Two types of Indigenous Leadership Needed

We need two types of Christian indigenous leadership.  One kind of indigenous leadership should come from poor and oppressed communities and it would give leadership in the rebuilding of these poor communties.  John Perkins serves as a model for this type of indigenous leadership.

Another kind of indigenous leadership should come from the rich and oppressor communities, especially the evangelicals in these communities.  They should identify the existing systems of oppression and then lead in the dismantling of these systems of oppression.  Then they should create just alternatives to the systems of oppression.  William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson serve as models for this type of indigenous leadership.  They, and their British colleagues, abolished the slave trade and then slavery in the British empire.

Ideally, both types of indigenous leadership would exist at the same time and they would cooperate with each other.  It is not right to expect the indigenous leadership from poor communities to also provide the leadership to dismantle the systems of oppression.  The people who "made the mess," i.e., those who created, funded and operationalized the system should "clean up the mess," i.e., the evangelical leaders from within the oppressor communities should lead the dismantling of the system of oppression.

Every graduate of every Christian liberal arts college, university and seminary should be taught at least in rudimentary fashion, how to identify a system of oppression and how to dismantle such systems; also strategies for creating just alternatives.  For the most part, this has not happened.  So what has taken place in American history in the presence of millions of evangelicals?

As a nation, we have moved from slavery (roughly 1660-1865) to legal segregation
(roughly 1875-1965) to the massive incarceration of young Black and Hispanic males (1982-20??).  The abolitionist and civil rights movements accomplished much, for a while; they provided, historically, a short burst of freedom and a degree of justice, but tragically, rather quickly, each time the oppressors cleverly redesigned a new system of oppression, according to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow (2010), the mass incarceration of young Black and Hispanic males has produced a new racial caste system, a redesigned system of oppression as damaging as were slavery and segregation.

Most of the evangelical church is not even aware that this new Jim Crow exists.  Evangelicals have not yet led an aggressive and sustained movement to abolish this current racial caste system.  Many evangelicals, possibly most, may even believe that this mass incarceration of Blacks is a good and necessary thing because Blacks are supposedly drug prone and unusually criminal.

Where is the white evangelical indigenous leadership on this issue?  Why are we so blind, ignorant, uninvolved or even endorsing the current system of oppression?  Is it because we do not understand nor practice the rather large biblical teaching on oppression and justice?  If we believe the Bible is inspired from cover to cover, why has this happened?

Because of our ignorance and uninvolvement, millions (31 million since 1982) of our fellow human beings created in the image of God are being crushed, humiliated, animalized, impoverished, imprisoned and even killed while we stand idly by.  Don't we know?  Don't we care?

Now through the eyes of Kristof and WuDunn (Half the Sky, 2009, pp. 234-6), I would like to examine the remarkable British effort led by Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, white evangelicals who led the effort to abolish both the slave trade and slavery in the British empire.

I could label this section of the essay, "The British; the Good, the Bad and the Ugly."  The major focus of this section will be upon the good, but first let's put the good in the context of some bad and very ugly.  This makes the good even more remarkable.

In the late 1500s, the British who had been nibbling away on Ireland for centuries, moved aggressively and brutally to invade, conquer and colonize Ireland.  Though of the same race, the British combined a vicious blend of religion ethnocentrism and oppression to dehumanize the Irish.

Shortly thereafter, the brutal British began invading, conquering and colonizing the eastern seaboard of America.  In addition to the Protestant religion, the colonizers brought with them lock-stock-and-barrel, the same combination of ethnocentrism (supposed Anglo-Saxon superiority) and acts of oppression.  This "God-sanctified" ethnocentrism and oppression dominated and legitimated the westward expansion of these United States.  My friend, Lee Harper, summarizes American history in one concise sentence:
"For injustice ran deep and cloaked itself well among those things that appeared just."

In the midst of all of this evil spewing forth from England, including heavy involvement in the slave trade and slavery in their colonies in the West Indies, something remarkable happened.  A surge of morality, inspired by the Holy Spirit and spawned in large part by the Methodist Revolution of the 1700s, overcame the considerable political and especially the economic vested interests in the slave trade.  Now Kristof and WuDunn speak:

"In the early 1780s, slavery was an unquestioned part of the global landscape--and then, astonishingly, within a decade, [the abolishment] of slavery was at the top of the British national agenda.  The tide turned, and the British banned the slave trade in 1807 and in 1833 became one of the first nations to emancipate its own slaves."

"For more than half a century, the British public bore tremendous costs for their moral leadership.  On the eve of the British abolition of slave-trading, British ships carried 52 percent of the slaves transported across the Atlantic, and British colonies produced 55 percent of the world's sugar.  Without new slaves, the British colonies in the New World were devastated, and Britain's great enemy, France, benefited enormously.  So did the United States.  Sugar production in the British West Indies fell 25 percent in the first thirty-five years after Britain's abolition of the slave trade, while production in competing slave economies rose by 210 percent."

For the British, the effort to abolish the slave trade and slavery was much more than a side issue.  Kristof and McDunn document the considerable cost to the British in both lives and treasure.

"The British navy led the way in trying to suppress the slave trade in the Atlantic and within Africa itself.  This led to the loss of some five thousand British, plus higher taxes for the British people.........for sixty years Britain sacrificed an annual average of 1.8 percentage points of its GNP because of its moral commitment to ending slavery.  That is an astonishing total, cumulatively amounting to more than an entire year's GNP for Great Britain (for the United States today, it would be the equivalent of sacrificing more than $14 trillion), a significant and sustained sacrifice in the British standard of living.  It was a heroic example of a nation placing its values above its interests."

Thomas Clarkson, who was was important as Wilberforce in the effort to abolish slavery and the slave trade, did a research paper on slavery as a college student.  What he discovered horrified him and he became an abolitionist for the rest of his life.  This experience was much more than a passing, one-day, reaction of horror, then back to his normal daily routine of life the next day.

Clarkson became a leader in an enormous grassroots campaign.  He, himself, traveled 35,000 miles on horseback all over Britain to organize the common person to take a stand against slavery.  An ex-slave, Olaudah Equino, lectured all over Britain on a five-year book tour.  300,000 person boycotted sugar.  Huge numbers signed a petition asking parliament to abolish the slave trade.

We need some white evangelical indigenous leaders to lead a similar effort in the US against the current system of injustice---the massive incarceration of young Black and Hispanic males.  Are there  any Clarksons or Wilberforces in our midst?

Occasionally, the American church has produced fragments of justice.  But, in the midst of oceans of oppression (a 25-1 Black-Whie incarceration ratio and a 20-1 racial wealth gap), fragments of justice are not enough.  What does God want?  God, speaking through his prophet Amos (The Message) thundered: "I WANT JUSTICE---OCEANS OF IT."