When people walk through the doors of a church, they’re ushered into living history. This is true whether the church is an established pillar of a community or was recently planted, like the congregation where I serve. Visitors and guests who walk into the doors of our meeting place, an elementary school in Charlottesville, Virginia, often do not realize they’ve walked into one of the first schools in the state to be racially integrated. Like many other places, its history tells stories about race and belonging that run deeper than what meets the eye.
Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church, written by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kevin Sack, is a sweeping tale that bears witness to a living history of African American Christianity rooted in one singular congregation: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Best known as Mother Emanuel, the church catapulted into America’s consciousness through one of the most heinous acts of racial violence in the nation’s history. On June 17, 2015, 21-year-old Dylann Roof entered a Wednesday-night Bible study inside the church, by all accounts unaware of its historical significance. Roof, who had been radicalized by white-supremacist ideology online, sat silent during the meeting for roughly 45 minutes before taking out his gun and killing nine people: Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Rev. Daniel L. Simmons, and Myra Thompson.
In the aftermath of the callous evil, illusions of a post-racial society in the wake of President Barack Obama’s second term deflated. But something remarkable also happened. Two days after “the tragedy,” as it came to be known by congregants, the world witnessed several of the victims’ surviving family members publicly voice forgiveness for the unrepentant killer. Thus the tragedy bore witness not only to the evil of racial hatred but also to the strength of Christian faith. And through it, the world witnessed America’s unvanquished racial animus and the resilience of Black Christians in the face of unthinkable grief and persistent injustice.
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In Mother Emanuel, Sack puts forth a gripping exploration into how centuries of white supremacy impacted the church and the witness of faith against a deluge of hatred. The book examines how forgiveness could be granted in light of shocking evil. And after centuries of Black suffering, is forgiveness radical or repressive?
Sack makes the case that the answers come only by “studying the church’s historical and theological origins” to “better understand the grace summoned” by those who pronounced forgiveness. Resistance, forgiveness, and race form the book’s subtitle, and rightly so. There is no accurate portrayal of the African American Christian experience without these three realities. The history of Mother Emanuel as a congregation can be summarized as resistance—of which forgiveness is a practice—in the face of centuries of racism.
A poetic and captivating storyteller, Sack details the birth of the church through a walkout of thousands of enslaved and free Black worshipers from a local Methodist church in 1818. He explains how adherents left to “protest indignities in [public] governance and worship,” including plans by the church’s white trustees to “build a garage for the church’s horse-drawn hearse” on the Black half of its burial grounds. The bulk of chapters narrate the church’s vital work and key figures through the pre–Civil War and Reconstruction eras, its pivotal role in the advancement of Black Methodism, and its advocacy for desegregation in the 20th century.
At the same time, the book paints an honest picture of the congregation in the lead-up to the tragedy, including its reputation as a church with a hard-to-manage vocal minority, resulting in a fair amount of pastoral turnover. “If we don’t like a minister, we know how to get rid of them,” one member admitted. The church saw declining membership and waning influence due to an aging congregation and forces like gentrification. But it sought to carry on its mission.
On the day of the tragedy, Myra Thompson, a member and aspirant for ordination, was prepared to lead Bible study, a responsibility that Sack writes “she took so seriously she had barely left home during two weeks of preparation.” Cynthia Hurd, a busy librarian and Bible study regular, had planned only to drop off an item at the church and depart. Sack reports that after being lovingly chided by a friend, Hurd gave in: “The weary librarian took a seat and grabbed a Bible.”
Such details, found throughout the book, provide a close look into the lives of the victims and add gravitas to the forgiveness pronounced by several of their family members in the aftermath. Their decision to forgive captivated many people but left others confused. Meanwhile, some didn’t want to hear it. One week after the shooting, the writer Stacey Patton wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post titled “Black America should stop forgiving white racists,” and she argued that “quick absolution” cannot produce real justice. But the forgiveness offered was neither cheap nor quick. It was formed by two centuries of trial, triumph, and resilient faith.
