: 124). The life force is the word. Jahn goes on to explain that ‘all the activities of men, and all the movement of nature, rest on the word, on the productive power of the word […] the life force itself’ (1994: 126). Scholars agree that the authority of the African priest was bestowed on the Black preacher – the Christian shepherd – during slavery, and it remains so in contemporary African American culture. African American pastoral theologians interrogate the ways in which the word (or Word) – the life force – remains present within the Black community, most notably among the Black church’s clergy. Though much has changed from the times of the slave ship and the plantation, the spectre of death still haunts Black life. Therefore, African American pastoral theologians continue to ask: where is the word, the life force, being spoken and heard today, in the Black church, and beyond? Is it still the case, as in the traditional model of pastoral theology, that this authority to speak the word is the exclusive preserve of the leader, the Christian shepherd? Or are there other persons within the community, spirit-led common folk, that are speaking life within the African American context?
2 The field of pastoral theology: the shepherding perspective and beyond
Seward Hiltner, an American Presbyterian minister, is widely regarded as the pioneer of pastoral theology as an academic theological discipline. Practical theologians James Woodward and Stephen Pattison argue that ‘Hiltner did perhaps more than anyone else to establish and foster pastoral theology as an area of serious, distinctive academic and practical concern’ (2000: 27). In his Preface to Pastoral Theology (1958), Hiltner asks three questions regarding the task of pastoral theology: (1) what is pastoral theology?; (2) how important is it?; and (3) whom does it concern? In response to the first question, he responds, ‘pastoral theology is a formal branch of theology resulting from the study of Christian shepherding’ (1958: 15). To the second question, he responds, ‘it is just as important as biblical or doctrinal or historical theology’ (1958: 15). And to the third question, he responds, ‘it is no less the concern of the minister of the local church than of the specialist’ (1958: 15). Hiltner’s pastoral theology is informed by the shepherding perspective, which is essential for persons called to care for God’s people. Furthermore, Hiltner examines the unique place shepherding holds within Christianity, pointing out that it ‘comes from the way in which our relationship to God and our relationship to our fellow men are regarded as inseparable’ (1958: 17). This perspective, however, though important, is not the only thing needed for pastoral theology, as ‘this perspective never exhausts the meaning of an event’ (1958: 55).
Two perspectives that are related to shepherding are those of ‘communicating and organizing’ (Hiltner 1958: 55). Communicating focuses on how the pastor or the church community ‘deals with the function of getting the ‘Word’ into the minds and hearts of the people, individually and collectively, regardless of the amount of such understanding they may have had prior to the event’ (1958: 56). Organizing, according to Hiltner, ‘is the perspective of social embodiment’ (1958: 61). The biblical metaphor of ‘the body of Christ’ is what Hiltner wants to focus on here, particularly as the organizing perspective studies those operations whereby the church body comes together in a unique way and, additionally, how this body relates to other bodies, such as ‘social institutions, conflicting ideologies, the political and economic orders’ (1958: 61).
2.1 The Christian shepherd
There are three operation-centred aspects in Hiltner’s exposition of pastoral theology: healing, sustaining, and guiding, all of which are activities carried out by the Christian shepherd. In The Christian Shepherd (1959), Hiltner points out that the Christian metaphor of shepherd ‘refers to the solicitous and tender and individualized care by the shepherd for the sheep’ (1959: 20). The primary biblical reference for this metaphor is the parable of the lost sheep (Matt 18:10–14), but there are references to shepherding and its primary aim, healing, found throughout the scriptures. Hiltner suggests that healing in the New Testament is focused on not just one’s physical ailments (e.g. Jesus healing blind Bartimaeus, Mark 10:46–52) but rather the whole person – mind, body, and soul. Hiltner notes that the healing offered through shepherding is ‘related to all other healing by physician, rehabilitator, or reeducator’ (1958: 100), which indicates that healing can, and in some instances must, be offered through secular means. Nevertheless, it is the Christian shepherd who, according to Hiltner’s shepherding perspective, is primarily responsible for returning the person to functional wholeness. Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, this wholeness is not achieved. During this time when wholeness is delayed or denied, the sustaining aspect of shepherding comes to the fore.
Sustaining, or sustenance, is that aspect of the shepherding perspective that is required when ‘total situations cannot be changed or at least cannot be changed at this time’ (Hiltner 1958: 116). Bereavement, for instance, is a situation that calls for sustaining, especially in the early phases of mourning when the initial emotions over the loss of a loved one are most intense. In most cases, there is little either the pastor or church can do but ‘stand by’ and offer sustenance – sustaining – so that the bereaved person can, with an empathizing community of believers, endure this season of mourning. Another situation where sustaining is required is during a separation, such as the severing of the relationship between two lovers during a temporary break-up or the dissolution of the marital bond in divorce. Unlike death, restoration of the affectional bonds between separated persons is possible. While separated, however, the person burdened with a heavy heart needs sustenance, someone to stand by during this time when restoration and reconciliation appear impossible. ‘When the situation is such that, at least for the time being, change is not possible, one stands by or makes sustenance available’, writes Hiltner (1958: 117). The final shepherding perspective is guiding, which, by Hiltner’s own admission, is the most controversial of the three aspects, as ‘it may carry unintended connotations that blur or distort’ (1958: 117).
Guiding, for Hiltner, should not be distorted by coercion, persuasion, or interpretation. Rather, he contends that guiding is eductive – that is, it ‘leads out something that may be regarded as either within the person or potentially available to him’ (1958: 151). The reason Hiltner emphasizes the eductive approach within shepherding is that it empowers the parishioner to participate in faith-generating-meaning-making, which is a pivotal element of the healing process. Ideally, it is the shepherd’s role to have the words, feelings, skills, and knowledge to aid the parishioner during the healing process. What is drawn out of the wellspring of parishioners’ life experiences through eductive guidance – not what is given through the shepherd’s coercion – will help bring them ‘to the light of human symbolic awareness’ (1958: 154). The parishioner’s hermeneutical framework must, through guidance, be amended to overcome the negative assessment they are making of a current crisis; and this should not be altered solely by external means, which, as stated earlier, is what occurs through pastoral coercion. Much of Hiltner’s approach to guidance was inspired by psychotherapist Carl Rogers’ client-centred therapy model. ‘Client-centered [therapy]’, writes Hiltner, ‘was intended to show that one begins and proceeds from the best possible grasp of internals – that is, the inner frame of reference of the other person in so far as it can be grasped’ (1958: 154).
