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'If Heaven is such a wonderful place, then why would White people tell Black people about it?': Problematising Black Christian confessional belief in Postcolonial Britain
Anthony Reddie (The Queen's Foundation, Birmingham)
The above quotation is attributed to the militant Indo-Caribbean activist Roy Sawh at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London, c. 1982. Sawh, a prominent member of ‘Racial Adjustment Action Society’ (RAAS) in 1960s Britain and was one of the earliest and most vociferous critics of Christianity and the colonising role it seemed to exert on the minds of Black Christian people. This paper, seeks to reflect on Sawh’s trenchant aphorism in light of the ongoing development of Black subjectivities in postcolonial Britain. This paper utilises case study and narrative as means of addressing how we interpret Sawh’s polemical charge in light of British Imperial mission.
As a participative Black Theologian and educator, the author’s work often collides head on with the conservative confessional beliefs of many Black Christians in Britain who remain wedded to the notion that the sole intent of Christian faith is to prepare them for Heaven. This fixation on heaven is often at the expense of any meaningful engagement with the materiality and socio-political and economic factors that impinge on their earthy existence that precedes any notion of an afterlife.
This paper will draw on Black Theology, transformative Christian education and postcolonial discourse in order to problematise the ways in which the historiography of Imperial mission Christianity has largely refused to interrogate the legacy of its own past, while confirming the dubious largesse of such matters onto the domesticated psyche of Black Christian people. Can Black Liberation Theology provide a means of enable often conservative Black Christians to re-interrogate their theological perspectives within a learning context in order to develop a conscientized faith that is fit for purpose for the 21st century? Or is Christianity (and the Church in Britain of whatever ecclesial structuring) condemned to be the greatest con that has been unleashed on Black people in postcolonial Britain?
This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
