Introduction

This chapter introduces the African American intellectual and theologian Howard Thurman and the physical embodiment of his thought: the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. The Fellowship Church, which Thurman cofounded in San Francisco in 1944, was the nation’s first interracial, intercultural, and interfaith church. Amid the growing nationalism of the World War II era and the heightened suspicion of racial and cultural “others,” it successfully established a pluralistic community based on the idea “that if people can come together in worship, over time would emerge a unity that would be stronger than socially imposed barriers.” Rooted in the belief that social change was inextricably connected to internal, psychological transformation and the personal realization of the human community, it was an early expression of Christian nonviolent activism within the long civil rights movement. The Introduction locates the Fellowship Church within its historical context and argues that, rather than being “56 years ahead of his time” as the SF Gate reported in 2010, the Fellowship Church was actually right on time—a distinct product of its historical moment and a provocative expression of midcentury liberal American thought.

God[’s] hung from a tree

As Black people struggled for freedom from oppression in the United States, toward the end of the modern era of the African American freedom struggle, a reflexive moment was taken to assess Christianity and its meaning for those whom Howard Thurman referred to as the “disinherited.” This article attempts to take up the pattern of reflective thinking, which began with Howard Thurman, James Cone, and William R. Jones, extending the thought forward to its natural conclusions. In doing so, the author intimates that the concepts that lead to racism and racial aggression are bound within the signs, symbols, and frameworks of white American Christianity, which has become a secular religion or secular way to order society. These signs, symbols, and frameworks continue to do the work of setting the ground for each subsequent generation to demonstrate a similar racial attitude as the preceding one. They also set the groundwork for Black reflective thinkers to find necessary the development of a posture of rejection toward white American Secular Christianity and all its derivative forms.