c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.)

(UNDATED) In Richard Llewellyn’s timeless classic, “How Green Was My Valley,” the ominous heap of coal slag threatening the Welsh village in which young Huw Morgan lives serves as a metaphor for the price of progress. The simple customs and biblical values that characterize life in the valley are incrementally but inevitably undermined by the industrial revolution that consumes the coal and the labor issues that threaten the miners. Left in their wake are the refuse of the coal mines and Huw’s rose-colored memories of a more virtuous time.

It is a cautionary tale illustrating how civil society can become uncivil. In our embrace of the new and trendy _ whether in technology or social convention _ we are often tempted to discard what has sustained us thus far.

For example, I have observed with increasing concern the lack of regard many young blacks have for the church. Notwithstanding data from Gallup and other survey groups showing African-Americans to be the most religious of all Americans, there is a disturbing trend among black men in particular to find spiritual sustenance outside of the traditional church.

As Lawrence Mamiya and the late C. Eric Lincoln noted in their 1990 study, “The Black Church in the African American Experience,” a typical black church contains fewer than 300 members, only 75 of whom are male. In 1993, writing in a Canadian religious journal, Mamiya and Lincoln gave at least a partial explanation for this exodus, arguing that many black men feel that the church has become irrelevant to the needs of the black community. They also found that African-American men accounted for 90 percent of American converts to Islam.

What this suggests is that black men are converting to Islam _ and perhaps other faiths as well _ because they are angry with the Christian church. This is significant because it is the church that has traditionally produced the leaders of the black community.

As social critic Carl Upchurch has correctly written, “The churches became the repository of our African culture and the womb of our moral, social and political development. And the best church leaders produced civil rights leaders, (who) then went on to represent their voiceless, anonymous black flocks with intellect, vision, and courage.”

Thus, the departure of black men from the church represents a brain drain of critical proportions. Equally important, however, is the effect that the black male exodus has had on the black community as a whole. Far from improving our collective lot as a people, there appears to be a direct correlation between the generation-old exodus from the church and the increasing dysfunction and criminality within the black community.

For example, drawing on the Mamiya-Lincoln data, black educational consultant Jawanza Kunjufu noted that in 1940 _ at the height of racial segregation in the South, where most blacks still lived _ approximately 80 percent of black men attended church services on a regular basis. By 1990, fewer than one black man in three regularly attended church.

Curiously, according to black sociologist Andrew Billingsley, the percentage of black men living at home with their families went down by approximately the same amount, over roughly the same period. Thus, even as legal measures such as integration and affirmative action served to elevate the economic standing of millions of blacks, this phenomenon was paralleled by an exodus of black men from both their churches and their families. That a corresponding increase in illegitimacy, drug use and violent crime has followed the dissolution of the black family is well documented.

The net effect is that even as black men have pursued a more “relevant” and “progressive” spirituality outside of the church, the slag heap of dysfunction, criminality and death have stalked our families and communities.

Maybe pursuing “progress” isn’t so progressive after all.

KRE END ATCHISON