2.2 Contextuality in pastoral theology
The above overview of Hiltner’s pastoral theology is by no means exhaustive. Rather, it is intended to serve as a brief introduction not only to the foundation he laid for pastoral theology but also his own awareness of the limitations of the shepherding perspective. Hiltner admits that pastoral theology, if it is to remain a viable theological discipline, must remain aware of and sensitive to the modern crises that Christians are experiencing. Pastoral theologian John Patton notes that a major challenge to pastoral theology is that the discipline is limited by its individualistic and psychological bias (Patton 2000: 49). More specifically, however, Patton mentions that changes to address these biases within pastoral theology are occurring, particularly as ‘context has been the most important recent feature of pastoral theology in the United States’ (2000: 49). Patton defines context ‘as the whole situation, background, or environment relevant to a particular circumstance or event. Contextuality means that the social situation in all of its uniqueness informs the thought and actions of one’s reflection’ (2000: 55). Patton was not alone in holding this view. Along with him, pastoral theologian Larry Kent Graham and sociologist and chaplain George M. Furniss were also part of an emerging cadre of scholars, during the waning years of the twentieth century, who were proclaiming that an awareness of context and culture are important when discerning, from a pastoral theological perspective, how diverse contexts provide care. African American pastoral theologians argue that this shift was important for their work because the individualistic focus of normative pastoral theology, particularly the mode espoused by Hiltner’s shepherding perspective, has proved insufficient to address the communal needs of the African American context.
African American pastoral theologians insist that pastoral theology must move beyond its focus on the care of the individual – via healing, guiding, and sustaining – in order to be attentive to the ways in which race, culture, gender, sexuality, and power impact how effective care is provided in the African American context. Patton notes in his book Pastoral Care in Context (1993) that in the current era a communal contextual model is being emphasized in pastoral care. Unlike the classical and clinical paradigms, which prevailed from the founding of Christianity until the mid- to late-1960s, the communal contextual paradigm shifts authority away from the church’s clergy and moves it towards Christian communities. That is, care is given beyond the shepherd’s purview. Moreover, when focusing on context, the issues of race, gender, and social class – all of which are important in African American pastoral theology – are not ancillary but essential to caregiving relationships.
3 Pastoral theology in the American context: the privilege of self-realization
Seward Hiltner’s shepherding perspective was formed during a time when Americans, particularly white middle-class Americans, were becoming more secure, financially and otherwise. American Church historian E. Brooks Holifield observes that after the Second World War many ministers found themselves serving parishioners who were living in a ‘prosperous society’ (2005: 270). In this new-found prosperity ‘there was virtually no unemployment, and consumers were buying cars and houses, filling restaurants, taking vacations, creating an expense account society, and moving to the suburbs’ (Holifield 2005: 270). To address the growing psychological needs of parishioners, many ministers began to focus on providing not only pastoral care but also pastoral counselling. ‘By pastoral care, they were referring to the broader range of pastoral duties; by pastoral counselling, they had in mind a more specific activity resting on knowledge of the psychotherapeutic tradition’, writes Holifield (2005: 273). Holifield avers that four pastoral theologians were influential during the post-war period: Seward Hiltner; Carol Wise, professor of pastoral psychology at Garrett Biblical Institute (now Garrett Seminary); Wayne Oates, professor of pastoral care at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; and Paul Johnson, professor of psychology at Boston University. These are but a small representation of the numerous pastoral theologians who wrote on topics that included but were not limited to the psychology of aging, alcoholism, human development, personal crisis, death and dying, sexuality, and politics. Holifield identifies one issue, however, that dominated pastoral writings during this era: self-realization.
Growth, for many pastoral counsellors, was the goal of self-realization. The client-centred psychotherapeutic model of Carl Rogers greatly influenced pastoral counsellors who supported their parishioners in the process of self-realization. Other theorists, including notable psychoanalysts (e.g. Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney, and Eric Fromm) and theologians (e.g. Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich), were also influential. Holifield shares an insight made by Karen Horney, who spoke of the psychological dangers that arise from a lack of self-realization, stating that
life [becomes] a series of hostile inward encounters, with the actual self-living in a constant tension torn between the tyrannical demands of the ideal self and the insistent efforts of the submerged real self to express its need for spontaneous growth. (Holifield 2005: 292)
Theologian Paul Tillich, as Holifield points out, ‘declared that self-realization was the precondition of obedience to the command of love’ (2005: 288). Pastoral theologians were also concerned with the way self-realization could be achieved in congregational contexts. Carol Wise, informed by the theories of psychoanalysts Karl Menninger and Karen Horney, believed ‘that the deepest purpose of religion was the fostering of self-realization’ (2005: 292). Unfortunately, this focus on self-realization came at a cost. According to Holifield, pastoral theologians realized ‘that a self-realizationist ethic presupposed communal structures and corporate commitments which could provide at least tacit guidelines for defining what was appropriate growth and what was not’ (2005: 288). A pressing issue that pastoral theologians were not rightly considering during this era of self-realization is that there were structural and, as some would argue, cultural challenges that inhibited the self-realization of certain persons, especially those in communities that were intentionally excluded from the immense prosperity that occurred during the post-Second World War period.
Holifield has it that ‘by 1968 the [American] culture was seemingly awash in therapeutic possibilities’ (2005: 308). 1968 is regarded as a year of immense progress and chaos in the United States. Politically, on the one hand, there were signs of progress as the Civil Rights Act of 1968 became law. On the other hand, there were also other events that showed the nation was declining into chaos. The assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrated that influential social reformers were not immune to acts of deadly violence. Civil unrest, in response to the Vietnam War and racial injustice, proved that the nation, especially its young people, were rebelling against ‘the system’ that was oppressing, through various means, many of the nation’s citizens. The nation’s chaos was most palpable in its urban cities. During a span of almost two months, the following cities were damaged, some irreparably, by what was termed by some scholars as the ‘Negro riots’ or the ‘ghetto riots’ (Goldberg 1968: 116): Baltimore, Chicago, Newark, Detroit, Washington, D. C. Sociologist Louis C. Goldberg, who was a research analyst at the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (also known as the Kerner Commission), writes that some of the civil unrest was caused by the anticipation, fuelled by the media, that an outbreak of ghetto violence, led by Black residents, would occur (1968: 120–124). Long before the waves of civil unrest, however, African American writers, beginning in the early-to mid-twentieth century, provided a grim picture of what life was like for the urban poor, and warned that this oppression was creating a dangerous rage amongst ghetto citizens. These were communities wherein self-realization proved impossible to achieve. Instead, self-alienation, the loss of self, became a poisonous rite of passage for many who resided within ghetto walls.
