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The Review of Faith & International Affairs

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RELIGION, RACE, AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN GLOBAL CITIZENS

R. Drew Smith Available online: 20 Feb 2012

To cite this article: R. Drew Smith (2012): RELIGION, RACE, AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN GLOBAL CITIZENS, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 10:1, 5-14 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2012.648394

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RELIGION, RACE, AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN GLOBAL CITIZENS

By R. Drew Smith
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his essay explores American bridgebuilding across formidable religious and racial barriersefforts that encouraged citizen-to-citizen solidarity with socially oppressed populations around the world. The analysis centers on pioneering African American leaders who challenged inherent religious and racial limitations in Americas approach to the world and who aligned with global movements for social change during the early to mid-20th century. These leaders were primarily clergy, and several, such as Howard Thurman, Benjamin E. Mays, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, Samuel Proctor, and James H. Robinson, came from historically black colleges. They transformed American religious and racial self-consciousness from a global barrier to a bridge through paradigms of crosscultural service and international social justice advocacy. Their activism was informed by an awareness of the promise and the peril of racial and religious identities, and their example provides a basis for evaluating our current conceptions of Americas place in the world.

American Exceptionalism and Barriers to Global Community

Americas relationship with the international community has been shaped from the outset by deeply held, though selective, commitments to

personal freedom. A central tenet of Americas national narrative is that freedom cannot be contained by geography, by competing ideologies, or by embodied or embedded tyranny. As part of that narrative, persons suffering religious and political persecution in Europe sailed to the New World across the Atlantic in pursuit of freedom. They established communities reecting their personal freedom convictions, they fought against native populations and British colonial forces to preserve these communities of freedom, they expanded their communities of freedom across the North American continent, and then they extended this new nations inuence across the world. This expansion of the American ideal has been accompanied, however, by a certitude and superiority that has justied exploitative, acquisitive encounters with nonwhite peoples. In America, at least through the end of the Civil War, white freedom was viewed by many as necessarily coupled with African American and Native American subjugation. And as Americans ventured around the globe during the 1800s and 1900s expanding their cultural, economic, and political reach, American ideals of freedom were selectively pursued among the peoples of the lessdeveloped nations with which they came into contact. This ambivalent pattern or doubleedged sword of American idealism (to borrow from descriptions by noted political scientists1)

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has been a common feature of what is referred to as an American exceptionalist understanding. American exceptionalism is a term that has been applied in various ways (positively and negatively) to denote American uniquenessits creeds and self-concepts, its socio-historical trajectories, or both. Americanist scholar Seymour Lipset points out, for example, that America conceives of itself as a unique standard bearer of liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faireprinciples that in themselves reect a unique lack of emphasis on social hierarchy and status differences characteristic of postfeudal and monarchical cultures.2 Lipset reiterates Alexis de Tocquevilles 1830s observations about an American religiosity that is both more widespread and voluntary than in other industrialized countries, and about religions central place within early Americas selfunderstandings of its historical purposes and obligations.3 These particularized conceptions of Americas political and religious purposes often combined in notions of American destiny and even chosenness, beginning with the Puritans, as demonstrated in the following Puritan utterance: There never was any people on earth so parallel in their general history to that of the ancient Israelites as this of new England.4 According to Ruth Bloch, New England Puritan covenant terminology fused together church, state, and society into an undifferentiated godly communitya community set apart from other religious groups and from, more broadly, British forces of sin and tyranny.5 Puritan doctrines of chosenness (applied specically to white Christians), alongside the political promotion of slavery and the conquest of native peoples and their lands, placed America on a clearly tragic racial (and religious) trajectory. In the American context, these factors reinforced what George Fredrickson contends is a European propensity since the Renaissance and Reformation to divide the human race into superior and inferior categories such as civil and savage and Christian and heathen.6 It was fairly commonplace among Puritans, even among celebrated clerics such as Cotton Mather (a slave owner himself), to speak contemptuously of Native Americans and blacks.7 Mather illustrates

