Foster and Smith set out to outline a ‘proposal for a view of religious education emerging from the heritage and experience of the black church’ (11). The makings of the proposal are set out in Section 4 (125–52). The history of the African American Christian religious experience is traced through the intellectual journey of Grant Shockley whose writings, and the reflections of Foster and Smith on his works, form the basis of this book.

The book sets out the basic problem that African Americans have lived with since the first African slave was forcibly taken to America; double consciousness. W.E.B. Dubois coined this expression in his book, The Souls of Black Folk:

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s souls by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this twoness,—an American and a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Over the centuries, this double-consciousness, always seeing oneself through the eyes of others, white people, who have no real respect for you as a human being, has created problems of identity for African Americans. African American experience is dominated by being black in a ‘white-oriented and white-dominated society, which imputes inferiority to non-whiteness’. The consequences of this status quo not only include discrimination and segregation but inferior social, economic, political, cultural and educational status (30). This affects jobs, equal opportunities, and often creates for black people an identity that ‘dehumanizes, depersonalizes, dissocializes and disempowers’. The African American experience is one of oppression, deprivation, exclusion, alienation and rejection (most of Shockley’s work was written during the difficult years of segregation in the United States).

Section 1 deals with the African American Christian experience, or more specifically, the Christian education of the African Americans, which for a long time tended to reinforce negative Negro stereotypes. Racism determined what kind of religious education was adequate for black people. The corporate conscience of the white church was muzzled by racist tendencies and sensibilities. ‘The main thrust and dominant motif in the Christian education that was offered to blacks during slavery and especially from 1800 onwards was not “religious” or “Christian” basically, but rather sub-Christian and racist’ (39).

Section 2 deals with liberationist movements not only for Black Americans but for all black people in all continents of the world, especially Latin America and Africa. The section traces the development from the cry of the oppressed to the liberation programmes and especially the hope that Christian education held potential as an enabling means for the realisation of ‘love, power and justice for all people’. Unfortunately, the reaction of the ‘white’ churches to the long struggle for acceptance of the black population had been at best paternalistic, but overall the church had ‘acquiesced in segregation, failed to identify, define, or articulate critically or challenge effectively a single aspect of the problem of racism faced by almost 15 per cent of its nation population, 80 per cent of whom were fellow Christians’ (69). This led directly to the marriage between African American Christian aspirations and the Black Power movement leading to Black Theology and a polarisation of attitudes between the black and white churches.

Black theology issued a challenge to the Black church to get involved in the struggle for selfhood of the oppressed black people. It opened up the possibility that Christian education could articulate a new way of looking at oneself which would lead to a new future for the oppressed masses. Black theology forced on to the table a black agenda. Freedom is not something to be to be handed down to ‘me’ but something I create. Christian education must therefore move from simply being cognitive and informative to the task of transformation. Black theology insisted that religious education programmes must ‘grow out of and centre around the experiences, relationships, and situational dilemmas that black people face in their day-to-day struggle to survive, develop, and progress in an often hostile, uncaring, majority-dominated society’ (73).

Section 3 deals with a ‘Quest for a Model’ of a Christian education that would make sense of the experiences of Black people in America. The basic sources for any such model were clear in Shockley’s mind. They were Black Theology, liberationist teaching, and especially the deprivation and underprivileged experience of life in the inner city. Shockley was determined to develop a model that would move the African American Christian from the ‘bondage of double consciousness until the giftedness of double consciousness becomes most evident’ (77). The guidelines for developing such a Christian education curriculum must be premised on the assertion that God must be presented as the God of the oppressed. He is to be a God who is not perceived as a God who supports the oppressor and the oppressive environment against the oppressed. Hence the guidelines for such a project must include empowering for the disempowered, fostering a faith that is pro-black without being anti-white. We need a holistic faith that does not compartmentalise life into sacred and secular, and a process that leads to the development of a person that is fully functioning and capable of impacting society. Such an ‘education-for-liberation model’ needs to start with the plight of the truly disadvantaged in their varied manifestations of homelessness, AIDS victims, the black poor and others who experience the cry of the oppressed and helpless. It must bear in mind the biblical goal of every creature, every tribe and tongue being enabled to bring its peculiar honours to the Lord.

In Section 4 Foster and Smith move beyond the work of Shockley to suggest that the logic of his work would lead to a third movement (after white racism, black reaction in black theology), that is the Ubuntutheology as articulated by Desmond Tutu and demonstrated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in which the oppressed and oppressor are both released from the forces that bound them on the opposite sides of the divide. The double consciousness of being African American must lead to a triple or ‘a reunited third consciousness of a … Christian/African/American sense of self’ (132).

This book is a very useful digest of the experiences which most African Americans have with regards to the troubled relationship between their culture and that of white Christianity. Foster and Smith deal with this subject through the writings of Grant Shockley. The book brings to attention the debilitating effect of double consciousness where black Americans as well as black people in general see themselves through Euro-American eyes which have often, historically anyway, been antagonistic, hostile and racist. This has often led to many black people internalising the views of their ‘oppressors’ in such a way as to despise anything of value in their own background. The anomie that has characterised many inner city areas of the major US metropolises can be directly attributed to this social problem of double consciousness. In many ways this is also true of other parts of the world where white culture has conquered and dominated other people, particularly people of a different colour. The challenges of this book for the Christian Church are clear, Christian education cannot simply be informative, but must be transformative. The plight of the disadvantaged and the flux of life which is their lot must form a major part of the platform for a relevant Christian education, which can and should lead to a truly united community, which accepts, promotes and celebrates difference without erecting unnecessary and unbiblical social and cultural barriers.

This book is truly informative, instructive and relevant for the Church in the United Kingdom as it faces the growing rift between mainstream white churches and the fast growing Black Majority and other ethnic Churches. The hope of the book is the vision of not only Isaiah (19:23–25) but also of John of the Apocalypse in which diverse peoples of every tribe and tongue all come together to be a kingdom of priests to serve their God (Rev. 5:9–10).

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