Pulpit

Pulpit and Politics: Reclaiming Prophetic Voice

I was not quite ready for the personal challenge posed by “Birth of a Nation,” the new film by Nate Parker. The lead character, Nat Turner—a slave preacher turned revolutionary—faces internal moral conflict when the politics of slavery forces him preach to slaves about being obedient to their brutally violent slave masters. The pulpit of the black church has always been a sacred place for the black prophetic tradition, but in this film we learn how it was also used to promote complicity with evil. As a black preacher, I began to wonder if I had ever been guilty, even