Michael Emerson Quotes
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I meet almost no one that goes to an African-American church or thinks, "I'm going to do that." Now there are whites in African-American churches. They're interracially married. They're highly committed. Maybe there's a professor or two, or a student.
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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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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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I never meet a church that wishes they didn't do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn't do it. They will all say, to the person, it's hard. It's difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion as you're trying to go across cultures, and you don't understand, you didn't mean to offend somebody but you've offended somebody. But they will all say it just does something.
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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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Humor is so culturally based that when I try to tell a joke as me being a white American, if I tell other white Americans, they'll laugh. If I tell an African American, they might not laugh. In fact, they either might not find it funny, or they might find it offensive, and I didn't mean it to be offensive. So these are the sort of little things that build up over time, just like in a marriage. You know, the little things can build up over time.
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Maybe there's even anger. But if they make it through that they come to a new agreement, and they start creating a new culture, and it becomes something that people just - a lot of times they'll say, "I couldn't live without it. I just have to be there."
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So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.
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Scripture is vast, and people can pick and choose what they emphasize, and so for hundreds of years verses that said that you are to welcome the stranger, that with Christ there's neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, we've broken down the dividing wall with the original church, where Christians were first called Christian was the church of Antioch in which for the first time you had Jews, Gentiles of all different ethnicities come together as one people. That's when they were called Christians.
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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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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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There's always the question of time. Does time at 10:00 mean 10:00 sharp? Or does it mean give or take a few minutes? And a few minutes, is that plus or minus two minutes? Or plus or minus ten, or maybe a half an hour each way?
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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.
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I've been blessed by doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever.
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You find the most in not any particular denomination specifically. It's the style of worship. So if we have what we call a charismatic worship style, that means upbeat music and a more lively style of preaching usually, people are allowed to clap, say "Amen," whether they're mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, and Catholics, whatever, they're much more likely to be integrated.
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Preaching styles and people being slain in the spirit and things like that. Now it doesn't happen in all black churches, and it happens sometimes in white churches, right? But on average they're quite a bit different.
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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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In your actor's heart, you know when you're playing well. Others may not always agree with you, but I'm always aware of when the scene is cooking or not. You have an instinct about that from years of doing scenes and plays, and I think it stands you in good stead even in the TV world.
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I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I don't want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down." It's also, of course, as we know, the seat of political organization and the affirming of your blackness and so on.
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If we go into white congregations, non-whites will sometimes say it felt like worship never started. It was sort of dead and didn't feel that warmly received. But so - and there are different realities either way, and it makes it difficult for all groups to try and cross boundaries.
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What's happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures.
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I ask the clergy why don't I see myself represented in leadership? And I'm told, and this happens quite a bit, "We don't think about race when we hire. We just hire the best person for the job."
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What sort of difficulties would happen when people of different cultures try to come together to worship? Tiny little things such as let's tell jokes with each other.
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There are roles that are terrifying because they're large or you may feel that they're out of your line, but I'm never terrified once the actual work begins. Once you begin rehearsal, then it's small building blocks. It's solving little problems one at a time.