Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion

by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

white evangelicals, who say so much about what God says so little — and so little about what God says so much — have dominated public discourse about religion in America for my entire adult life. They have insisted that faith is not political, except when it comes to prayer in school, abortion, homosexuality, and property rights. They have overlooked the more than 2,500 verses in Scripture that have to do with love, justice, and care for the poor, and they have tried to make Jesus an honorary member of the NRA.

The original sin of racism in America began with a deeply flawed and demonic notion that shaped this nation’s development. Bad science claimed that black bodies were biologically deficient, then extrapolated a sick sociology that assumed that people of color had to be placed in subordinate positions. Evil economics perpetuated the lie that money and profit are the chief ends of human existence, and these ends justified almost any means. Slaveholder religion blessed all of this with a heretical ontology, asserting that God ordained racism, slavery, and systems of subjugation. The cumulative effect of this lie threatens not only the witness of Christianity in the world but also our existence as creatures on God’s good earth.

The main obstacle to beloved community continues to be the fear that people in power have used for generations to divide and conquer God’s children who are, whatever our differences, all in the same boat.

We don’t erase the memories we each carry in our body when we come to follow Jesus. But the Jesus I know can make the children of slaves and the children of slaveholders into friends who link arms and work together for justice.

When you live in a world that tells you your existence is a problem, you don’t have patience for a religion that says the same with a smile. Soul survival demands a good BS-detector for people who’ve been labeled black, criminal, ungodly, and undeserving.

I don’t just live in a divided world. I am divided. And if it’s true all the way down—not just for me, but for the sisters and brothers who’ve loved and taught me, then I must confess this also: the gospel I inherited is divided.

The gospel that was twisted to accommodate America’s original sin must also be reconstructed if we are to experience the healing that Jesus wants to bring. Otherwise, evangelism is violence and those of us who spend our time in church meetings are perpetuating a death-dealing culture without even realizing it.

When middle-class Americans silence the voices of poor black and brown people who know from daily experience that race and history still matter, our hardness of heart betrays a spiritual sickness that Jesus detected in the Pharisees of his own day. We, like them, have turned the gift of God’s law against itself. Splitting the good news in two, we refashion it as both a shield against God’s grace and a sword to wield against our neighbors. We turn God’s good news into our bad news.

Better to see how you’ve been deceived—how, even, you’ve deceived yourself—than to miss the gospel because you thought you already had the answer.

This is why Jesus said that the poor are blessed and the hungry will be satisfied and the merciful will be shown mercy. Not because God loves them any more than he loves the rest but because they know their need. They have a clear diagnosis. A hungry man knows he needs bread. A heart that’s been broken knows it wants mercy. And a soul that can see its own self-deception knows it needs good news, which is what the gospel is.

Why are millennials choosing to part ways with the faith of their parents? No doubt the reasons are many and complex. But one clear factor in the decline of white Christianity is a prevailing sense that Christians are more likely to be racist, homophobic, self-righteous, and blindly patriotic. Not just in the past. And not just in the South.

But long before we get to public policy, the bald fact of inequality exposes how white supremacy is ultimately about who we love and who we listen to, who we long to be with and how we interact with the so-called other. It’s about the patterns of our daily life and the desires that are tied up in them.

Here was a wealth of wisdom and community that I’d been cut off from—one I hadn’t even known I was missing, imagining myself to be a capable, educated middle-class individual. One of the illusions of whiteness, I’d begun to realize, was that each of us is somehow a world unto ourselves, responsible for the choices we make and the relationships we choose.

The last thing any attempt to reconstruct the gospel in America needs is a white man to lead the charge. Yet, this is what whiteness conditions people like me and Nicodemus to imagine. If poverty is a problem, something inside of us wants to start a campaign to end poverty now. The moment we wake up and realize that slavery didn’t go away but simply evolved, we think somebody has to do something. If not me, then who?

Racism thrives on the lie that I don’t need the people my life depends on—that they, in turn, don’t need me in a relationship governed by justice. The wages of whiteness, it turns out, is a loneliness in which individuals are damned to face the greatest challenges of life on our own. At the very center of this hell are those whose isolation is combined with power, deluding them into believing that the fate of the world depends on their hard work and good judgment.

When an officer asked me to leave, my body wanted to listen. To be compliant felt like the “Christian” thing to do.

A cross is what you’re forced to carry after you’ve been identified as an enemy of the established social order. Jesus says that when we join his movement, we’ll face daily consequences of this social nonconformity.

honest grappling with the Christianity of the slaveholder and the Christianity of Christ must, in the end, face the fact that white Christians in this land called America are the inheritors of tortured institutions, many of them rich in property and tradition, which nevertheless have experienced precious little church. What hope is there for such institutions? I hope by now the answer is plain enough—by God’s grace, a church did emerge on the edges of plantations in the American South. In it, people who had not called themselves Christian retold stories they had learned to read in the holy book of their enslavers. Then and there, out in the unsanctioned brush arbors, they started having church. And people have been having church in America ever since.

The Christianity of the slaveholder has shaped everyone’s imagination in America.