the underlying animus toward those considered inferiors when he describes how all will gather in Heaven at Abrahams tableeven the Indians and the Negros. Mather refers to the latter as dark-hued Ones with Despised Complexion. He then admonishes his presumed inferiors: let these News wondrously encourage you to become the Seekers of GOD.8 Presumptions of not only white racial superiority but also religious superiority informed justications of slavery in America. Puritan chosen people doctrines combined with racial hierarchical thinking in the 19th-century South for spirited defenses of slavery that argued that social station is predetermined by God. According to 19th-century advocates of this position, whites were divinely entrusted with the superior qualities necessary for carrying out a range of godly purposes, with the purpose most often cited being that of Christianizing and civilizing the benighted slaves. The views expressed by a Methodist minister in North Carolina, Washington S. Chafn, were typical of this attitude. He asserted that nature has drawn lines of demarcation between (blacks) and (whites) that no physical, mental, or religious cultivation can obliterate. Because of what he considered to be a tendency by blacks toward barbarism, he believed that blacks required the continual supervision of the white man to hold him in check. According to Chafn, a slave was provided with conditions more conducive to his happiness than any other the African has ever known.9 American missionary activity embraced a similar spirit. As Ussama Makdisi points out in his book on American missionary involvement in the Middle East from the early 1800s, the ofcial seal of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (an organization founded in 1812 as the rst American overseas Christian mission agency) depicted a seminaked native kneeling down before, and accepting a Bible from, a white male missionary who is pointing to a heavenly dove. Makdisi remarks: Such a transaction, in turn, revealed how tightly the scriptural commission to go and make disciples of all nations was tied to historical, racial, and cultural assumptions that emanated from a more recent American past.10 Although the social impact of

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American missionaries was complex, consisting of Africans to be carried off into slavery so that they both tragic and progressive features, the American could be Christianized and civilized and return to uplift their kinsmen in Africa.15 While these Board of Commissioners went into mission African American settlers in West Africa typically contexts such as the South Pacic islands with a stated intention of raising up the whole people to possessed far stronger sympathies for their African hosts than did white missionaries, Drake notes that an elevated state of Christian civilization and black settlers could often be as censorious of turning them from their barbarous courses and habits.11 The mass conversions and decimations African customs as white missionaries were.16 For of native cultures that occurred as a result were example, historian Lamin Sannehs seminal study given a fairly positive spin by classical missiologists of American blacks in early Liberia describes such as Kenneth Latourette, whose assessment of Alexander Crummell, a free black from New York the impact of South Pacic mission activities was who came to Liberia in 1853 after spending time in that Christianity nourished a type of character for England, as someone who was stamped with a which there can be only admiration.12 distinctive American character in his religious Contemporary Congregationalists do not share outlooks. This was displayed no doubt in Latourettes admiration of Crummells promotion of a US their past missionary impact; protectorate status for Liberia THE BROADER SOCIAL in 1993, the Congregational with the intent of bringing IMPACT OF THESE 19THChurch, which was the civilization and superior dominant church of 19thvalues related to the CENTURY AFRICAN century American advancement of women and AMERICAN SETTLERS WAS missionaries in the Hawaiian the importance of family and THE ENTRENCHMENT OF islands, issued a formal home to the Liberian SOCIAL STRATIFICATIONS apology to the Hawaiian interior.17. The broader social people for Congregationalists THAT GREATLY FAVORED THE impact of these 19th-century African American settlers was role in the total disruption of SETTLERS OVER THE the entrenchment of social their culture, traditions and INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS stratications that greatly economy as well as their favored the settlers over the government.13 African Americans were also involved in indigenous populations, resulting in long-term overseas missionary activities, primarily in Africa, strife and instability that has carried over into beginning with the settlement of freed American contemporary Liberia. slaves in Sierra Leone in 1792 and settlements of Nonetheless, the early African American freed American slaves in Liberia during the early missionary presence that led up to the founding of 1800s.14 These African American settlers were the Liberian nation in 1849 paved the way soon animated by a commitment to black afterwards for some of the initial American and empowerment, in which they viewed their Caribbean proponents of an unapologetic African deliverance from the American slave context and nationalist independency. Persons such as their relocation to West Africa as potentially Crummell and Edward Wilmot Blyden, a scholar resulting in the empowerment of settlers and from the West Indies who arrived in Liberia in 1851 African hosts alike. While motivated by strong after a period in the United States, celebrated the black solidarities and religious concerns, there were idea of black reconnection with the land of their also dimensions that centered far more in African ancestorsviewing Africa as key to a global black American interests and inclinations than on African future.18 Blyden and Crummells nascent black nationalism in West Africa, and the similar black ones. For example, as black historian St. Clair Drake points out, some of these African American nationalist, anti-colonial emphases of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and other African Methodist settlers bore the imprint of the providential design thinking of their white evangelical mentors; Episcopal ministers in South Africa a few years later, set the stage for the 20th-century black nationalist, their perspective was that: God had allowed

