Divine Rage

Malcolm X threw down the gauntlet on religion and violence. Did Christianity have nothing more to offer, he asked, than spiritual "novocaine," enabling Black Americans to suffer peacefully? On the face of it, this critique-religion as opiate of the masses-was nothing new, but in other ways Malcolm X's challenge was strikingly novel. He straightforwardly gave voice to the anger and frustration many Blacks felt over the expectation, in the words of Joseph Washington, Jr., that, unlike white Americans, they were supposed to respond to violence with "superhuman" calm and forgiveness. And unlike other critics of Christianity, Malcolm did not reject the imaginative power of religion to inspire political action. Instead, he told a different story about God's role in the struggle for justice than the one voiced by major organizations in the civil rights movement.