The basic goal was the same: building up an institution that justified itself by the number of people who showed up to receive spiritual nourishment. Whatever material ministry the church engaged in was secondary to this mission. No one could deny that Jesus calls us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and visit the imprisoned. But those works of mercy had been imagined as auxiliary ministries, dependent on the central mission of building up a spiritual institution. No one had ever made this case to them. It’s simply what they understood when they heard the word church. But what if church was something else? What if it was the movement Jesus invited people into when he invited them to join together in “setting the oppressed free”? What if evangelism was inviting others to join this movement and church work was organizing local efforts to keep the movement moving?

gospel practices fundamentally interrupt the racial habits that are too often perpetuated in church communities.

Black skin—even the black church tradition in America—doesn’t automatically grant anyone direct access to the Christianity of Christ. No congregation is untouched by the Christianity of the slaveholder; we’re all called to conversion through gospel practices.

The faith-rooted, black-led freedom movement in America is the source of church renewal that generations of white-led institutions have longed for without having the eyes to see it.

Slave Religion, Albert J. Raboteau made

Read later

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.

The practice of resistance as “staying with” is an invitation to unlearn whiteness. Late in his life, the prophetic writer James Baldwin frequently asked white Americans to consider what their ancestors had given up in order to become white. When they were German or Irish or Greek, what did they leave behind in order to step into America’s imagination of whiteness?

We are well practiced in self-deception. If we recall that no single issue for a quarter century after Brown v. Board was more important to white Southern Christians than segregation, it’s much less confusing why our various denominations have been in turmoil for the past decade over how the church should respond to homosexuality. We are well practiced in self-deception.

I get it honest. I was both born into an economy built on race-based slavery and baptized in a church that broke fellowship with sisters and brothers who said God was opposed to slavery. White supremacy isn’t something I chose, but I have to own it. It is my inheritance. In this, I am not alone. The world system that was literally fleshed out on this land that I call home is what we all now call the global economy.

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.

Whenever we try to start with the personal work of reconstructing the gospel, the individualism of the faith we’ve inherited almost guarantees that we miss the essential context of our personal conversion in community. But if we stop short of the personal work—if we deceive ourselves into thinking that we can reconstruct the gospel without addressing our divided souls, then we carry the germ of white supremacy with us into our most noble efforts to rid this world’s systems of racism. 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.

“The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community,” Baldwin observed. “America became white—the people who, as they claim, ‘settled’ this country became white—because of the necessity of denying the black presence, and justifying the black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle.” The inevitable end of whiteness is self-destruction, Baldwin saw.

Eventually, Bob came to the conclusion that, as a group, white people suffer from a malady that he calls the “shriveled-heart syndrome.” It is rooted in the experience of white people enslaving black people. “Slavery is an act of war,” Bob said. “You can’t maintain it without violence.” If black people were to be kept in slavery, they had to become an enemy. That meant cutting off any empathy that arose from witnessing the suffering of a fellow human being.

But the calling of the monastic is to lead a life of repentance—a “perpetual Lent,” Saint Benedict, the father of Western monasticism called it.

True repentance is never about beating ourselves up. White guilt can easily become the self-flagellation of a monasticism that has lost its way, but true repentance turns our hearts toward the love of God, compelling us to chase after the gospel life, no matter the cost.

three basic practices, which echo throughout the Scriptures: listening, staying put, and constantly reforming your life.

“Just shut up and listen” might be the most important instruction for anyone committed to unlearning whiteness. A shriveled heart, I know from experience, cannot listen well. In conversation, it interrupts to make a point. In daily life, it often prefers distraction to genuine engagement with God or other people.

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. Whether it’s the prayer warrior at your local AME church or the Black Lives Matter activist you meet at a local protest, white people need to cultivate the daily practice of listening to that person. We listen not only to hear where they are coming from but also to understand who we are in a world we share, though our experiences of it are vastly different.

It’s not enough to be in relationship. White and black people have a long history of relationship. For healing to begin, we must learn to listen with our hearts.

This is where the monastic practice of staying put becomes so important—because we white people don’t know what to do with our vulnerability. White fragility, while real, is more the exception than the rule. We’re more accustomed to white rigidity—to clearly defined roles and responses. We know precious little about lament.

“We used to tell white people they needed to check their privilege when they come to work with us,” a black pastor told me years ago. “So they stopped coming. Now they go on mission trips to Africa instead.” Rather than do the hard work of staying put, whiteness tempts us to believe that our efforts will be of more use (or more appreciated!) somewhere else.

Nothing you can do is going to change the world. But that’s no reason not to do it. If you spend a night in jail, standing up for what is right, you may not change anyone’s opinion on the issue. But you will change—and not only in your own estimation. Your public action will compel every person who knows and loves you to reconsider how whiteness has taught them to imagine the world.

Most of the social sins that have been committed in our tortured history have been perpetrated by Christians. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) we say, and it is true. But we practice self-deception if we do not acknowledge that the worst of these sins were done in the name of God. From Easter Sunday at the Colfax Courthouse to our family’s Easter dinner, we are a people divided by faith.

The black-led freedom movement has long insisted that there are two things white folks need to learn: when to shut up and when to speak up. One pitfall of whiteness is thinking you always have something important to say. Anyone who publishes a book about anything is subject to this temptation. But on the other side of the narrow way that leads to life is an equally perilous precipice—the danger of silence when you are the one who must speak up.

!!!