The New York Declaration

The New York Declaration

October 14, 2019

Given by:

Social Justice Commission of the Progressive National Baptist Convention

We come to this historical moment deeply disturbed by the overwhelming confluence of troubling dynamics that have converged in a potentially devastating tide of spiritual, political and cultural chaos.  For some it appears that the current crisis emerged rather suddenly with the ascent of the present presidential administration, which through a torrent of lies, innuendos, perverted public policy initiatives and Machiavellian machinations simply overwhelmed our capacity to absorb and process it all.  But the current crisis is no flash flood.  The debris laden tide swelling around us is laced with pathogens years in the making.  Were the waters to recede with an overnight impeachment, the landscape of American life would yet remain scarred or years after and the soil of our republic, poisoned but the toxins left in its wake.  Nor will the unwholesome aftermath be so easily cleared, not the atmosphere so quickly cleansed of airborne disease.  And it’s raining.


As with any flood, the thin veneer of carelessly laid coverings is washed away exposing what is often the wretched corruption of what lies beneath.  Issues declared dead and long thought laid to rest but merely buried alive eddy to surface in swirling conflict.  Issues of race, of labor, of economic justice, of the bill of rights, issues of education, such as the fair administration and allocation of resources, of criminal justice etc., all covered by the thin sediment of sentimentally cheap religious ideologies of togetherness and glib, self-congratulatory discussions of incremental progress re-emerge as the deep fractures in the bedrock of our socio-cultural topography are once again exposed.  And the fissures run deep.


The marauding waters of our current historical surge, running roughshod and reckless has failed, in the nature of the case, to discriminate between our cherished social institutions leaving the Church of Jesus Christ no less damaged and exposed that the other artifices and edifices of our cherished American experiment.

Ø  Exposed is the spiritual rot, moral corruption and the delusional racism at the heart of White Conservative Evangelicalism

Ø  EXPOSED is its root and ground in an idolatrous worship of Whiteness masquerading as the Christian Faith.

Ø  Exposed is the idolatrous worship of Whiteness as the ultimate ground of value and final arbiter of all values heretofore referred to simply as American or Christian, such as Democracy, freedom, the rule of law, Justice and Christian Faith.

Ø  Exposed is the complicity of many African American preachers and parishioners who betray their worship at the same time alter, gouging their own eyes in an act of devotional sacrifice to tap the source of their supreme validation.

Ø  Exposed is the intersection where the worship of Whiteness and an adulterous Christian religion are wedded ideologically to an exploitative and predatory economic system.

Ø  Exposed is the virtual identity of White Christian Nationalism and White Evangelical Christianity betrayed by the invocation of the Divine to sanction the subduction of our deepest value claims, shameful crimes and transparent political corruption for the sole purpose of shoring up the decaying underpinnings of Western White Supremacy and identity.  In the end the  Conservative Evangelical Right is no less nihilistic than they claim the relativistic liberal left to be.  And it is no wonder since each share in the same self-righteous presumptions of Whiteness filtered through related but alternative  semantic grids.  But at the core of both is an identity that supersedes God as the Supreme source of human worth and the arbiter of value.

Ø  Exposed is the false narrative of a White righteous America, to which all others are at best an addendum and at worse a contaminant of its otherwise God ordained perfection.  We see clearly what you are.  Over against the collapse of the more popular expressions of the Christians Faith into the spiritual rot of a Materialistic, Nationalistic, Corporatized Americanity thinly veiled by the sanctimonious odor of enthusiastic Pentecostalism, comes THE CLEAR CALL OF GOD IN CHRIST TO RESIST!

Unlike the objective of Martin Luther Kings Jr.’s Letter From A Birmingham Jail, this is no plea for cooperation, but rather the wholesale condemnation for the complete prostitution of the Christian Faith; of the idolatrous worship of Whiteness and the heretical synthesis of God and Nation.  We condemn and resist the moral bankruptcy of a perverted form of the Christian Faith in Black and White that affirms as Divinely ordered and sanctioned an economic system that places profit over people; the religion of wealth, the idolatry of celebrity; the culture of greed that encourages a criteria of success defined by the abundance of one’s of ignorant but trusting sentimentality to the detriment of the spiritual wellbeing of persons, the environment, the other of the most vulnerable among us.


We hear anew, in this hour and this world the summons of the Apostle Paul, “And be not conformed to this world: but by ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good , and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” (Romans 1:2)


Likewise, we reject and resist the claim of the more cynical among us that the Christian Faith is the White Man’s religion or that Justice is tangential to the thrust of God’s redemptive work in human history declared in and through the person of Jesus the Christ and sustained through the activity of the Holy Ghost.  The fact that slave holders and those who trafficked in the souls of folk though out Western History sought to either excise, dilute or otherwise obscure the Biblical testimony to god’s emancipatory providence gives eloquent testimony to the revolutionary potential of God’s word wherever oppression abounds.  For, “By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharoah’s daughter; Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches that the treasures in Egypts: for he had respect unto the recompence of the reward.  By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible.” (Hebrew 11:24 – 27)

My Miracle Birth Story

As a second generation baptist preacher, I grew knowing God early in life and knowing there was a special calling on me. As long as I can remember, my parents to told me the peculiar way I was born and that I was born to be great for God's glory. The story goes that my mom, Sister Raba Gilbert, had unfortunately, had internal stomach issues and was forced to receive a hysterectomy. People didn't know, but for years she wore a colostomy bag.

Well one day at an evening service, Deacon Alfred O'Neal (from Jerusalem Baptist) went to my father, Rev. George Gilbert, Sr., who was a minister at Central Baptist Church and said, "Rev. Gilbert, I know you want a son. I can't wait to see him running around this church." My father, not wanting to embarras my mother, sheepishly, laughs and says, "O no, we are find with our daughter, Lisa. God has blessed us." Deacon O'Neal, didn't recieve that answer as truth, and said, "No Rev Gilbert, I know you want a son." And at that instant, fell to his knees and begin to pray for my mother's womb to carry a son.

Time went on, and Deacon O'Neal would see my father, and just start laughing. He would say, "Do you see that boy running around by your legs? Do you see that boy running around this church?" My dad, again not wanting to embarass my mother would just laugh this old deacon off. Suddenly, my mom begin to have morning sickness, and she could not explain it. She and my dad went to her doctor, and the doctor, explained that there was no need to see her, because it was impossible for her to conceive. A few weeks later, the morning sicknesses continued and she went back to the doctor and just begged for a sonogram. By everyone's astonishment, my mother was pregnant with me. Not only was I an unexplained conception, but I was delivered exactly seven (7) years, on the same birthday, as my sister, Lisa. Above my crib, hung a sign "Mark 10:27 - And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible."

Without a boasting spirit, I can truly say that I was created for greatness and peculiarity.

Don't give up

https://youtu.be/zp37Ts1GWAk