Pondering Meaning of Kwanzaa
Black Christians' Views Diverge

By Hamil R. Harris and Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 26, 2005

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.

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.