In 1845, a fugitive from slavery named Frederick Douglass closed his narrative with a warning about the faith of the men who had owned him.

“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds.”Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845

Of all the slaveholders he had known, Douglass said, the religious ones were the worst. More than a century later, James Cone, the father of Black liberation theology, gave that indictment a name. White Christianity, Cone wrote, is the Antichrist.

That charge opens the premiere of Black Theology & Black Power, a new Liberation Now series from The Kansas City Defender asking a question many young Black people have already answered by walking out of church: is the God of the Black church a God of empire or a God of revolution?

Our first guest is Dr. J. Kameron Carter, a professor of African American Studies, Comparative Literature, and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. Nearly twenty years ago, in Race: A Theological Account, Carter argued that modern racism was born inside Christian theology. His most recent book, The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song, opens a trilogy he calls The Black Study of Religion. He is also assembling a definitive reader of James Cone’s work.

Over the course of the conversation, Carter lays out an argument that reaches from the Roman Empire to the ICE detention camp, and from Columbus’s ships to the Supreme Court.

“Theology never was innocent”

Carter begins with a claim that sets the terms for everything that follows. Theology did not arrive in the world as a neutral study of God. From the Greco-Roman world forward, he says, theology was a form of thinking “to narrate a world in which the leaders of empire were in control,” and to ground that control in the authority of God.

“Theology doesn’t emerge innocently,” Carter said. “So theology never was innocent.”

When that way of thinking crossed the Atlantic in the fifteenth century, the missionaries and sailors who carried it met peoples they had no category for. Christianity’s old way of ranking the world, Christian against Jew against Muslim, stretched to cover the whole planet. The new lines of difference hardened into what we now call race.

“There’s nothing natural about race,” Carter said. It was born, he argues, out of historical conditions mediated through Christianity at the very moment that Christianity was learning to hide itself inside institutions called secular: the nation-state and the market.

Whiteness as Christian empire’s afterlife

Here Carter builds on one of W.E.B. Du Bois’s most profound insights. When Christian empire stopped announcing itself as Christian, the logic survived under another name: whiteness.

Whiteness, in Carter’s account, is an organizing system and a civilizational project. It places the people called white closest to salvation and places Black people at what he calls its “hell-bound bottom.” Skin color is how that system gets read on the body. The system itself runs much deeper, and it extends into what he names its racial capitalist imaginary.

His forthcoming book, After Apocalypse: Christian Empire and the Politics of the Present, takes this argument into the founding of the United States. “The founding documents are scripture,” Carter said. “They are a scripture. Full stop, period.” Judges who interpret the Constitution, he argues, are working as scriptural interpreters.

The book also takes up Du Bois’s “doctrine of the strong man,” which Du Bois first sketched as a Harvard student in a speech on Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Du Bois argued that Davis was the embodiment of Western civilization itself, northern liberals included. Carter redeploys that idea to read today’s authoritarianism, and draws on James Baldwin to interpret the genocide in Palestine.

Your god might be capital

Carter’s most unsettling move comes by way of the historian of religion Charles Long, a contemporary of Cone. Long taught that religion is orientation. Carter explains it with a phone’s map app: something that locates you in the world and points you toward what you take to be your destination.

“Anything you take to be of ultimate concern and that you orient yourself around is religion,” Carter said. For many people who call themselves secular, he added, “the gods that orient us are things like capital or money,” along with markets, rights, and the individual. People will sacrifice their lives for these things.

Property sits near the center of that orientation. And African people, Carter said, “were reduced to property” within it, with Christianity serving as one more vehicle to sanctify the arrangement.

“Black religion is anarchic”

So what is Black religion? Carter’s answer is the heart of his work.

Black religion cannot be a copy of an orientation toward property and the gods of this world. Carter reaches for the Greek root of anarchy: arche, the ruling foundation, negated. Black religion moves against the foundations that ground the modern world order.

“Black religion is anarchic,” he said. Even when it takes Christian form, even in his grandmother’s testimony that she made Jesus her choice, that insurgent impulse comes through.

That is why Carter calls Black theology “an absolutely impossible project, which is why it’s so powerful.” Cone at his best, he said, took a language built to hold up empire and bent it toward liberation, the way Black trumpeters made a European instrument do things it was never designed to do.

The Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter gives Carter a way to see where this impulse comes from. In Black Metamorphosis, Wynter argued that the gods of enslaved Africans did not die in the Middle Passage. They went underground. Funeral rites in hush arbors, crops coaxed from the rockiest soil the masters allotted, cloth woven from discarded rags: in all of these, the gods seeded what Wynter called Black culture’s underlife. By Wynter’s account, Carter said, Blackness is “a certain kind of heresy” against the orthodoxy that wants to run the planet.

The catastrophe is one catastrophe

Carter refuses to separate the racial crisis from the climate crisis. “Our socio-racial catastrophe is our socio-ecological catastrophe,” he said.

The claiming of this land as property meant the genocide of Native peoples. Enslaved Africans were stolen to convert that stolen land into the United States. Chinese laborers laid the tracks of Manifest Destiny for trains powered by coal and oil. The fight over oil in the Middle East continues the same story. As Carter noted, the people of Flint, Michigan, already know this.

What comes next, he argues, will not be found ready-made. It will be made in the doing. “When we struggle,” Carter said, “we are producing other worlds.”

Watch the full conversation

The conversation also includes Defender founder Ryan Sorrell’s own story of leaving the church as a teenager after the killing of Trayvon Martin, and finding the Black prophetic tradition again at Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side after the 2016 election.

Dr. Carter will return to Liberation Now for more conversations in this series, including an episode on James Cone.