I have been reading the book, “Jesus and the Disinherited,” over the past few months as part of the online Renovaré book club. Howard Thurman’s classic was first published in 1949. While some of the specific content makes it clear that Thurman was a “man of his time,” I’m struck by how much of the message remains relevant today.
Thurman directs his message to those “with their back against the wall.” Being a man of his time and an African American, he focuses primarily on the plight of the “American Negro” in the Jim Crow segregated South. However, he acknowledges that many populations around the world find themselves in a similar predicament. For example, Thurman was deeply influenced by the experience of Mohandas Gandhi in India, where the Indian people were brutally oppressed by British colonizers.
While Thurman clearly focused on populations who were disinherited in his day, I think his message transcends time and can still be applied today. I imagine that everyone of us has at one point or another felt like they like they have been living “with their back against the wall.” Given that reality, maybe it’s worth thinking about what Thurman has to say to us in 2021.
After introducing the plight of the disinherited, Thurman proceeds to place Jesus in his historical context. This is such an important starting point for any Biblical study. We have to understand Jesus in the context in which he lived: Jewish, poor, and living under Roman oppression. In other words, the historical Jesus lived “with his back against the wall,” and thus, Thurman suggests, he can relate to the plight of the disinherited. The “religion of Jesus” (not to be confused with Christianity as it is often practiced today) has much to offer them—wherever and whenever they live.
The bulk of the book is three chapters that discuss what Thurman calls “the three hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, and the disinherited.” The first of these hounds is fear. There are many fears with which humans struggle, but the specific fear that plagues the disinherited is suffering violence at the hands of the dominant power. The weak come up with all kinds of tactics to avoid being killed by the strong.
Thurman talks about how fear makes us define ourselves relative to others. When others gain new freedom, I fear losing my privileged status over them. We fall for the lie that the only way they can possibly gain more is for me to have less.
Thurman says that the only remedy to fear is faith. That is to say, one has to become secure in one’s own identity as a child of God. An individual needs to feel like “they count” or that “they matter.” When one becomes secure in that identity, what others think of us doesn’t matter as much. That is to say, our external circumstances no longer dictate our perception of ourselves. Although it’s not exactly a positive example, Thurman (publishing in 1949) points out how part of what made Adolf Hitler’s message to the German youth so effective was that he made them feel like they counted, like their voice was heard. Does this sound at all familiar to us today?
While being a child of God is an essential starting point for overcoming our fear of the other, it’s not enough. Once we become secure in who we are, in general, we need to know what we are specifically. In other words, what gifts has God given me uniquely and who does God call me to be individually. Thurman argues that knowing who we are and what we are is the best antidote the disinherited can have as they stand against fear.
The second hound that the book discusses is deception, which has long been a tactic used by the weak to avoid the wrath of the strong. In fact, deception seems hard-wired into creation. Animals have evolved attributes and they adopt tactics that help them deceive predators. Similarly, deception is alive and well in human relationships. Children learn to use deception to manipulate their parents to get things they want. Likewise, Thurman talks about how, in a traditionally male-dominated world, women employ deception to get what they want. I personally think this is one of those places where the content is a bit dated. Deception is hardly unique to women; it’s a technique both sexes use to manipulate—and to get what they want.
Thurman talks about how lies can become habitual. (Indeed, we can learn negative habits as well as positive ones.) As he puts it, “the penalty of deception is to become a deception.” Can we think of any modern examples of this?
According to Thurman, the only true remedy to deception is uncompromising sincerity (or integrity.) Sometimes we attempt to “hold the line” on certain issues and compromise on others in order to survive. However, it’s hard to straddle the fence between honesty and deception for long. The Apostle James warns us that, “A doubleminded man is unstable in all he does”—James 1:8, KJV. In other words, eventually you’re bound to fall off the fence!
Last but not least, the book discusses the hound of hate. Thurman talks about how hate of the Japanese became acceptable in the aftermath of World War II. Hate, he explains, validates our negative feelings toward “the enemy” and provides a sense of significance to our endeavors. Hate provides a “tremendous source of dynamic energy” that temporarily fuels our enmity. Thurman describes how normal American life didn’t prepare young men psychologically to become “human war machines.” He writes that, “Something radical has to happen to their personality and to their overall outlook to render them more effective tools of destruction.” In other words , they have to be trained to hate the enemy. The problem is that once a person becomes “disciplined in hate, they find it hard to discriminate whom they hate. Thurman says that, whatever short-term “benefits” hatred may bestow, it ultimately “turns to ash,” and consumes the person—because it “guarantees a final isolation from one’s fellows.”
Thurman outlines a progression of hate in the book. He explains how hate usually arises in a situation where two people (or groups) have contact but not fellowship. In other words, they don’t really know each other personally—and certainly not intimately. (While not impossible to do, I think it’s harder to hate someone you know intimately.) In contrast, when you have contact but lack a true sense of connection, it can lead to what Thurman calls unsympathetic understanding of the other. That is to say, even though I don’t know you personally, I rather arrogantly assume I’ve got you “all figured out”—and the verdict is usually not positive. Of course, since I haven’t really taken the time to truly get to know you, my assessment can’t be based in reality. But that doesn’t matter, because I assume I “know” who you are and proceed to cultivate active ill will based on those misconceptions. If this goes far enough then it can lead to what Thurman calls hatred walking on earth in a human body—or we could say, embodied hate.
Jedi Master Yoda (from Star Wars) said: “Fear is the path of the dark side (which was all about deception). Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” This is a slightly different list of traits mentioning a couple “pups” of the hounds of hell: anger and suffering. Another similar list is Paul’s Works of the Flesh in Galatians 5:19–21. The essential message of all these lists is the same: These ravenous canines feed off of one another. They reproduce within the individual they inhabit and ultimately consume them. Thurman concludes that, “Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with [God]. He affirmed life and hatred was the great denial.”
What is the remedy, then, to these voracious scourges on human life? Is there a kind of “mace” that can be used to repel the hounds of hell? Jesus suggests the answer is love. (Paul starts with love and then proceeds to list eight other Fruit of the Spirit—Galatians 5:22–23—to counter the Works of the Fleshdiscussed above.) Of course, the cliché is that the Gospel in a word is love. It seems too simple an answer; yet anyone who has tried to actually live out 1 Corinthians 13 (and not just read it at a wedding) will tell you how hard it is. The religion of Jesus makes the love-ethic central. (The same ethic was also key to Gandhi’s teachings.) Jesus said that we should love our neighbors—and then demonstrated what he meant. As Thurman says it, Jesus shows (e.g., in the parable of the Good Samaritan) that “every [person] is potentially every other [person’s] neighbor.” He not only told stories about love—but he also lived love. He reached out the least, the last, and the lost. Jesus modeled agape love in all of his relationships and interactions not just with friends but also with “enemies”—with intimate allies, with the Jewish leaders (who collaborated with Rome), and with the Romans oppressors themselves. He gave the ultimate demonstration of love when he died on the cross.
In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.”
FOR REFLECTION [Read 1 Corinthians 13; Galatians 5:16–26; James 1:2–8]
· Can you think of a situation where you felt like “your back was against the wall”?
· Do the descriptions of the three “hounds of hell” resonate with you? Did you experience feelings of fear, deception, and/or hatred in your situation? Did they feed off of each other?
· Have you ever seen the progression of hate described above play out in your life?
· Do you really believe love is the “mace” that can drive away these hounds? It’s easy for us to say, “I love you”—but can we live love as Jesus did?
