Toni Morrison on Black Christian Conservatism

While literary critics have yet to theorize the relationship between post-1945 American literature and the white Christian Right in ways that are proportional to its political power and cultural influence, this scholarly neglect is even more pronounced when considering the Black Christian Right. This inattention is closely related to two other historiographical lacunae in American literary studies: the post-World War II conservative movement and, as a subcategory of that movement, the rise of post-1980 Black conservatism. As I have written about elsewhere at length, the disciplinary absence of the U.S. political Right is better described as a pseudo-absence structurally akin to Foucault's "repressive hypothesis": ostensibly repressed and invisible, but constantly debated in coded terminology (e.g., white supremacy, neoliberalism, patriarchy, etc.) that is often meant to signify different dimensions of post-1945 American conservatism.1 The Foucauldian analogy can be extended to the way that contemporary literary studies as a discipline conceptualizes Black conservatism in general and Black Christian conservatism in particular.2 By resurveying Toni Morrison's writings on Black conservatism in the last decade of the twentieth century, this short piece asks: in our neglect of the "Black Christian Right" as a category of analysis, what have we missed? One tentative answer is a better understanding of Morrison's powerful, though surprisingly empathetic, critique of Black conservatism and, by extension, the texture of her critique of the U.S. Christian Right more broadly.

In the wake of Morrison's global literary fame, it can be difficult to appreciate the significance of her role in the early intellectual theorizations of Reaganite Black conservatism. In late 1992, roughly one year after Clarence Thomas assumed his position as an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court, Morrison edited Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. For this anthology, Morrison gathered leading Black intellectuals — including Kimberlé Crenshaw; Paula Giddings; A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.; Manning Marable; and Cornel West — to contribute original pieces, which Morrison summarized and synthesized in an editor's introduction. While the anthology was ostensibly about the controversy surrounding Thomas's nomination, an event which Marable described as "the first decisive national debate in the post-civil-rights era," it was also the first major interrogation of Black conservatism by several prominent Black thinkers.3 To appreciate the anthology's historical importance, one must recall the intellectual discourse surrounding Black conservatism in the early 1990s. As Michael L. Ondaatje shows in Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America, the intellectual birth of Reaganite Black conservatism can be traced back to Thomas Sowell's 1975 book Race and Economics, and its organizational birth into political institutions can be traced back to the 1981 publication of The Fairmont Papers, the edited proceedings from the so-called "Black Alternatives Conference" held in December 1980, which was organized primarily by Edwin Meese, chief legal counsel to then-President-elect Ronald Reagan.4 From the early 1980s to Thomas's nomination hearings in the fall of 1991, most of the public commentary on Black conservatism was partisan and passionate — either bitterly condemnatory or overwhelmingly celebratory. After the Thomas nomination affair, as Ondaatje shows, the reigning interpretations of Black conservatism were, in hindsight, exaggerated and inaccurate. For example, some commentators "insisted that black conservatives had only emerged because white conservatives wanted them to emerge," implying that Black conservatives were more like paid puppets than actual, committed Reaganite conservatives.5 Other commentators "saw in these [Black] intellectuals' prominence confirmation of a broader rightward shift within the black community," predicting a dramatic increase in Black support for the Republican Party by the turn of the century.6

From this perspective, it's easy to see why many of the pieces that Morrison collected in the anthology seem like political reckonings with the state of Black politics in America. Cornel West bemoaned the "pitfalls of racial reasoning," which he characterized as a knee-jerk form of unsophisticated political thinking that surfaced during Thomas's confirmation hearings. "The very fact that no black leader could utter publicly that a black appointee for the Supreme Court was unqualified," West wrote, referencing Thomas's deficient moral character in light of Hill's accusations, "shows how captive they are to white-racist stereotypes about black intellectual talent."7 Similarly, Marable argued that Black support for Thomas was a symptom of "liberal integrationism" bereft of a moral compass. "Liberal integrationism," Marable wrote, mistakenly "argues that if individual African Americans are advanced to positions of political, cultural, or corporate prominence, then the entire black community will benefit."8 Echoing West and Marable, and applying her then recently coined term "intersectionality," Kimberlé Crenshaw criticized this "reflexive vision of racial solidarity" because it obscured "the central role that black women's stories play in our coming to grips with how public power is manipulated."9 In her editor's introduction, Morrison also criticized the crude racial solidarity of "skin voting," noting that many Black citizens were afraid to criticize Thomas's nomination because they "were struck mute by the embarrassing position of agreeing with Klansmen and their sympathizers."10 But Morrison went beyond mere castigation in her introduction; she deployed the methods of literary studies to anatomize Thomas's Black conservatism from a larger historical perspective.

