In our long journey towards overcoming racism and moving to racial reconciliation, there has been a wide range of competing voices that call us to move in polarizing and contradicting directions. Some voices are secular (e.g. James Baldwin) or militant (e.g. Malcolm X). There are Social Gospel voices like Martin Luther King Jr., and traditional Baptist voices like King’s father. There are also silent voices like the White pastors whom King addressed in his Birmingham prison letter.
Today, there are secular and radical left voices like Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter organization. There are growing numbers of radical right voices like those of the alt-right white supremacists shouting Nazi slogans in Charlottesville, NC in 2017. 1 There are competing evangelical conservative voices like John MacArthur and Al Mohler.
With an honest measure of humility, believers must seek to hear, and follow our Lord’s voice. Admittedly, with all the conflicting voices from the past and the present calling us to follow them, it’s difficult to discern which one is His. Nevertheless, we stand on solid ground when we affirm that at the founding of our nation, Thomas Jefferson’s words concurred with our Lord’s: “…that all people are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I love that vision for our nation. Although at many turns we have failed to live up to that ideal, I believe that all believers should help our nation become what it dreamed that it could be, a nation where every citizen is treated with dignity. So in this final article, I will offer biblical convictions that Christians and the church can apply in an effort to help our nation pursue the harmony of racial reconciliation.
1. Stop Embracing A False Binary Choice Between Systemic Racism And Personal Responsibility: Both Are True
Israel’s problems in the book of Exodus were both systemic and personal. First, the Israelites were systemically oppressed by the Egyptians. Egypt killed Israelite male babies and forced them to perform slave labor under harsh conditions. As a result, the Israelites were real victims in great need of being liberated.
At the same time, God still held the Israelites responsible for their sins and did not let them use their years of servitude under Egypt as an excuse for their waywardness. As we read in Exodus, after God freed the people from slavery, the people grumbled against Him, made an idol in the form of a calf, and even refused to trust God at the doorstep of the Promised Land. Because of this, God judged them and the adult generation all perished in the wilderness.
So if we are going to talk biblically about racism and racial reconciliation in America, then we have to be able to use biblical categories of corporate and personal sin, not just one or the other.
False assumptions about the real problem regarding race in America forces people into inflexible competing camps. Some believe systemic racism absolves Blacks of being personally responsible for their sin. These systemic advocates would say that you are blaming the victim when you bring up statistics about Black-on-Black crime. Opponents to this position rightfully point out that it is contrary to the Gospel. If people aren’t held accountable for sin, they won’t hear the call to repentance. In Mark 1:14-15, Jesus commands all sinners to repent and believe in order to be saved. Without repentance, there is no salvation.
Conversely, those who quickly dismiss corporate sin miss the point as well. Nations really can sin against a marginalized group within their society. Stalin sent his political enemies to Gulag. The Hutus of Rwanda targeted and killed the Tutsis. America stole Native American land, placed American citizens of Japanese descent into internment camps during World War II, and enslaved Black people.
When sins like that happen, the sinning nation needs to acknowledge its sin and do what it can to make amends. Germany acknowledged its evil against the Jews after WWII and made amends in profound meaningful ways.
So the million-dollar question is: What is systemic about racism today? Since it is no longer legal to institutionalize racism in our country, I prefer describing what still exists as the systemic effects of racism. Today the law, which once empowered systemic racism, can now be used to dismantle it wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head. So with deep gratitude, I freely acknowledge that we’ve made tremendous progress towards racial reconciliation. As a society, many Americans no longer have any tolerance for personal prejudice.
However, 350 years of systemic racism have left clear markers in our country. Without advocating the Marxist’s idea of demanding equal outcomes and anarchy to overthrow the present structure, we can acknowledge the profound different pressures one will face growing up in a middle-class suburb versus growing up in the Imperial Courts or Nickerson Gardens’ public housing projects in Watts, California.
2. Stop Using Inflammatory Language And Assuming The Worst Of Each Other: Speak The Truth In Love
You’re a cultural Marxist. No, you’re a White privileged racist. On and on, the social media wars rage. Christians need to do better, but instead we “bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another,” Galatians 5:15.
Conflicts are resolved by being a good listener and by speaking the truth in love (Eph 4:15). When two believers disagree over a complex issue like systemic racism, it’s not wise to assume that one side is 100% wrong and the other side is 100% wrong. We should instead carefully listen to each other.
For one, most of us are taught very little about African American history. In addition, almost all Christian ethics books focus on majority culture concerns like abortion and traditional marriage issues. They rarely ever address the issue of racism. 2 This means few Christians and pastors are well equipped to bring clarity to these debated issues. Instead, we are tempted to take our talking points from the secular left and right and resort to ad hominem arguments using labels that we barely understand, e.g., critical race theory (CRT), intersectionality, and Cultural Marxism.