3.1 The Bigger problem: communal crisis in America’s ghettoes
Richard Wright’s Native Son, published in 1940, is the story of Bigger Thomas, a young African American male whom scholar of African American literature Donald B. Gibson describes as ‘an angry and vicious young black ghetto dweller who at first has little to recommend him beyond his membership in the human race’ (Gibson 1977: 527). In the novel, one discovers that much of Bigger’s trauma, and his negative response to it, is due to his context: the ghetto. In his insightful essay ‘How Bigger Was Born’, Wright discusses how it is, in fact, the context that produces Bigger Thomas, or a Bigger-type. For instance, in the South, Wright notes there are two separate American contexts that create ‘white schools and black schools, white churches and black churches, white business and black businesses’, and there is even segregation after death, as seen in ‘white graveyards and black graveyards’ (Wright 1940: 437). According to Wright, the North, where the divisions marked out by Jim Crow were not as rigid (at least ostensibly), offered a different kind of torment: ‘The urban environment of Chicago, affording a more stimulating life, made the Negro Bigger Thomases react more violently than even in the South’ (1940: 442). In essence, in the North, Bigger was promised that he could grow up, achieve a sense of self, become a real (hu)man, a self-made man, the American ideal. Unfortunately, the ghetto context would not allow this kind of growth to occur. Rather than growth, the kind that allows one to create and maintain healthy sense of self, the ghetto context made Bigger ‘sullen, angry, ignorant, emotionally unstable, depressed, unaccountably elated at times, and unable […] to unite with members of his own race’ (1940: 448). Bigger was totally isolated, disconnected not only from himself but also his community. This negative assessment of self-realization amongst the urban poor was also the topic of a landmark government study conducted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, or the Moynihan Report (1965).
Moynihan was the Assistant Secretary of Labor for both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, from 1963 to 1965. As part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda – an aggressive legislative plan to reduce crime, abolish inequality, improve the environment, and end poverty – Moynihan was commissioned to study the underlying causes of the ghetto culture that, it was widely believed, caused the vast gap between the nation’s Black and white citizens. At the beginning of The Negro Family, Moynihan identifies several recent advances the federal government had made in improving the status of African Americans, such as the Economic Opportunity Act (1964) and the Civil Rights Act (1964). Though citing these legislative accomplishments as signs of the nation’s progress, Moynihan recognizes and confesses that much work remained to be done, on several fronts, to achieve a just society. The central problem that Moynihan’s report underscores is that, no matter the federal government’s efforts, there is something within the African American context itself that he believes is keeping its members from achieving equality: the Negro family. ‘At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society’, Moynihan writes, ‘is the deterioration of the Negro family’ (1965: 5). The African American family is characterized in the report as ‘disorganized’. The problem, however, was not just that too many African American children were not being raised in stable two-parent households but that too many were being raised by African American women. Moynihan has it that this deviant, deficient, and, at its worse, deleterious family structure creates a tangle of pathology, as ‘ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs’ (1965: 29). He also adds that ‘the arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it’ (1965: 29).
A similar claim is made in African American psychologist Kenneth Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1965), published the same year as the Moynihan report, in which Clark provides his perspective on the tangle of pathology in the ghetto. Clark states that ‘the child without a secure family life is often forced either into aggression and delinquency or into apathy and despair’ (1965: 47). This was what so afflicted Bigger Thomas. A stable family structure is hard to achieve and maintain due to the prevalence of the Negro matriarchy, which, for Clark, ‘made the female the dominant person in the Negro family’ (1965: 70). Like Moynihan, Clark declares that the dominant African American female weakens the African American male’s ‘normal desire for dominance’ (1965: 70). Both Moynihan and Clark, along with other adherents of the tangle of pathology theory, argue that the African American family’s disorganization, beginning with the devaluation of the Black male’s authority, started during slavery. More so than the weakening of the communal bonds that are formed within the family, slavery, as some scholars posit, severed the social networks that facilitate life-giving and live-sustaining care within the African American community. This leads to a discussion of the legacy of social death in the African American context.
In Slavery and Social Death (1982), African American sociologist Orlando Patterson offers the thesis that ‘the slave had no socially recognized existence outside of his master, he became a social nonperson’ (Patterson 1982: 5). The slave was socially dead. It is worth quoting Patterson at length, as he explains the absolute isolation caused by the slave’s social death.
Not only was the slave denied all claims on, and obligations to, his parents and living blood relations but, by extension, all such claims and obligations on his more remote ancestors and on his descendants. He was truly a genealogical isolate. Formally isolated in his social relations with those who lived, he was also culturally isolated from the social heritage of his ancestors. He had a past, to be sure. But a past is not a heritage. Everything has a history, including sticks and stones. Slaves differed from other human beings in that they were not allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebearers, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory. That they reached back for the past, as they reached out for the related living, there can be no doubt. Unlike other persons, doing so meant struggling with and penetrating the iron curtain of the master, his community, his laws, his policemen or patrollers, and his heritage. (Patterson 1982: 5, emphasis added)
In his review of Slavery and Social Death, historian Michael Fellman contends that Patterson’s text offers an ‘absolutist theory’ that doesn’t take into account the many ways slave culture, which informed various forms of resistance, enabled slaves to challenge and in many instances overcome the deadly isolation within plantation system (Fellman 1984: 328). Nevertheless, Patterson’s point regarding the social isolation of the slave is something that has remained within the current African American context.
