the gospel of impotence:
the crises of values in the black church

"If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land." 

—2 Chronicles 7:14

They could become doctors or welfare queens. Although we doubt many nine year-olds dream of becoming impoverished unwed mothers, a great many end up becoming exactly that. Welfare Queen is a career path. It is not an inevitability. It takes the same skill and initiative for a kid to pursue Welfare Queen, Junkie, Hoodlum, Lowlife, or Inmate  as it does for them to pursue Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer or Rocket Scientist. It's really a simple matter of values. Of deciding what is and what isn't desirable and essential.

The tide of popular culture threatening our community promotes materialism as an almost deistic presence. Young adults assess the value or "hip"-ness of most any given item by it's retail price. Hideous (and, incongruously suburban Anglo) Tommy Hillfiger and Ralph Lauren clothing designs are the prize many urban black teens will sacrifice family and friends to attain— in spite of the insipid in-joke that these "designer" fashions are designed for country club fairways most blacks never get a chance to see.

A couple years ago, teens were murdering each other over 8-Ball jackets (expensive leather bombers with a prominent insignia on the back). But, see, those jackets are no longer in style, likely discarded in closets all over urban Black America. But those kids are still dead. And the kids who killed them are spiritually and emotionally dead; victims of encroaching maturity and its inevitable re-setting of the moral compass.

This is a crisis of values.
Guess, Versace, Lexus, Nike. These are things worth dying for. Worth picking up a pistol for. Materialism as self-esteem. The absence of visible material wealth is a crushing blow to most adolescent blacks and has a direct influence on their popularity.

Music videos are the worst examples and the most strident perpetuators of this mindset. Hour after hour of young black males driving fabulously expensive cars while chatting on cell phones. Black girls barely out of high school— typically unnamed and having no spoken lines— with not an inch of body fat, no glasses, hair weaves to their tiny waists and breasts barely contained in halter tops, salaciously service these little creeps and are summarily dismissed once the males are satisfied.

 Every time you abandon your nine year-old kid in front of the tube and let him or her ingest this garbage, you are committing them to a career path more likely to lead to Welfare Queen and Lowlife than Doctor and Lawyer. Kids are impressionable and they subliminally process this stuff into their value system. By showing them this material, along with intermittent Madison Avenue head-banging by Tommy and his pals, you are validating this way of thinking. Materialism as an end in and of itself.

While the Ku Klux Klan is most certainly still in business, the most effective weapon forged against our community is this subtle and insipid distortion of reality and corruption of our value system. Show me a single music video where we see the Chilly Home Boy actually go to a job and do something for a living. Let me see him agonizing over the monthly bills the way we all do. Let's see him writing a check for that car note. Let's see a girl who isn't a perfect size two and maybe she wears glasses and maybe she's got a degree hanging on her wall.

The crisis in our community is this crisis of values. Crime, addiction, teen pregnancy, violence— the root cause is this materialistic communal dementia. A buy-in to the nihilistic caste esthetic booming from televisions and radios. It's a fire-at-will twenty-four-seven onslaught, one most of us welcome every time we pay that cable bill. While we certainly would not poison our children's food, we easily abdicate our parenting to the television every time we park junior in front of the set and wander off.

There can be no change in the rushing current of moral and economic decline without a fundamental shift in how we perceive ourselves and our world. In how we think and in what we think about. In what constitutes our values.

Fanatic conservatism, the bleaching of America, is hardly the answer. Extremism in the employ of even the most noble cause is still extremism. The concept of absolute truth, of a singular vision and a singular correct application or expression of that truth or vision, is dangerous.

It's the buy-in to The Lie: the great diviner between mythology and theology.  Mythology tells us Good People Go To Heaven, Bad People Go To Hell. This has nothing to do with theology, that reveals heaven to be populated by sinners saved by grace, and the road to hell paved with the best of intentions.

In the lifelong struggle between emotion and intellect, perhaps the most difficult concept for many of us is the fact that each of us, individually, is entitled to our own Truth. The Apostle Paul taught us to each work out our own soul's salvation, and repeatedly cautioned us against simply imitating him or parroting his words.

Paul was not preaching The Lie or The Bleaching. He was preaching Christ and His Kingdom. Again and again he said, in effect, this is how I'd do it, this is how I run my ministry, this is what I prayerfully recommend, but I'm just a guy. This is my way of expressing what I believe. You find yours. And, of course, what happened, subsequently, is the advent of religion— which Paul never preached— taking Paul's teachings as a literal Levitical template.

The Gospel became The Rule Book, and layer after layer of meaningless, useless hierarchy— totally at odds with Christ's teachings— has been added on, elevating the ministers, a servant class, and further separating mankind from the God who sacrificed everything to reconcile us to Himself.

Ministry— true ministry— has nothing to do with religion. With Jesus or Bhuddah or Muhammad. Ministry is feeding the hungry. Visiting the sick. Comforting the bereaved. Ministry is service, and ministers are the least among us. They're not supposed to be feared and adored and lavished with gold and cars and homes. But, in our community, that is most often the way.

The ministers are typically those among us with the biggest ego, the thinnest skin, the shortest temper and the least patience.  All of which he (typically a "he") wears as badges of office. So many are slaves to unclean spirits of Self-Importance, of Competition, and the unclean spirit of Numbers— head counts, rosters, political position and the  like.

And, sadly, many of these people are sell-outs.  Con men with a  good hustle. It seems inconceivable that many Christians actually read or believe what is in the bible. It's difficult to believe any bible-believing and bible-implementing Christian could watch Bobby Jones Gospel without throwing up. The clownish epitome of minstrel hustle, the heavily-sequined Jones' show is the top-rated black "gospel" program on the air. And it is typically preceded or followed by the same fare of social poison that typifies BET, the ultimate sell-out of Black America.

No black parent who seriously purports to follow Christ should ever allow BET, a media empire built on the systematic destruction of the black family in America, into their homes. It seems ridiculous to tote bibles around on Sunday, and then turn a blind eye and deaf ear to this poison, which the majority of black youths have their TV's tuned to an average of four hours a day. While the network does promote education and black causes, and does feature cultural and historical programming as well as political and religious broadcasts, the bread and butter of this network is youth-targeted music videos. Typical BET programming features thousands of images of salaciously postured, seemingly underage girls slam-edited into a kaleidoscopic blindfold whose net emotional impact is a de-sensitizing of black youth to issues of sex, profanity and violence, a tragic correlation of love and sex (a distorted view of human sexuality that teaches intimacy without emotional consequence), the aforementioned deistic materialism and demand for instant gratification, and reward without struggle.

Which would seem at odds with what we believe. It's religion without discipleship. Conviction without teeth. Allowing this garbage in your home strips the Gospel of its dignity and power and renders it moot and impotent; our children all become Gideons, who can't even recognize God when He appears to them, to whom God has become an oblique reference, an abstraction of our parents' quaint yestertime. God is dead, because we do not allow Him to live outside the church walls. Because the grinning, sparkling materialistic Jones is left the standard bearer in this environment, this heroin we tacitly submit to in our own homes.

It's the road to Welfare Queen. To  Junkie, Hoodlum, or Lowlife. Not BET specifically, but our abandonment of our values. Our apostasy. Our resignation to inevitability. Or, in the other extreme, our buy-in to The Lie.

Ministry begins with each of us, in each of us. It begins with a simple resolution: think.

The rest is easy.

Christopher Priest
September 1996

Text Copyright © 2007 Grace Phonogram eMedia. All Rights Reserved.  TOP OF PAGE