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anti-colonial fervor that would culminate in African independence by the mid-1900s.

Black 19th-century Western hemisphere champions of African independencesuch as Blyden, Crummell, Turner, and otherscut away at the racial and political chauvinism in Americas relationship with Africa. But most of these men operated out of Christian instincts rooted largely in Euro-American cultural sensibilities, and so much of Americas religious chauvinism remained intact in international encounters. Nevertheless, African American leaders, and especially several African American clergy, would prove vital in repositioning racial and religious bearings toward less-developed nations during the 20th century. I view three 20th-century developments as important watersheds in Americas view of lessdeveloped nations. These developments were also stages on which African American religious leaders would emerge in pivotal roles. These are: (1) the anti-colonial struggle among the religiously diverse less-developed nations, as projected in important ways by Gandhis movement; (2) the secularization of American global voluntary service; and (3) the challenges to American global security paradigms. While Americas evolving religious and racial approach to the rest of the world cannot be traced solely to these factors, these factors, and the role of African American religious leadership, were strategic.

Repositioning Religion, Race, and American Relations with Developing Nations

Religious Diversity and Anti-Colonialism

Although some Americans expressed strong anti-colonial sentiments in the late 19th century, American anti-colonial critiques gained an even wider international framing during the early 20th century as key African American activist leaders increasingly linked the anti-colonial struggle in Africa to anti-colonial struggles around the globe. What particularly contributed to this globalizing consciousness among Americans, says historian Sudarshan Kapur, was a growing African American interest in the Indian freedom movement and in the vision and life of Mohandes

Karamchand Gandhi.19 Kapur notes that African American newspapers, organizational publications, and public statements by populist leaders were particularly strategic to forging African American solidarities with the Indian struggle. For example, articles about the Indian struggle ran frequently in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP) The Crisis magazine (edited by renowned African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois) and in the ofcial newsletter of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (edited by Bishop Reverdy Ransom). Kapur also pays close attention to the strong sympathies toward the Indian struggle publicly expressed on many occasions by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (whose historic back-to-Africa movement gained resonance among hundreds of thousands of African Americans).20 In one such instance, Garvey spoke to a 1921 gathering of thousands of his supporters, reading a statement of support for Gandhi which contained the following: Please accept best wishes of 400,000,000 Negroes through us their representatives, for the speedy emancipation of India from the thralldom of foreign oppression. You may depend on us for whatsoever help we can give. At another gathering later that year, Garvey evoked the racial and religious dimensions of the Indian struggle and the importance of solidarity between Indians and African Americans across these boundaries. Three hundred and eighty million Indians, on a matter of religion, on a matter of race, have revolted, in sympathy with the oppressed and defeated of their own race and of their own religion, stated Garvey. He went on to say: if it is possible for Hindus and Mohammedans to come together in India, it is possible for Negroes to come together everywhere.21 Direct interactions between African American leaders and leaders from India increased through visits to the United States by Indian leaders who, according to Kapur, sought out African-American contacts,22 and also by visits to India by African American leaders. The rst African American delegation to visit India, and explicitly to meet with Gandhi, was a group of four African Americans on a year-long pilgrimage of friendship sponsored in 1936 by