Yet, like a broken clock is right twice a day, conservative evangelicals can find agreement with their favorite conservative non-Christian thinkers, such as Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, or Larry Elder, and similarly, those who see systemic racism may find some points of agreement with progressive scholars in areas of CRT and the like.
To be perfectly clear, all believers should reject the Marxist worldview behind CRT and the organization Black Lives Matter (BLM). 3 However, that doesn’t mean believers should ignore police brutality when it is indisputably right in front of their eyes. Although we disagree with the organization Black Lives Matter, we can and should proclaim “Black lives matter.”
In conclusion, Christians should reject the moralistic worldview of secular Christ-rejecting cultural conservatives, yet at the same time affirming that when those who are considered under-privileged sin, they should be held accountable. Looting, rioting, and promoting anarchy are always wrong and should always be stopped.
3. Acknowledge, Reclaim, And Stay On The Mission Of The Church
If you wonder if you or your church can make a difference, then try to imagine a world without Christians. There would be tragically fewer orphanages, pro-life clinics, adoption agencies, or homeless shelters. There would be very little biblical social justice.
By living out our King’s radical ethic of loving our neighbors well (Matt 5–7) and preaching the Gospel, Christians have transformed societies. The Lord can do much with little, even with one faithful Christian or church. Think of how Harriet Beecher Stowe, who, as much as any one person, awakened the consciousness of our nation to the reality that American slavery was an intolerable evil.
So what can the church do? We can reject America’s original racist’s lie that the church endorsed that Black people are made inherently inferior. 4 We can try to repair what has been broken. As Christ ambassadors, we are His official ministers of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:15-19).
We are tasked to forge missional relationships with other churches to bring the hope and the reconciling power of the Gospel to our inner cities. We are informed by our Lord’s intentional missional focus in John 4:4 in which Jesus “had to pass through Samaria.” We can obey Acts 1:8 and go into our “Samarias,” which have been created by our racialized divide.
Each Christian should personally strive to “[o]pen your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy,” Proverbs 31:8-9.
In our church, we have a teacher who won a national teacher’s award. He could have gotten a teaching job anywhere, but he chose to teach in a poor minority community so that children there could receive a quality education. Another church member holds a high-ranking position in our city government and strives to bring equity to old systems that discriminate based on race.
I know lawyers who defend poor Black men and women because of their experiences growing up with racism. We have police officers who serve to rebuild trust with our communities. There are countless ways Christians can impact our communities with a love for our neighbors from Monday to Saturday. In order to be preserving salt in urban communities, Christians have to be close enough to touch others. In order to shine light, we have to be willing to go to troubled neighborhoods and not flee to the suburbs.
In addition, the church needs to teach urban concerned Christians how to use their political agency with a clear biblically based public and political theology. 5 One great problem in the Christian community today is how anemic and biblically compromised the Christian voice is. The American church needs to labor harder to produce more mature urban disciples and missionaries.
However, what seems impossible for one might be achieved with many. Jesus sends His church into the world to preach that through His substitutionary atoning death for sinners, He satisfied the righteous wrath of God for sinners. By living a perfect life and by raising from the dead, Jesus alone can give the gift of righteous and new transformed life to all who believe. The church armed with this Gospel empowered by the Spirit, filled with Christ-love is the best answer to go into our cities and use our influence to bring reconciliation to our nation that was divided by greed and hate by false notions of race.
4. Acknowledge Our Past Failures And Move Forward Through The Power Of Love
What if stronger Christian voices had stood up when the founders removed these words from a draft of Declaration of Independence:
“[George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him…Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold… he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.”[11]
Wouldn’t our nation be different today? But we failed. We failed to embrace the path of racial reconciliation after we gained our freedom from Britain through the Revolutionary War. We failed to embrace the path of racial reconciliation after we waged and won the Civil War that cost us the priceless blood of both White and Black soldiers. We struggled to embrace the path of racial reconciliation at the passing of the Civil Rights Act because laws don’t change hearts.
So what should we do? We first need to acknowledge our failed history. We need to acknowledge that those failures carry the hefty price tag of racially divided communities today and worse a racially divided church. King’s haunting indictment of the church is still true today 60 years after he said it, “the most segregated hour in this nation is Sunday at 11:00 am.” Good intentions won’t change that. Rejecting personal prejudice won’t change that. The church must lead the way by intentionally crossing cultural and ethnic boundaries and strive to become one nation under God (Acts 1:8; 8:1).
We all can debate how much influence the past, politics, or the personal choices have in the deplorable conditions in poor Black communities. I have argued in these articles that hundreds of years of systemic pressure as well as personal sinful choices have had a crippling effect on poor Back communities. Both have contributed to a culture that will continue to lead to further human suffering.
