The American Church’s Complicity in Racism

  

First a book review from the April 2019 Sojourners Magazine. The book is entitled, The Color of Compromise, written by Jamer Tisby. 

“A HAUNTING, emotionally charged, fact-based narrative, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism covers 400 years of American civil rights history.  It is a withering look at the role white Protestant churches played in reinforcing institutional support of slavery and racism.  Its main thesis is that moderate Christians have had the clout to rebut racism but have an abysmal record of doing so.  This story is woven from a survey of biographies, memoirs, classics of history, and serious journalistic research.”

“White moderates, Jamer Tisby demonstrates, time and again mouthed sympathetic clichés toward the black community but inevitably supported the status quo.  Probably the most iconic example Tisby gives is that of Billy Graham, one of  the most prominent Protestant figures of the 1950s and 1960s.” 

“ . . . . estimated 40,000 Protestant ministers were members of the Klan.”

Second book review from April 2019 Sojourners Magazine.  The book is entitled, A Riff of Love: Notes on Community and Belonging, by Greg Jarrell.

“BLACK AND BROWN folks have discussed at great length white supremacy and empire, but unless white folks have the conversation, those demons will never be fully cast out of our lives.  White folks have become content with a lifestyle that hovers above black and brown folks and doesn’t dive into the white supremacy and empire that threatens them.”

“But, ultimately, the intended focus of Jarrell’s book is white folks like him, and rightfully so.  A Riff of Love is nothing less than a spiritual autobiography of whiteness, a memoir about healing from white supremacy and empire and exchanging it for abundant community.  Such a work of art is rare.  I strongly recommend A Riff of Love to all who seek a better world and want to start building it in their neighborhoods—especially folks of European descent who must find liberation from whiteness to fully immerse themselves in the movement for social justice.”

Quotations from an article in the 2019 Sojourners Magazine entitled, How Racism Wins, by Jay Wamsted:

“The devil wants us to not worry about any of these things, structural or personal.  ‘Racism is out there,’ he says, ‘but that’s not you.’  Instead, he lurks behind us—listen to him breathing—and tries to focus our attention on Dylann Roof and public events featuring white supremacists and neo-Nazis.  These kinds of racists are worthy of attention, of course, but when we turn our eyes too far toward the extreme edge, we let racism win.   Because so long as the structures of inequity prevail—inequities of education, health, employment, wealth etc.—and we believe that racism only operates on the crazy margins, in the screamers and the trolls, so long as we think we have nothing to do with the system of white supremacy that lurks in the minds of white people like a symbiotic virus, benefitting us even as it sickens, so long as we keep our heads low and soldier on: Racism wins.”

“We must not let Dylann Roof, Nazi tattoos, Confederate flags, or blackface yearbook photos convince us that this story has nothing to do with us.  We must not believe the lie that a nation predicated on centuries of chattel slavery has healed itself magically in the space of two generations.  We must not continue to tell ourselves that the devil of racism is nothing more than a cartoon, a halting vestige of what he once was, an impotent fool in red tights.”

“Look for the devil in the shadows, not on Twitter or television.  Look inside your mind, under the structures of your mostly white spaces of safety.  Look behind you and listen for his breathing.  Otherwise, racism wins.”

Quotations from the book, Becoming a Just Church, by Adam Gustine.

“I’ve never waved a Confederate flag at a race rally or systemically defrauded the poor, but I have personally participated in—and benefitted from—a cultural way of life that does.  And for most of my life, I had no idea.”

“My first steps into the world of justice came through my exposure to the global AIDS crisis.  I was just out of college and Bono was trying to get Christians to pay attention to the way this disease was ravaging sub-Saharan Africa.  I heard his 2006 prayer breakfast sermon; one of the best I’ve heard on justice.  I still catch my breath when I read it.”

            “God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor

            play house.  God is in the silence of a mother who has infected

            her child with a virus that will end both their lives.  God is in

            the cries heard under the rubble of war.  God is in the debris of

            wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with

            them.”

