Howard Thurman’s “Deception as Coping Mechanism, Sincerity as Liberation”

Howard Thurman’s classic, Jesus and the Disinherited, casts Jesus as one whose ministry is for all whose backs are against the wall. Published in 1949, Thurman’s book addressed Jesus’ ministry in light of African Americans’ suffering under racial oppression and became a favorite of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Thinking of what Frances faced in her childhood home, I thought of Thurman’s work around how deception is “perhaps the oldest of all the techniques by which the weak have protected themselves against the strong.” Frances fought to stay alive by going along with her parent’s rules, but it was a sincerity that ultimately freed her from her prison.

Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

“It is only when people live in an environment in which they are not required to exert supreme effort into just keeping alive that they seem to be able to select ends besides those of mere physical survival. On the subsistence level, values are interpreted in terms of their bearing upon the one major concern of all activity - not being killed. This is really the form that the dilemma takes. It is not solely a question of keeping the body alive; it is rather how not to be killed. Not to be killed becomes the great end, and morality takes its meaning from the center. Until that center is shifted, nothing real can be accomplished…

Even within the disinherited group itself artificial and exaggerated emphasis upon not being killed tends to cheapen life. That is to say, the fact that the lives of the disinherited are lightly held by the dominant group tends to create the same attitude among them toward each other…

It may be argued that the insistence upon complete sincerity has to do only with man’s relation to God, not with man’s relation to man. To what does such a position lead? Unwavering sincerity says that man should always recognize the fact that he lives always in the presence of God, always under the divine scrutiny. Here all men stand stripped to the literal substance of themselves, without disguise, without pretension, without seeming whatsoever. No man can fool God. From him nothing is hidden…

Sincerity in human relations is equal to, and the same as, sincerity to God. If we accept this explanation as a clue to Jesus’ meaning, we come upon the stark fact that the insistence of Jesus upon genuineness is absolute; man’s relation to man and man’s relation to God are one relation.

A death blow is struck to hypocrisy. One of the major defense mechanisms of the disinherited is taken away from them. What does Jesus give them in its place? What does he substitute for hypocrisy? Sincerity. But is sincerity a mechanism of defense against the strong? The answer is No. Something more significant takes place. In the presence of an overwhelming sincerity on the part of the disinherited, the dominant themselves are caught with no defense, with the edge taken away from the sense of prerogative and from the status upon which the impregnability of their position rests.”