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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jemar Tisby
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February 4 - February 15, 2021
“What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the [Equal Rights Amendment]. . . . What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”
the man who would become the darling of the Religious Right, Ronald Reagan. Reagan, a divorced Hollywood actor-turned politician who supported a liberal pro-abortion law while governor of California, certainly did not scream out “champion of Christian conservatism.”
In Reagan’s first term, antidrug spending by the FBI went from $38 million to $101 million. The Drug Enforcement Agency’s budget went from $86 million to over $1 billion. At the same time, the budget for the Department of Education’s drug prevention programs dipped from $14 million to $3 million.61
Christians have a responsibility to, at the very least, consider how the political connections between theologically conservative evangelicalism and conservative politics, namely through the Republican Party, have supported racial inequities.
After he died, the teenager’s body lay in the street for several hours in the summer heat in front of an ever-growing crowd of community residents before officials finally removed him from the scene.
Activists have deployed the phrase black lives matter because the cascade of killings indicated that black lives did not, in fact, matter.
many white Christians wrongly assume that racism only includes overt acts, such as calling someone the “n-word” or expressly excluding black people from groups or organizations.
Lecrae wrote an op-ed in the Huffington Post expressing the frustration he felt from battling the misperceptions of conservative Christians.
Anyabwile pointed out that his rejection came not as a result of changing his positions on the longstanding “culture war” issues of the Religious Right and evangelicals such as gay marriage, homosexuality, and abortion. Rather, the controversy began when he started talking about justice.
Ultimately, the organizations with which one chooses to affiliate in the cause of antiracism is a matter of conscience. The only wrong action is inaction.
Trump hardly fits the “family values” mold that conservative evangelicals had cast for their ideal candidate.
as well as an intense dislike of Hillary Clinton.
Evangelical support of Trump and dislike of Clinton went beyond policy concerns.
Perhaps Christian complicity in racism has not changed much after all. Although the characters and the specifics are new, many of the same rationalizations for racism remain.
Pioneering black historian John Hope Franklin said, “I think knowing one’s history leads one to act in a more enlightened fashion.” He went on to state, “I cannot imagine how knowing one’s history would not urge one to be an activist.”
black history did not start with slavery.
making Juneteenth a national holiday would help solidify the reality that black history is American history.
The first reconstruction occurred immediately after the Civil War when newly freed slaves joined in a flowering of black political, economic, and social participation. The second reconstruction happened during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s when activists assailed the stronghold of Jim Crow segregation. The third reconstruction is happening right now.
The entrance to the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which opened in 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama, has the words slavery evolved at the beginning of an exhibit showing how slavery morphed into modern-day mass incarceration.
Many Christians today say they would have been active participants in the civil rights movement fifty years ago. Now, in the midst of a new civil rights movement, is their chance to prove it.
Confronting the shortcomings of powerful and respected people has never been easy, but it has always been necessary.
