The claim is easy to state: Black preachers could move a room, but there was no real theology underneath the sound. It does not survive contact with the evidence. The preserved sermon record, gathered in an anthology running from 1750 to the present, shows doctrine, biblical interpretation and argument across more than two centuries. The record also shows how much of that evidence has already been lost. That loss, more than any lack of thought, is why the Black church has to tell its own story.
Dr. Martha Simmons is unusually placed to test the charge. She co-edited, with Dr. Frank Thomas, the Norton anthology Preaching with Sacred Fire: African American Sermons from 1750 to the Present, which she describes as a 960-page collection. She does not soften her verdict on the claim: “that’s one of the biggest lies that’s been told about black people. We could preach, but we didn’t have any theology, which is absurd.”
A strong word from a scholar is not proof, though. The useful question is what the record would look like if the charge were true, and what it looks like in fact.
Two versions of the same charge
The charge comes in two forms, and they are not the same claim. The first says Black Christians had no theology when they first arrived in America. The second says Black theology did not exist in any serious form until the 1970s, when academic Black theology began to appear in print.
Simmons answers by separating having a theology from writing one down. She grants the publishing point and rejects the conclusion drawn from it: “it wasn’t until the seventies that more of our theology began to be written down, but God knows we had it before we arrived on these shores.”
That distinction carries the whole argument. A date of publication tells you when ideas entered a certain kind of document. It does not tell you when people began thinking them. If the test for theology is a book on a seminary shelf, the charge is true by definition and also uninteresting, because the same test would erase the theology of most Christians in most centuries. The fairer test is whether the preaching itself contains theological thought: claims about God, readings of Scripture, an account of sin, salvation, suffering and hope.
What would count as evidence?
If Black preaching were heat without content, the preserved sermons should read like that. Strip away the delivery and you would find repetition, emotional prompts and little sustained engagement with a text. You would also expect a narrow range: one style, one register, one message.
If the charge is false, the sermons on the page should still make arguments. They should interpret specific passages, apply them to specific circumstances, and differ from one another in method and emphasis the way any living theological tradition does.
A printed sermon suits this test because it removes the very thing critics say is doing all the work. On paper there is no voice, no organ and no congregation answering back. What is left is the thought.
One limit belongs here at the start. The sermon descriptions that follow are Simmons’s own summaries, recalled in conversation, not texts reproduced in this article. They show what the anthology’s editor found in the material. The printed sermons themselves are what a reader should check.
What the record contains
The first observation concerns range. Simmons argues that “the African American community, faith community is no more homogenous than the white faith community,” and she names her evidence. Howard Thurman represents a mystical stream. C.L. Franklin represents the chanted, musical tradition. Martin Luther King Jr. preached for social justice. Sojourner Truth was a justice advocate. Maria Stewart, in Simmons’s account, held justice and personal piety together. These are different answers to theological questions about how God is known and what faithfulness requires, not variations on one emotional style.
Individual sermons point the same way. Franklin preached on the eagle stirring her nest, an image taken from Deuteronomy 32:11. Gardner Taylor is in the collection, along with a sermon by Caesar Clark built around the line that the worms ate up a man’s flesh. Claudette Copeland preached on the prophet hiding in a cave and applied it to Black people hiding out instead of standing and taking their rightful place.
That last example shows the kind of interpretive work involved. The text is 1 Kings 19, where Elijah has fled for his life after his confrontation on Mount Carmel. In 1 Kings 19:9 the word of the Lord comes to him in the cave with a question: “What doest thou here, Elijah?” The passage is narrative, and its first meaning concerns a discouraged prophet whom God calls back into his assignment. Copeland’s sermon, as Simmons summarizes it, moves from that meaning to an application for a community tempted to retreat. Whatever one thinks of a particular application, that is the ordinary work of preaching: read the text in its setting, then ask what it asks of the people in front of you. It is theology done in public.
The second observation concerns context. The anthology pairs each sermon with a biography, because, in Simmons’s words, “all preaching is particular.” Her example is Jarena Lee, a woman who rode on horseback and sometimes traveled by boat to preach in places that did not want to hear women preach at all. Lee was a Black woman preaching before women could vote and while Black people were still being lynched. A sermon preached under those conditions has to say something about God’s justice, God’s calling and the worth of the hearer. Reading it beside its biography makes the theological stakes visible.
The third observation concerns how emphasis shifts over time. Prosperity messages, priestly messages and social justice messages all live in Black preaching, and Simmons calls the justice motif cyclical, rising when historical pressure pushes it forward. Lisa Fields adds that preachers serving mostly comfortable, middle-class white congregations face different questions, so faulting Black preaching for sounding different while ignoring context is a mismatched comparison. A tradition whose emphases shift with conditions is behaving as a thinking tradition does.
