Is There a Problem in Some Black Churches?

The racial divide in the United States is wider than it has ever been. Most Americans are not racists. They sympathize with Black Americans who have been treated unjustly. The history of Black suppression is real. It’s been a slow road to right past injustices.

Unfortunately, the Black Lives Matter movement has hijacked much of the goodwill that has been growing in the past few decades and turned race into a political club. It’s getting to the point that anything and everything is racist. Requiring that students show their work in math is said to be racist. Even insisting on getting the right answer is now racist. Really?

Some black churches are the worst. They’ve given into the plantation mentality. If a Democrat gives some political song and dance with a faked accent, the applause is unrelenting. I suggest you listen to this short video: “Officer Deon Joseph Has a Message for Black Churches.” Here’s some of what Deon Joseph says: “Dear black churches. I’m not talking about all of you guys, but some of you all. When are we going to stop letting the Democrat Party and their politicians make complete asses out of ourselves. Every time they screw up or need political help, they come running to the black churches.”

The most egregious example is a church that declared that Kamala Harris was a modern-day Esther Megachurch Pastor Jamal Bryant of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, urged his congregants to go out and vote if they hadn’t already after likening Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, to the biblical Esther who became queen of Persia and rescued her people from a murderous plot to annihilate them.” And what is one of the reason Pastor Bryant supports Harris? Because she supports the killing of unborn black babies in something called abortion and believes men can become women and women can become men! A church and pastor like this are an abomination and a major reason why some black churches are keeping black people down as perpetual victims that only government can save. As you will read below, Booker T. Washington had a pastor like Pastor Bryant in mind when he described some prominent black community leaders as “Problem Profiteers.”

If a pro-Trump pastor had told his congregation to vote for Trump, the ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation would be calling on the IRS to remove the church’s tax-exempt status. As recent history attests, Harris is one of the most anti-Christian candidates in history.

Deon Joseph mentions Jimmy Carter who pandered to Dixiecrats (White Democrats) to get elected as Governor. But Carter also needed black votes if he was going to run for President. Democrats are chameleons. They will say anything to get their votes. Who saved Carter? It was MLK’s father who brought him up on stage at a black church. “He’s a Democrat. He messed up. Give him another chance.” And guess what the black church did. They started clapping, singing, and dancing. All was forgiven even as Governor, Carter “urged Georgia parents to support a resolution for a constitutional ban on busing by writing their legislators.” He also “spoke favorably on numerous occasions, when running for Governor, of both George Wallace and Lester Maddox, two of the foremost symbols of the relationship between racial hatred and political success in the pre-1970s South.”

Blacks, poor whites, and the middle class generally have been used by race hustlers and “Progressives” to keep elitists in power. This is not to say that Republicans have not done something similar but only to a lesser extent. That’s why is important for Christians to be engaged politically to decrease the scope, power, and authority of civil government at all levels including the bureaucracy and the administrative State. Unfortunately, Pres. Trump was correct when he said at Believers and Ballots Faith Town Hall in Zebulon, Georgia, that “Christians are not tremendous voters in terms of percentage. If they were, we would never lose an election.” There are a variety of reasons given for not engaging politically. I cover many of them in my book Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths. In some cases, Christians don’t know the issues. In other cases, Christians and conservatives who have voted were disappointed in how the people they voted for did not follow through on their campaign promises.

But let’s get back to the way Blacks have been used by their own so-called “Black Leaders.” It’s no less true of White politicians. Gaining power, money, prestige, and influence is the name of the game. Corruption is color blind. There is a long history of corruption in the black community going back centuries. Let’s not forget that the people who kidnapped and sold black people into slavery were also black.

Booker T. Washington (1865-1915) warned of such people within the black community in his 1911 book My Larger Education. He described them as “problem profiteers”:

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Washington could have had in view, although writing more than a hundred years ago, black people who rail against a black conservative like the late Herman Cain. Cain didn’t present himself as a victim, and this disturbed people like Sharpton. Cain lived at a time when there were “colored” water fountains, segregated schools and neighborhoods, and racial discrimination that few people today can imagine. If anyone had a right to play the victim card, it was Cain. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. He stayed out of trouble, worked hard, and made something of himself without the help of a cadre of “poverty pimps.” Cain was the antithesis of the Democrat Party and 90 percent of blacks who support it.

Washington continues with a story that encapsulates what is wrong with so many black “leaders” and their guilt-ridden white supporters. Those victimizing blacks are often other blacks:

A story told me by a coloured man in South Carolina will illustrate how people sometimes get into situations where they do not like to part with their grievances. In a certain community there was a coloured doctor of the old school, who knew little about modern ideas of medicine, but who in some way had gained the confidence of the people and had made considerable money by his own peculiar methods of treatment. In this community there was an old lady who happened to be pretty well provided with this world’s goods and who thought that she had a cancer. For twenty years she had enjoyed the luxury of having this old doctor treat her for that cancer. As the old doctor became—thanks to the cancer and to other practice—pretty well-to-do, he decided to send one of his boys to a medical college. After graduating from the medical school, the young man returned home, and his father took a vacation. During this time the old lady who was afflicted with the “cancer” called in the young man, who treated her; within a few weeks the cancer (or what was supposed to be the cancer) disappeared, and the old lady declared herself well.

When the father of the boy returned and found the patient on her feet and perfectly well, he was outraged. He called the young man before him and said:

“My son, I find that you have cured that cancer case of mine. Now, son, let me tell you something. I educated you on that cancer. I put you through high school, through college, and finally through the medical school on that cancer. And now you, with your new ideas of practicing medicine, have come here and cured that cancer. Let me tell you, son, you have started all wrong. How do you expect to make a living practicing medicine in that way?”

If the patient gets well, the incentive to make money from victims shrivels up and dies. This would be the best thing for the black community. Until minority communities throw off the shroud of victimhood, they will be at the mercy of “doctors” and “pastors” (Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson come to mind) who treat a sham disease that only makes the doctors and pastors rich.

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