Why Do We Cling to Scripture? Our Lives Depend on it.

More than other groups, black Americans dive deep into the Word.

It’s a Sunday evening and we’re just kids—black kids, in fact. We should be outdoors in fading daylight, slurping Mama’s homemade ice cream, catching fireflies, watching our parents laugh with neighbors, changing the record player—turning it low to soft-serenade our long-running, after-church meal.

Instead, dinner’s over and we kids are back at church. And get this: We kids are happy about it. “Sit next to me,” a friend whispers, pulling me over to her. We compare the outfits we’ve worn. Our summer sandals. Our straw summer handbags. As the boys come in, we try to act aloof, as if we don’t care. One boy pulls my friend’s curly ponytail. She starts to protest, but in walks our teacher.

“Let’s turn to Genesis.”

That’s our Bible leader, our Mr. Bell, starting a Sunday evening class for teens at the Cleaves Memorial CME Church in northeast Denver. It’s the Jim Crow ’60s, and this church is our heart place—our safe house sanctuary—in our red-lined cow town. We’re far from our parents’ Southern birthplaces and Dixie traumas. Yet we all have Bibles. White leatherette among the girls. Grown-up black among the boys. (Or a pew Bible if you forgot to bring yours.) For all of us, our Bible is something we don’t hold loosely—it’s something, indeed, to grasp, chew, swallow whole, and inhale, as if our lives depend on it.

Our lives do. We are black, and the wrong against us is a scourge and it’s sin. A toxic cocktail of lies and fears, the hurling mix of madness intends to kill us, again and again, every American day. When just leaving your home could mean risking your own death, your daily life ...