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August 18 - September 15, 2018
My soul cannot be well without the society that made it sick finding health.
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.
Racism is about implicit bias as much as it’s about public policy. It’s why a white applicant with a criminal record is as likely to get a job as an African American with no criminal history. And it’s why African American veterans of World War II didn’t benefit from the GI Bill—legislation offering educational funding, low-interest housing loans, and other support for veterans—the same way their white counterparts did.
how a gospel that doesn’t confront racism is no gospel at all.
the foggy morning of the soul—that
the only good news that’s worth believing comes through loud and clear at the end of your rope.
Jesus didn’t come to preach a new gospel. Jesus came to reconstruct God’s good news, which religious leaders had turned against itself.
a Moral Majority emerged in the 1980s to subvert almost every systemic change Dr. King had died for.
Ours is a shared story, and all of us bear some responsibility for the mess we are in.
I’m trying to expose how racial blindness, racial habits, and racial politics are tied together in the slaveholder religion that has been passed down to in America us simply as “Christianity.”
Remembered as a domesticated preacher who focused on the “content of their character,” King became a household demigod of American civil religion, perpetuating the Redeemers’ myth in a new, postracial chapter of American history.
No, I have no room to judge. I can only confess.
More and more I realize that reconstructing the gospel is, first and foremost, about knowing which Jesus we follow.
To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.
Christians are more likely to be racist, homophobic, self-righteous, and blindly patriotic. Not just in the past. And not just in the South. This is the lived experience of twenty-first-century Americans. Theirs is not an angry rebellion against conservative values. It simply seems to them that the Christianity of this land makes people worse.
Still, the Jesus whom Frederick Douglass trusted doesn’t give up on someone like me. This Jesus hasn’t given up on any of us. He finds us in our self-deception and interrupts us. He invites us to follow him into a whole new
He was, instead, interrupting religion’s tendency to turn against itself. Jesus was saving us from ourselves—even from religious sin.
also naively suggested that these young people had the freedom to choose biblical faithfulness in all the same ways I did.
Their religion didn’t temper their violence. It added fuel to the flames.
our very worst sins are almost always things we know to be our Christian duty.
also helped me explain to myself how racial blindness is at the root of so many of our religious contradictions in America.
Our racial blindness is generational and multilayered, folded in among all that is true and good about our faith. There is no easy way to be freed from it.
my problem as a white man was that I didn’t know how to live in skin.
a faith that keeps you from living in your own skin can only make you less human.
Because even though slavery ended in 1865, most white Christians went on reading the Bible and seeing the world around them exactly as they had before.
Stringfellow did what Christians have always done to justify injustice. He assumed that the status quo was normal. Abraham, the father of our faith, owned slaves. So did New Testament Christians. Jesus himself had not condemned the practice so it must have been acceptable. Stringfellow, like many before him, read in the curse of Noah’s son, Ham, a divine cause for the race-based subjugation that had become a matter of law in America.
Because his so-called gospel prioritized the eternal security of souls above the temporal living conditions of bodies, Stringfellow simply could not see the inherent connection between bodies and souls.
Instead, we Christians who think we are white vacillate between naive nationalism and a pseudospiritual disavowal of politics.
Jesus gives sight to the blind. But we all have to admit our own blindness—even those of us who have pledged to follow him.
But what if Jesus doesn’t let you look away? What if he doesn’t let you fix anything? What if he looks at you and asks, “How long has it been like this?”
“She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.”
daily habits of our bodily existence continue to repeat the patterns of white supremacy at home, at school, at work, and at church. White supremacy is written into our racial habits.
The heresy of America’s segregated church is rooted in the racial habits of the heart that grew out of the nineteenth century’s struggle with America’s original sin.
a continuation of racial segregation was sanctioned as Redemption.
Clansman into one of cinema’s first feature films, The Birth of a Nation.
Change your racial habits and you change the way you see the world.
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.
Racial politics is about dividing us from people we don’t know through fear, then offering a savior to make us feel secure.
“I listen to you until I understand what you want, then I help you get it. And when we get about halfway to what you want, I tell you what I want.”
There is nowhere you can go to find the pure, peaceable, and unadulterated Christianity of Christ.
slaveholder religion has infected us all.
he wanted to build movements, not monuments.
The other half of history is an invitation to live into another story.
fusion politics offers us a form of moral witness in the way of Jesus.
the cross is a consequence of confronting political power.
relationships. A cross is what you’re forced to carry after you’ve been identified as an enemy of the established social order.
They weren’t searching for a model of faithful public engagement. Instead, they were trying to defend the only model of church they’d ever known.
When church growth isn’t about how many people show up for services, but rather how many oppressed have been set free, then building a new worship space isn’t as important as building a movement.
No congregation is untouched by the Christianity of the slaveholder; we’re all called to conversion through gospel practices.
the gospel of the enslaved church is preserved in its songs.
