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May 28 - June 1, 2020
So-called 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.
I thought about how the same gospel that made some Christians want to sing praise music had sent a black person running for freedom in the nineteenth century and another fleeing the DPAC in the twenty-first century.
I’ve seen it transform lives, lift up the brokenhearted, and spur people from bondage toward freedom. But like every good gift from God, the story of Jesus has been hijacked to serve the opposite of what God wants. The institutions of Christianity, the words of Scripture, the very message of the gospel was twisted 150 years ago to endorse what we now readily confess is sin.
I am a man torn in two.
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.
Racism is about implicit bias as much as it’s about public policy.
When white Christians refuse to hear cries for justice from black and brown sisters and brothers, it is one more symptom of the racism that has long divided our souls, our congregations, and our nation. 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.
No one needs to tell this young black man that all lives matter.
They have shown me how a gospel that doesn’t confront racism is no gospel at all.
I call it the foggy morning of the soul—that liminal time when you can see just enough to pull the car out of your driveway—but you aren’t quite sure you see where you’re going. We turn our headlights on in such a situation. We sit on the edge of our seats, eyes wide open to detect whatever might emerge before us. We are afraid, yes. But we lean in, because there’s no other way to get where we are going.
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.
Jesus didn’t come to preach a new gospel. Jesus came to reconstruct God’s good news, which religious leaders had turned against itself.
Reconstruction was the name they gave their brief attempt to make formerly enslaved people full citizens of the United States. Because that effort was subverted by people who called themselves Christian, slavery did not end. It evolved into Jim Crow in the South, segregated ghettos in the North—an existence both separate and unequal.
reconstruction is, in fact, what Jesus has always been about.
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.
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. 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.
For the first time, Cleopas realizes why Jesus’ message had thrilled him: Jesus was reconstructing the gospel.
the same Jesus who met Cleopas on the road to Emmaus is here, living and active, walking alongside you and me. Sometimes he’s holding a Styrofoam cup, begging us to see him, and sometimes he’s holding a sign that says Black Lives Matter, refusing to be ignored.
The stranger I’ve been taught to fear sits down at my table, asks the blessing, and breaks the bread.
“Were not our hearts burning within us while he opened the Scriptures to us?”
Because sin is, at its very root, self-deception.
Truth was, I didn’t have a clue. Here I was preaching grace and the good life, and a young brother who could hardly remember his mother and whose father, I’d later learn, was in prison, was showing me what it looks like to bear ignorance graciously.
My false confidence was all tied up with a piety that my religious tradition reinforced rather than challenged. Somehow I’d internalized this idea that being Christian was about knowing what’s right.
our very worst sins are almost always things we know to be our Christian duty.
And white evangelicals can’t ignore black and brown sisters and brothers in America who ask why 81 percent of us voted in 2016 for a man who was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. At least, we can’t ignore them if we see them.
Franklin Graham sincerely compared the enslavement of African Americans to a conservative being asked to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple or to a guy who might find himself in a bathroom stall next to a man who used to be a woman.
far too often, our piety looks like sin to people of color who feel they wear their skin like an invisibility cloak before white evangelicals.
he warned those who gathered for prayer that progressive was a euphemism for atheist.
he lauded Republican Governor Pat McCrory’s Christian values, despite a federal court ruling just months before that found a North Carolina bill had “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
Freeman steered religion toward one great end: to make America great again.
God who raised Israel up out of Egypt was not working to deliver African Americans from slavery to freedom as the abolitionists so impudently insisted. He was, instead, creator of an institution in which people of color are subject to white rule. “Their state of pupilage never ceases,” Freeman wrote. As this god would have it, white men are responsible for maintaining order.
Of all the prophetic words in Scripture, Bartimaeus’s simple confession may be the most damning of slaveholder religion and its habits, which have been passed down to us. If we are honest to God and ourselves, we have not wanted to see. Far too often, we have chosen blindness, even refusing the hands of friends who reached out and tried to lead us to the one who could restore our sight.
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.
As long as we sacrifice ourselves to a false sense of duty—fighting for what we already know to be good and true—we are captive to the spirit of men who held other people captive.
Maybe we even learn that our true Christian duty is to see and want one another.
But those urges, I knew, had to be resisted—at least until marriage. That’s what they taught us in the True Love Waits program.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Mario. It wasn’t even that I couldn’t perceive him there in front of me as a fellow human being, created in the image of God. No, it was more that he and his friends looked “like trees walking around.” I didn’t have any capacity to comprehend their reality.
my problem as a white man was that I didn’t know how to live in skin. This was the poverty of my so-called privilege, what kept me from seeing the fullness of the gospel’s power for my own life, for Mario, and for the rest of God’s good world.
Tupac understood how any art that echoes the rhythm of life is simply human.
By virtue of their whiteness—and for no other reason—they imagined a divine right to own black bodies.
For you, a son of so-called privilege, puberty means beginning to make sense of why you kissed Imogene down in the hay pile when y’all were six and why you both always knew you could never tell a soul. It means coming to terms with the fact that you and Imogene both share your father’s nose. And it means beginning to internalize an arrangement in which you will one day inherit as property the woman who both competed with your mother for your father’s love and nursed you at her breast. If you were a good Episcopalian, as most plantation families were, this is also about the time you would be
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Growing up Southern Baptist in North Carolina, I memorized Scripture in the King James Version and engaged in a serious program of discipleship as a white adolescent without ever giving serious consideration to the Southern in our denomination’s name. Then in 1995, the summer before my freshman year of high school, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) issued an official apology for its endorsement of slavery. There it was. We’d separated ourselves from our
American Baptist sisters and brothers some 150 years earlier in order to stay “Southern” and keep our slaves. Enough water had passed under the bridge for our elders to decide that it was time to bury that hatchet. They said they were sorry. But their concession stirred up old fears.
Before I had finished high school, a conservative movement within the denomination insisted we had become too liberal, took over the denomination, and forced everyone who worked for the International Mission Board to sign a statement of faith to which they added an article about female submission. It was the first time in...
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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.
Instead, we Christians who think we are white vacillate between naive nationalism and a pseudospiritual disavowal of politics.
But Jesus does not imagine himself as a white man who always has the answer to whatever problem presents itself. He is instead, as Scripture tell us, the Great Physician who searches our souls and sees us with greater clarity than an MRI.
To confess that racism is America’s original sin is not simply to acknowledge that slaves came over on the same ships that carried the missionaries and the political ideals that were eventually written down in America’s founding documents. We all know this is true. But anyone who asks in the midst of a particular racial crisis, “How long have we been like this?” is likely to be accused of simply stoking the fires of racial resentment.
Many white people would rather do something to address the symptoms we can see than acknowledge our original sin. Racism isn’t only a part of who we’ve been. It is, in ways we don’t even comprehend, who we are. It has cut us to our very core, severing soul from body. Which is to say, if we are honest with ourselves, we carry the wounds of white supremacy in our bodies.
