Since we’re still largely barred from attending church, I’ve used the opportunity to watch a number of services online, some altogether different from what I’m used to. To that end, I recently watched a curious, hipster-like Evangelical service on the World Wide Web.
Now, one of my longstanding critiques of Evangelicalism is its tendency to focus almost exclusively on the “Jesus and me” phenomenon. I sometimes get the impression that I’ve entered “Jesus World,” a hermetically sealed, bubble-like place largely disconnected from the world around it.
Whatever is going on, the message always seems the same: ignore what’s going on and focus on being saved; focus on your personal relationship with Jesus.
So I was pleased to hear this particular preacher speak about the tendency within his tradition to focus solely on the vertical, i.e. our personal reconciliation with God in Christ. This narrows the spiritual to what’s going on in my life, my church, my (fill in the blank).
This, he insisted, is not enough. We must take our vertical relationship out into the world, bringing God’s reconciling presence into all our human encounters.
In my own mainline tradition, the opposite tends to be the case. It focuses almost exclusively on the horizontal while forgetting or merely presuming the vertical.
To overgeneralize, the mainline church’s motto might well be “in the world and of it” while the Evangelical church’s could be “not of the world but not in it either.”
In any event, what I found curious about the preacher’s message was that once he had urged us to practice Christ’s reconciliation in the world, he offered little in the way of content. The message was as simple as it was shallow: we are equal in Christ; therefore, we should renounce racism.
Not for nothing, but I kinda knew that already. What was absent, in other words, was any analysis of the history of racism, the current state of race relations, or the challenges we as people of faith and goodwill face when attempting justice in this world. The whole issue was presented as a simple choice between good and evil, as if that’s all it takes. Sadly, nuance was nowhere to be found.
Yet life is full of nuance. In fact, one of the guiding principles for me as a pastor (as well as the focus of this blog) has always been to study and dissect the wider culture to determine how it either honors or dishonors Christ.
It’s not enough just to urge people to do what’s right. The church also needs to teach spiritual discernment so we can thoughtfully and carefully navigate our way through our Monday through Saturday lives.
Applying Jesus’ mandate to love one another is easy to say but not always easy to define, much less live out. For, as I often say, reasonable and faithful people can and do disagree about how best to effect Christ’s call to love our neighbor. It’s not always obvious. There is, in fact, a whole field of Christian ethics that testifies to our everyday moral challenges.
It’s sort of like telling your children to be good while forgetting to teach them how. Through painstaking effort, good parenting requires we guide and direct our children in and through the various minefields, deceptions, disguises, and pitfalls rampant within our fallen world.
Wise and loving parents, having been around the proverbial block a few times, guide their children along the path that leads to goodness and godliness while helping them avoid that which is unhealthy and spiritually debilitating.
In any event, when I first saw the video of several members of the Minneapolis Police Department subduing an already handcuffed George Floyd, I was concerned, obviously. As with the vast majority of people everywhere, I wished justice to be served, wherever that fell.
Within a day or two, however, I realized this was not going to be a simple albeit heart-wrenching case. There would be no time to allow for due process (though it had already begun) nor time to mourn with the family, community, and nation.
For the ugly specter of the NARRATIVE had descended upon the scene, effectively sucking all the oxygen out of the room.
Though the George Floyd death had all the hallmarks of a racially inspired incident, we do not as yet know that for certain, appearances notwithstanding. Hopefully, further investigation into the matter will reveal the truth one way or the other.
Regardless, the incident did rip the scab off the troubled history of race relations in our country.
We are all familiar with the history of slavery – or should be. Though it has existed since the dawn of man (and continues in certain parts of the world today) and was practiced virtually everywhere at the time of our nation’s founding, it is an inescapable fact that a country founded on Judeo-Christian principles had failed to live up to its ideals.
While it is generally true that the Founders hoped that later generations, guided by the principles embedded in the Constitution, would eventually eliminate the practice, it took a bloody civil war to officially end it.
In the years immediately following emancipation, while the federal government still maintained control over the Reconstruction South, things started to improve for the black population. In the North, the progress was, in fact, palpable.
But after the feds left, the South reverted to form, effectively eliminating equal status for blacks before the law. I still remember as late as the 50s traveling down South as a young child and seeing the “negro” and “white” bathrooms and water fountains. I found it appalling, and frightening.
I also vividly recall the Civil Rights Movement of the late 50s and early 60s that eventually led to the elimination of legal discrimination for good. I can still see the images flickering on our black and white TV showing demonstrators being water hosed and set upon by attack dogs. It was horrifying.
Because the conscience of the nation was roused by such blatant injustice, significant civil rights legislation was eventually passed in 1964 and 1965.
What was to follow, however, is a bit more controversial.
