American christianity is a cargo cult

Haha I sympathize with this meme. But it applies to the colonized as well as the colonizers. I do tend to fault impoverished people for shackling themselves to church dogma. Religion rationalizes and preserves inequity. Of course this ignores that African American congregations are community centers above everything else. To cast off religion would deprive believers of their whole social fabric. But isn’t that like arguing that slave plantations were more than places of involuntary employment? Obviously tobacco and cotton plantations were the centers of slave communities. To end slavery threatened a slave’s source of everything: sustenance, shelter, family and community. Small wonder most slaves resisted those agitating for abolition. Slave rebellions were always betrayed by fearful slaves. No churches advocated for abolition. Even the civil rights movement a century later, was resisted by African American churches, except for a tiny few associated with MLK. Everyone today pretends to have marched with MLK, even as they admonish their followers to stay in their pews! Ferguson ignited the Black Lives Matter movement despite local preachers incessantly calling for the protests to cease.