Wanted: A WASP Killer

Wanted: A WASP Killer; REPENT. "God's kingdom is here." (The Message)

After 240 years, will the white American church finally repent of its WASP superiority?

"Hundreds of kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope. . . . Picture cards photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling the postcard showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of country schools the day's routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man." (The Crisis 10, no.2, June 1915).

On occasion, lynchings took place after church, on church property, with full approval of the church. Just as bad was the silence of the church nationwide.

America: From slavery to neoslavery (segregation, sharecropping, prison chain gangs, lynching, Jim Crow laws) to today's neoslavery: mass incarceration/racial wealth gap; in other words, 240 years of unending systems of oppression with the white American church usually approving or participating or standing silently by.

Millions of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants--white supremacy/superiority, supposed Anglo cultural superiority, and perverted religion---should commit social suicide---by deep repentance from Anglo cultural superiority/white American exceptionalism and by complete conversion to the kingdom of God as justice for the oppressed poor. Our founding fathers who believed in Anglo-Saxon superiority (Jefferson was fanatical in his belief) have passed this flawed American cultural gene down through history (see Race and Manifest Destiny). Most American Christians have never confessed this national sin so their conversions were shallow, incomplete. In fact, millions of born again Christians are proud of this idolatry.

James Cone documents the above in chapter two titled "The Terrible Beauty of the Cross and the Tragedy of the Lynching Tree: A Reflection on Reinhold Niebuhr" in his excellent book The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Niebuhr was in some ways one of America's great theologians, yet he was deeply flawed on racial and justice issues. He was only a moderate when America needed a radical. In some ways, James Cone admired Niebuhr:

"Today I teach a course on Niebuhr because of his profound reflections on human nature, the cross, and creative social theory focusing on justice, self-interest and power. My understanding of the cross is deeply influenced by his perspective on the cross. . . . What I questioned was his limited perspective, as a white man, on the race crisis in America. His theology and ethics needed to be informed from critical reading and dialogue with radical black perspectives."

But,in a telling footnote, Cone added:

"My biggest problem with Niebuhr on race was not merely that he failed to associate himself with black organizations fighting for racial justice but, more importantly, what Niebuhr wrote about America's greatest moral issue was at best moderate in a time when he was radical on other issues that were dear to him. . . . Niebuhr did not have a deep commitment to racial justice, at least not in his writings or his life."

How did the American church respond to lynching? Not well. Cone asserts: "White conservative Christian's endorsement of lynching as a part of its religion, and white liberal Christian's silence about lynching placed both of them outside of Christian identity."


Why this catastrophic failure? Is there a connection between the white church's failure on lynching and the total white theological failure to engage the extensive biblical teaching on oppression (the 555 OT references)? I think so. If the white church started preaching that oppression crushes, humiliates, animalizes, impoverishes, enslaves and kills person created in the image of God, it would have preached itself under conviction. But this biblical silence allowed the American cultural stance that white is right, best, superior, and even necessary for civilization to stand unchallenged. If major cracks is this wall of deceit and denial had appeared, if the wall supporting oppression had started to crumble, then the charity response would have been seen as inadequate. The church would have been pushed hard in the direction of repentance and justice.

The white church in the past and today in 2015 usually has chosen, either by participation or silence, oppression over justice. It needs a series of sermons on Isaiah 58 and James 2. Many of the Christian abolitionists, including Lincoln, believed in white superiority and black inferiority. The civil rights movement stopped legal segregation but not white supremacy. White oppressors then created another clever system of oppression---mass incarceration.

Wanted, for the first time in American history, a biblical white church that will attack and destroy white supremacy or WASPs or white superiority or the American trinity, not comfortably co-exist with them. After 240 years of massive racial justice failure, it is long past time for a crisis response. I suggest that each church, each seminary, each Christian college/university assign one person/faculty full time to organize/lead the response in their institution. I suggest the following books: Thomas Hanks, God So Loved the Third World: The Biblical Vocabulary of Oppression; James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Perry Yoder, Shalom; Edward Blum, W.E.B. Du Bois: American Prophet; Jennifer Harvey, Whiteness and Morality; Jennifer Harvey, Dear White Christian. By the way, most white American evangelicals are personal theists but social deists; Du Bois may have been a personal deist but a social theist.

Other quotations from The Cross and the Lynching Tree, a book that never would have been written by a white theologian:

"Lynching was not regarded as an evil thing but a necessity---the only way a community could protect itself from bad people. . . . "

". . . . cinematic masterpiece of racist propaganda The Birth of a Nation (1915), first seen at the White House and praised enthusiastically by President Woodrow Wilson. Whites, especially in the South, loved Birth and regarded seeing it as a "religious experience." "It rendered lynching an efficient and honorable act of justice" and served to help reunite the North and South as a white Christian nation, at the expense of African Americans."

