We welcome visitors to our website whose racial background, as well as spiritual background, are different from our own. Most often the exchange of correspondence is rich and rewarding, as the medium of the Internet allows believers the opportunity to meet others who live in distant communities and far away lands. As new-creation Christians first, and Americans second, we strive to understand as well as be understood. However, we recognize that there will probably always be barriers this side of Glory.

Below, we have posted segments from John Weldon Hardenbrook's book MISSING FROM ACTION as being somewhat representative of our own views. We also have provided our comments to clarify as well as stimulate the thinking of our readers.

Hope, for the Crisis in Black America

No code of conduct ever compelled a father to love his children or a husband to show affection to his wife. The law court may force him to provide bread for the family, but it cannot make him provide the bread of love. A good father is obedient to the unenforceable. The ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable. Martin Luther King, Jr.[1]

Martin Luther King Jr. (considered 'evangelical' in the early years of his ministry) was deeply aware of the critical need in black families and the black community. However, because of his drift toward theological liberalism, he was incapable of leading his followers into any "solution," ultimate or otherwise, which would not prove to have serious spiritual and social side effects. King's loss of a sound biblical foundation continues to cripple all who look to him for inspiration.

No other single segment of society suffers more from the national problem of missing fathers than the Black families of America. This is not a racist statement. It is simply the honest, tragic truth. This situation is largely due to the unique history of African-American men. The first Black men in America didn't arrive on the Mayflower. They arrived in chains in the cargo bays of slave ships. And their struggles did not end when slavery was abolished.

Today almost seven out of ten Black children in America are born out of wedlock. The illegitimacy rate in Black families has more than tripled in the last three decades. Before they reach the age of eighteen, an astonishing eighty-six percent of all Black children will spend part of their childhood in a single-parent home. The missing parent is almost universally the father. [2]

Since father absence is the biggest contributing factor to criminal behavior, it should come as no surprise that the prisons of America are disproportionately filled with Blacks. African-Americans constitute twelve percent of the total U.S. population, but fifty percent of its prison population. [3] In large American cities, four out of every ten Black men between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five are either in prison, on parole, or wanted by the law. [4] Half of all the young Black men between fifteen and twenty-four years of age who die from accidents and violence are victims of homicide. [5] It's hard for people who do not live each day in this kind of environment to realize the tension that permeates the community. According to John Dean, an African-American who lives in the nation's capital:

It's very difficult to live outside of a black community and perceive of the thinking and feeling that goes on inside.... It is that all-pervasive fear because you never know, as I say, when you step out whether you're going to come back, and mostly when you're even in your house you don't have the sense of security that the majority population takes for granted. [6]

In the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., during the fall of 1995, some 400,000 Black American men gathered to proclaim that the greatest poverty in the Black community is not measured in dollars and cents or in crime statistics, but in the number of Black households from which responsible fatherhood has disappeared. This is really the same societal cancer that is ravaging all of America, but in the Black community the disease is found in a far more advanced stage. To understand why things have progressed to such an alarming stage in the Black community, we must begin by talking about what the American experience was like for the first African-Americans.

When Black Men Came to America

From the close of the eleventh century, Europeans began to seek a stronger trade with Africa. The Portuguese captured the North African city of Chute in 1415. During this time, slave-trading became a profitable venture among the Portuguese. Much of their business was aimed at supplying slaves to the Spanish colonies in the New World--the West Indies and Central and South America. The slaves were the Black people of northern and southern Africa.

The newly "reformed" Dutch Protestants quickly supplanted the Portuguese as the most active participants in the transatlantic slave trade to the New World and, in time, to North America. At a conservative estimate, fifteen million slaves reached the New World between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. And scholars of African-American history state that of those who were captured, only half actually reached the New World. The rest either died while imprisoned in Africa or during the long boat passage, were discarded as "unstable," were killed for rebellion, or committed suicide. Sometimes the entire shipload of slaves was lost, and on some occasions ship captains "cast their entire cargoes of slaves overboard." [7]

In August, 1619, the colonial government at Jamestown, Virginia, purchased its first twenty Black slaves from a Dutch ship. Thus began the importation of Black people into North America for servitude purposes, a national disgrace that would last over two hundred years.