In Rituals of Blood (1999), Patterson argues that ‘Afro-Americans are the most unpartnered and isolated group of people in America and quite possibly the world’ (1999: 4). This is a double isolation, however, in that he claims that it is ‘both external and internal: they are isolated from other ethnic groups in the society and they are isolated from each other’ (1999: 150). As a sociologist, Patterson provides a wealth of data regarding the social and economic consequences of this harmful isolation. For instance, he mentions the scholarship of network sociologists who argue that ‘characteristics of a person’s network of ties to others structure the flow of information that both socialize people as they grow up and provide social resources critical for competent functioning in society’ (1999: 151). Such networks, the network sociologists argue, are just as important as one’s individual attributes in determining one’s achievements. Above all, these networks are needed to support one’s sense of personhood – that one is in fact somebody.
African American pastoral theologians are focused on the need for African Americans to strengthen and, in some instances, refasten the communal bonds that are continually damaged by racial oppression. To varying degrees, these scholars are reimagining new ways that African Americans, as a community and not just as individuals, can continue to encounter divine care even as the African American community sojourns through the American wilderness. Contra Patterson’s social death thesis, African American pastoral theologians shun despair and hold onto a faith that looks to the past and sees, as looking through a glass darkly, faint images of families living in love, communities guided by the wisdom of the ancestors, and a homeland, Africa, that is filled with stories about communities of care, making sure that no one is left to suffer alone. Most of all, African American pastoral theologians have their ears always ready to hear the Word. It is a word that has been spoken, across the ages from the Middle Passage to the slave communities, from the unknown prayer closets of faith-filled believers to the marchers standing on the frontline during the Civil Rights era, from the haughty protestations of prophets to the divine utterances of common folk – ‘We shall live…We shall live…We shall live and not die’.
4 African American pastoral theology: major figures
African American pastoral theology was formed within the womb of the African American community’s experience in the American wilderness. African American theologian J. Deotis Roberts describes the unique challenges of doing ministry in African American context, when he says,
Much of the black minister’s time and effort go to the underclass. The underclass in the inner cities is almost another society, even beneath the working poor. It is an alternate society for those who have been shut out of the regular society. The tragedy is that it is growing faster than other parts of black society. While the number of whites in this category may be greater, the percentage of black sinking to this level of existence is reaching alarming proportions. (Roberts 1994: 20)
It is for this reason that African American pastoral theology’s formative years witnessed the emergence of scholars who, given their perspective of the African American context, crafted a theology that spoke prophetically to not just traumatized individuals but a traumatized community in desperate need of divine care. The goals of self-realization proved too limited within a context where communities were struggling to cobble together their collective identity. Over the years, the focus on the communal nature of African American pastoral theology has come to the fore. African American pastoral theologian Thomas J. Pugh, who taught at Interdenominational Theological Center for thirty-five years, is credited as ‘the first African American to pioneer in the field of pastoral theology’ (Wimberly 1995: 44). The aforementioned John Patton, in an editorial titled ‘Pulling Things Together’, shares how his conversations with Pugh helped to shape his own perspectives on pastoral care. Patton writes that in their ongoing dialogues about pastoral theology they discussed the following: ‘[a]ction and reflection on one’s ministry, the use of case material, small group interaction, and a number of other things [that] have been incorporated into general theological education’ (1981: 145). Pugh was a forerunner in bringing the insights of the African American perspective to pastoral theology, especially the need to be more attentive to context. Pugh’s early contributions have been expanded and refined by such noted African American pastoral theologians as Edward Wimberly, Archie Smith, Homer U. Ashby, Jr., Lee H. Butler, and Carroll A. Watkins Ali. The scholarship of these African American pastoral theologians underscores that the normative models of pastoral theology, such as the shepherding perspective, must be altered – in some instances radically – in order to address the current crises in the African American community.
4.1 Edward P. Wimberly: reclaiming the caring community
African American pastoral theology begins with the African American experience, and, because of this, it asks a simple question: what is happening in the African American community today? Edward Powell Wimberly was a student at Boston University School of Theology in 1965, and like so many African Americans during that era, he had witnessed the progress that had been achieved through the Civil Rights Movement. Wimberly also witnessed the wars, assassinations, and social protests that contributed to this being one of the most tumultuous times in American history. With his unique perspective, Wimberly ‘surveyed the scene’ – that is, examined the context – during his years as a burgeoning pastoral theologian (Moschella and Butler 2020: 1).
As for his immediate context, ‘the city of Boston was a hotbed of racial tension with major protests against integration’ (Moschella and Butler 2020: 2). Wimberly was greatly influenced by what was happening at Boston University School of Theology, a theological institution that had gained recognition for its commitment to racial justice. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., by then the leading figure in the Civil Rights Movement, and Howard Thurman, the renowned mystic and theologian, were both, at one point in their lives, members of the Boston University community, and these two figures greatly influenced Wimberly’s development as a pastoral theologian. Upon completing a Master of Sacred Theology degree, Wimberly moved on to pursue a doctoral degree in Pastoral Care and Counselling at Boston University. Similar to Martin Luther King, Jr., Wimberly would be exposed to Boston University’s focus on personalism, which, in essence, is a philosophical perspective that regards personhood as giving meaning to one’s reality. Christian minister and philosopher Borden Parker Bowne, a major figure in the Boston personalism movement, avers that the person is a unity that includes ‘selfhood, self-consciousness, self-control, and the power to know’ (Buford 2006: 215). Personalism was an integral component of Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism, especially the notion that God ‘maintained a personal interest in each human soul and was most discernible through personal experience and the biblical stories of Jesus’s life’ (n.d.). During this time, Wimberly’s pastoral theological perspective was also being shaped by the Black Consciousness Movements, particularly as its teachings were spreading in newly-formed Black Studies programs in various universities. But Wimberly, as a pastoral theologian, wanted to know how this newly-acquired knowledge related to the care provided to African Americans in the Black church. Wimberly works towards addressing this concern in his first book, Pastoral Care in the Black Church (1979).