Thomas Sowell grew up poor and black in the Harlem of the 40s. After attending public schools, he eventually graduated from Harvard, earned his master’s degree from Columbia, and his PhD from the University of Chicago. He went on the teach at Cornell, Brandeis, Amherst, and UCLA, and is currently a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He has authored some 40 books or so.
In his remarkable 2019 book, Discrimination and Disparities, Sowell uses voluminous statistics and empirical data to show that blacks in the 50s and early 60s were actually starting to catch up with whites in any number of categories. They were closing the gap economically. Crime was low. Intact families were the norm. And significant strides were being made in education.
Until the Great Society came along, that is. Advanced by presumably well-meaning whites, the idea was to design social and economic programs that would reverse the historic inequities and injustices suffered by blacks.
Fueled by the newfound wealth and ascendant idealism of postwar America, the “best and the brightest” busily went about engineering a society that finally would foster equality and justice for all. Unfortunately, as Sowell establishes in painful detail, these efforts had mostly the opposite effect.
After a decade or so of sweeping changes in welfare, criminal justice, civil rights legislation, and social restructuring, conditions for blacks worsened – and dramatically. Murder and crime rates in the black community skyrocketed, though both had been going down steadily in preceding years.
It became an entirely rational decision not to work, since people could get more income through anti-poverty programs. Educational levels plummeted and dropout rates grew exponentially.
Perhaps worst of all, the absence of fathers became endemic, leading to the breakdown of the black family. Today, roughly 75 percent of all black babies are born to an out-of-wedlock mother. Once it became economically unnecessary to have a father, in other words, fathers simply disappeared.
In the early 70s, facing increasing criticism as to its ineffectiveness, the federal government conducted a survey to determine how well the Great Society had actually performed. Fully expecting the results to confirm their policies, the statistics proved the opposite. It had been a disaster.
Observing the perverse failures of the Great Society (which he himself had helped craft), Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously characterized the entire project as “the soft bigotry of low expectation.” What had begun as idealistic and virtuous had devolved into a paternalistic attempt by whites to “fix” black Americans, the implicit assumption being that they were incapable of doing it themselves.
But facts be damned. As Sowell points out, once the “prevailing social vision” had been established among those commanding the cultural heights (academia, media, governmental bureaucracies, etc.), there was no turning back. No amount of countervailing evidence would be considered, regardless of how little these programs actually aided those they were designed to help in the real world (as opposed to the theoretical one). (N.B. The title of Jason Riley’s book of a few years back, Please Stop Helping Us.)
Noted black intellectuals, including Walter Williams, Shelby Steele, and others have argued, contrary to this prevailing social vision, that the biggest impediment to black advancement today has little to do with “systemic racism” or “white privilege,” despite what we’re constantly told.
In his book, White Guilt, Williams maintains that over the last few decades the legal barriers for blacks have effectively been eliminated. But because of the history of racism and discrimination in this country, the black community still defines itself in terms of “victimhood.”
This, he argues, is exacerbated not only by the prevailing social vision of our elites, but by the so-called black “leaders” who traffic almost exclusively in grievance and victimhood.
Rather than venturing out on their own, in other words, blacks are told they are helpless, that there is no point in trying because the system is rigged against them. Only change brought about by their white “oppressors” can make them whole.
Contrary to this notion, Steele and others cite the breakdown in the black family as the biggest contributing factor keeping blacks from success. There is no substitute, they argue, for hard work, discipline, personal responsibility, and moral and spiritual development. These are the factors that define success (or the lack thereof), not discrimination or racism.
In other words, though some degree of discrimination has existed in every society on earth, this is not the determining factor in achieving or preventing success (though at one time it was). For there are countless “minorities” all over the world who have successfully risen above such adversity, and of all colors.
As soon as I heard the particulars of George Floyd’s death, I feared the worst. I worried that the establishment’s prevailing social vision would swoop in and take over, aided and abetted by the coterie of black “leaders” preaching “systemic racism” and “white privilege.” Lost in the mix would be the singular humanity of George Floyd the man.
If what Sowell and Steele are saying is true (and I’ve only scratched the surface), how are Christians to understand and act upon their desire to effect the good in terms of race relations?
Such requires honest, thoughtful conversation and spiritual discernment, not airy platitudes about the equality of the races (though of course that’s a start). What’s even less helpful are the equally airy, knee-jerk charges of “systemic racism” and “white privilege” which do absolutely nothing to advance healthy race relations.
To effect the good, for Christian and non-Christian alike, we must make the effort to understand the depths and intricacies of our cultural landscape so we can love our neighbor in ways that are truthful, effective, and genuinely beneficial. Otherwise, we default to what the secular culture is telling us.
So, yes, let’s talk about the sins of white people, and their biases, both conscious and unconscious. But let’s also talk about the sins of black people, and their biases, both conscious and unconscious.
Short of that, all we’re doing is pointing fingers and talking past each other.