Slavery not only robbed Black men of their freedom and human dignity, but the purchase of individual slaves also promoted the breakup of Black families. It was common to capture young fathers while leaving their wives and children behind. Added to that, the system inherently created more instability in the slave family in America. Slave fatherhood was not legally recognized. A few states had laws forbidding the selling of mothers away from their children who were under a certain age. But there were no laws to prevent a Black father from being taken away from his family.

Making things even worse, white male slave owners often raped Black slave women or took them as concubines. Slave women had no rights or protection against the sexual desires of their "masters." This disgraceful, tragic situation resulted in the births of 410,000 "mulatto" slaves by 1860. So "slave breeding" further increased the instability of family life among the African-American slaves.

The author would have best served all readers by providing documentation as support for these painful statements.

Where were the Christians during this era? What about the Puritans and those people who were set free from the evil hierarchy that denied them religious freedom? They now not only enslaved, but imposed their religious systems on a subjugated people. Some of these "pious" Dutch reformers are my direct ancestors, who helped purchase and establish New Amsterdam (New York) with the sweat of their slaves.

You should be aware that the author, now an adherent to the Eastern Orthodox faith, has been in a running battle with his "Reformed" tradition, which he views monolithically and erroneously equates with all "Protestantism."

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., pointed out, no one in the Protestant church in America "can deny the shameful fact that it has been an accomplice in structuring racism into the architecture of American society. The church, by and large, sanctioned slavery and surrounded it with the halo of moral respectability." [8]

The famous Puritan leader, Cotton Mather, misused the Holy Scriptures to set up some "Rules for the Society of Negroes," which outlined discipline and punishments for "disobedient" slaves. The greatest blasphemy of the whole ugly process was that the white man ended up making God his partner in the exploitation of the African-American. Once again in history, ethical Christianity vanished and the moral nerve of religion was atrophied as human beings made in the image of God were treated as property. Black fathers, stripped of their families and their human dignity, were seen as nothing more than a piece of farming machinery.

By repeating King's overstatement of the facts, author Hardenbrook's prejudice appears to blind him to the efforts of Protestant slave trade abolitionists such as: William Wilberforce, John Newton, Thomas Clarkson, etc., and their followers.

With the end of the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery in America, Blacks were free, but still not equal. After the outlawing of slavery, Blacks were segregated and treated as second-class citizens for another hundred years. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally ended segregation, but not the real-life problems of many Black families. So we [America's liberal element] began to try to remedy the remaining problems with a host of social programs.

For the last thirty years we have poured trillions of dollars into well-intended social programs that have, in too many cases, harmed the very people they were intended to help. The social policies of the last three decades have been a prime factor, not in reconnecting Black men with their families, but in driving them farther away.

There is a critically important set of facts surrounding the failure of America's "well-intended social programs." Nearly all of these programs have originated with the Religious Left. The Tenets of the Religious Left are destructive to human life and ultimately undermine all civil society.

George Gilder, senior fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, observes:

The chief cause of black poverty is welfare state feminism. Thirty years of affirmative action programs have artificially elevated black women into economic power over black men.

This regime prevailed from the highest levels of the economy, where black female college graduates with five years on the job significantly out-earned black men in 1991, to the underclass, where a typical package of welfare benefits produced disposable income 28% above a typical job in 1994. It prevailed on college campuses, where more than 60% of the blacks are women. It dominated government job training programs, where girls are found to benefit far more than boys. It even invaded such male bastions as the cockpits of fighter planes, police squad cars, fire stations, construction sites and university athletic teams....

