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Inspired
Inspired is the nation's leading public radio show about faith, ethics and spirituality. Each week we offer you analyses of the big headlines alongside lesser-told stories – those of Orthodox Jewish artists and African-American atheists, Muslim feminists and spiritual seekers. Through these stories, a rough sketch of our country’s religious landscape begins to emerge. It’s a marketplace of beliefs and ideas too complex for sound bites, and too important to ignore.
How Far to the Promised Land with Rev. Esau McCaulley (Originally broadcast in September 2023.)
In 2017, an unexpected traffic accident killed Rev. Esau McCaulley’s father. His family then asked him to take on a difficult task: delivering a eulogy for a father who abandoned him. The ritual of learning about his father led him on a journey to discover parts of his family and his story that were until then missing. In conversations with elders, he saw complexity and began to interrogate the ideas of Black success that sometimes made him feel trapped. Those stories also provided a sharp contrast to the history he learned in school. Today, he sees the controversies around lessons on Black American history connected to a persistent mythology that the Civil War was not fought because of slavery but Southern heritage.
“This is Not the Story of An Exceptional Kid”
Rev. Esau McCaulley uses the memoir to write a story about the family and community that shaped him, not his journey or success. In each chapter, he introduces readers to a new person who he sees as shaping and forming the world that raised him. In interviews with family elders, McCaulley details one Black family’s experience and hopes in sharing their story, which challenges the dominant myths in America of Black success.
Rev. Esau McCaulley uses the memoir to write a story about the family and community that shaped him, not his journey or success. In each chapter, he introduces readers to a new person who he sees as shaping and forming the world that raised him. In interviews with family elders, McCaulley details one Black family’s experience and hopes in sharing their story, which challenges the dominant myths in America of Black success.
“…I Didn’t Think To Dream of It”
The journey to becoming a public theologian with best-selling books and a regular column in the New York Times was not something Esau McCaulley dreamed of growing up in Huntsville, Alabama. Demystifying his success as a writer, he explains how, for many years, he had no idea where it would lead, and that fame was not the goal. The urge to write for others he describes as a nagging calling, an urge that would not let him go.
“The Lost Cause Persists”
In the present-day battles over Black History lessons in textbooks, McCauley sees the stubborn persistence of the belief in the Lost Cause in the Confederacy at its core. He talks about the pseudo-historical narrative that the Civil War persists in today’s battles over teaching race and systemic racism in America’s public schools. At its root – an inherent disconnect between Black Christians and White Christians on how faith was used to defend an economic and political system that enslaved humans.
