The Numinous Negro - His importance in our lives; why he is fading

National Review, August 20, 2001 by Richard Brookhiser

The Numinous Negro is a post-World War II phenomenon. He appeared at a particular time in the history of mainstream American Protestantism, and its decay. He drew his stereotypical power both from the religion and its evanescence. The key to both sources of power was suffering. Christianity is the religion based on the Man of Sorrows; liberalism is a secular faith concerned to remedy what political scientist Kenneth Minogue called "suffering situations." The Numinous Negro symbolized and expressed the travails of American blacks; the blacks who best incarnated the role were ministers who ventured beyond their pulpits.

This is why Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, though they were certainly famous, and both clergymen, never spoke as Numinous Negroes. Islam, where Malcolm X ended up, is too remote from the American religious experience; the Nation of Islam, where he began and where Farrakhan remains, is, with its myths and space ships, more alien still.

The minister-politicians offered political victories to their black flocks. To their white admirers, they offered the possibility of redemption. They could criticize and condemn, but they could also exhort and save. They offered to resolve America's blundering over a race brought here as subjects. Nothing else white America had done, from the evil to the heroic, had settled the race problem: not slavery; not keeping blacks in their neighborhoods; not settling them in Liberia; not the Civil War. Maybe by touching the Numinous Negro America could finally put this problem behind it.

Why at the beginning of the 21st century is the Numinous Negro dying? The 2000 Census showed Hispanics pulling equal with black Americans, but numbers have little to do with the American psyche. There have long been more German-Americans than black Americans, but the former have made no impression on the national mind greater than the Katzenjammer Kids.

The Numinous Negro is dying because the source of his divinity has dried up. America's white elite, having cut its ties to its historic Protestant roots, no longer seeks the comfort or counsel of ministers. As far as an outsider can judge, black Protestantism is withering too. Large swaths of it seem to be little more than a community self-esteem racket. Witness the speed with which so many crooked preachers are forgiven. I'm okay, you're okay, we're all okay together.

The suffering the Numinous Negro offered to repair has also changed. It has been a long time since anyone stopped a black person from voting. There were complaints that this happened in Florida last year, but such problems as arose were caused by incompetence, not by Bull Connor; the only reason the Florida race was closer than the margin of error was that blacks voted in such large numbers. Many blacks suffer great problems, but the federal government has spent trillions of dollars on them over the last thirty years. Conservatives say that it has all been misspent, but only the demented say that the government's motives were malicious.