The Black church has been a refuge — a communal stronghold, a sanctuary that helped us survive the unsurvivable. But beneath the gospel and the fellowship lies a question few dare speak aloud: Is the Christianity handed down from the slave master's pulpit still shaping how Black people see ourselves — and what we believe we deserve?
To question the church risks exile. To leave risks losing everything — community, family, self. So, the theology goes unexamined; the discomfort goes unspoken.
The Burden of the Cross is for those who feel it but can't yet name it, for those who love the community but distrust the doctrine, for those still in the pew, wondering why faith asks so much and changes so little.
The Burden of the Cross tackles how religion, Christianity in particular, has functioned as one of the social institutions helping to produce and perpetuate a negative self-definition among Black people. Western Christianity took part in and continues to play a vital role (post-Emancipation expressions have tended be more subtle, yet powerful) in creating a generalized Black state of mind that instinctively adapts and accepts our race-based oppression as an inescapable reality.