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the national YMCA and YWCA. The group was headed by theologian Howard Thurman and included his wife Sue Bailey Thurman (an organizational ofcer of the YWCA) as well as Methodist pastor Edward Carroll and his wife Phenola Carroll (a school teacher). Howard Thurman, especially during this trip to India, emerged as perhaps the foremost of several early 20th-century African American clergy who would challenge both the racial and religious selfassuredness of American Christian culture and its relationship to the world. Thurman stated that this visit reinforced to him that all religions (while not the same) contain universal truths and essences, a realization that confronted him (and all of humanity) with an unavoidable challenge. I had to nd my way, said Thurman, to the place where I could stand side by side with a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Moslem, and know that the authenticity of his experience was identical with the essence and authenticity of my own.23 Thurman was well aware of barriers within Western Christianity to mutual respect and recognition between faith traditions and of the racial dimensions implicit in Western Christianitys reluctance along these lines. When he met with Gandhi, he asked the Mahatma: What do you think is the greatest handicap to Jesus Christ in India? Gandhi responded: Christianity, as it is practiced, as it has been identied with Western culture, with Western civilization and colonialism. This is the greatest enemy that Jesus Christ has in my country.24 Thurmans encounter with Gandhi and with many others during his time in India shaped his strong conviction that a way must be found to answer the persistent query [from persons during his India visit] about Christianity and the color bar.25 Close on the heels of Thurmans visit to India was a visit by Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, who was Thurmans close colleague, fellow Morehouse College graduate, and Dean of the Howard School of Religion where Thurman taught. Mays traveled to India during the latter part of 1936 as part of a delegation of 13 Americans attending the World Conference of the YMCA. Assessments of discriminatory color lines within

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the United States and India, and Christian complicity in the divisions aficting the two countries, dened his visit and meetings with various persons in India (including with Mahatma Gandhi). Mays would become a central gure in international dialogues during the next few decades in his capacity as president of Morehouse College, and he would remain strongly critical of Western Christianitys racial and cultural limitations, both domestically within the United States and in Americas relationship to the broader world. Upon returning from India in 1937, he commented in an article published in The Crisis magazine: The existence of black races, yellow races is to be accepted gladly and reverently as full possibilities under Gods purpose for the enrichment of human life. All share alike in the concern of God. He went on to say, The sin of man asserts itself in racial pride, racial hatreds and persecutions, and in the exploitations of other races. Against this in all its forms the church is called by God to set its face implacably and to utter its word unequivocally, both within and without its own borders.26 Mays and Thurman would have a profound impact on fellow Morehouse alumnus, Martin Luther King, Jr., who placed Gandhis methods and vision at the tactical and moral center of the American Civil Rights Movement.

The Secularization of American Global Voluntarism

As less-developed nations began ridding themselves of colonial rule by the mid-1900s, with India (1947), Libya (1951), Egypt (1952), and Ghana (1957) among those leading the way, new approaches to international community building seemed needful and possible. Although the United States tended to approach these developments with a Cold War framework that placed nations either in the camp of Western democracies or of the Soviet Union, Americans more sympathetic to victims of historical oppression viewed the wave of independencies as an opportunity for strengthening solidarities premised on justice and peace. Building solidarity and community across historic divisions and demarcationsand against the historic opposition by world powers to this kind of

