Here is how the call of God came to the Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, Presbyterian Visionary, Scholar, Minister, Theologian, Professor, and Prophet (1950-2018), in Atlanta, Georgia, 1971. In her own words:

"So here I was having been brought up in the church all my life, and now being told in my reading and in the political movement I was involved with that Christianity was the opiate of the people. It was a slave religion, and so I went to seminary, not as a born-again, God struck me dead kind of person. I went as agnostic.

So when I walked into the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, I went to find out if this is a slave religion, I wanted to be in the vanguard telling people, 'We gotta get this out. Our liberation, our freedom is worth more than being numbed out by this religion that’s keeping us from being free.'

Within the first week of being in seminary, I was onboard as a liberationist. It was the best time, in 1971, to be in Atlanta. One-third of the men in my class had just come back from the Vietnam War. The other third of men in my class were in seminary to keep from going to the Vietnam War, and then the last third was there because they’d been told since they were three or four years old they were gonna be preachers.

So here were these young women, 20, 21, about six or seven of us who arrived in Atlanta, and they just assumed we were there to get husbands. It’s like, 'You’re not here to really study theology.' And we’re like, 'Yes... We gonna get our freedom. We gonna finish out the Emancipation Proclamation.'

So it was just a wonderful time, because the veterans from the war and the people who didn’t wanna go to war, and all of us right there, and James Cone’s book, Black Theology and Black Power, was out. The Bible and the Bullet by Malcolm X, Black Preaching, I mean it was just an incredible time.

The hermeneutical principle we used in our three years at ITC was that when we read Barth and Tillich, and Schleiermacher was always, 'How is this relevant to the black church?' So we could plow through these dead white men and their texts, because we had a question, 'How is this relevant to the black church community? If it’s relevant, make a case. If it’s not relevant, make a case.'

So we mastered that stuff, but we mastered it with a purpose, and so we would go up for four and five hours at a time theologizing, tearing apart – what do you mean by the grasp by an ultimate concern? What is your ultimate? What is a penultimate? I mean we’d just go back and forth, mastering the language, mastering the concepts. If it’s not relevant, make a case. If it’s relevant, make a case. It was a joy. I mean it was an intellectual high from ‘71 to ‘74.

The call for me was to get the word out that Christianity is not a slave religion, but Christianity is a liberating religion. It was just... a particular cohort group, I thought needed that information. Those of us who were just a little young to be civil rights freedom riders, but old enough to understand what the march on Washington in ‘63 meant.

That was the group I was gonna say, 'No, we don’t have to give up Christianity. What we need to be free is right here in this religion. It just hasn’t been unleashed, and that’s our job as liberating liberation theologians- to get the good news of the Gospel – to set the captives free.'

That’s what we’re here to do."

This excerpt is from a 2009 interview given by the Rev. Dr. Katie Cannon to the Fund for Theological Education. The interview is available in text and in audio via fteleaders.org, August 17, 2018.