Michael Emerson Quotes
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Every pastor I talk to says, and particularly if they're African American they'll say, "I'm not black enough for African Americans. I'm not white enough for the whites. I'm not Hispanic enough."
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Then of course there are bigger things that matter, like who do I see up there in the congregation? Do I see myself up there? Well, I don't.
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I see this in the way that sermons are preached. How would you give a Black Nationalist speech or campaign for the Republicans when you're an integrated congregation? It doesn't happen.
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So we didn't get the denominations and the separate congregations really till about into Civil War time. What's happened then, of course, is now that we've had well over 100 years of this history to establish separate cultures, different ways of worshipping, and different ways of understanding theology so that when people try to come together makes it very difficult. And then, of course, social networks, you know, how do we find a place to worship?
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We've had people say, "Now when I go to work, I don't feel uncomfortable talking to people of different races, and I go up and introduce myself, and I start making a new friend I wouldn't have done otherwise."
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What happens is sometimes these congregations will still have the white style of worship, even though they're mixed, because folks are willing to give up whatever they may have come with. So it's still quite a stretch for African Americans, yeah.
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There's always that sense of because we're so racially defined, if you're trying to cross the boundaries you don't fit into any particular space.
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It's one of the things we find in these congregations is that they are much more likely to be sort of up-beat worship styles, more likely that people in these congregations say "Amen," maybe get up and dance some, tend to be a little bit more lively than a typical white service would be, but not as lively as a typical black service would be.
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I think with President Obama there's going to be a discussion, because he himself is multiracial, because we have for the first time a non-white president. There's going to be talk about what does this mean? What is it? Are we in a new era?
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As you may know, previously as Attorney General and now as Governor, I have supported legislation to close the gun show loophole in North Carolina.
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One of the things we find when we talk to people that attend these congregations, they all have social cost to it. People want to know why they're doing that. Sometimes they're questions about selling out on their race or "Are we not good enough that you have to go to this kind of congregation and not ours?" So there are costs to it, and I think they're a little bit higher in the South because of its history.
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We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you're immigrants, you're not part of that history.
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I see it happen in uniracial congregations all the time. But people - when they're in mixed company, we speak differently.
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If you move here from somewhere else, I often think if I move to Germany, for example, or if I move China and I go worship there I will understand and I'll be willing to give up a lot of my culture because I'm in somebody else's homeland. So I'm going to have to act German or Chinese, whatever that might mean.
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It happens a little bit more in the West, where there's more fluid - where everybody's originally from somewhere else. So they have a little bit more permission to do it. It happens the least, at the individual level at least, in the South, because the South has very strong, you know, set up black churches and white churches and a long history of that, and so it's a bigger social cost.
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I really do think that every time you play a role well, you are in danger of being identified with that role until the next big thing comes along.
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We just say there are five, you know, racial groups in the US. I say that these folks are what we call a sixth American. There's something different. They are somebody who - they don't exist in any particular racial category, so they all feel it and they kind of congregate to each other.
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I liked the scenes with the baby, but the baby steals all the scenes that you're in. So that would get old after a while, because the baby is too perfect. I liked being high on ecstasy.
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Downsides, yeah, and when there are more downsides when churches first start - they go through stages of transforming to becoming multiracial. So in the beginning stages there's often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, a lot of people leave.
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I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, "People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?"
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But in the US, when you have two separate cultures, each with its right, each of which has come to exist in this political entity in the last couple hundred years, each feeling like, "I have the right to hold onto my culture," and that's what makes it difficult.
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It's the sad fact of how race still works in our country. We find that over and over again.
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So there was great clashes when, you know, if you believe you shouldn't remove your shoes and someone's taking their shoes off, how can they do this? That actually was such a big clash in this case that they had to put a curtain down the middle of where they would worship.
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I mean, so if I've talked to whites in City of Refuge, sometimes they'll wonder, "Why do we do things a certain way, and why do we make a big deal out of events?" And what's happening is they're falling back on their understanding of the way that church should work. It's not always working exactly like that, and they feel frustration or confusion. Sometimes people leave. That's certainly common in mixed churches.