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empowerment of peoples of colorwas an superiority.28 He also urged American churches inherently politicized undertaking. Nevertheless, to move beyond denominationalism and some Americans saw the possibilities within this divisiveness to greater cooperation between mid-20th-century moment for building new denominations and partnership with African bridges across longstanding barriers, specically religious and social leaders who ultimately must through non-ideological, service-based global be allowed to lead for themselves. Moreover, interactions. A leading visionary in this regard was Robinson clearly asserted that the harmful an African American Presbyterian clergyman, historical associations between Christianity, Dr. James H. Robinson. racism, and colonialism placed churches at a Robinson was the pastor of Church of the severe disadvantage in competing with the Master in Harlem, a congregation that grew from a expanding inuence of nationalist, democratichandful of members to over 3,000 during his liberalist, and communist politicsespecially tenure. He was an ambassador globally (Europe, among the growing numbers of secular youth. Asia, the Middle East) and domestically for the Although Robinson never announced any ofcial Presbyterian denomination on race matters. As break with religion-centered missionary Robinson traveled the United paradigms, it is instructive States during the mid-1950s, that he resigned his pastorate SOME AMERICANS SAW THE his speeches would often focus at Church of the Master in POSSIBILITIES WITHIN THIS on Africa, a continent he had 1961 to devote himself full TH toured twice by 1954. His MID-20 -CENTURY MOMENT time to the nonsectarian speeches in the United States, FOR BUILDING NEW BRIDGES global service work of OCA. especially on college campuses, Symbolically and practically, ACROSS LONGSTANDING centered on an idea he began this may have signaled BARRIERS formulating while touring Robinsons transition toward Africa: short-term voluntary a greater emphasis on the kind service projects in Africa. College students of fraternal work represented by OCA, and a expressed interest, and in 1958 Operation shift away from the more self-serving activities of Crossroads Africa (OCA) was ofcially initiated the American churches and mission agencies he with fty-nine Americans and one Canadian critiqued in Africa at the Crossroads.29 Just as the shared trajectory between OCA and [traveling] to French Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia, Peace Corps is intriguing, so too is the shared Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.27 A few years later, President John F. Kennedy launched the US Peace trajectory between Robinson and Dr. Samuel Corps, which he acknowledged was modeled after D. Proctor, a black Baptist clergyman recruited in OCA, and the two organizations sent thousands of 1962 by Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver (a Roman Catholic) to serve as associate director US volunteers abroad over the next ve decades. with responsibility for launching the Peace OCA never conveyed an explicit religiosity, Corps program. Proctor outlines what that meant: although it is likely Robinson viewed OCA, up There was a Peace Corps on paper, in law, in through at least the early 1960s, as a special embryo, but not yet kicking. There were 695 service-oriented extension of his ecclesiastical white middle-class teachers already in Africa work. Robinsons 1962 book, Africa at the but the grassroots [in Africa] had to be won to the Crossroads, is an historical summary and idea.30 Proctor, serving at the time as president of assessment of American Christian missions in Africa that outlines a series of reforms based upon North Carolina A & T State University, relocated with his family to Nigeria (the heart of the Peace his own interactions with Africa through OCA Corps program at that time) and directed Peace and otherwise. He explains how Western Corps operations from there for the next two years. Christian missions reached a turning point as a Proctor had previously been part of a threeresult of Africas new independence and suggests person American Baptist delegation visiting the urgent need for American churches to rid themselves of racial antagonism, snobbery, and foreign mission sites in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria,

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Jordan, Israel, Burma, India, and Western Europe in 1953, and he says that experience shifted his consciousness through exposure to cultural differences, cross-cultural mutualities, and American privilege.31 Proctor recalls how this microcosmic view of the family of humankind Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Christian, Jewish; rich and poor, educated and illiterate was an experience of community with all of its breadth, depth, and diversity.32 Proctor brought this consciousness, his scripturally-informed social justice orientation, and his immersion in the struggle of blacks in America to his leadership responsibilities in a Peace Corps organization he believed could create new openings for constructive relationships among the worlds most deprived and oppressed peoples.33 Like Robinson, Proctor was critical of Christian missionary efforts that go among deprived people and preach Christ and baptize converts [but do not] equip them for changes that will bring about relief from their long-term suffering.34 The fact that Proctor walked away from his extensive involvements in the American religious community to spend two years in Nigeria lending his authority to a paradigm of nonsectarian community service contributed signicantly to shifting domestic and global impressions about American religion and race. Given how tragically American religion and race have combined historically in American global affairs, there is a poetry in the fact that two African American clergymen, Robinson and Proctor, played such pivotal roles in placing those two dynamics on such a different cross-cultural trajectory.

