(RNS) — When visiting his maternal grandmother’s house in Florida, the Rev. William Lamar IV remembered feeling “frightened” when he stared at the picture of a great-aunt hung up prominently on the wall.
It wasn’t until his grandmother explained what the portrait represented that he began appreciating it.
“This picture of Aunt Viney is the first ancestor that reached out for me beyond time and space, to teach me something about who I was, biologically and genetically,” Lamar said in a recent interview with Religion News Service. “But also to teach me about what kind of human being I was supposed to be.”
Today, Lamar is the pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., a historic Black church that was vandalized by Proud Boys members in 2020 and, after a lawsuit, was awarded the trademark rights to the alt-right group’s logo. In his book, “Ancestors: Those Who Bless Us, Curse Us, and Hold Us,” releasing Tuesday (March 3), Lamar hopes to share what ancestral veneration has taught him about civic engagement and navigating the current political moment.
“This idea of lifting up ancestors, designing space ancestrally, is to always remind us of humanity,” he said. “My grandparents, great-grandparents, people, my parents’ generation … they taught us to be human.”
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Though the practice is often linked to Black diasporas and Indigenous culture, the national myths, heroes and historical narratives invoked by the American right are signs that ancestral veneration is deeply rooted in American culture, he said.
“No one venerates ancestors like white people who seek to keep power in their hands,” Lamar said.
Lamar said he was raised to look up to the example set by his ancestors — not exclusively family members but also Black historical figures fighting for African Americans’ freedom and for civil rights: journalist Ida B. Wells, voting activist Fannie Lou Hamer and civil rights activist Prathia Hall. Studying their lives and being in dialogue with their writings gave him moral and spiritual anchor, he said.
The Rev. William H. Lamar IV, front, leads a Palm Sunday service at the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, March 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades)
The practice is also at the core of the Christian tradition, he argues in the book. The apostolic tradition — passing on Jesus’ teachings as delivered to the Apostles — or the Lutheran church’s reverence for Martin Luther are examples of that. Jesus himself, going up to the Mount of Transfiguration to dialogue with Moses and Elijah, shows deference toward his ancestors, the pastor said, citing the Gospel of Matthew.
An ordained itinerant elder for the AME for nearly 20 years, Lamar has pastored congregations in Florida and Maryland. He also served as the managing director of leadership at Duke University’s Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. Lamar said the Black church has a long tradition of celebrating and learning from ancestors.
Black church elders, he noted, gave him attitudes to model and offer in response to the vision of America promoted by the Trump administration. Anthems such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ “Wade in the Water,” a 1901 spiritual, gave him the image of a “water-troubling God,” a foundation of his theological views.
“Melding that understanding with the kind of humanity that I was taught to model and live, it just upset me deeply,” he said. “The waters are whirling and boiling, and we must enter them.”
As he observes what he sees as a rise of authoritarianism and a turn toward anti-democratic practices, Lamar said more Americans should consider how examples set by their forefathers can help them be more engaged politically.
Yet, popular Christian culture, which he says is influenced by white evangelical theology, has downplayed and demonized ancestral veneration. “I think that we need a different theology,” he said.
The question, says the pastor, isn’t whether venerating ancestors is acceptable but rather which ancestors we choose to elevate. It came up starkly when Proud Boys members burned down a Black Lives Matter sign on the lawn of Metropolitan AME in December 2020. They too, were unleashing “ancestral energy of political violence,” he said.