It is an unpopular fact of life that in all societies and in all races monogamous marriage is based on patriarchal sex roles with men the dominant provider. Welfare state feminism destroyed black families by ravaging the male role of provider. Some observers claim that black communities benefit from matriarchal institutions. Looking more closely, however, you will find inner cities implacably ruled by gangs of young men, with the "matriarchs" cowering in their triple-bolted apartments in fear of them.

Men either dominate as providers or as predators. There is hardly any other option. The key problem of underclass--the crucible of crime, the source of violence, the root of poverty--is the utter failure of socialization of young men through marriage. The problem resides in the nexus of men and marriage. Yet nearly all the attention, subsidies, training opportunities and therapies of the welfare state focus on helping women function without marriage. The welfare state attacks the problem of the absence of husbands by rendering husbands entirely superfluous.

Welfare reform continues the policy, giving welfare mothers new training and child-care benefits and further obviating marriage by pursuing unmarried fathers with deadbeat dad campaigns.

Bill Clinton is the greatest dupe and poster child of welfare state feminism to come along in years. This is why both the feminist and black communities are reluctant to sanction his outrageous and deviant behavior--he serves two important political purposes. 1) He promotes welfare state feminism, and 2) his lack of character proves their fundamental tenet--that women are morally superior to men.

Today, in large American cities, fully 40% of young black men between the ages of 17 and 35 are in prison, on probation, or on the lam; and some 40% of young black women say they have been forced into unwanted sexual activity. To fear young black males has become a mandate for survival on the streets of many American cities. This unspeakable social tragedy--with all its infuriating reverberations on law-abiding black citizens-is the inevitable harvest of government policy. [9]

A Surprising Trend

Many Black men have come to realize the solution to their problems does not lie in inept government social programs which promote irresponsible male behavior. Disillusioned with [liberal] Protestant Christianity and hungry for dignity and self-discipline, Black men of America, by the hundreds of thousands, are turning to Islam. Over one-and-a-half million African-Americans are Muslims. A recent Newsweek article predicts, "At its current rapid rate of growth, Islam will become the second largest religion in the United States by the year 2000." [10]

The rise to power of liberalism in Protestant Christianity is a story in and of itself. As a primer, we direct you to our article titled, THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE.

Famous professional athletes such as boxing's former heavyweight champion, Mohammed Ali, basketball's all-time great, Kareem Abdul Jabar, football's all-pro wide receiver turned commentator, Amad Rashad, and more recently boxing's Mike Tyson spring to mind when one speaks of Black men converting to Islam. But there have been numerous others as well.

One of them is Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. In the 1960s he was known as H. Rap Brown, a Black Power advocate and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). America's "rap" music was named after him because he could powerfully communicate his political rhetoric with spontaneous and effective poetry. Brown spent over five years in prison and it was there he became a Muslim. One of his reasons for converting to Islam came from his personal desire for self-control and discipline over passion.

Jamil explains, "Islam enables you and teaches you not to be controlled or to do things out of anger. The Prophet pointed out that the strong man is not he who is a good wrestler, but he who can control his anger. That doesn't mean that you don't get upset about things, but if you can't control it, then you will be victimized by it." [11]

Now Jamil is one of the nation's most influential Muslim leaders, with nearly 10,000 followers in more than thirty cities across America. Once known as a rebel against authority, Jamil teaches his followers to discipline themselves through prayer, fasting, charity, and persistent faith.

Probably the most influential African-American leader in this century, besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was Malcolm X. Malcolm X was the most dynamic Black leader of the Nation of Islam. Anyone who has read his personal autobiography, as told to Alex Haley, could not help but be stirred by the life of this man. He converted from a life of crime and became a Muslim ascetic." He was killed by a hail of assassin's bullets at the age of thirty-nine because of his decision to leave the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) for mainstream Islam after his pilgrimage to Mecca. Malcolm X viewed himself as the "Billy Graham" for Islam in America.

