Pondering Meaning of Kwanzaa

Many black churches -- including many of the region's megachurches -- do not mark Kwanzaa, for various reasons.

A national campaign called "Merry Christmas, Not Happy Kwanzaa!" was launched last year by Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, a conservative Los Angeles-based group aimed at rebuilding the black family.

"If you believe in Christ, all you need is Christ," said the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, the group founder, who calls Kwanzaa "racist, anti-American, godless, separatist and Socialist."

The Rev. Nathaniel Thomas, pastor of New Redeemer Missionary Baptist Church in Forestville, said he sees Kwanzaa as an attempt to replace Christmas. "Kwanzaa is celebrating Christmas from an Afrocentric perspective," he said.

But several megachurch ministers said they don't mark Kwanzaa simply because it has nothing to do with Christmas.

"It is not in competition with Christmas," said the Rev. Perry Smith, pastor of First Baptist Church of North Brentwood. "It was designed as a cultural celebration of one's heritage, as opposed to the celebration of the birth of Christ. To celebrate Kwanzaa is not to deny Christ."

The Rev. Lawrence Davies, a former longtime mayor of Fredericksburg and pastor at Shiloh Baptist Church (Old Site) there, said the black American struggle for unity and self-determination that Kwanzaa emphasizes is an inherently spiritual pursuit.

"You have to go beyond the human realm for inspiration," he said.

For that reason, he believes there is no reason Kwanzaa can't be easily incorporated into black church services. So has he? "I have to confess, I haven't," he said. Many of his parishioners come from rural areas and may see the Kwanzaa-Christian border more distinctly than do people in urban areas, he said.

By some yardsticks, Kwanzaa remains peripheral. Many -- if not most -- black churches purposely do not acknowledge it, and it is largely ignored commercially. But it has resonated far beyond what many expected.

"If I went back to the '60s and '70s and I was a betting person and someone asked what would survive: Kwanzaa, dashikis or the Afro-pick, I would have said the Afro-pick," said E. Ethelbert Miller, longtime director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University. "I have to give Karenga credit."

Miller and others have a theory about why Kwanzaa has not only endured but is weaving its way into the Christian mainstream: Perhaps the secular holiday is putting the spirituality back in Christmas for some people.

"I get disappointed in Christmas, because it gets away from the true meaning. People get bogged down in buying expensive stuff. And that hasn't happened to Kwanzaa," said the Rev. Denise King Miller of the nondenominational Divine Science Church of the Healing Christ. She is Ethelbert Miller's wife.

For Denise Miller, Kwanzaa affirms the duality of being a black Christian in this country. She recalled growing up very much in the minority in Des Moines and how her mother and grandmother hired a black Santa to come visit her and her sisters. Not only was Santa white, but there were no black dolls. Her grandmother finally found one, and all the sisters shared it.

"That was my mother's Kwanzaa," she said.