Abstract
The relation between insurrectionist ethics and Christian theologies of liberation has been largely unexplored. In this chapter, I argue that “theologizing” insurrectionist ethics is in fact vital to this moral philosophy’s bearing fruit in liberatory praxis. I begin by discussing Harris’s reading of David Walker, then review other related figures, centering the religious dimensions of their insurrectionist project. While acknowledging that Christianity is by no means the sole vehicle of an insurrectionist ethos, I contend that such an ethos wants a religious aspect, if it is to achieve its intended aims. At the same time, interpreting the inter-American tradition of liberation theology through the lens of insurrectionist ethics clarifies that tradition’s central claims and their implications for action. In turn, the continuity of ends and means between insurrectionist ethics and liberation theologians provides common ground upon which to foster activist coalitions.
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Notes
- 1.
McBride (2017) adds Harriett Tubman, Nat Turner, Peggy Garner, and Angela Davis to this list of exemplars. Interestingly, in McBride (2021), rather than elaborating his conception of insurrectionist philosophy with specific reference to historical personages, McBride chooses to discuss insurrectionist ethics almost exclusively in relation to other contemporary moral philosophies/philosophers, thereby leaving the question of his philosophy’s application to history or the present intentionally open and ambiguous.
- 2.
See Darrell Scriven, A Dealer of Old Clothes: Philosophical Conversations with David Walker (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003).
- 3.
See Valerie Cooper, Word Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011).
- 4.
Garnet’s address is printed as an epilogue to Walker’s Appeal in the 1848 edition. This editorial choice indicates how closely associated Garnet was perceived to be to the views of insurrectionists like Walker.
- 5.
One of Douglass’s most oft-quoted lines—“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”—in fact parallel’s Garnet’s conclusion that “No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance.” In spite of the many respects in which these two figures were “singing from the same hymnal,” there existed a bitter personal enmity between the two of them, one which was exacerbated by Garnet’s support of colonization in Latin America, the West Indies, and Africa for freed slaves, a position Douglass vehemently disagreed with. See Garnet and Schor (1977).
- 6.
A few years after writing this, in a 1973 essay entitled “Black Theology on Revolution, Violence, and Reconciliation,” Cone backs away from his prediction and from his endorsement of revolutionary violence, while retaining his critique of the pervasive, systematic violence of white supremacy. One of the interesting things that comes out of putting liberation theology in dialogue with insurrectionist ethics is to raise the question anew of what means are justified (including violence) in liberationist struggle, and whether Cone was right to retract his endorsement of insurrection.
- 7.
Lavinia’s comments were published in Blase Bonpane, Guerillas of Peace: Liberation Theology and the Central American Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1985), pp. 48–54.
- 8.
See Kristin Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (NY: Norton and Norton, 2020).
- 9.
See Shepherd, Challenging the New Atheism (Routledge, 2020), pp. 162ff.
- 10.
See McBride (2021, 53ff).
- 11.
In a similar vein, Izuzquiza argues that liberation theology be committed to a “real option for the poor that assumes a kenotic solidarity embodied in nonviolence” (p. 18).
- 12.
“We, ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ…cannot condemn an oppressed people when it finds itself obliged to use force to liberate itself; otherwise, we would commit a new injustice upon the people…We believe it is not the business of the ecclesiastical hierarchy as such to determine the technical means by which a temporal problem is to be solved most efficiently and effectively. But it must also not try to hamper men, Christian or not, from attaining their most ample freedom, in accord with the evangelical principles of fraternity and justice…[through the] just violence of the oppressed, who find themselves forced to use it to gain their liberation.” (Qtd. in Torres and Gerassi 1971, 442–446).
- 13.
In Ethics of Insurgency (2015), Michael Gross gestures in this direction. There he argues that JWT can be used to delineate the morality of violence in the context of guerilla warfare (and, presumably, insurrections as well). Gross’s project focuses on assessing the morality of specific tactics guerilla fighters employed from the perspective of contemporary JWT; needless to say, the theology of liberation figures little in this work. Nevertheless, this opens up an interesting avenue of inquiry into the nature of religious justifications of revolutionary violence.
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Shepherd, A.P. (2023). Theologizing Insurrection: On the Religious Dimension of Insurrectionist Ethics. In: Carter, J.A., Scriven, D. (eds) Insurrectionist Ethics. African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16741-6_4
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