Malcolm was born May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska. His father, the Reverend Earl Little, was a Baptist minister who also worked for Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Malcolm's father was a "visiting" preacher. Malcolm wrote, "I remember especially his favorite sermon, 'That little black train is a-comin'. . . an' you better get all your business right!'" [12]

Church "confused and amazed" Malcolm, who said he would gaze "goggle-eyed at my father jumping and shouting as he preached, with the congregation jumping and shouting behind him, their souls and bodies devoted to singing and praying. Even at that young age, I just couldn't believe in the Christian concept of Jesus as someone divine. And no religious person, until I was a man in my twenties--and then in prison--could tell me anything." [13]

There were serious reasons why the young Malcolm couldn't receive the teachings of his father. His father, Earl, had so many rules it was hard for his children to remember them all. But, according to people who knew him, he failed to observe them himself. Biographer Perry Bruce wrote, "In addition to being brutal to his wife and children, he was notoriously unfaithful to Louise--'a natural born whoremonger,' his friend Chester Jones called him. From childhood onward, Malcolm would have great difficulty trying to decide whether to follow the path of virtue his father preached or the path of vice he often practiced." [14]

This Black family has suffered the same tragic result as millions of others--the corruption of a 'law-centered' perversion of the Christian faith. For more detail see, THE LAW.

This explains why the following poem by Edgar Guest became one of Malcolm's favorites during his "conversion" years in prison.

I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day;

I'd rather one should walk with me than merely show the way.

The eye's a better pupil, and more willing than the ear;

Fine counsel is confusing, but example's always clear.

The best of all the preachers are the men who live their creed.

For to see the good in action is what everybody needs.

I can soon learn how to do it if you'll let me see it done.

I can watch your hands in action, but your tongue too fast may run.

And the lectures you deliver may be very wise and true,

But I'd rather get my lesson by observing what you do,

For I may misunderstand you, and the high advice you give,

But there's no misunderstanding how you act and how you live.

Malcolm's brother, Philbert, who had been an especially devoted Christian as a young child, had written to Malcolm in prison saying he had discovered the "natural religion" for Black people. Malcolm's two brothers, Reginald and Philbert, and two of his sisters, Wilfred and Hilda, had joined the Nation of Islam. [15] Both Hilda and Reginald visited Malcolm in prison and continued to send him literature produced by the Nation of Islam. Finally, after writing letters for more information, Malcolm received a reply letter from Elijah Mohammed, the leader of the Nation of Islam.

Malcolm converted. "The leap of faith, which he completed before or by early 1949, was not achieved without conflict; the price was complete submission to Allah. The conflict was so intense that it took Malcolm a week to bend his knees and pray for forgiveness. Every time he began to prostrate himself, something drove him back up. But his need for atonement, he later acknowledged, drove him back down." [16]

Malcolm used his time in prison as practice for spiritual discipline. "I was in prison before entering here .... The solitude, the long moments of meditative contemplation, have given me the key to my freedom." [17] Dancing, alcohol, drugs, tobacco, gambling, and all criminal activity were given up for hard work, short vacations, less sleep, and seeing sports as a frivolous pursuit. Cosmetics were discouraged by the Nation of Islam, swimming with the opposite sex was forbidden, men and women were separated in temple worship for concentration's sake, dating was seen as a danger, and premarital sex was called fornication. Such discipline soon began to help "demolish the myth that the majority of America's blacks were promiscuous, sports-crazy, hard-drinking, indolent lawbreakers." [18]

Fasting also became a new discipline for Malcolm. "The former fast-living drug addict who had tried to solve the problem of gratification by continual indulgence had become an ascetic who mastered the need for gratification by denying it." [19]

Malcolm rejected Christianity. From his own experience he saw it as incapable of saving his people. During his serious years in prison, he sought diligently and tirelessly to discover what kind of leader would appeal to America's Blacks. He converted to Islam because he found a discipline and purpose that could harness himself--and thus save others. Like most other converts to Islam, Malcolm apparently never knew he could have found the dignity and self-discipline he sought in the ancient, historic Faith of the Christian Fathers. He had only seen a pale and warped image of Christian Faith.