Constructing an analogy between Thomas and the character Friday in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Morrison compared Thomas's sociopolitical assimilation to Reaganite conservatism and Friday's cultural assimilation into Anglo-European culture: "Crusoe's narrative is a success story, one in which a socially, culturally, and biologically handicapped black man is civilized and Christianized — taught, in other words, to be like a white one."11 Morrison's point here is subtle but potent. Thomas was embraced by the larger Reaganite conservative movement, Morrison implies, not simply because he is a Black conservative who espouses culturally conservative views on the role of women in society, or because he supports Black-owned businesses and capitalist entrepreneurship, or because he criticizes Black dependency on liberal-progressive social welfare programs, or even because he embraces the signature American discourse of individualist self-reliance. All of these generically conservative traits could equally describe Booker T. Washington or, just as easily, Elijah Muhammad.

Rather, the overwhelmingly white conservative movement embraced Thomas because he is a Black Christian conservative whose Christianity functions like a proxy for white ethnic identity. Thomas thus exemplifies what Christopher Douglas has called "the peculiar double register" of the resurgent, post-1970 evangelical Christian Right — i.e., the way U.S. Christian conservatism "functions both in terms of a religion extending its universal and metaphysical claims to everyone and a kind of descent-based cultural identity within the broader frame of American multicultural reality."12 This insight explains why Morrison concluded her introduction by declaring that "the time for undiscriminating racial unity has passed," for it obfuscated more than it clarified the rising Black Christian current — epitomized by Thomas — within the contemporary Christian Right.

If Morrison utilized the methods of literary studies in her introduction to begin interrogating Black conservatism via the figure of Clarence Thomas, she harnessed all of her aesthetic prowess as a novelist to imagine this same Black strain of the Christian Right from an insider's perspective in her first post-Nobel Prize novel Paradise (1997). Indeed, Morrison's earlier analysis of the Thomas affair, along with several pieces she edited, read like preliminary thematic sketches of Paradise. Set mostly in the 1970s, after the so-called "golden age" of the civil rights movement, Paradise is a neo-Faulknerian modernist text of shifting timelines and alternating focalized perspectives about the all-Black community of Ruby, Oklahoma. Founded by strong, patriarchal Black men who believe themselves to be divinely appointed by God, Ruby is a utopian space in rural Oklahoma designed to shed the oppression of Jim Crow and invert white supremacy. This space allows the founders to value dark skin and preach Black separatist uplift. "The black town of Ruby," Morrison noted in her foreword to the paperback edition," is all about its own race — preserving it, developing myths of origin, and maintaining its purity."13 Utilizing free indirect discourse to inhabit the collective male mind of Ruby, Morrison reiterates this worldview from the inside. Contemplating the "Out There" of the white world in America's post-Reconstruction frontier, Morrison writes:

