White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

by Robert P. Jones

One of the most impressive things about the journey of the two First Baptist Churches in Macon is that FBC of Christ has not succumbed to a mistake that most white Christians make when they engage in this work: reaching too directly for reconciliation. Dickison had this to say about the challenges of the reconciliation paradigm: I’ve stopped using the word reconciliation… for what we’re doing. I’ve started using justice work more, not saying racial reconciliation, but really talking about racial justice. When we throw around the word reconciliation, especially as white Christians, white people, we’re betraying our desire to just kind of move through all of the hard stuff just to get to the happy stuff. So, when we’re talking about justice work, for me we’re getting into these much stickier questions of what has been lost, what is owed.9 And justice, rather than reconciliation, takes white Christians into difficult terrain indeed. Even with all of the work done at FBC of Christ to come to terms with the church’s history, Dickison says, “We have lamented that, we have confessed that to a degree, but what we haven’t done is repented for that.” That next step, repentance, involves the difficult question of restitution and repair.