From the outset, Wimberly outlines the differences between African American pastoral theology and normative (i.e. Eurocentric) pastoral care, noting that in the African American context ‘pastoral care is a communal concept’ (Moschella and Butler 2020: 13). Wimberly follows Hiltner’s shepherding model of pastoral theology – i.e. healing, sustaining, and guiding – but mentions that, given his perspective as an African American pastoral theologian, guiding and sustaining are more prominent than healing in African American pastoral care. Furthermore, due to the historical peculiarities of the African American context, there are differences in the way that guiding and sustaining are operationalized in the Black church. Wimberly notes that
unlike the sustaining function in the healing tradition of mainstream Protestant pastoral care, sustaining in the black church tradition has not been the function of the pastor alone. The sustaining dimension of black pastoral care has been the function of the total church acting as the caring community. (Moschella and Butler 2020: 16)
Wimberly traces the origins of this sustaining to the slave community. Put simply, the persons within the community were able to sustain each other because they had ‘developed an important theological worldview that enabled black persons to find hope to endure the mundane problems of living in a hostile world’ (2020: 17). Wimberly does not agree with pessimistic theorists who suggest that slaves were rendered socially dead due to the plantation system. Rather, he contends that slaves held a theological worldview ‘that not only gave meaning to the slave’s existence but also provided the efficacious power that sustained the slave in a hostile environment’ (2020: 17). Wimberly adds that ‘the worldview of the slave projected God as the important resource of sustaining’ (2020: 17).
When the Black church began to take form, there were several communal practices – such as singing the spirituals and baptism – and institutions – such as extended family networks and mutual aid societies – that were pivotal in sustaining communal life. Wimberly argues, however, that since the 1960s these sustaining functions, particularly within Black church, have been weakened, though not destroyed. ‘The centralized role of the black church in the black community has been weakening’, writes Wimberly, ‘and the old supportive resources for sustaining black people, though still in existence, are disappearing’ (2020: 23). Wimberly holds a traditional (or Hiltnerian) perspective when it comes to guidance in the Black church, however. The declining role of the Black pastor is, for Wimberly, a major contributing factor in the crisis of community in the African American context. According to Wimberly, ‘the black pastor, namely the male, became the spiritual father and leader of black people, and was expected to guide the congregation’ (2020: 25). Ideally, parishioners in the Black church expect the (male) pastor to provide a worldview that assists them in finding meaning and purpose in their lives. The pastor is the one who has the word for God’s people. Wimberly suggests that the Black pastor’s influence has waned because African Americans have more access to other leadership figures outside of the Black church. Furthermore, educational improvements have made it so that some African Americans, more so individually than collectively, have found other resources, some of which are not found in the Black church, that provide the guidance they believe will help them navigate life’s challenges.
Surveying the scene, once again in 2008, Wimberly revisits his observations about the crisis of community decades earlier in Pastoral Care in the Black Church. He states that, from his perspective, ‘the village that used to characterize the African American community has collapsed’ (Wimberly 2008: viii). ‘Those relational traditions’, Wimberly writes, ‘that in the past enabled African Americans to thrive despite racism have all almost collapsed, and something drastic must take place to reverse the trends’ (2008: viii). To combat the enervation of these communal bonds, Wimberly suggests that Black churches must lead the effort of re-villaging, which he defines as follows: ‘the village is that small communal network of persons linked together by a common biological family, cultural heritage living in a particular geographical location where frequent interaction is a reality’ (2008: 13). Theologically, Wimberly grounds re-villaging in an African American pastoral theological approach that utilizes narrative therapy to help parishioners understand how God is working in their lives. He notes that ‘genuine pastoral care from a narrative perspective involves the use of stories by pastors in ways that help persons and families visualize how and where God is at work in their lives and thereby receive healing and wholeness’ (2008: 1).
Wimberly’s Relational Refugees provides a focused meditation on the intimate relationships that must be restored within the African American community (or village). In this text, however, Wimberly is focused on those persons in the African American context who, due to various traumas, have decided to cut themselves off from any life-sustaining relationships. The Black church has been responsible for creating countless relational refugees because, as Wimberly points out, it has been entrenched in a propositional approach to ministry. A propositional approach seeks to enforce rules and regulations, whereas a narrative-based ethical approach encourages the faithful community to use its theological imagination to ‘enact and live out the salvation drama of God’ (Wimberly 2000: 114). The restoration of the communal bonds, the village, is a dominant theme in Wimberly’s African American pastoral theology, and it is the primary concern for other African American pastoral theologians who continue to survey the scene in the African American context.
4.2 Archie Smith, Jr.: an ecology care
Edward Wimberly met Archie Smith, Jr. while both were students in the Boston area. Smith was a student at Brandeis University, where he was completing clinical training at the Worcester Area Council of Churches Pastoral Counselling Center. The two burgeoning African American pastoral theologians became friends because they ‘shared similar passions related to ministry’ (Moschella and Butler 2020: 2). In his first book, The Relational Self, Smith develops an African American pastoral theological approach that focuses on the importance of relationality and liberation in the Black church. Smith attests that ‘this book is about the church’s ministry of liberation with the victims of oppression, the freedom struggles of the oppressed, and the relational or communal nature of selfhood’ (Smith 1982: 13). Relationality and the communal self, according to Smith, are essential in the fight for liberation, thereby indicating that the achievement of self-realization, as promoted during the post-War era of pastoral theology, is not the goal of pastoral care in the African American context. There is neither self-realization nor liberation without the community. There is no I without We. Therefore, Smith states that ‘we not only live among other people, but also they live in us and we in them’ (1982: 13). Smith also critically assesses the resources used in African American pastoral theology’s methodology. The Bible alone, he argues, is not a sufficient resource in liberation ministry. Therefore, he says, ‘social science, then, may bring forth awareness of certain relevant conditions that are important for therapy, ethics, social action and change, and social policy’ (1982: 48). For Smith, the problems that African American parishioners bring to the caregiving relationship are caused not only by spiritual maladies but also by oppressive social, political, economic, and cultural structures. Nevertheless, though he upholds the verity of the truths offered by the social sciences, Smith remains primarily committed to the theological understandings that are grounded in his faith, as he claims that ‘my faith and theological understanding of life informs my psychological and sociological understanding’ (1982: 35).