Tragic, is it not? In addition to their sad past, Blacks have borne the brunt and effects of both liberalism and Christian humanism. In response, their leaders have increasingly embraced the heresies of Islam and the Muslim faith.

In the remainder of this chapter (10 pages), 'Father' Hardenbrook develops his polemic in favor of his Eastern Orthodox faith and tradition (his so-called "Hope" for the black community) and further seeks to establish the "spiritual failure of the Protestant movement in America." He is correct in suspecting that there is something terribly aberrant in the Reformed tradition; but his "answer" is equally off-the-mark. Just how far off was witnessed this past summer (1998), when denominational powers permanently defrocked him and excommunicated several (19) of his colleagues as a "schismatic group." Our hope and prayer is that through this painful event these men discover that the "Spiritual Court of the Antiochian Archdiocese" is no substitute for the heavenly court of the Risen and Ascended Lord Jesus Christ!

We have provided a more detailed discussion in our review of the whole book. See Letter regarding the book - MISSING FROM ACTION.

[1] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 100.

[2] Harrison Raine, "A New Awakening," U.S. News & World Report, Oct. 30, 1995, p. 36.

[3] U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1995, pp. 31, 219.

[4] George Gilder, "The Roots of Black Poverty, " Wall Street Journal, Monday, Oct. 30, 1995, p. A18.

[5] Statistical Abstract, p. 99.

[6] MacGillis, Crime in America, p. 63.

[7] Kenneth G. Goode, From Africa to the United States and Then... (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1969), p. 18.

[8] King, Where Do We Go from Here, p.96.

[9] Gilder, "The Roots of Black Poverty, " p. A18.

[10] Carla Power and Allison Samuels, "Battling for Souls," Newsweek, Oct. 30, 1995, p.46.

[11] Steven Barboza, American Jihad (New York: Doubleday, 1994), pp. 50-51.

[12] Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965), p. 4.

[13] Ibid., p.5.

[14] Bruce Perry, Malcolm (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press), pp.7,8.

[15] Ibid., p.113.

[16] Ibid., p.116.

[17] Ibid., p.120.

[18] Ibid., p.148.

[19] Ibid., p.1.

Hello,

I just wanted to thank you for the excellent articles. The articles "Feminist Legacy" and "Thirst for Justice" are excellent to name a few. This phenomena is exactly what I have been seeing for some time. Occasionally a writer will touch on the subject. John Leo wrote an article for the Washington Post some time ago titled "Gender-Bent Discord." The article covered the rise of female spousal abuse toward men and how the feminist were not so quick to embrace this reality having made spousal abuse a political issue. There were also several articles written on child abuse and how the majority of this abuse is by women, but never reported this way due to the fact the newsrooms are very supportive of feminism even to the point of deception.

I believe there is much truth to the statements of households being "battlefields for domestic power struggles." As insubordination and arrogance rises among women, so does the ratio of broken homes, lesbianism and domestic violence. I'm an African-American man and lesbianism is definitely on the rise in my community among married and single women. I often get into conversations about why this is. It always comes down to the arrogance and disrespect in the homes; the casting off of all restraint. Arrogance and insubordination are often confused with strength. [Romans 1:28 speaks of being given over to a reprobate mind. My point in this statement is when all restraint is cast off and God judicially gives us over to certain things, this is not good, unknowingly we inherit much harm and evil.]

Back to my original point, this is the reason many African-American men are not in there homes... the ongoing domestic power struggles and not wanting to be feminized. I am not saying this to take away anyone's responsibility, just pointing out a fact. America talks about a race war; however, there is a serious gender war going on in Christian and non-Christian homes. In [public] schools, young boys are told to sit down, be quiet, and stop acting aggressive. Little girls are told to be aggressive and express themselves. This is the makings for wimps.

When men and women get sick and tired of being sick and tired in their own homes and return to the biblical guidelines laid down for homes, then change will occur. The key is men and women. We should take note of Isaiah 3:12: