"Come Sunday: All Hell Breaks Loose!" by Johari Jabir

Come Sunday: All Hell Breaks Loose! [in memory of James Cone: 1936-2018] by Johari Jabir | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. – Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto.
The Netflix docudrama, Come Sunday dramatizes Bishop Carlton Pearson’s rejection of hell in 2004. Pearson had been the golden boy of Oral Roberts’ evangelical legacy, and his annual Azusa Street event was an international platform that served a wide range of religious professionals. But after Pearson announced to his constituencies that he no longer believed in the Christian doctrine of hell − all hell broke loose!
Pearson was taken to task by his primary mentor, Oral Roberts, who symbolized the White colonial father disinheriting his disobedient Black son. The Joint-College of African American Pentecostal Bishops branded him a heretic. Several of these very bishops had previously reaped the economic benefits of Pearson’s religious empire. And, enrollment in Pearson’s 6,000 member interracial congregation swiftly declined, forcing the church to abandon its space and auction its furniture. Religious colloquialisms such as “fall from grace,” and “excommunication” have been used to frame the controversy surrounding Bishop Pearson. This kind of provocative language gives the illusion that in this context, hell exists only as something purely theological. Thankfully, however, the film reveals the real truth about hell as a theological and economical construct. Hell is a man-made social reality in the enterprising of Christianity.
Not to minimize Pearson’s personal losses and suffering, but his confession is our revelation. The reactions of clergy and religious professionals reveals a lack of compassion and mercy, and a deeper concern for numbers and the economic results. But ultimately, the collapse of Pearson’s religious empire is a testament as to how hell was assumed to be a necessity, one that blinds us to the ways we live with hell as a man-made social reality. The stress and strain of Empire is the hell in which we ALL live. In more specific terms, the film allows us to consider how the current moment of Black Church as TV Entertainment is a primary vehicle used to flaunt the wealth of a few in order to conceal hell.
Come Sunday arrives in a television market flooded with Black Church Entertainment. The Oprah Winfrey Network’s (OWN) Greenleaf, is a soap opera that revolves around the family secrets, competition, and conflicting corporate interests of a family’s religious dynasty. Another Black church soap opera is Bounce television’s Saints and Sinners, which, in contrast to Greenleaf, follows members of a large Baptist church in a small town in Georgia. Both shows are set against the backdrop of greed, corruption, and murder, but Greenleaf stands out in terms of excess and opulence. In addition to Greenleaf and Sinners & Saints, several reality TV shows extol the virtues of personal wealth displayed by Black pastors − Thicker than Water, Pastors of L.A. and Preachers of Atlanta just to name a few. And, this is not to mention the ongoing television programming of Black Mega-Churches, which glorify mass membership as evidence of economic prosperity.
Images of Black preachers and Black churches flaunting their evangelical decadence are constantly streamed over our television screens, so as to mask the church’s complicit role in sustaining poverty. In keeping with the logic of race, capitol, and society, Black Christian celebrities flaunt their wealth and a perversion of the gospel known as “the prosperity gospel” blames the poor for being poor. The messages encoded in these images and the accompanying sermons correspond to the theological foundation of America as a chosen nation in which some are free while “others” were to be enslaved in the service of their master’s wealth. The Civil War did not destroy this social structure.
Even after the gains made by African Americans during Reconstruction, racists forms of Social Darwinism secured the anti-democratic “pursuit of happiness” for some but not all. Centuries and decades of civil protests have not yet decimated the logic that some people in the society are chosen to live above and beyond their means, they have God’s favor, while others are destined to live in hell here and now, and will do so again after their earthly departure. The combination of a violent Social Darwinism and American evangelical fundamentalism is a hell that, by design cannot be seen or dismantled using the traditional tools of the master.    
The moment that [re]defined Bishop Carlton Pearson’s belief in the Christian conventions of hell was his awakening to the 2004 Rwandan genocide. It is logical that the film’s use of archival news footage in order to serve the overall arc of Pearson’s de-conversion. But, what is missing from his transformation is how the CIA, well informed about the deadly conflicts in the region, did not halt its supply of weaponry, which only further enabled a genocide that otherwise could have been thwarted. Here, unfortunately, Pearson’s conversion experience repeats the same personal piety that renders Christianity in America a complicit observer in human suffering.
“Africa,” as presented in most forms of American media, is always already a portrait of disease, violence, and immorality. This visual construct is an old colonial trope that considers Africa to be innately “undeveloped.” But meanwhile, the fires of hell are raging all around us, right before our very eyes, but because we choose an optics of a Christianity that prioritizes profits over people we cannot tell the difference between the cranes for luxury condos and a crucifix; we confuse the auction blocks of the market place with the altar of our souls. O Jerusalem. Even as I write this the embers of hell burn within the Holy City of Jerusalem. The reign of Trumpism fuels the fire of hurt, hate, and xenophobia not only in the United States but throughout the world.
When Sunday Comes
Lord dear lord of love God almighty, God above Please look down and see my people thru…. Up from dawn til sunset Man work hard all day Come Sunday, oh, come Sunday That’s the day -- From My People, by Duke Ellington, performed by Mahalia Jackson
According to the chronicle of the film, it was a Sunday morning when Pearson tried to explain to his congregation his new position. Members in the audience challenged him with venom and anger, and some walked out in protest. Would that Christians were empowered every Sunday morning to confront the money changers, thieves, and false prophets with the same might.
In the Christian Church’s Gregorian calendar Sundays come and go, marking the beginning of the seven-day week. In America Sunday morning is the time when Christians reenact the very segregation that betrays the human connectedness of the gospel. But, another Sunday is on the horizon. This kind of Sunday comes as a result of radical forms of love that lead to revolutionary acts of justice and compassion, new social visions of caring and sharing, and a radical redistribution of the world’s resources. This Sunday will come from a real state of emergency after the yokes of hell the strongholds of capitalism − have been broken. And when this Sunday comes, and it most surely will, if we are still convinced that we must have a church or a liberation theology, then let this church and its theology first liberate itself from the forces that can never realize the Kingdom of God. If we take a cue from Pearson’s courage, “Come Sunday,” all the chains of hell will break loose and perhaps, then, we can all be truly born again.
+++
Johari Jabir is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army”