Caught up in God

During times of turbulence in politics, culture, and religious life, it’s tempting to hold tightly to current convictions. Allowing a change of one’s mind or heart can be difficult work. With this in mind, we have resumed a Century series published at intervals since 1939, in which we ask leading thinkers to reflect on their own struggles, disappointments, and hopes as they address the topic, “How my mind has changed.” This essay is the first in the new series.

In the fall of 1990, I stepped into the classroom at Duke University Divinity School and began teaching a course on race, white Christianity, and the black church. Before I had fully formed my ideas for a dissertation, before I would pass from anxious doctoral student to anxious assistant professor with PhD in hand, I stepped into a course that would be endlessly painful, not by intention or design but by necessity. It was painful because many of the students were resistant participants who’d waited until their last year or final semester to take this required course. It was also painful for me because the course sat at the spear’s point of my thinking and struggles with both race and faith.

The course was set up to be a history of the black church that examined the pre-slavery, slavery, and post-slavery past and present of black Christianity. But given my own turmoil with race and faith, I needed this course to do more than history and do more than turn black Christians into cultural objects to be studied, understood, tolerated, or even celebrated. I needed the course to be a path through my turmoil. I needed the course to make sense of the racial world that I was first introduced to as a child in Grand Rapids, Michigan.