dignity of all humankind.” Then a commitment to the black community and black family, education, the work ethic,
discipline, and self-respect.
A sensible, heartfelt list-not so different, I suspected, from the values old Reverend Philips might have learned in his
whitewashed country church two generations before. There was one particular passage in Trinity’s brochure that stood
out, though, a commandment more self-conscious in its tone, requiring greater elaboration. “A Disavowal of the Pursuit
of Middleclassness,” the heading read. “While it is permissible to chase ‘middleincomeness’ with all our might,” the
text stated, those blessed with the talent or good fortune to achieve success in the American mainstream must avoid the
“psychological entrapment of Black ‘middleclassness’ that hypnotizes the successful brother or sister into believing
they are better than the rest and teaches them to think in terms of ‘we’ and ‘they’ instead of ‘US’!”
My thoughts would often return to that declaration in the weeks that followed as I met with various members of
Trinity. I decided that Reverend Wright was at least partly justified in dismissing the church’s critics, for the bulk of its
membership was solidly working class, the same teachers and secretaries and government workers one found in other
big black churches throughout the city. Residents from the nearby housing project had been actively recruited, and
programs designed to meet the needs of the poor-legal aid, tutorials, drug programs-took up a substantial amount of the
church’s resources.
Still, there was no denying that the church had a disproportionate number of black professionals in its ranks:
engineers, doctors, accountants, and corporate managers. Some of them had been raised in Trinity; others had
transferred in from other denominations. Many confessed to a long absence from any religious practice-a conscious
choice for some, part of a political or intellectual awakening, but more often because church had seemed irrelevant to
them as they’d pursued their careers in largely white institutions.
At some point, though, they all told me of having reached a spiritual dead end; a feeling, at once inchoate and
oppressive, that they’d been cut off from themselves. Intermittently, then more regularly, they had returned to the
church, finding in Trinity some of the same things every religion hopes to offer its converts: a spiritual harbor and the
chance to see one’s gifts appreciated and acknowledged in a way that a paycheck never can; an assurance, as bones
stiffened and hair began to gray, that they belonged to something that would outlast their own lives-and that, when their
time finally came, a community would be there to remember.
But not all of what these people sought was strictly religious, I thought; it wasn’t just Jesus they were coming home
to. It occurred to me that Trinity, with its African themes, its emphasis on black history, continued the role that
Reverend Philips had described earlier as a redistributor of values and circulator of ideas. Only now the redistribution
didn’t run in just a single direction from the schoolteacher or the physician who saw it as a Christian duty to help the
sharecropper or the young man fresh from the South adapt to big-city life. The flow of culture now ran in reverse as
well; the former gang-banger, the teenage mother, had their own forms of validation-claims of greater deprivation, and
hence authenticity, their presence in the church providing the lawyer or doctor with an education from the streets. By
widening its doors to allow all who would enter, a church like Trinity assured its members that their fates remained
inseparably bound, that an intelligible “us” still remained.