Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion

by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

from a religion that was making me worse.

“Wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told” (Mark 14:9).

But as in the Gospel stories, persistent women continue to cross dividing lines to worship the God who saves us from racial politics.

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years,” Frederick Douglass would later write, “but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

If we are honest, there is no time in our history we can return to when everything was as we say it should be.

To be true to our faith as well as our nation’s aspirations is to be on pilgrimage.

the “Christian” vote was framed as candidates who opposed abortion, claiming to be pro-life even as their policies were often detrimental to the lives of poor and black people in America. I, along with millions of other white Christians in America, was sold the stale bread of racism in this sweet and simple packaging of the Moral Majority.

I will trust in the Lord, I will trust in the Lord, I will trust in the Lord till I die. (Repeat) I’m gonna stay on the battlefield, I’m gonna stay on the battlefield, I’m gonna stay on the battlefield till I die. (Repeat) I’m gonna treat everybody right, I’m gonna treat everybody right, I’m gonna treat everybody right till I die. (Repeat)

The greatest threat to the gospel in America is not that it will be lost in translation; it’s that it will be confused for the Christianity of the slaveholder. As such, it can either be dismissed as unhelpful baggage or be embraced as a set of beliefs that prop up the world as it is. But either way, it doesn’t offer the gift of church—a people called out of this world’s system into the life that is really life.

The practice of resistance as “staying with” is an invitation to unlearn whiteness.

To say Black Lives Matter is not to say that officers’ lives don’t matter. It is to commit ourselves to stand with people who are being killed until we can, together, win police officers as our friends.

You sing this song, and you know you’re not alone. You’ve been invited into something big enough to hold all your sorrows. You’ve become a living member of the body of Christ.

Between the Christianity of the slaveholder and the Christianity of Christ there is the widest possible difference, I know. And yet I have loved and been loved by people who still cannot see the Brown v. Board of Education decision as anything other than unrighteous meddling in “our Southern way of life.” It was never about race. It was always about our right to decide how and where we want our children to be educated.

In short, when we trust the gospel’s practices, letting them direct our lives, we begin to have what the New Testament calls “church.”

White supremacy isn’t something I chose, but I have to own it. It is my inheritance. In this, I am not alone.

Reconstructing the gospel can never only be about the individual. This is why so many noble efforts at reconciliation fail. They pretend that broken people with the best of motives can simply opt out of hundreds of years of history through individual choices and relationships. Such relationships are necessarily dishonest, both because they ignore the real material conditions that weigh on people’s lives and because they offer a false sense of relief from white guilt, which keeps people like me from facing the hidden wound of our whiteness.

Nothing is uglier than the inevitable explosion when white people try to participate in antiracist work without addressing their own hidden wound. Each of us has to do our own soul work.

“Here’s what you’ve got to understand about white folks,” the deacon said to Rev. Barber. “At the end of the day, their choice isn’t whether the cause is just. What they’ve got to decide is whether their mama lied to them.”

But for white people who have learned to think of themselves as naturally in control, the rare experience of vulnerability introduces the possibility of the essential soul work that might lead to conversion.

the well-being of the planet very much depends on white people doing this work.

While none of us can do this work alone, it may well be that no work to reconstruct the body politic or the body Christ can be complete until white people deal with the division each of us embodies.

But if the white supremacy

is rooted in the shriveled hearts of millions of people who imagine themselves to be white, then personal practices to heal the heart are needed. This is the soul work that each white person must commit to do, each and every day.

The personal transformation that is essential for each of us is listening—and listening, in particular, to the voices of those who have been rejected because of their blackness.

Without a practice of listening to enlarge our hearts, it really doesn’t matter how much our lives are desegregated.