Why Doesn’t The White Church Pray With Their Legs?

If you ask a White Conservative Christian in America if they’re under attack, you might hear “yes!” Much of this subset feels that they are being forced out of their beliefs. Ultra conservative and fundamentalist preachers spout on about the secularization of America. They have started to become more active politically, focusing on school boards and local elections to further their beliefs in government. Even still, there is a lack of what Frederick Douglas called ‘praying with your legs’.

“I prayed for freedom for 20 years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs”
– Frederick Douglass

70 years after Douglass’ death, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement organized the March from Selma to Montgomery. The goal was to register disenfranchised Black voters in the face of violent opposition. Numerous people were beat by police as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

“During the height of the Civil Rights era, Dr. Martin Luther King led a march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama. One of the people who participated in that march was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. When Rabbi Heschel returned from Selma, he was asked by someone, ‘Did you find much time to pray, when you were in Selma?’ Rabbi Heschel responded, ‘I prayed with my feet.’  What was his point? That his marching, his protesting, his speaking out for Civil Rights was his greatest prayer of all.”
– Central Synagogue.

Why doesn’t the White Church pray with their legs?

Comfortable Power

The Black Church in America has understood the problem of power. Jews understood the problem of power during the rise of Nazism. The problem is that the White Church has the power. The White Church in America is in the majority. There is a disproportionate influence of White Conservative Christianity in this country.

So here’s the question: Isn’t this praying with your legs? Why isn’t this dominance the result of praying with your legs? Isn’t this the result of decades of praying with your feet? I think the problem is this: The White Church in America isn’t in an existential crisis. They are in the midst of many other issues – sex scandals, bigotry and racism, Christian Fascism – but their existence as a group is not up for debate.

What Douglass and Heschel tapped into as they reflected was their experience as a person who was viewed as subhuman. Their experience as the oppressed showed them that it takes action to bring the Kingdom of God to earth. Praying the Lord’s Prayer in your church on Sunday morning is not the end – it’s just the beginning. Like James says in his letter, “But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without works, and I will show you faith from my works.” (James 2:18).

The White Church is comfortable in their power. Even as the country becomes less religious, the White Church is still a large force in policy. The White Church serves the comfortable by providing them with more comfort. The pacifying nature of this cycle continues unbroken. Unfortunately, it’s not only Evangelicalism. White Mainline churches have to step up.

King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a powerful and scandalous rebuke of the “Good White Churches”. These churches said the right things, but when it came time to march on Selma or sit in at the counters in Greensboro, they were often missing and silent.

What Now?

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
– Letter From a Birmingham Jail

It’s time to start praying with our legs. Whatever your passion is, it’s time to bring the Kingdom of God to earth.