A black Mississippian said, "Back in them days, to kill a Negro wasn't nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake. The whites would say, 'Niggers jest supposed to die, ain't no damn good anyway---so jest go an' kill them'"

"Whites lynched blacks in nearly every state."

"Like black men, they [women] were tortured, beaten, mutilated and hanged, burned and shot, tarred and feathered, stabbed and dragged, whipped and raped by angry white mobs." Not only lynching trees, but raping beds.

"Love in society is named justice."

"An apology, although important, . . . is not justice."

Apologies, charity, reforms and reconciliation are good and necessary, but alone they are not good enough, they are not substitutes for justice.

In addition to his chapter on Niebuhr, Cone also has a chapter on Martin Luther King; I drew these conclusions:

Niebuhr was a brilliant theologian but a limited doer of justice; King was also brilliant and a risk-your-life doer of justice.

Niebuhr has a limited understanding of oppression both biblically and experientially; King was deeply immersed in the poverty and oppression of others.

Niebuhr was better informed on racial issues than most white theologians, but he was too WASPish to go all the way; King practiced the Sermon on the Mount; he was a doer, not just a hearer.

Will the White American church repent and prepare the way for the kingdom of God? Repent---get rid of all competing allegiances, idolatries that stop the kingdom of God; for Americans, forsake the American Dream, American exceptionalism, white supremacy/superiority, WASPness, the American trinity of hyperindividualism, hypermaterialism and hyperethnocentrism. During my 88 years, I have discovered that most American Christians have a shallow understanding and commitment to the kingdom of God. Many have futurized and spiritualized the kingdom; few have a strong grasp of the present and social dimensions of the kingdom. Or many have falsely combined the kingdom with the American Dream.

The New Testament kingdom of God, like the Old Testament Sabbath year and the Jubilee year, is meant to be extreme, sweeping, radical, comprehensive, revolutionary, transforming. The Upside-Down Kingdom by Kraybill and the article "Jesus and the Kingdom of God" by Borg are among the few scholars who understand the profound social implications of the kingdom of God.

The Holy Spirit is the key to the incarnation of the kingdom of God here on earth. Borg asserts that the kingdom of not only refers to the reign of God, "but also to the life lived in response to God as King." According to Borg, the principles of life tied into the incarnation of the kingdom of God are sharply contrasted with the "conventional wisdom" of culture. Every culture presents us with a picture of socal reality. But Jesus, in his teachings about the kingdom of God became a subversive radical; he called into question "their understandings and loyalties, and invited them to participate in another way---namely life under the kingship of God."

Borg's judgment is that the American church has largely failed to understand the nature of the kingdom of God, and failed to tie the person, power and wisdom of the Holy Spirit to incarnating the kingdom of God here on earth. The result:

"The church to a large extent participates in our culture's conventional wisdom, indeed often legitmating it. Much of contemporary American Christianity is 'enculturated religion,' radically adapted to culture and domesticated within it. We live in a Babylon often declared to be Zion."

Borg's comments remind me of the Introduction to Jude in The Message:

"Our spiritual communities are as susceptible to disease as are our physical bodies. But it is easier to detect whatever is wrong in our stomachs and lungs than in our worship and witness. When our physical bodies are sick or damaged, the pain calls our attention to it, and we do something quick. But a dangerous, even deadly, virus in our spiritual communities can go undetected for a long time [240 years in the American WASP church]. As much as we need physicians for our bodies, we have an even greater need for diagnosticians and healers of the spirit."

"Jude's letter to an early community of Christianity is just such a diagnosis. It is all the more necessary in that those believers apparently didn't know anything was wrong, or at least not desperately wrong. . . ."

Americans need the radical good news of the kingdom of God/justice approach. Pursue passionately, give your highest priority to, incarnating the kingdom of God as Jubilee justice among the oppressed poor. As Graham Cray says, "The agenda of the kingdom of God is justice; the dynamic of the kingdom of God is the Holy Spirit." Cray is echoing the apostle Paul, Romans 14:17: "The kingdom of God is justice, shalom and joy in the Holy Spirit." (Noble paraphrase

Diagnosis: America's demonic and profoundly damaging social evil is our WASP or American trinity idolatry.

Cure: The American church must incarnate the kingdom of God as justice among the oppressed.

Prescription: The person, power, and wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

Warning: If the church does not do justice, it faces the judgment of God.

Prayer: Pray a Daniel 9 confession (The Message).





P.S. Reread my September blog "Can Oppression Create PTSD?"