Hooping as craft
Hooping, the chanted and musical close of many Black sermons, is usually the exhibit behind the claim that the preaching is mostly feeling. Simmons points to a damaging comparison with minstrel shows and a sharper split underneath it, with white preachers cast as the thinkers in homiletics and Black preachers as the emotive side. The view is not held only by outsiders: “our own people have bought into that false narrative.”
Her account of hooping makes three claims. The first is about difficulty: “it’s a very difficult art form to pull off.” The second is about origin. She says it traveled with Black people from Africa, carrying rhythms, songs and ways of communicating the gospel, and was then mixed with chords learned in America. The third concerns its relationship to content: “hooping never stands alone. It always stands with a well-written text. It stands with outstanding theology, and this is when it’s done well.”
That last sentence includes its own limit. Simmons does not claim every hooped sermon is theologically strong. She claims that hooping done well depends on a strong text and strong theology, and that the close draws its force from what the sermon has already built. Many readers of her anthology essay on hooping told her they had no idea there was so much to it. That reaction is a small piece of evidence about how the caricature spreads: people judged the form without knowing its history or its demands.
The critic’s error is one of sampling. Hearing the hoop at the climax and concluding the sermon had no content means judging the whole by the moment where emotion peaks, after the argument has already been made.
The strongest objections
A careful skeptic can push back in three ways, and each deserves an honest answer.
The first objection is about selection. An anthology is a curated collection. A little more than a hundred sermons, chosen by editors who already believed in the tradition, cannot prove that every Black pulpit in every era was theologically serious. That is correct, and the anthology does not establish a universal claim. What it does is refute the universal claim on the other side. The charge was never that some Black preaching lacked theology, which would be true of every tradition’s weaker preachers. The charge was that Black preaching as such had none. One well-documented counterexample would damage that claim, and a 960-page record spanning more than two centuries refutes it, provided the sermon texts bear out the editors’ descriptions. Those texts are the thing to check.
The second objection is about the editor’s interest. Simmons is a committed advocate who has spent her career promoting Black preaching. Her enthusiasm does not make her wrong, but it is a fair reason not to rest the case on her word alone. Her position does not require anyone to trust her verdict. The sermons are printed, and anyone can read them and decide whether they contain theological argument.
The third objection is about what came before the documents. Simmons holds that African people understood God as the one who controls the universe and their lives, and held beliefs about the earth, the sun, the moon and creation, before arriving in America. The anthology begins in 1750 and cannot itself verify belief from before captivity. That part of her case stands as her historical assertion, and readers should hold it as such. It also matters less to the main question than it might seem. The claim being tested concerns Black Christian preaching, and that is exactly what the preserved sermons document.
The record that was lost
The most sobering evidence concerns what the anthology could not contain. Simmons describes preachers who were remarkable and served their communities well, whose “material had been thrown away by their children and their families.” Often only brief snapshots survived. The editors started with close to 200 people under consideration and published a little more than a hundred sermons.
Some losses came from neglect. Others came from the ordinary friction of history. The project took about six years, partly because copyrights and permissions sometimes took years to secure. In one case the editors talked with a family for three years and still could not use the material, because relatives disagreed about who controlled the estate. In many other cases they simply could not get the permissions. When space ran out, Simmons persuaded the publisher to print a list at the back of almost 300 names of people she describes as largely erased from history, so that future scholars would know where to look.
This is where the investigation turns. The “no theology” charge did not come from reading the sermons and finding them empty. It grows where the sermons were never read, or no longer exist. A missing record does not prove missing thought, but it removes the means of disproving a false claim. Lisa Fields names the danger: “it’s easy for whiteness to hijack Christianity in America if we don’t keep the record.”
Simmons states the consequence bluntly: “If you don’t care about your own faith community and your own history, others will care less.” She expects others to take up pieces of that history for their own purposes, not the purposes it was meant to serve. Her conclusion is that “the lies about the African American faith community will continue to be told in minor ways or major ways, unless we write our own stories.”
So she asks preachers to “please keep your records, keep your records, your records matter.” She urges them not to leave their work only on a computer, to give it to a school or a student if family is not interested, and to “make sure that your legacy does not go to the grave with you.”
What follows, and what does not
The charge that Black preaching had feeling but no theology fails against the preserved record, and hooping, properly understood, depends on theological content rather than replacing it. The evidence does not show that every sermon in the tradition was strong, and Simmons does not say so. The anthology cannot settle her claims about belief before captivity, and it cannot recover what has already been thrown away.
That is why this is also an apologetics question. Lisa Fields raised the anthology because some young adults in the Black community have come to see Christianity as the white man’s religion without knowing the history of Black Christian faith in America. Jude 3 holds that this claim is historically inaccurate and that following Jesus is deeply woven into Black history. A historical answer of that kind depends on historical evidence, and the evidence only answers anyone if it survives. The sermons that refute the charge today exist because someone kept them. Whether the next generation has an answer depends on whether today’s sermons, notes and records are kept the same way.