Pondering Meaning of Kwanzaa

Black Christians' Views Diverge

Raquel Reed, 11, performs at the Christmas-Kwanzaa celebration at the King Peace Center in Washington. (By Jahi Chikwendiu -- The Washington Post)

First she was little Theresa Robinson, the girl who went to church on Sundays with her parents, learned about being a good Baptist from her pastor grandfather and acted out the story of the infant Jesus in the Christmas play each year.

Then Theresa became Jamela, a young woman stirred to take an African name after discovering Malcolm X, reggae music and stories of European Christians converting Africans with images of a white Jesus.

Today, Theresa Robinson Diggs, 35, a married mother of four, is an active member of Open Heart Way of the Cross Church in Oxon Hill and someone who has given her life to Jesus -- a black Jesus. This morning, she will throw away the crumpled Christmas wrapping paper and begin seven days of celebrating Kwanzaa with her family, lighting red, green and black candles, watching African drummers and making homemade gifts in recognition of kuumba, the Kwanzaa principle of creative expression.

"I raise my children to be aware of who they are and their culture, but also to be spiritual, to follow God. These two things can't be separated," said Diggs, a jewelry designer who lives in the District and still sometimes goes by the name Jamela.

Sorting out faith and identity isn't always a matter of black and white. And so it is that, 39 years after Kwanzaa was created by the secular, radical black power movement -- and is sometimes seen as a challenge to Christmas -- the holiday is finding its way into churches and into the lives of the churchgoing black mainstream.

"In the black church, it is now becoming an acceptable celebration. Kwanzaa is in harmony with the church," said the Rev. Marvis P. May, pastor of Macedonia Baptist Church in Baltimore, where May has marked the pre-Christmas season of Advent by walking his parishioners through the principles of Kwanzaa.

Ministers and churchgoers described Kwanzaa as having moved beyond the politics of its roots, which date to a time when some American blacks saw Christmas and Christianity as having a decidedly white, European pedigree. Today, Kwanzaa, with its rituals and explicit focus on values, seems nothing if not spiritual.

"To me, the only thing that makes spirituality comprehensible is the ethical values it affirms," said the Rev. Cheryl Sanders, senior pastor at Third Street Church of God in the District and a professor of African American spirituality at Howard University's Divinity School. She leads her church in marking Kwanzaa by lighting candles, inviting the choir and congregants to dress in Afrocentric garb and discussing from the altar the holiday's principles: unity, self-determination, shared responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith.

Those principles resonate today, Sanders says, after the baby boom era of abandoning traditional ideals. "Kwanzaa is an example of a way to recover the intergenerational dialogue around values," she said.

For many, however, the relationship between Kwanzaa and the church isn't so clear.

Kwanzaa's founder -- black power activist Maulana Karenga, a black studies professor at California State University at Long Beach -- says the holiday was never intended to be a replacement for Christmas, or even religious. It is a cultural event, he says on his Web site, but with the "inherent spiritual quality" that all African celebrations have. The date is meant to summon African harvest festivals that fall in December, he says, but the Kwanzaa-Christmas connection has raised enough questions that it has its own entry on the site.

"Some celebrants see Kwanzaa as an alternative to the sentiments and practices of other holidays which stress the commercial or faddish or lack an African character or aspect," the site says.