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This chapter argues that the apologetics of black theology of liberation, evidenced by its wrestling with method, produced an obsession. This obsession resulted in the alienation of this alternative hermeneutics in black communities and created a rift between itself and its interlocutors. Preoccupation with method hampered black theology of liberation from dealing with burning issues. Since black theology of liberation in some instances failed to critically engage Western hegemonies and power, it was incapable of dealing with issues that could have rolled back the flight from the black self. The willingness by the oppressed to participate in their own oppression remains a painful pathology related to scandalous social ills such as Afrophobia. Violence against the black other is ill-informed and should rather be directed at the hegemonic powers of capitalism and neoliberalism. We need a theology that is willing to listen earnestly to its interlocutors.

This chapter examines the Black Mural Movement in the context of religious imagery by focusing on the evolution of Joseph W. Evans Jr.'s art. In 1986 Evans illustrated the motto of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian” with a painting of a Jesus with dark brown skin and tightly curled black hair, his arms outstretched around a smiling African American family. This image of a black Christ was Evans's vision of being black and Christian. In the 1970s Evans joined TUCC, where the pastor, Jeremiah Wright Jr., promoted Black Liberation Theology and recommended specific texts and sermons for the artist to study that transformed his conception of Christ. This chapter first considers black theology and pan-Africanism at TUCC before discussing the influence of the Black Arts Movement and the muralist William Walker on Chicago. It also assesses the impact, in terms of style and content, of the murals on Chicago's South Side on Evans's work and concludes with an overview of TUCC's stained glass program.

This book explores the visualization of religious imagery in public art for African Americans in Chicago between 1904 and the present. It examines a number of case studies of black churches whose pastors have consciously nurtured a strong visual culture within their congregation. It features examples of religious art associated with some of Chicago's most historically significant black churches and art in their neighborhoods. It considers how the arts interact with each other in the performance of black belief, explains how empathetic realism structures these interactions for a variety of publics, and situates public art within a larger history of mural histories. It also highlights the centrality of the visual in the formation of Black Liberation Theology and its role alongside gospel music and broadcasted sermons in the black public sphere. Finally, the book discusses various representations of black Christ and other black biblical figures, often imaged alongside black historical figures or portraits of everyday black people from the community.

In the years after the civil rights movement, evangelicals on a global stage argued over the very meaning of the gospel. This chapter traces this debate from the famous International Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 to a lesser-known conference named “Evangelizing Ethnic America” in 1985. While black and Latin American evangelicals argued that racism had to be confronted and social justice could not be separated from the gospel message, leading figures in the Church Growth Movement and Southern Baptist Convention took a pragmatic approach, seeking to use race for the purposes of conversion. While concern for social justice seemed to gain the ascendancy at Lausanne, the trajectory to Houston ’85 signaled that colorblind Christians in the United States could become multiethnic without becoming antiracist.