The charge usually comes in one breath: the Black church took our money and gave us nothing back. It collected offerings, kept the pastor comfortable, and kept everyone else calm enough to stay poor. The documented history runs the other way. Black churches organized credit unions when banks would not lend, built senior housing, formed a mutual aid society before they formed a denomination, sent ministers to Congress within a few years of emancipation, and produced women who held real institutional power. Dr. Marvin McMickle, president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and a teacher of Black religious history for about 30 years, calls the charge “wholly, totally and completely false.”
His diagnosis of where it comes from is just as direct: “anybody who says that has not studied African American religious history.” The charge is not mainly a dispute about values. It is a claim about what happened, and claims about what happened can be checked.
Which church is the slogan describing?
The version circulating online says the Black church has done little for the community and mostly works as a pacifier. Its strongest image is the pastor driving a Cadillac or a Mercedes while the congregation pays. Lisa Fields answers that image with scale. Most churches are not megachurches, and “most pastors are bi-vocational, so they’re working a full-time job and preaching.”
That reply exposes the slogan’s first move. It takes the most visible figure and treats him as the whole. The tradition it claims to judge spans roughly 250 years and includes Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals and independents. It includes congregations like the ones McMickle pastored, where physicians, educators, bankers and lawyers sat beside custodians and laborers. A sentence that begins “the Black church” and ends with a single verdict has to say which church, in which city, in which decade. The slogan never does.
Where did the money go?
Money is the ground the critics claim, so start there. In 1945, Black veterans returning from World War II to Cleveland could not get conventional mortgages from any bank in the city. These were decorated soldiers, sailors and Marines, and this was before VA loans opened that door. Antioch Baptist Church, which McMickle later pastored, organized a credit union, first chartered by the state and later nationally. Members deposited savings and could borrow up to five times their holdings for a first or second mortgage, a car, or a child’s college tuition. By the end of McMickle’s tenure it held two and a half million dollars, with members across the city buying homes through it.
The smallest detail may matter most. Antioch ran a tithing program in reverse. The congregation gave away 10 percent of the church’s annual budget to neighborhood agencies working on drug addiction and domestic abuse, to civil rights organizations, and to Black colleges for scholarships. The church also sponsored an 18-story senior citizen high-rise. And Antioch was one church among many sponsoring credit unions and housing programs across the country.
I could talk all day long about the ways in which churches through housing, economic development, credit unions, have not just taken money from the neighborhood, but poured major capital into the neighborhoods to make them better.
McMickle’s sentence names the assumption under the slogan. The critic pictures money flowing one direction, from the pew to the pulpit. Antioch’s budget shows money moving outward, and its credit union shows members’ own savings becoming deeds and diplomas.
McMickle then proposes a test anyone can run. Take the Black church out of a neighborhood. Remove its buildings, its credit unions, its housing projects, its investment in small businesses, and the community programs that meet in its rooms. Then ask where that economic activity would have come from. He goes further and claims churches have been the largest generator of economic progress in most Black communities. That is his assertion, and a reader can test it city by city. The subtraction test is the right method either way, because it forces the critic to account for what actually exists.
Was the bank there before the church?
In one famous case, yes. Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, worked beyond his required labor with his owner’s consent, saved money, and bought his own freedom and then his family’s. Later, living free in Philadelphia, he was seized by a slave catcher who claimed he was a runaway. A white Philadelphian identified him, he was released, and he sued his accuser. McMickle says Allen won, and places the episode in the 1780s.
Allen was also a businessman, with shoemaking, chimney cleaning (he employed the sweeps) and barbering enterprises. With Absalom Jones, he founded the Free African Society in 1786, a mutual aid group that worked like an insurance company. Members paid in, and when someone died or an emergency hit, the society paid out for funerals and other needs. McMickle sums up the sequence plainly: “Before there was the church, there was this black financial institution.”
The society’s charter required its treasurer to be a Quaker, because no Philadelphia bank would do business with Black people even when they had the money. Quakers were known as anti-slavery and as capable businesspeople. The first financial institution in this story was built under conditions where its own members could not hold accounts.
Then comes the part that turns the slogan around. What drove Allen out of St. George’s Methodist Church in 1787, in McMickle’s account, was a congregation that let Black people sit in their section but would not let them lead and would not change anything to serve them. Describing churches that still operate that way, McMickle voices their unspoken terms: “We’ll have all the power, but you’re free to pay in.” The complaint that an institution takes your money and gives you nothing back is close to the founding complaint of one of the oldest Black denominations. Allen kept the faith and built a church that served the people who filled it.
Why did civic life run through the sanctuary?
Charles Hamilton’s book The Black Preacher in America helps explain why. As McMickle summarizes it, the Black church has four advantages. People show up every week without an invitation. The church owns its space. It has the equipment it needs. And it needs no permission from downtown to act. No professional group, whether doctors, lawyers or accountants, could claim all four.
This is the structural answer to the pacifier charge. In communities shut out of banks, boards and city halls, the church was often the one institution Black people fully owned and controlled. That is why so many Black churches became polling places and centers of voter registration and education.
The same pattern reached Congress. Hiram Revels, an AME minister, was the first Black clergyman in national politics. Senators were then chosen by state legislatures, and after Mississippi was readmitted to the Union, its legislature sent Revels to the United States Senate. The seat had last been held by Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. In about four years it passed from a slaveholding secessionist to a Black Methodist preacher.
Revels had company. Black clergy served in Congress from South Carolina and Louisiana, and a Black clergyman briefly served as governor of Louisiana. After 1877, when Black voting was suppressed, those officeholders disappeared until the 1930s and 1940s. Adam Clayton Powell went to Congress in 1944, and later decades brought ministers such as Andrew Young, Walter Fauntroy, Floyd Flake and Bill Gray. In his book Pulpit Politics, McMickle reports that of roughly 2,000 African Americans who held political office between 1865 and 1876, about 200 were known to be clergy. He expects the scale to surprise people: “It is a revelation to most people that many clergy were involved in that many political offices over that long a period of time.”
Holding office does not prove faithfulness, and this history endorses no party. The point is narrower and harder to dodge. People formed in these churches went into public life in large numbers. A sedative does not produce that.
Who led when the rules said women could not?
Jarena Lee asked Richard Allen to authorize her to preach. Allen told her AME polity made no provision for women clergy. She pressed him on whether the Lord who saves both men and women could not use both. Allen did not ordain her, but he let her preach in his own church, the first time a woman preached in an AME church. The line from her runs to Vashti McKenzie, elected the AME Church’s first woman bishop in 2000.
Some of the most powerful women were never clergy. Nannie Helen Burroughs organized the Women’s Division of the National Baptist Convention and, by McMickle’s reckoning, was second in power only to the convention president for 60 years. His explanation is practical: whoever organizes the women holds real power, because women make up most of the membership. “It would be false to say that women have been mute in the church. They’ve been very much central to the mission of the church.”
Faithful Christians still differ on whether women should hold pastoral office, and this history does not settle that. It answers a different question. Even where ordination was withheld, the Black church created organizations where women raised money, directed programs and held authority.
What about the churches that really did take the money?
They exist, and McMickle does not pretend otherwise. He raises the point himself: “Now, has every single congregation been as aggressive and as engaged as every other single congregation? No.” He grants that even in the 1950s and 1960s most churches were not marching, though many were working in other ways. Discussing Eddie Glaude Jr.’s argument that the Black church’s role is fading, he concedes that some clergy have traded the role of protest leader for a prosperity message where everything is about being wealthy and healthy, and failure means your faith was too weak. His verdict on that teaching: “Well, that’s just foolish.”
So the critic’s best evidence is real, and it is named from inside the tradition. The error lies in the inference. A grifting pastor shows that a pastor grifted. He does not cancel the Antioch credit union or the Free African Society, and he does not turn Hiram Revels into a myth.
He also does not represent the faith he exploits. The New Testament condemns exactly what the slogan describes. James writes: “If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?” (James 2:15-16). In context, James is arguing that faith which leaves a hungry neighbor hungry is not living faith. Paul gives the positive charge: “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10).
A church that takes and gives nothing is judged by its own Scriptures. A mutual aid society paying for a member’s funeral, or a congregation tithing its budget to the neighborhood, looks a great deal like what James and Paul asked for. That is why Jude 3 can honor the Black church as a guardian of historic Christian faith and a witness for justice while calling it, like every tradition, to continual faithfulness to Scripture. The same text that vindicates Antioch indicts the private jet.
Every institution asks for money, including the critics’ own. The question that matters is where the money went. In Cleveland in 1945, it went into mortgages that no bank would write.