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We tend not to think about religious freedom as an issue with a special connection to the black community and the black church. However, the connection is very close and crucial. In fact, the black church's interaction with the subject offers lessons to the wider Christian community.

Along with many African-American theologians, I believe in the tremendous importance of preserving religious communities not only as centers of difference—that is, places where one grasps the meaning of the world as different from what you find in the dominant culture—but even more so as centers of resistance. These centers of resistance do not simply proclaim

"We don't believe what the rest of you believe," but say, "We are willing and ready to sacrifice, to lose something material for the sake of that difference in which we believe."

One of the tragedies of American history has been that whatever part of the culture has been dominant has always worked hard to domesticate or to destroy religions that seem to be turning into communities of resistance. The black churches have always faced this problem and face it today. Even though sometimes the destruction is through inadvertence or ignorance, it is also sometimes a matter of will.

A few years ago, I was on a panel with a gentleman who had for many years pastored one of the largest inner-city black churches in Connecticut. He described to me a meeting of ministers of several large urban black churches at which they discussed the continuous litigation attempting to strip Roman Catholic bishops of their tax-exempt status. The plaintiffs in the suit claimed that the bishops were violating the tax code by engaging in either lobbying or, more importantly, favoring or opposing political candidates. Most people do not know about such litigation. Furthermore, no one seriously believes that any court will try to take away the tax-exempt status of the Roman Catholic bishops. The ministers had this meeting because they were terrified. They said: If, because of their political advocacy, the Roman Catholic bishops were to lose their tax-exempt status, what ramifications would this have for the various black denominations and their political involvement?

These black ministers believed that the people suing the Roman Catholic bishops did not appreciate a crucial difference between political activity in black communities and political activity in white communities. Moreover, these black clergy believed white people think civil society works through many diverse institutions with different functions. Consequently, it is not that important if one says churches cannot engage in politics. Many other institutions perform such activity in civil society. The problem, argued the ministers, is that in the inner city, the only institution of civil society able to enable political activity is the church. There, if one does not do political organizing in the churches, one does not do political organizing at all.

This anecdote points to a larger concern regarding the law of religious freedom. The law of religious freedom, in America, often falls on the religions of the black community and other people of color with a harshness, with a force, and with an edge that often does not strike communities of other kinds.

In 1988 the U.S. Supreme Court decided a legal matter called the Lyng case (Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association). In this instance, the U.S. Forest Service decided to allow someone to cut down a national forest. The party granted this permission planned to cut down the forest and, in addition, to build a road through the area in order to transport the trees down to a mill. This would have been fine, I suppose, depending on how one feels about trees, except that this was sacred ground for three Indian tribes. When I say "sacred ground," I do not mean sacred in the sense in which Christians tend to think of sacred spaces—that is, something that has been consecrated and, if destroyed, something else can be consecrated in its place. What I mean by sacred is that the Indians' religious traditions were tied to keeping this land in its pristine form. Indeed, as some of them claimed in their later lawsuit, their religious traditions were the land, in the sense that if the trees were cut and the road were built, their religion would cease to exist.

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June 12 2000, Vol. 44, No. 7