Black churches minister to social needs out of necessity.
When a black church is hit in South Carolina by someone with hate in their spirit, that's something that touches all of America, but as a person of color, I see that story even through a deeper prism of, 'Gosh, that takes us back to a time when black churches were targets in this country.'
You see a lot of Baptist churches in Harlem, you see a lot of the same kind of cuisine, the soul food - there's a lot of places that remind you of its southern roots.
Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.
The little platoon of the black community is the church. Our Christian faith is based on individual freedom from sin and the personal decision to find spiritual liberty that leads to a better life here on Earth and for eternity. On Sundays in America, the most conservative people can be found in black churches.
The next Republican that will win will campaign in the Latino community, will campaign amongst Asian-Americans, will campaign in the black churches, will campaign in college campuses.
Everything that we are about as African people in terms of our struggle for justice and freedom started in the church. There is no separation of the sacred and secular—of the church and state—in Black America. There is no separation.
Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.
I love going to black churches, and I love some of these black preachers. The best preacher I ever saw in my life was a 93-year-old in a black church in Hamilton, Virginia. What a preacher!
What I've had to do is divide my time between black churches and white garden clubs. I want to be Atlanta's mayor, but I would also like to be Georgia's governor or senator. I can't be that without white support.
Preaching styles and people being slain in the spirit and things like that. Now it doesn't happen in all black churches, and it happens sometimes in white churches, right? But on average they're quite a bit different.