Challenges to American Global Security Paradigms

Nothing did more to position American religion and race on a more progressive footing than did the Civil Rights Movement. American mainline religious groups, and especially African American religious groups, became strongly associated with a social justice agenda, primarily with respect to race matters. In addition, civil rights activism paralleled and sometimes coupled with religious activism during the 1960s on womens rights andcertainly through the activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. global human rights. King became an outspoken critic of white minority rule in southern Africa and

especially of the apartheid system in South Africa, and he also publicly condemned American military involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Americas tacit support of white minority rule in southern Africa and its active military involvement in Southeast Asia were tied to Americas Cold War view of the world. Emboldened by a particularly active decade of popular dissent in the United States (and in many developing nations around the world), by the mid-1960s American activists began systematically challenging Cold War ideologies that had framed American foreign policy since the end of World War II. King was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a standard bearer of the moral critique embodied by the Civil Rights Movement, and his critiques alarmed the American foreign policy establishmentwho viewed Kings positions on these matters as jeopardizing US global interests. Cold War approaches to Southeast Asia were largely non-negotiable at the time, but a greater exibility emerged in American approaches to southern Africa by the mid-1970s. US policy circles gave a greater hearing to arguments for a US foreign policy based on the other nations regional and national imperatives rather than on Cold War considerations after the 1973 collapse of Americas war effort in Vietnam and Jimmy Carters election as president in 1976. Carter signaled a continuity of sorts between his foreign policy concerns and Dr. Kings when he appointed Kings protg, Rev. Andrew Young, as US Ambassador to the United Nations. Human rights was an important part of Carters campaign platform and, just as Kings voice on these matters was hard to ignore, Carter believed that Young, a highly respected civil rights veteran who was entering his third term as a Congressional representative from Atlanta, would be hard to ignore on human rights matters as well. According to Young, Carter said this explicitly when inviting him to serve in the position, stating: Frankly, I need you because of your relationship to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. You can give our efforts on human rights an instant credibility.35 Young accepted the position because he saw the potential for basic human rights to become a major emphasis of United States foreign policy.36 In the two and a half years Young served in this position, he was at the center

