Will the white, Evangelical church in America ever open its eyes to the devastation that racism and the endemic ideology of white supremacy inflicts upon our black brothers and sisters? The events of the last two weeks have moved more white pastors and Christians to make statements against racism. Unfortunately, however, a barely conscious belief in white superiority and dominance still permeates the white church, our mentality, and our society to a degree that is not so easily undone. The white church in America has suffered this crippling spiritual disease since before the founding of our country.
For more than two centuries, white men and women in the United States of America enslaved our black brothers and sisters. By 1860, the U.S. census counted 31 million people, almost 4 million of whom were enslaved. In other words, nearly 12% of the entire population of the United States of American lived under the brutal weight of slavery. It’s a sick and devastating irony that the Christian church in America not only accepted this horrific practice, but also developed doctrines to explicitly support and defend it. A classic pillar of the “Christian” proslavery argument states: “It is in the order of Providence that one man should be subservient to another.” Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist, denounced Southern Christianity, calling it “corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” While White Southern Christianity was infected and corrupted through and through by these evil doctrines, the white church in the North spent 200 years accommodating their Southern brothers and absorbing a more subtle mentality of white supremacy. 1
In his famous speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, Douglass lamented about the Christian church in the North and South calling the church itself the “bulwark of American slavery”. He challenged Christian pastors throughout the nation saying they “have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system.” In doing so, he charged them with preaching an abominable faith that “makes God a respecter of persons, denies His fatherhood over the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man.”
The institution of slavery was ended violently, through our nation’s only civil war. But the mentality and the doctrines that permitted and supported it naturally did not die when Lee surrendered to Grant in 1865. The evil monster of white supremacy, which had become an active part of the daily life and even of the “Christian” faith of so many, still roamed wild, barely restrained by emancipation and madder than hell. It devised new ways to wreak havoc on people of color. It permeated the laws and the justice system and created a comprehensive code of legal and societal oppression known as Jim Crow laws.
When I was a young boy in the 1970s, I didn’t grasp the recency of the Civil Rights Movement. I learned some things about it, but I never pondered the fact that Dr. King had been assassinated just two years before I was born. “Bloody Sunday” and King’s march from Selma occurred just 5 years before my birth. It turns out I was growing up in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, and I didn’t even know it! My own journey underscores how oblivious most white people are to the near realities of racial injustice in our present and recent past. This lack of awareness afflicts the white Evangelical church and, coupled with a toxic allegiance to a political ideology, is part of our blindness to issues of race that continue today.
Though I don’t know any Christians who would openly embrace the ideology of white supremacy, that doesn’t mean the mentality doesn’t continue to live in our hearts and find expression in our actions today. We didn’t mind putting a white nationalist in the White House. We adamantly deny the existence of systemic racism. We disparage black athletes who use their platform to call attention to racial injustice. According to many white Evangelicals, our first black president was a Muslim, a socialist, was going to take away our guns, hates America, and wasn’t a natural-born citizen. Many of us express a condescending view of black people as we dismiss their experiences and believe that they lack the intelligence or education to think for themselves. Some assert that our black brothers and sisters blindly follow political leaders who are just trying to make them dependent on the government. In white circles, we complain that black people would rather live on welfare than work for a living. When it’s just the good ‘ole boys, we compare one minority group to another, making judgments and generalizations about which one has a better work ethic and which group values the family more. We criticize the music, the wardrobe, the culture, the purchasing decisions, and the hairstyles of people of color. We sit in the seat of power, judgment, leadership, wealth, resources, education, and theological orthodoxy, enjoying prominence in every area of our society, and we are indignant if anyone dares to suggest that we set it up that way or that we receive any benefit from it that might be called “privilege.” At the same time, we’ll fight tooth and nail to keep from losing this position of privilege we deny we have. We refuse to affirm the value of black lives. And, we believe in our hearts that the reason black people are dying and being incarcerated in higher proportions has something to do with their inferior character. To top it off, we feel really great when we talk about “racial reconciliation” and “unity”, but we recoil at the idea of “racial justice”. White Church, I hate to break it to you- we still have a serious problem with white supremacy.
Frederick Douglass: American Prophet, D.H. Dilbeck, The University of North Carolina Press, 2018, p.3