Will we be like Jonah (Jonah 4:1-2) and justify our inaction? Or will we have compassion like our Lord who looked and saw the plight of the masses and was moved by compassion and so He sent His church (Matt 9:36-38, c.p., Jonah 4:11). Let us be like Jesus, who without bearing any false guilt, went to Samaria armed with the Gospel and love and changed a community.
5. Encourage Christians To Embrace And Model For Our Communities The Power Of The Gospel
So what can Christians do to pursue racial reconciliation? We can peacefully and lawfully continue the struggle. We can endure carrying the burden.
I am a descendant of slaves and survivors of 100 years of Jim Crow so I can’t stop striving for racial reconciliation now. Now that slavery has ended, and Jim Crow laws have been banished, I am armed with the law on my side to fight against any and all remaining vestiges of systemic racism. All the while, I keep finding new allies every day, many who were former enemies. So I will tell my Christian brothers and sisters we can’t stop in our journey now. We’ve come too far by faith.
We have to lead with hope, looking to the future and not allowing the past to keep us in bondage (Phil 3:13). In the last conversation I had with my grandmother, she exhorted me: “But Bobby, you can make it.” By that she didn’t mean that my life as Black man in America would be easy. Instead, she was saying I had been freed to pursue my dreams because of how she endured and how my father had endured as well. God uses people to bless people.
I have a burden for my brothers and sisters according to the flesh who have a zeal for God but not according to knowledge (Rom 9:1-3; 10:1-3). My prayer is for a revival so we can keep moving forward in America’s long journey towards racial reconciliation. We must keep King’s dream alive until all of our children — Jamal, Shanice, and Tyrone 6 — can be judged by the content of their character and not their names, doo-rags (if they choose to wear one), or the color of their skin. We must until they sit down in brotherhood in a nation that their ancestors helped to build and make the greatest nation on earth.
The other alternative is so bleak. Jesus warned that a house divided against itself won’t stand (Matt 12:25). As Christians, united into our new family, we can fight together and wrestle against our true enemy who wants to divide and conquer us (Eph 6:10-16). When the devil vocalizes his satanic seduction through human agents (1 Tim 4:1; 1 John 4:1-3), through the media, in our schools, and through our devices, we can confront his lies with the truth of the Gospel. When he tries to deceive Americans to wage war against Americans, we can lift up our Christian voice with cries for reconciliation.
Alternatively, we can abstain from fighting for truth and love, or worse, continue to fight against one another. Wars have outcomes and sometimes there is more than one loser.
The same declaration of Independence that hailed our unalienable Rights given to us by our Creator, also enshrined a warning to future governments who refused to honor them.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, depriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principle and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.”
There are a growing number of Marxists, anarchists, and corresponding right-wing militia groups who want nothing more than to start a new revolution. This movement isn’t being led by voices like those from the 50s and 60s seeking the peace that comes from forgiveness and reconciliation. My hope is in Christ, but I wonder some days if our American church will fail again, and if our nation will end the way that it began: in revolution. I pray it will not be so.
For further reading:
- The Birth Of A “Free” Nation: America’s Long, Troubled Journey Towards Racial Reconciliation, Part 1
- A War For Freedom: America’s Long, Troubled Road Towards Racial Reconciliation, Part 2
- Legalized Racism And Civil Rights: America’s Long, Troubled Road Towards Racial Reconciliation, Part 3
- “Over the last few years, most of the deaths in the U.S. that have come from acts of terrorism, they’re not from global jihadist terrorists, but in extreme right wing groups,” Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security Secretary under George W. Bush.
- An example is John and Paul Feinberg’s book, Ethics for a Brave New World, Second Edition. Although the 2nd edition adds almost 400 new pages to the new 800-page-plus book, there is not a single section devoted to racism. Prejudice is brought up in passing just four times. In Scott Rae’s work, Moral Choices, the 2009 edition, racism is mentioned in passing twice. I have two theological Masters degrees from a conservative evangelical seminary, and I don’t recall discussing the theological problem of racism once.
- Host Jared Ball of TheRealNews.com asked Black Lives Matter Co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, “What was the ideological direction of BLM.” She answered that she and the other co-founders are trained Marxists. The question is asked at the 6-minute mark and answered it at the 7-minute mark.
- Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, Jemar’s historical research into the church’s complicit role in racism is compelling. However, I don’t agree with his prescriptions.
- The AND Campaign is one such ministry that teaches concerned Christians how to biblically use their political agency to help Christians advocate for Black communities: https://www.andcampaign.org. Like everything political, you won’t agree with everything they hold to.
- A more recent study at UCLA dismisses evidence that we have made progress.