Forgiveness functions as the narrative frame of Mother Emanuel, anchoring its opening chapter (“The Open Door”) and epilogue (“On Forgiveness and Grace”). For Christian readers, the drumbeat of forgiveness is of course vital. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us our Christian life is framed at all points and junctures by forgiveness. Martin Luther recognized Christians as simultaneously righteous and sinful (simul iustus et peccator). As those made righteous in Christ, we have a continual duty to extend forgiveness in a world vandalized by sin. As those who are still sinful, we extend continually the very thing we need constantly—forgiveness from God himself and from others.
Culturally, it’s easy to see that forgiveness has fallen on hard times. It is viewed as a means of revictimizing sufferers and a loophole for evading true accountability. Far too often, the act has been distorted from its scriptural vision. Biblically, forgiveness is not the denial of accountability. Forgiveness names a wrong and releases it while seeking repair and reconciliation rather than resentment and personal revenge.
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Part of the gift of Mother Emanuel is that readers, by entering the 200-year history of this church, will reckon with how those who have suffered greatly sought somehow to forgive freely. When forgiveness is offered without coercion and in the context of centuries of injustice, even secular audiences take note.
Readers will benefit from Sack’s refreshingly nuanced portrayal of the “idiom of forgiveness.” Mother Emanuel acknowledges the surviving family members who forgave—and those for whom such an act is a work in progress. Forgiveness is depicted as a discipline of spirituality, a reality forged in and from one’s heart, soul, and psyche through true human agency—but not powered solely by us.
Notably, Sack writes that the forgiveness displayed after the “tragedy” was in some form “mystical.” Nadine Collier, the first person to speak at Roof’s bond hearing, where she voiced her forgiveness, said, “[I] didn’t know what I was going to say” and “something just came over me.” Chris Singleton testified of a similar experience, akin to an “out-of-body” feeling. Singleton said he “knows it was God,” for he offered forgiveness with “zero premeditation.” “There is no way in a million years,” Singleton declared, “someone could tell me I would forgive the person who murdered my mom.”
Though Sack accurately notes these acts of forgiveness are described in “mystical terms,” it’s not entirely a mystery for theologically minded readers. In the face of heart-wrenching evil, the in-breaking grace of God shines mysteriously forth. The late pastor Tim Keller said it well: “Human forgiveness is dependent on divine forgiveness.” The type of forgiveness that is impossible with humanity is possible with and through God. It may flow forth in an instant or by a longer process. In either instance, Christians can grasp both manifestations as the prevenient work of the Lord.
Desmond Tutu, a famous South African bishop who led resistance to apartheid, asserted there is no future without forgiveness. In Mother Emanuel, the act of forgiving is widely described among family members as a power that releases bitterness, enabling them to move forward without being overcome by hate. Historically, for Black Christians forgiveness has been an act of resistance that preserves faith, dignity, and agency against the harsh winds of systemic racial violence.
The implicit challenge of Mother Emanuel is this: Ten years later, what future has forgiveness wrought? If the story of Mother Emanuel is a microcosm of America’s living history with the injustice of racism, has the forgiveness extended been met by accountability and works of righteousness? Although those from Mother Emanuel bore witness to forgiveness, one is right to wonder whether Americans have not quite received the message.
Far from sparking revival, this act of forgiveness and resilience has perhaps faded from national memory. In its place, America’s national touchstone has increasingly become resentment and resignation across the board—racially, politically, and culturally. In the wake of intensified racial hatred, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 book asked, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” In this radical act of forgiveness depicted in Mother Emanuel, readers see an option beyond chaos.
While the sweeping history of Mother Emanuel is honestly pessimistic about America’s racism, it is hopeful about the counterculture of Christ’s church, even with all its human imperfection. When Sack set foot in Mother Emanuel after the tragedy and attended services for his research, the church, despite its traumatic recent history, welcomed him. The people chose community over chaos. Even in grief, Mother Emanuel embodied a resistance to hate by the work of forgiveness and welcome.
If any retrieval of justice, mercy, and forgiveness will occur in America in the decades to come, the house from which such a revolutionary resistance will come is the church of Jesus Christ, particularly its Black remnant, which can teach us in theory and practice what it means to persevere in a sin-stricken world.
Claude Atcho is pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just and the forthcoming Rhythms of Faith: A Devotional Pilgrimage through the Church Year.
