Religion and Philanthropy: The Role of Black Church in 21st Century African American Philanthropy

• In Event: Fascinating and Under-explored philanthropy

Abstract

From its origin in the 18th century to the 20th century, the Black church in America played an integral role with its own principles and charitable systems in shaping African American philanthropy by organizing and consolidating philanthropic resources to challenge slavery, segregation and other forms of racial domination like the Jim Crow laws. The Black Church proved to be not just a religious and social structure but a financial institution to empower African Americans to free themselves from centuries of unrelenting racial assaults and marginalization. During those years, it provided funds and organized volunteers to strengthen movements to abolish slavery and promote education among Blacks. The philanthropic deeds of varied forms reveal a deep sense of commitment of the Black Church toward self-help, community development and racial progress which in spite of scant resources and legal, social and political limitations played a significant role in enriching American liberal democracy.
However, the role of the Black Church has undergone substantial transformation in the 21st century to meet the emerging challenges posed by poverty, poor health, disparities in education and even by climate disasters like Hurricane Katrina, one of the five deadliest hurricanes in the US history that devastated many Black lives, as the problems that African Americans currently confront are not confined to race, civil rights and social injustice. In other words, the Black Church has switched from adhering to a “race-centric model” to a “development-centric model,” with figures recently released by the Statista Research Department showing that the poverty rate of Black Americans remained the highest among all the ethnic groups at 17.1% in 2022, followed by Hispanic Americans at 16.9%, while non-Hispanic Whites had the lowest rate at 8.6%. Figures from the Center for American Progress for 2019 showed that Black women have a higher rate of poverty at 22.5% than Black men at 19.4% as well as white women at 9%. African Americans also had a higher unemployment rate and maintained a low average in the educational and health sectors. The US Labor Department found that the country experienced the widest gap (5.3 percentage points) in unemployment rates between Blacks and whites in five years in June 2020.
The present study analyzes the strategies, patterns of giving and approaches developed by Black Churches in the 21st century to tackle the intractable economic, social, political and other problems confronting the community today. The study makes a dialectical interaction between the Black Church and the discourse of development to appreciate the Black church's self-help efforts, entrepreneurship and humanitarian assistance that provided the community with an organized political, social and cultural agenda to challenge the forces contradictory to American democracy and freedom. The study is likely to generate a fresh dialogue between African American philanthropy and public policies to enrich the civil society of America, a fact which is not without considerable significance for grappling with the problematic discourse of minorities across the world.
Key Words: philanthropy, Black Church, African Americans, civil rights, minorities, race relations

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Other Resources Consulted:
Center for American Progress: https://www.americanprogress.org/
Statista Research Department: https://www.statista.com/
U.S. Census Bureau: https://www.census.gov/
U.S. Department of Labor: https://www.dol.gov/
U.S. Department of Education: https://www.ed.gov/

Author

• Lalatendu Das, Watching America