“God is with us if we are with them.  ‘I really don’t think that any single sentence has ever shattered my life more than this one.’”

“Once, when I first encountered the reality of injustice, I turned it into an issue of systematic theology.  How could God allow . . . ? is a super white way of reacting to injustice.  The notion that the church, and therefore I, might be complicit in the systems of an unjust world was unimaginable.  Crazily, it was easier to lay the fault at the feet of God than to wonder if it might mean I’ve been out of alignment somehow.”

“Instead of better answers, we needed better questions.  These questions drive us downward, deeper, yes, but also to the realization that we’ve been asking the wrong questions all along.  At first, this came across like a clever way to talk about the same old topic of hermeneutics, but I’ve realized this is another major breaking point for folks like me.  We need better questions, he asserted, because the quest for answers makes us arrogant.  The search for the better question is fundamentally about repentance.”

I, Lowell Noble, would like to add the biblical understanding of oppression and justice that is missing in the two books listed above and the article as well.  I have laid out a lesson plan for my readers to study:

1.    Exodus 1 – The beginning of 400 years of oppression [this is the beginning of oppression in the Bible.  It’s the beginning of 400 years of slavery. 

·      555 references to oppression

·      Thomas Hank’s definition: oppression crushes, humiliates, animalizes, impoverishes, enslaves and kills people who have been created in the image of God

·      Oppression traumatizes individuals/families/communities/culture

·      Oppression smashes the body and crushes the spirit

2.    Exodus 6 – From Ch. 1-6 essentially cover 400 years of oppression, so Exodus 6 is approaching the end of oppression for the Hebrew slaves.

Exodus 6:9 is one verse that summarizes the damage done by 400 years of oppression:

“But when Moses delivered this message to the Israelites, they didn’t even hear him—they were that beaten down in spirit by the harsh slave conditions.” [The Message]

Exodus 6:10:

“Then God said to Moses, ‘Go and speak to Pharaoh, King of Egypt, so that he will release the Israelites from his land.’” [The Message]

Proverbs 18:14:

“What can you do when the spirit is crushed?” [The Message]

·      In modern language we would say the Israelites were suffering from PTSD.  For a modern day application see

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, by Joy DeGruy.

3.    Another example of oppression in the Old Testament immediately followed by Nehemiah demanding that his people do Jubilee Justice.  [Nehemiah 5]

4.    Isaiah 10: 1-2 has another powerful statement about oppression in Isaiah’s time.

“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.”

5.    Isaiah 58:6 shows what followers of God must do to release the oppressed.  While the words Jubilee Justice are not used, phrases like cancel debts are referring to the OT Jubilee

6.    Luke 4:18-19 are from Isaiah 61; they echo Isaiah 58:6.  My paraphrase of the meaning of 4:18-19 is this:

“The Spirit-filled church does Jubilee Justice in order to release the oppressed poor.

7.    The following six Isaiah Messianic Passages repeat the message of Luke 4:18-19.  These passages are Isaiah 9:7; 11:1-4; 16:5; 28:16-17; 42:1-4; 61:1-4.  In the NRSV the word, poor is replaced by the word, oppressed.  61:1 is best translated not poor nor oppressed but as oppressed poor.

8.    In the New Testament the word rich essentially replaces the word oppressor so in Luke 6:24 instead of woe to the oppressor, Jesus says, “Woe to the rich.”  Luke 11:39 & 42 says, “Woe to the Pharisees”, because they were full of greed and they neglected justice and the love of God. And as Jesus describes the sacred temple he calls it a den of robbers.  James 5:1-6 describes agricultural oppression in Palestine.

9.     Combine Luke 4:18-19 with James 1:27: When you visit oppressed widows and orphans, take more than a plate of cookies with you.  In your back pocket, be sure you have a plan to release those oppressed widows and orphans from their oppression.  That plan can be built on James 2.

Also see my blog entitled, Rejusticize the New Testament Gospel and my blog, Rejusticizing the Sermon on the Mount.