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of negotiations moving toward majority rule in Zimbabwe and was active on peace matters related to various regions of the world. Throughout, says Young, he was speaking of the world from a completely different point of viewone attuned to the struggles within many of these nations and not simply framed by the Cold War calculations prevalent for so long in Washington.37 Several other black clergy veterans of the Civil Rights Movement were also at the forefront of human rights activism during the 1970s and 1980s, and were especially prominent in the ght against apartheid in South Africa. Jesse Jackson (both prior to and throughout the period of his presidential campaigns during the mid- to late 1980s), Walter Fauntroy (Washington, DC pastor and delegate to the House of Representatives during the 1970s and 1980s), and Wyatt Walker (Harlem pastor and board chairman of the advocacy organization, American Committee on Africa) were lead organizers of American anti-apartheid activism during the 1980s. Their human rights activism regarding South Africa was pursued mostly during a period when it directly opposed the Reagan presidencys constructive engagement policies toward South Africa. Their resistance consisted of protests, civil disobedience, and submitting to arrest. Some black church leaders worked for change in South Africa through less confrontational means. For example, Leon Sullivan (Philadelphia pastor and founder of the development organization, Opportunities Industrialization Center) authored a code of conduct designed to encourage business practices by American corporations in South Africa that would erode the apartheid system. In addition, during the presidential administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the King Center (directed then by its founder, Coretta Scott King) received grants from the National Endowment for Democracy and from the US Agency for International Development to provide training in nonviolent social change to persons in South Africa as the country was transitioning toward democracy. From the Johnson presidency through the Clinton presidency, Dr. King and many of the individuals who worked most closely with him were central to a moral repositioning of US foreign policy toward a greater emphasis on human rights.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cold War approaches no longer competed with human rights approaches in US foreign policy. Instead, competition to human rights now came from the emphasis on containing the spread of Islamic radicalism, as well as from a much older concern within American foreign policy about avoiding foreign policy involvements where American strategic interests were not readily apparent. This latter emphasis was driven home by the foreign policy embarrassment suffered in Somalia in 1993. The US military, sent originally into the country on a humanitarian mission in 1992, suffered signicant casualties in a street battle in Mogadishu, and the bodies of two slain American soldiers were dragged through the city streets. This incident produced increased US government concerns about the insidiousness of non-state combatant groups and a growing cautiousness about being drawn into messy entanglements with such groups. That all changed on September 11, 2001, and since that time American foreign policy has been largely preoccupied with containing terrorist groups and other non-state combatant groups. This foreign policy trajectory has not particularly embraced the input of American citizens emphasizing human rights or cross-cultural bridge building, and there is little room for the kind of foreign policy emphases promoted so ably by the African American religious leaders outlined in this article. As I have argued elsewhere, the American government and media outlets proved very selective in the tense security context immediately following the 9/11 attacks about the perspectives and information that were included in the coverage of the crisis related to the Middle East.38 Only a handful of African American religious leaders were able to successfully break through this rewall and, even then, their perspectives were not given much attention. Religious input has also been unwelcome on what has been one of the enduring legacies of American Cold War policiesthe blockade against Cuba. Here again, an African American clergyman from the civil rights generation, Lucius Walker, was at the forefront of challenging American resistance to the self-determination of a poorer nation attempting to chart its own path toward development. Walker, who passed away in 2010, was the director of the

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Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) since its founding by progressive church leaders in 1967. IFCO was actively involved in protesting USCentral America policies during the late 1970s and the 1980s, including the US governments efforts to defeat peasant uprisings in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and then its efforts to destabilize the peasant movement in Nicaragua (the Sandinistas) once they came to power in 1979. Walker led delegations of American church and community leaders to El Salvador and Nicaragua on fact-nding missions throughout the 1980s and organized policy education and lobbying activities on USCentral America policy across the United States during this period. In the early 1990s, IFCO began systematically challenging the US blockade of Cuba, raising awareness across the United States about the humanitarian impact of the blockade on the Cuban people. In addition to organizing policy forums and lobbying activities, IFCO established an initiative called Pastors for Peace, which facilitated caravans of vehicles that traveled across the United States and collected donations of humanitarian assistance en route to Mexico, Central America, or Cuba. Pastors for Peace organized more than 40 caravans to Mexico and Central America since 1992 as well as 16 caravans designated for Cuba. The Cuba caravans were in
1. See Lipset, American Exceptionalism; and Ignatieff, Introduction, 1. 2. Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 19. 3. Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 1719. 4. Cited in Stout, The New England Soul, 173.

direct deance of the US blockade, and the caravans were typically detained and the caravanistas threatened with arrest when crossing the border into Mexico en route to the ships that would take them to Cuba. The blockade against Cuba remains in force (as of this writing), although in 2011 the Obama administration eased restrictions on travel by Americans to Cuba and on the amounts of money they can invest in Cuba.