There are three diagnostic paradigms that instruct Smith’s relational pastoral theological approach. Paradigm I proposes that problems are personal, and that these personal problems contribute to psychic, familial, or biological dysfunction. ‘Strategies that derive from Paradigm I seek either to change individual or family dysfunction or attempt to adjust such problems with existing institutional arrangements’, writes Smith (1982: 41). The problem with this paradigm, for Smith, is that it leaves the current social structures in place, which is problematic for persons who are being oppressed by such structures. Paradigm II moves from the personal to the political in that it identifies the social structure itself as dysfunctional. Smith explains, ‘the private troubles of individuals are perceived to be the products of malfunctioning institutions, maldistribution of resources, restrictive opportunity structures, and powerlessness’ (1982: 41). When assessing his own ministry with African American residents of Worcester, MA, in the early 1980s, Smith confesses that he did not address the issues raised in this paradigm. Up to that point, he remained focused on the healing, guiding, and sustaining that occurs in individualized care, often between the pastor and parishioner, not the larger social structures that harm communities. Paradigm II is what Smith suggests brings ‘the ministry closer to the prophetic vision of social justice and to the biblical understanding of God’s liberating acts in history’ (1982: 44). Paradigm III, the core of Smith’s relational paradigm, contends that liberation is grounded in the community’s relationships. ‘The goals of liberation’, Smith proclaims, ‘is to free the human spirit by enabling individuals to form communities that value all life; to share their resources responsibly; to view themselves as valued participants within the larger drama of life’ (1982: 53). The community, not a sole caregiver, i.e. a shepherd, is called to ‘see themselves as sources of responsibility, grace, creativity, and healing’ (1982: 53). Specifically, Smith identities the Black church as the institution within the African American context wherein one encounters a therapeutic community, that is, a community established through relationships – comprised of two or more people – that has the ‘aim of effecting a change, or furthering a curative process that relieves suffering’ (1982: 75). Furthermore, these therapeutic relationships are guided by a Christian social ethic.
Smith has it that, in the African American context, Christian social ethics is devoted not just to the Holy Scripture but also the folk traditions and communal practices that have informed liberative praxis throughout the African American community’s history. Smith’s second book, Navigating the Deep River, published in 1997, makes it clear that caregivers can help the community become more aware of its spiritual resources by using an ecological approach. For Smith, the ecological approach has a communal focus because it offers ‘an advance over views that consider the individual apart from a wider social context […] one that takes seriously American history, democracy, racism, the environment, and black experience within a multicultural context’ (Smith 1997: xix). When enacted, the ecological approach combats structures that are creating relational and, Smith adds, spiritual refugees in the African American community – the latter are the most isolated persons within the African American community. The spiritual refugee, according to Smith, ‘is the person driven out from his or her customary place of worship by persecution […] such persons cannot return to their former places of spiritual nurture’ (1997: 37). Smith identifies gays and lesbians as the African American community’s most persecuted and rejected spiritual refugees (1997: 38). A similar claim regarding the Black church’s homophobia is made by Womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglass, most notably in Sexuality and the Black Church (1999) and Black Bodies and the Black Church (2012). African American pastoral theologian Horace L. Griffin identifies the many challenges that gays and lesbians face in the Black church and offers some methods, such as utilizing narrative theology, to reimagine new theories and practices of pastoral care for such persons (Griffin 1999: 209).Therefore, African American pastoral theology must be at the forefront of inspiring innovative modes of pastoral care that create a home for the African American community’s spiritual refugees.
5 Paradigm shifts in African American pastoral theology
Given the ongoing crisis of spiritual refugees, along with a host of other communal crises, some African American pastoral theologians, though greatly influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Edward P. Wimberly as well as other notable African American pastoral theologians, are moving beyond reform and arguing that new paradigms – radical changes – in African American pastoral theology are needed. This article now turns to a few African American pastoral theologians who are pushing the discipline in new directions, particularly towards developing more contextually- and culturally-oriented theological perspectives.
5.1 Charles W. Taylor: Black experience matters
Edward Wimberly laid a firm theoretical foundation for African American pastoral theology. However, Wimberly would readily admit that the discipline must continue to develop in order to address current challenges in the African American context. An ongoing issue for many African American pastoral theologians is that the wider field of pastoral theology has not been attentive to the African American experience itself. To address this pastoral theological problematic, African American pastoral theologian Charles W. Taylor posits that Black experience needs to be a resource for the field of pastoral theology, not just African American pastoral theology. In his essay ‘Black Experience as a Resource for Pastoral Theology’, Taylor writes ‘that the main resource that the Black experience can bring to pastoral theology is the experience of a tradition which is outside of the male Euro-American liberal protestant ghetto – yet has ties to it’ (1988: 28). Taylor is attempting to express that, given his perspective, pastoral theologians, many of whom are white male liberal protestants, have not allowed themselves to listen to other voices, mainly African American voices, in the discipline, and this has hindered the theological development of the field of pastoral theology.
Taylor provides three points that underscore his conviction that the Black experience is a resource for pastoral theology. First, the Black experience provides normative pastoral theology a different lens that can break it out of its ‘cultural ghetto’, that is, the discipline’s dangerous tendency to view pastoral theology, pastoral care, and pastoral counselling exclusively from a white male liberal protestant perspective. Second, African American pastoral theologians, such as Edward Wimberly and Archie Smith, are committed to using Christian values, symbols, and practices to theologically inform the African American community’s caregiving. Therefore, as Taylor points out, though Wimberly uses narrative therapy to develop his pastoral theological perspective, he remains faithful, fundamentally, to ‘the power of the church and the Gospel to transform and sustain’ (1988: 30). Third, Taylor highlights the relationship between care for the individual and its effect on social change in the African American context. This is radically different from what is found in normative pastoral theology.
The reason for the separation of personal and social transformation in Euro-American culture is that middle- and upper-class whites felt a strong need for personal transformation, but enjoyed society as it was – at least social transformation was not necessary for their very existence. (Taylor 1988: 30–31)
African Americans, on the other hand, ‘are permanently excluded from the comforts of the society by color’ and, because of this, are aware that personal survival is linked, indelibly, to social transformation (1988: 31). Taylor warns that African American pastoral theology can be a resource for but should not be appropriated by normative pastoral theology. Rather, it should be appreciated in all of its cultural uniqueness, as it ‘arose out of the particularities of the West African world view as it was shaped by the Christian Gospel and the ordeal of being black in America’ (1988: 31).