At its moral core, though, the novel is a tragedy in the classical sense of the term, for these men's most impressive qualities (in their eyes) — i.e., race pride, self-determination, individual industry, faithfulness, preemptive protection of their wives and children — are precisely what cause them to murder five innocent mixed-race women whom the men see as living wild and witch-like on the outskirts of town in the Convent. By opening the novel with this massacre and retracing the timeline that led up to it, Morrison invites readers to ask: How did this happen? The novel provides plenty of evidence, but early clues can also be found throughout Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power. Analyzing Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill as embodied tropes, Morrison argues that while the Black male Thomas "was cloaked in the garments of loyalty, guardianship, [ . . .  of] Love of God via his Catholic school, of servitude via a patriarchal disciplinarian grandfather," the Black female Hill "was dressed in the oppositional costume of madness, anarchic sexuality, and explosive verbal violence."15 In his contribution to the anthology, West critiqued this form of Black conservative "racial reasoning" in a way that clearly anticipates Paradise: "The idea of black people closing ranks against hostile white Americans reinforces black male power exercised over black women (e.g., to protect, regulate, subordinate, and hence usually, though not always, use and abuse women) in order to preserve black social order under circumstances of white-literal attack and symbolic assault."16 In Paradise, Morrison enfleshes West's insight, for the utopia of Black conservative men turns into a gothic dystopia for the women.

Today, what continues to make Morrison's interrogation of Black Christian conservatism unique and vital, though, is not simply its debunking power, but its empathy that does not excuse, its aesthetic commitment to capture a sense of how it feels in one's bones to be a Black conservative man in Ruby. As Erica R. Edwards astutely points out, "the same story that gives the male leadership [of Ruby] a language of peoplehood gives the men the words to justify the scene of annihilation at the Convent."17 The problem, of course, is that the Ruby men are proud Black heroes in their own minds who are trapped within this mythic story of peoplehood. In the opening chapter, Morrison splices together present-time descriptions of the massacre with quasi-inspirational flashbacks of the town's original rationale. Describing Ruby as "a town justifiably pleased with itself," the Ruby men are proud that the town does not need a jail, that "its people were free and protected, and most poignantly that a "sleepless [Black] woman could always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight."18 On one occasion, when a group of white men drove into Ruby to harass young Black girls by exposing themselves from a moving car, over twenty Ruby men walked out to the town square with shotguns, their "guns not pointing at anything, just held slackly against their thighs."19 The phallic imagery hints at benevolent patriarchal protection, but also at a malevolent undercurrent of that power's authoritarian potential to turn inward, toward the very Ruby women the men vow to protect.

In these candid moments in the novel, Morrison's imaginative leap into the consciousness of the Black male conservative psyche bears a strikingly resemblance to what Corey Robin has described as Clarence Thomas's overarching political worldview. Raised in a traditional Catholic home, Thomas briefly attended a Catholic seminary, lost his faith as he became enamored with Black nationalism, and only returned to Christianity as an adult while simultaneously growing into a staunch conservative Republican.20 But while Thomas would eventually reject the dimensions of Black nationalism that emphasize Third World pan-Africanism and leftist revolutionary violence, as Robin argues, he never discarded "the celebration of black self-sufficiency, the scathing attack on integration, the support for racial separatism and black institutions, the emphasis on black manhood as the pathway to black freedom, [or] the reverence for black self-defense."21 If Thomas merely gave the reactionary elements of Black nationalism a conservative Christian twist, then Morrison's all-Black town of Ruby can legitimately be described as Thomas's Black Christian conservatism imaginatively incarnated.

The final, tragic downfall of Ruby is bound up with the men's failure to recognize that they have, over the course of several generations, come to subscribe to a despotic ideology that formally replicates elements of the white conservative ideology that their ancestors had escaped — namely, a religio-political form of "militant Christian masculinity," which Kristin Kobes Du Mez has defined as "an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power."22 Morrison focalizes these realizations via Reverend Richard Misner, a young Baptist minister in Ruby who sympathizes with teenage Black political activists but frequently clashes with Reverend Senior Pulliam, an older Methodist pastor who wields his conservative Christianity like a dogmatic hammer. Thinking about the men's murderous raid on the Convent toward the end of the novel, Misner concludes: "They think they have outfoxed the whiteman [sic] when in fact they imitate him. They think they are protecting their wives and children, when in fact they are maiming them."23 In the same final chapter, Morrison makes clear what imitating white conservative religion means once one of the Ruby men, Deacon Morgan, confesses his shame to Misner, admitting that "his long remorse was at having become what the Old Fathers cursed: the kind of man who set himself up to judge, rout and even destroy the needy, the defenseless, the different."24 Morrison seems to be recoding James Baldwin's famous claim in The Fire Next Time that the theological paradigms of the Nation of Islam, Black Baptist Christianity, and white conservative Christianity, so different on the surface, were all seemingly designed for the same purpose: "the sanctification of power."25 But unlike Baldwin, who left Christianity altogether, Morrison still found salutary elements of the Christian faith.