Concluding Thoughts
African American religious leaders advanced models of American global engagement that were rooted in a strong sense of their own racial and religious identity, while embracing a transcendent quality that bridged historic boundaries between America and the broader world. Operating in a 20thcentury context that saw America emerging from centuries of explicit racial and religious prejudice and moving toward a new global dominance, these religious leaders challenged the blatant privileging of American interests and priorities in US interactions with developing nations. Through acts of policy advocacy, community service, and resource investment, these religious leaders promoted an American relationship with the world premised on partnership, mutual respect, and the rights of all nations to progress along lines determined by their own people. v

5. Bloch, Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution, 49, 52. 6. Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 78. 7. Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, Volume I, 243, 282, 473, 494. 8. Cited in Lovelace, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather, 236. Emphasis in original. 9. Chafn, Sermons, 878. 10. Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, 3. 11. Instructions from the Prudential Committee of the ABCFM to members of the Mission to the Sandwich Islands, xxi. 12. Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, Volume 5, 262. 13. McCollough, Why Our Church Apologized to Hawaii. 14. See Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad. 15. Drake, The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion, 41. 16. Ibid., 53. 17. Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad, 229. 18. Ibid., 229, 233. 19. Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet, 13. 20. Ibid., chapters 1 and 2.

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21. Ibid., 19. 22. Ibid., 13. 23. Thurman, With Head and Heart, 120. 24. Ibid., 1334. 25. Ibid., 136. 26. Mays, Born to Rebel, 162. 27. Plimpton, Operation Crossroads Africa, 18. 28. Robinson, Africa at the Crossroads, 67 29. For a fuller treatment of each of these issues, see Robinson, Africa at the Crossroads, especially chapter ve. 30. Proctor, Samuel Proctor, 128. 31. Ibid., 889. 32. Proctor, How Shall They Hear, 61. 33. Proctor, Samuel Proctor, 129. 34. Proctor, Preaching About Crisis in the Community, 101. 35. Quoted in Young, A Way Out of No Way, 123. 36. Ibid., 124.

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37. Ibid., 129. 38. For a fuller analysis of the marginalization of African American clergy on matters related to USMiddle East policy, see Smith, Black Denominational Responses to USMiddle East Policy Since 9/11, 518.

References
Bloch, Ruth H. Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution. In Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s, ed. Mark A. Noll, 4461. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Chafn, William S. Sermons, Jan. 1845June 1862. In W.S. Chafn Papers, Duke University Manuscript Dept., Durham, NC. Drake, St. Clair. The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion. Chicago, IL: Third World Press, 1970. Fredrickson, George. White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Ignatieff, Michael. Introduction. In American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, ed. Michael Ignatieff, 126. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Instructions from the Prudential Committee of the ABCFM to members of the Mission to the Sandwich Islands. Boston, MA: Samuel Armstrong, 1819 Kapur, Sudarshan. Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992. Latourette, Kenneth Scott. A History of the Expansion of Christianity, Volume 5. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1943. Lipset, Seymour Martin. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996. Lovelace, Richard. The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian University Press, 1979. Makdisi, Ussama. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Mather, Cotton. Diary of Cotton Mather, Volume I. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., n.d. Mays, Benjamin E. Born to Rebel: An Autobiography. New York: Scribner, 1971. Reprinted with a revised foreword by Orville Vernon Burton. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002. McCollough, Charles. Why Our Church Apologized to Hawaii. UCC @ 50Our Future, Our History. Cleveland, OH: UCC, 2007. Plimpton, Ruth. Operation Crossroads Africa. New York: Viking Press, 1962. Proctor, Samuel D. How Shall They Hear: Effective Preaching for Vital Faith. Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1992. Proctor, Samuel D. Preaching About Crisis in the Community. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1988. Proctor, Samuel D. Samuel Proctor: My Moral Odyssey. Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1989. Robinson, James H. Africa at the Crossroads. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1962. Sanneh, Lamin. Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Smith, R. Drew. Black Denominational Responses to USMiddle East Policy Since 9/11. The Review of Faith & International Affairs 6, no. 1 (2008): 518. Stout, Harry. The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Thurman, Howard. With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. Young, Andrew. A Way Out of No Way: The Spiritual Memoirs of Andrew Young. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1994.

14 | spring 2012