5.2 Homer U. Ashby, Jr. and Lee H. Butler, Jr.: Afro- and Africentric approaches to pastoral theology
Comparable to Taylor’s argument, African American pastoral theologian Homer U. Ashby, Jr. also questions if pastoral theology, in its normative mode, can adequately address the crises in the African American context. In his essay ‘Is it Time for a Black Pastoral Theology?’ (2016), Ashby shares that he wants to build on the work of previous African American pastoral theologians, such as Edward Wimberly, Charles Taylor, James H. Harris, and others, by ‘pursuing a more Afrocentric approach based upon recent social, cultural, and historical developments in American society’ (2016: 1). From his perspective, Ashby sees that the persistence of racism in American society, and the weakening of supportive communal structures, means that African Americans must reclaim a sense of pride in their own cultural identity. Afrocentrism meets this need because it provides an alternative worldview that upholds values that ‘have emerged from the culture and experience of African people’ (2016: 5). Philosopher Molefi Kete Asante, a pioneer in field of African American Studies, upholds the ‘practice of Afrocentricity as a transforming agent in which all things that were old become new and a transformation in people’s lives of attitudes, beliefs, values, and behavior create […] a revolutionary perspective on all facts’ (2003: 3). Ultimately, for Ashby, an Afrocentric meaning system will address the major threats to the African American context, which are: competing views on African American liberation, the intra-communal wealth gap in the African American context, and Black on Black violence.
In Our Home is Over Jordan (2003), Ashby utilizes the African tradition of conjuring as a resource for African American pastoral theology. ‘Conjuring’, Ashby states, ‘was a means by which Africans brought to bear the power of the transcendent forces to affect change in the this-world context’ (2003: 12). He also adds that biblical images, like the exodus story, have played a major role in the African American conjuring tradition. In using the Joshua story, or the Joshua conjure, Ashby is taking the focus off the single leader motif, the Christian shepherd, and instead putting it on the need for a ‘Joshua people’ (Ashby 2003: 13). As a Joshua people, African Americans can conjure the Joshua story
to transform the present reality from a time of fear and anxiety to a time of expectation and desire […] [it] is a powerful story of hope in which the promise of God, the will of God, and the guarantees of God all come together to provide a safe haven for a people lost in the wilderness. (Ashby 2003: 22)
It is only through a caring community, a Joshua people, that, per Ashby’s Afrocentric pastoral theological perspective, African Americans will be able to survive the American wilderness and continue their journey towards the promised land.
African American pastoral theologian Lee H. Butler has built on Ashby’s scholarship to construct an innovative theory of African American identity formation, which is necessary for effective African American pastoral care. For Butler, ‘African American pastoral care reframes the challenges of black life to bring hope out of despair, inspire joy where there is sorrow, and heal the broken hearted’ (Butler 2003: 25). This care, Butler attests, is based on an African American pastoral theological framework that is attentive to the ‘traumas caused by individuals, institutional racism and sexism’ (Butler 2004: 195). According to Butler, there are several ‘features’ of African American pastoral care, which include but are not limited to the following: African American culture is a resistance and survival culture; it is an oral culture that ‘responds best to care that consists of narrative’; and it is a culture that ‘has been organized around the principles of family and community and not individualism’ (2004: 197). Supporting these components, however, is an African worldview that espouses a web of communality that maintains a life-giving and sustaining spiritual relationship with the lifeworld. Butler notes, ‘it is the spiritual interconnectedness of all people and all things that situates the individual within the world’ (2004: 198). He also adds that this is important to the African American identity as ‘one’s identity comes from one’s connectedness to the community, and without that connection, there is no identifiable being’ (2004: 198).
In Liberating Our Dignity, Saving Our Souls (2006), Butler provides an Africentric theory of identity formation. Butler argues that Africentricity, not Afrocentrcity, speaks to the identity of persons of ‘African descent from the continent of Africa’ and he adds that it ‘has become the preferred term for identifying African-centered thinking’ (2006: x). Throughout Liberating Our Dignity, Butler carefully works out the Africentric influence on African American identity by focusing on five themes: identity formation, racial identity, gender identity, religious identity, and identity liberation. The upshot of Butler’s integrative analysis is to offer a new theory of identity formation that is influenced by but not beholden to the Eurocentric models of identity formation put forth by influential theorists like Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. The ‘Theory of African American Communal Identity Formation’ (TAACIF) is relevant to the African American context, for it is ‘the result of direct observation of the African American community’ and is ‘a culturally specific approach to African American identity formation’ (2006: 160). Overall, Butler’s theory is not deterministic, contra stage development theories, in that there is always room for something new to occur – for instance, creativity inspired by the spirit – during the course of the individual’s, as well as the community’s, development.
5.3 Caroll A. Watkins Ali: nurturing, empowering, and liberating in African American pastoral theology
African American pastoral theologian Carroll A. Watkins Ali’s Survival & Liberation is an unabashed refutation of normative pastoral theology, particularly Seward Hiltner’s shepherding perspective. Watkins Ali identifies three limitations in Hiltner’s pastoral theological approach: (1) it overvalues the pastor’s perspective; (2) it is individualistic and focused on Eurocentric cultural thought; and (3) it ignores the cultural experiences of African Americans (Watkins Ali 2000: 343). Nevertheless, despite these critiques, Watkins Ali maintains that Hiltner’s methodological approach has had a positive influence on pastoral theology in three areas: (1) theological reflection must bear on human experience; (2) problems must be identified as occurring within the context of ministry; and (3) a pastoral theology utilizing the correlational method ensures that theology remains in dialogue with secular resources. Watkins Ali argues that, due to the unique experiences of the African American context, a new method – and paradigm – of pastoral theology is needed, one that contributes to the survival and liberation of the African American community. By focusing on the experience of African Americans, Watkins Ali’s new paradigm of pastoral theology asserts that theological reflection begins ‘with the focus on the experience indigenous to the [African American] cultural context’ (Watkins Ali 1999: 11). Thus far, Watkins Ali is upholding context as a significant part of pastoral theological reflection, a point that was previously made by such (normative) pastoral theologians as Seward Hiltner, John Patton, and Larry Kent Graham. A focus on context is also found in the scholarship of African American pastoral theologians like the aforementioned Edward Wimberly who sought to reform pastoral theology. The second part of Watkins Ali’s new paradigm, however, is where a paradigm shift – a radical turn – is made, as ‘it suggests that pastoral theological reflection is at least a two-step process that puts the experience of the people inhabiting the context for ministry ahead of the experience of the pastoral caregiver in the ministry context’ (1999: 11). For Watkins Ali, the shepherding perspective does not truly value the voice of the community, and it is therefore insufficient to address the various communal crises in the African American context. The voice of the community must come first.