A biographical fact often ignored by critics, Morrison converted to Catholicism as a teenager and, even though she wavered in her institutional practice throughout her life, she remained so enchanted by an embodied Afro-Catholic aesthetic that, in Nick Ripatrazone's words, Morrison should be regarded as "the greatest American Catholic writer about race."26 Nadra Nittle has recently echoed this point, arguing that Paradise should not be regarded as a novel by a Black secular writer simply aiming to deconstruct Black conservative Christianity. "While Paradise doesn't condemn Christianity [outright]," Nittle writes in Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision, "it argues that for it to be a tool of liberation, it can't be a reproduction of white religion. It must recognize the cosmologies of people of color and the social conditions that fuel oppression."27 According to Morrison, religion is absolutely central to any genuine history of Black American life. "The history of African Americans that narrows or dismisses religion" and its attendant conflicts, Morrison declared in a Moody Lecture entitled "God's Language" delivered at the University of Chicago in 1996, "in both their collective and individual life, in their political and aesthetic activity, is more than incomplete — it may be fraudulent."28

This premise explains why Paradise stages an imaginative collision between Clarence Thomas's patriarchal Black Christianity and Toni Morrison's mystically egalitarian Black Christianity. Morrison's novel illuminates not only the aspirations of the Thomas-led Black Christian Right in the late-twentieth century, but also the later legal repercussions of that movement — hitched to the larger Christian Right — in our contemporary post-Roe world. Like the founders of Ruby in Paradise, Thomas fantasizes about an archetypical Black Christian man who, Corey Robin argues, is "an outcast from white government and racist society; he is a refugee from politics. His guns are no longer the tools of a world-building project; they are the emblems of a fugitive black patriarchy."29 From that perspective, Robin continues, the supposedly "errant fathers created by the rights revolution can give way to the armed black patriarchs of Jim Crow" who dutifully protected (and controlled) their women and children.30 For Thomas, the various civil rights and liberties that the U.S. Supreme Court enshrined into law  under Chief Justice Earl Warren are not just arbitrary and constitutionally unsound, but destructive of the Black patriarchal family in ways that mirror the white Christian Right's conviction that women who sought legal abortions effectively undermined the traditional patriarchal family. Throughout his abortion jurisprudence, Robin notes, Thomas "invokes as a basis for his opposition to Roe one of the dissenting opinions from [Roe v. Wade], in which Justice Byron White characterized a woman's decision to have an abortion as reflecting the 'convenience, whim, or caprice of the putative mother.'"31 Unbounded by traditional religious norms, the female figure imagined here is dangerously free, and her licentious freedom is destructive in the ways that anticipate the conspiratorial rumors about abortion that swirl around Paradise's Convent women.

Morrison claimed that she wrote Paradise because she was alarmed by this distinctly American "debasement of religious language," this "cliché-ridden expression" clothed in "patriarchal triumphalism" and "morally opinionated dictatorial praxis" that fused the all-too-human interests of powerful men with the sublime, mysterious will of God.32 But Morrison was only reiterating a previous argument that she had made more pointedly in her 1989 lecture "Women, Race, and Memory:" "Relinquishing reproductive control to God is, in fact, relinquishing it to men. Demanding reproductive control is to usurp [not God's sovereignty, but] male sovereignty and acquire what masculinity takes for granted — dominion."33 To be aware of these insights is to confirm Toni Morrison as one of our most significant Christian theorists of the much-neglected Black Christian Right. It is also to see her critique of the broader white Christian Right as grounded less in the secular category of race than in the religious category of sacrilege.

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Bryan M. Santin (@BMSantin) is Associate Professor of English at Concordia University Irvine. He is the author of Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism: A Literary History, 1945—2008 (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and the editor of the forthcoming volume The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics.

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