Ninety-seven. But since the natives of that place, who will be concerned in our plantation, are utterly strangers to Christianity, whose idolatry, ignorance, or mistake gives us no right to expel or use them ill; and those who remove from other parts to plant there will unavoidably be of different opinions concerning matters of religion, the liberty whereof they will expect to have allowed them, and it will not be reasonable for us, on this account, to keep them out, that civil peace may be maintained amidst diversity of opinions, and our agreement and compact with all men may be duly and faithfully observed; the violation whereof, upon what presence soever, cannot be without great offence to Almighty God, and great scandal to the true religion which we profess; and also that Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from the purity of Christian religion may not be scared and kept at a distance from it, but, by having an opportunity of acquainting themselves with the truth and reasonableness of its doctrines, and the peaceableness and inoffensiveness of its professors, may, by good usage and persuasion, and all those convincing methods of gentleness and meekness, suitable to the rules and design of the gospel, be won ever to embrace and unfeignedly receive the truth; therefore, any seven or more persons agreeing in any religion, shall constitute a church or profession, to which they shall give some name, to distinguish it from others.

Oddly enough, we think we attend church more than we actually do. In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South.

Despite its reputation, Appalachia — especially northern Alabama and Georgia to southern Ohio — has far lower church attendance than the Midwest, parts of the Mountain West, and much of the space between Michigan and Montana. Oddly enough, we think we attend church more than we actually do. In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South.

It’s a racist narrative trick we always do when we talk about Christianity in America. When we say “Christian” we mean white people. When we talk about great Evangelists in American history, we mean Billy Graham, not Martin Luther King. King is a black activist. But Graham is allowed to be for all. This is the narrative trick being pulled when people tell me to disregard Chicago. It’s the erasure of othering. As if centuries of struggling together and against one another hasn’t left us all deeply and irrevocably changed.

Chicago’s story, like the story of St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Iowa City, is a Midwestern story. The story of the black Evangelical church is the story of the Evangelical church. These stories might not fit the narrative we want to tell about ourselves, but they are as essential to the meaning of who we are as any other story.

Faith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America. “The church is people,” says Reverend Craig McMullen, the activist co-pastor of the Dorchester Temple Baptist Church in Boston. “It’s not a building; it’s not an institution, even. It is relationships between one person and the next.”6 As a rough rule of thumb, our evidence shows, nearly half of all associational memberships in America are church related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context. So how involved we are in religion today matters a lot for America’s social capital.

...the people... they are church-broken, nation-broken — they drink and pray and piss in the one place. Every man has a house-broken heart except the great man. The people love their church and know it, as a dog knows where he was made to conform, and there he returns by his instinct.

Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals.

Individual members of certain churches in black communities should protest when worship services become a platform for teaching anti-gay sentiments. Often individuals sit and listen to preachers raging against gay people and think the views expressed are amusing and outmoded, and dismiss them without challenge. But if homophobia is to be eradicated in black communities, such attitudes must be challenged.

According to Gallup, church attendance hovered around 39 percent in the 1930s and 1940s.7 It increased in the 1950s, when Dwight D. Eisenhower encouraged Americans everywhere to go to services. This was the sales pitch: America was now at war with communism, which was perpetuated by atheism. Americans could differentiate themselves from the godless hordes by exercising their freedom of religion. The call was taken up by religious leaders such as Billy Graham, and soon going to church was more than just something for the religious, it was part of being a good American.

Yet some striking exceptions there are among us, from the fact that the negro is naturally more impressible to religious sentiment than the white.

How does a mission of outreach and support to immigrant communities square with the repressive politics of the region? In a way, it’s the guiding question of this book — how can a nation that professes to be majority Christian become a breeding ground for hate? How can Evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham preach purity for women from the pulpit and still support as president a man who brags about grabbing women by the pussy? How can people who have seen me spend my whole life struggling to live and practice my faith call me godless?

How can a message of peace and unity bring so much pain and loss and destruction?

When I ask what is happening to our churches, what I really want to know is what is happening to our souls?

كم فى المؤمنين من أوغاد.

At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.

But the emphasis is not on the growth of the congregation as a structure — in numbers, finances and success — but on the growth of the gospel, as it is spoken and re-spoken under the power of the Spirit. In fact, New Testament congregations, as far as we can tell, were usually small gatherings meeting in houses. They were outwardly unimpressive, and had minimal infrastructure. But God kept drawing people into them by the gospel. Or to put it another way, Christ kept doing what he said he would do in Matthew 16. He kept building his church.