Germane sources are vital to the African American pastoral theological task, and Watkins Ali argues that Black liberation theology (e.g. James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power), Womanist theology (e.g. Delores Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness), Black psychology (e.g. Nancy Boyd-Franklin’s Black Families in Therapy), and African American literature (e.g. Toni Morrison’s Beloved) are requisite sources, for they ‘provide interpretations of African American experience’ (Watkins Ali 1999: 14). Watkins Ali asserts that Womanist theology, in particular, is a much-needed source in African American pastoral theology, because it has a wholistic approach to ministry, one that values the voices of the least of the least in the African American community, that is, poor single Black women and their families. With this new perspective, the focus of caregiving is no longer only the healing, guiding, and sustaining provided by the shepherd. Rather, the ‘intent of care must also be nurturing, empowering, and liberating if African Americans, collectively, are to survive the harshness of their external realities’ (1999: 121).
Nurturing is the ongoing care provided by and for the community, that is, ‘caregiving for indefinite periods of time’ that keeps persons within the community from being overwhelmed by an oppressive environment (Watkins Ali 1999: 121). Empowering speaks to when the community is aware of its own resources and power so that its members can engage in the struggle to ‘claim their rights, resist oppression, and take control of their lives’ (1999: 121). Liberating includes those acts of resistance, including but not limited to political activism, that seek to change the community’s lived reality. Watkins Ali posits that reconciling is also necessary, and this aspect entails ‘the act of reconciling African Americans to African Americans’ (1999: 121). The need for African American pastoral theologians to underscore the urgency of intracommunal reconciliation is further explained by Watkins Ali when she notes, ‘African Americans need as a priority to reconcile ourselves with one another and with lost traditions and strategies for survival inherent in African culture’ (1999: 140).
One of the lost traditions that is important to current African American pastoral theology is that of social prophetism, or prophetic oratory, which scholar of Black religion Theophus Smith traces to African ‘shamanic and conjurational [practices], and its therapeutic or homeopathic, elements’ (Smith 1994: 159). Through this conjurational practice, the believing community, clergy and laity, are empowered, regardless of their official title or even personal rectitude – to become oracles who speak God’s liberating, life-giving word and rebuke the angel of death: ‘We shall live…We shall live…We shall live and not die’.
6 Conclusion: the future of African American pastoral theology in the age of Afropessimism
African American pastoral theology is always expanding into new territory. The ongoing effects of race and racism in the United States remain at the fore, but African American pastoral theologians are also addressing other issues, some of which have been overlooked by, or are regarded as taboo in, the African American community. Cedric C. Johnson’s scholarship explores how African Americans, in the neoliberal age, continue to develop modes of soul-care that lead to alternative forms of cultural, political, and religious life (Johnson 2016). Stephanie M. Crumpton offers a Womanist pastoral theological response to Black women seeking healing from intimate and cultural violence (Crumpton 2014). Gregory Ellison provides a critical analysis of the ways African American pastoral theology is a vital tool for better understanding the spiritual and psychological lives of Black men (Ellison 2013). Phillis Sheppard has broken new ground in African American pastoral theology by bringing attention to the way Womanist-lesbian pastoral ethics ‘takes seriously the ways in which the operative political forces take up residence in systemic structures, the strategies of privilege, embodied disciplining, and violence’ (Sheppard 2016: 161). Sheppard confesses that, although progress has been made in the lives of the LGBTQ+ community, especially in the African American context, problems remain, as those who ‘publicly identify as lesbian, gay, trans and queer gather in community, justice-making world and public rituals of acceptance are vulnerable – every day’ (2016: 162). Though these new areas being explored by African American pastoral theologians are of great value, particularly to the entire field of pastoral theology, a central concern that remains for many African American pastoral theologians is the pessimism, diagnosed by Watkins Ali as ‘the nihilistic threat infringing on Black life’, that is becoming more prevalent in the African American community (Watkins Ali 1999: 140). Philosopher Cornel West describes it ‘as a monumental eclipse of hope, the unprecedented collapse of meaning’ (West 2001: 12). Something must be done for those who believe they are destined for a life filled with unrelenting isolation, pain and sorrow, because they are too Black for care.
Afropessimist scholar Frank B. Wilderson tells of a psychotic episode he suffered while he was a graduate student at Columbia University. What is most troubling about this anecdote is not his description of the palpable moans, sobs, and howls that signalled his mental collapse but rather that his caregivers, all of whom were white, had no interest in remedying his condition. They left him there to suffer. ‘They didn’t approach’, writes Wilderson, ‘they didn’t call for help, not for themselves or for me, a monstrous aphasic too Black for care’ (2021: 37). Similar situations occur every day throughout American society. Some, of course, are private, living on in the hearts of countless uncared-for victims, whereas others are played out before the nation on the nightly news, social media, and various other media platforms. The repeated horrifying images of police brutality, whether a group of officers attacking Rodney King or the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin on the neck of George Floyd, both of which occurred while other police officers stood by and did nothing, communicate the message that certain persons should be left to suffer, and are too Black for care. Afropessmism argues that ‘Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures’ (Wilderson 2020: 15). Blackness becomes synonymous with death. Furthermore, the Afropessimists contend that there is nothing – no act of rebellion nor redemption – that can change this state of non-beingness (Marriott 2024). Particularly within urban African American neighbourhoods, ghettoized locales where the touted signs of racial uplift are seldom evident, there is a growing sense that it is hopeless to hold on to hope. Therefore, in keeping with its tradition, African American pastoral theology must remain committed, both in theory and praxis, to finding and listening to those persons not only within the Black church but also outside of its walls who, when moved by the spirit, are still giving a life-giving word to the community: ‘We shall live and not die!’