Reverend Calvin O. Butts is revered widely as one of the nation’s prominent and effective black preachers.
He has led the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem for nearly three decades and is considered the spiritual scion of Rev. Samuel DeWitt Proctor and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Both men preceded Butts as pastor at Abyssinian which has long been considered among the most recognized black churches in the country.
Butts’ preaching style is characterized by charismatic bombast laced with a steely intelligence which creates for his congregation of worshipers clear sacred narratives that are at once exhortive and intensely compelling. He possesses an urbane swagger that avoids high self-regard. In the domain of the sacred — and all that may be considered holy — he is an unrestrained pugilist of the pulpit.
This past Sunday Butts once again waded into the nation’s racial waters in a sermon on the barbaric acts of white supremacy we witnessed this week in Charlottesville, Virginia, where one protester was murdered and 19 hurt. Hundreds were challenging — or “counter protesting” — the KKK and neo-Nazis who were seeking to impose their poisonous racial worldview.
Butts was neither subtle nor inarticulate in his sermon, evincing his nuanced understanding of the rhythm and tune of racial hatred that can at times grip the nation and seduce some to dance with devil of disaffection.
“Thank God for those men and women who went down [to Charlottesville] yesterday and stood before those gun-totting, invective-spewing haters and put their very lives on the line ... to stand up for what was right,” exclaimed Butts.
He concluded his sermon by calling for President Trump to “resign.” The sermon was a display of moral courage and seriousness that can be found in few other places in the black community than in the African-American church.
Rooted in slavery, the black church has always provided the nation with an ethical compass, a directional sense required for the purposes of corrective civic philosophy. The black church has served as a fulcrum at which much of the American vocabulary of freedom, equity and liberty has been forged and refined — it is the singular private institution that has over generations incubated our ongoing national intelligence on the meaning of citizenship, race and democracy.
The voices emanating out of historic black churches were distinctly powerful in the Abolitionist, Reconstruction and Civil Rights Movements. Those voices included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But others contributed mightily, including the Rev. Gardner Taylor, Leon Sullivan and Rev. C.T. Vivian whose words to a racist police officer during the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign still echo in the history: “You can turn your back on me, but you cannot turn your back on the idea of justice.”
The African-American church of the post-King era has been similarly brilliant, espousing a vision that could lift the country from confines of apartheid. Clear guidelines to erase the stain of American slavery and Jim Crow are found in numerous documents produced in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, including the Black Manifesto, Black Theology: A Statement of the National Committee of Black Church Men and the Black Paper. Each initiative, unfortunately, were hindered by white intransigence.
Butts’ call to black church renewal is necessary against the backdrop of Charlottesville. It functions to rally the African-American’s only viable institution to engage in truth telling and the work of social healing. The call inspires millions in the black faith community to reconvene for the cause of what King described as the effort of “saving the soul of America.
Butts’ challenge was joined over the weekend by Bishop Charles E. Blake, Sr., who presides over the worldwide Church of God in Christ. Blake proffers an analysis of the Charlottesville uproar and the role of the black church with striking clarity.
“Just as the white supremacist Dylan Roof’s assault on Mother Emmanuel AME Church [in Charleston] was an act of domestic terrorim so too is the incident in Charlottesville,” said Blake.
“The political goal in both instances was the intimidation of black people and the violent denial of their rights as citizens. But it is essential to note the the black community must oppose terrorism in all its forms....”
The question Butts suggest is: How will the black church respond? Will it, in the words of Langston Hughes “dry up like a raisin in the sun?”
Or will the black church, with the poetic resonance summoned by Lincoln, allow us to ascend to the “better angels of our nature?”