Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion

by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

How long has it been like this? How long have we taught our boys not to cry while not understanding the tears that flow uncontrollably when we least expect them? How long have we defended the integrity of family values in public while being privately confused about the urges that drive us back to Internet porn, searching for an intimacy we

can’t quite imagine? How long have we asked a woman to “submit herself graciously” while ignoring the obvious signs of domestic abuse in our churches? How long have we scrambled to make it look like our homes and work are in control ...

White supremacy doesn’t persist because racists scheme to privilege some while discriminating against others. It continues because, despite the fact that almost everyone believes it is wrong to be racist, the 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. In short, it looks like normal life.

To be white and Christian in America is to be, on average, more segregated than your unchurched neighbors, whatever the color of their skin. How could this be? 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.

When the war was over and African American Christians gained citizenship in the South, their white Christian neighbors did not repent and ask forgiveness for their sins. Visit historic black churches throughout the South today, and you’ll find cornerstones marked 1865. With the legal right to own property, formerly enslaved Christians followed Richard Allen and others before them to establish congregations where the Christianity of the slaveholder did not hold sway. Today, we call these congregations “black churches” and often assume that people self-segregate because of cultural differences that are value neutral. But our racial habits are directly connected to a violent and heretical past. A gospel that does not interrupt them perpetuates a church that is broken by sin.

Whenever that circle of trust has existed—wherever people who have been raced as other have gathered to stay sane and make sense of their world—the gospel of Jesus has connected with power.

But the compound effect of sin-sick individuals is an unjust society. Along with racial blindness and racial habits, white people have inherited racial politics. Like our racial habits, racial politics have little to do with how each of us feels about other individuals. Try to talk to a white person about racial politics and the go-to response is some version of “that’s not what my black friends say.” And it’s true—because racial politics has never been about hating the people you know. Racial politics is about dividing us from people we don’t know through fear, then offering a savior to make us feel secure.

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.

Donald Trump did not create this tumult, and he was certainly not the first politician to exploit it for political power. But his ascent to the White House did clarify how, in a deeply divided America, the victory that many white Christians celebrated as God’s blessings was for sisters and brothers on the other side of our racial politics a descent into hell.

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

But for all the attention we’ve given this central teaching of Jesus, racial blindness has kept us from seeing what everyone in the first century knew as a fact of life: the cross is a consequence of confronting political power.

The way of the cross showed us that we were going to have to face some dark Fridays before we tasted Sunday’s resurrection.

In the Greek of the New Testament, “church” is ekklēsia—“the called-out ones.” To be called out of the patterns and practices of this world’s sinful and broken systems

into the economy of God’s grace is to become church. To participate in an institution called church that nevertheless reinforces this world’s broken systems is something far more cynical. I’m tempted to call it a country club for the middle class, but the country club is less tortured. Its members do not have to grapple weekly with a text and a tradition that have the power to liberate us from our self-imposed slavery, if only we would believe.

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19)

If this was Jesus’ first sermon, Rev. Barber asked, what does it tell us about the priorities of his earthly ministry? And how should it shape our vision for what we’re doing as a church in Goldsboro?

Over the next decade, a congregation of about 150 people invested $1.5 million of its own money in community development projects that brought over $10 million of investments into their neighborhood. They partnered with state and local government, businesses, congregations, and individuals to build fifty-six single-family homes, forty units of subsidized senior housing, a restaurant, and a community center, which houses a preschool, an after-school program, a gang-prevention program, and a reentry program for people coming home from prison. And twenty-five years after their leadership retreat, they still haven’t built a new sanctuary.

A pastor who went with me to visit Greenleaf—to hear this story from some of the people who’ve lived it—confessed on the ride home, “That is the most faithful local ministry I’ve ever seen. Yet I’ve sat quietly and listened as fellow Christians who saw Rev. Barber for fifteen seconds on TV accused him of not doing the work of the church.”

Raboteau put down in writing what he’d learned at his grandmother’s knee—namely, that the gospel of the enslaved church is preserved in its songs.

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.

But for those of us who’ve inherited the so-called privilege of social power, the practice of resistance is an invitation to stay on the battlefield with sisters and brothers who have no choice but to be there.

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.

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 am a man torn in two. The only gospel that can be good news to me is one that has the power to touch me down on the inside and heal the hidden wound that rends my soul. 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 t...

Just as laws and customs are passed down, one generation to the next, shriveled-heart syndrome has become part of white people’s shared inheritance. It’s a way of naming how we’ve been torn in two—why

why those tears flow with inexpressible emotions

when we try to face real issu...

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.