I am fortunate to have people in my life who see me and who hold me accountable. No one can navigate the systems of this world without help; finding people who will give us their attention and seek our full transparency is a gift that everyone should seek to have—and to give to others.
One of my friends—or, as we say in the Christian community, a brother—is that for me. A pastor in a dynamic local church in another state, he texts me every so often with an update or a question, or simply to chat.
We talk about various things—family, career, church, friends, how to handle the vicissitudes of life that seem to suck out energy and hope or the wonderful occasions of grace that fill us with renewed energy and assurance.
And we do so with the explicit acknowledgement of our humanness, our society, our roles in our world, and our race. For my friend is a Black pastor and I’m a white guy who has no aspirations to theological leadership. I’m just a learner from wise people, and my friend is among the wisest. We do not shy away from hard questions or hard topics that might be present in our own lives. How can we be friends face-to-face if we do not show our faces?
We had the beginning of a conversation the other day, but I got busy and couldn’t respond right away. I promised I’d have a fuller answer, and rather than post yet another long-winded text message, I thought it would be more useful to share here, so that we can open this up to a wider discussion.
What is your theory as to why many white evangelicals in particular deny or minimize the existence of systemic racism? Some give verbal assent to the reality of interpersonal (one-on-one) racism.
My theory is that for a white person to concede that there is far-reaching systemic racism is to admit any success they’ve had in life was made possible, at least in part, by an unfair advantage; that is, white privilege. Systemic racism flies in the face of the “boot strap theory,” the Protestant work ethic, and rugged individualism. Further, I think their repulsion relative to Critical Race Theory is all about its emphasis on systemic racism.
What say you, my friend?
First, let’s start by admitting that this is going to be a complex answer to handle a complex situation. We must consider the history of both whiteness and evangelicalism as forms of Christianity. We must consider how deeply shame and honor are tied together in developing the culture of white American Christianity. And we must consider how unwilling we all are as humans to look at ourselves with both objectivity and compassion.
The easiest way to talk about Christianity is to declare that it is a faith centered around the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who by account from both the religious and the secular world lived somewhere in the time of Caesar Augustus of Rome, born into a land occupied as a Roman province, living out a life as a teacher, and suffering an ignominious death as a state criminal charged with treason and insurrection. Christians also extend this understanding to include elements from our texts that flatly state Jesus is publicly risen after his public death, and that while he is gone for a while, he will return one day to hold us all to account for how we have followed his words.
The faith has splintered into myriad factions over the past two millennia, with many flavors and thrusts and emphases on what it is that Jesus actually wants us to do. In more than a few instances the people who claim to revere and honor Jesus and to be among the obedient to his commands are the most willing to harm and abuse and even kill others who also make these same claims about Jesus and their own obedience. But, as sad as this is—Jesus himself did not seem to want to establish this as his legacy—most people who have a common understanding of Christianity, whether from within or without, are in agreement with the general ideas that Jesus promulgated: we are the beloved children of God, who would gather us into his realm to be loved and redeemed, healed and restored, filled with love for one another and dedicated to doing good works of healing and gathering.
Come 1500 years later and one part of the world is especially identified with the teachings of Jesus, far more than his original homeland: Western Europe is awash in the religions that have developed from his message. And within the peoples of Europe there arises a combination of adventure and technology and religious fervor that together bring about the age of exploration: European Christian men take to the sea to explore the world, convinced that there is a way to make a profit by trading with the Far East—and perhaps discovering gold and silver along the way. Their boats are their means of investigation and of spreading European Christianity to the rest of the world, and the main religious leaders of the main form of Jesus’ religion in Europe declare that such exploration can include not only the discovery of new lands, but also the ownership of those lands by those who discover them.
This “Doctrine of Discovery” gives the imprimatur of the Church—and by extension, of Jesus himself—to the navigation, exploration, discovery, and colonization of lands that might be fully inhabited or empty of people. It doesn’t matter; as long as the discovered lands are not already populated by people who have the same kind of Jesus-religion as those in Western Europe, the land is there for the taking by the explorers. And by “land” we mean both land and people. The exploration of foreign lands leads directly to the discovery that conquered people can be used as direct resources for the conquerors. At first, the colonized people are picked off here and there and taken to Western Europe as exhibits in a human zoo, but then as lands are conquered and found to be more profitable in agriculture than in the near-hopeless search for gold and silver, the captured humans are turned into a stream of human farm animals, fit only for ceaseless labor and abuse and terror and death.
The largest resource pool for this human traffic is West Africa. Tens of millions, perhaps even a hundred million or more, are kidnapped and sold on the shores of Ghana and Benin and other conquered lands, sent across the Atlantic in what is known as the “Middle Passage,” to be re-sold to white slavers who seek their own profit at the expense of a fairly cheap and replaceable resource. The system extends throughout the Americas: North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America become slave colonies for the benefit of both private owners and European nations. (Africa also becomes a continent of slave states owned and controlled by Europeans just because they can, but that’s another story entirely. Read King Leopold’s Ghost for one such instance.)
And this economic and social system develops because of the Christianity of Western Europe. The colonization is blessed by religious leaders and praised in sermons and books and studies and dogma. The souls of Black folk are treated as irrelevancies or as counters for a religion’s success: some Europeans make the effort to implant their religion into the lives of the enslaved, but there is no matching desire to see these enslaved be liberated in their actual lives; the work of Jesus to bring the world into his kingdom is restricted to just the thoughts and prayers of the Europeans.
Christianity in the Americas also develops into new strains, some in parallel to the Christian religions of Europe and many more in independence, but they develop in the context of legalized and sanctified enslavement of Africans. Enslaved Black people are turned into the permanent property of white owners, who can now treat them as assets to be given to their children for their benefit and profit. White Christianity develops a parallel world for white Christians and Black Christians, where both can be “saved” but only one people can be liberated. In such a world there must be a greater and a lesser, a master and enslaved, an owner and the owned, a superior and an inferior. This attitude is inculcated in white culture so thoroughly, so deeply, so widely that it becomes normal and then invisible: it is just the way the world is created, blessed by God, and entirely logical in its operation.
White Evangelicals themselves come from this background. Their formation is traceable to the events of the early 20th century, but their forefathers come from a line of white southern Christians who formed the original resisters to the federal forces that brought physical liberation to the Black folks of the South. From the formation of White Christian Councils, objectively defining themselves as protectors of white Christianity and white dominance, to White Citizens Councils, to white Fundamentalists, to white Evangelicals, the line of succession is continuous and unbroken. The formation of the faith is in the milieu of white cultural, political, social, economic, and religious supremacy, and in a nation where white people are the supermajority, the power of this faith is unassailable. It not only maintains a deathlike grip upon the Christian religion in general, it goes back to revise history to center this version of Jesus’ religion as one that brings liberty and hope and sanctification upon America. The past of enslavement as central to the success of America is simply whitewashed and made to disappear. America is, and has always been, a “shining city on a hill,” no matter that the hill on which America stands is a heap of the bodies of the enslaved and the conquered and the erased.
White Evangelicals today are still in the line of succession from their forebearers. Without repudiation, white Evangelicals continue the tradition of idealizing their past and glorifying their religious inspirations, most of who are white male theologians and church leaders of European background. Colonization and erasure are celebrated as “civilizing the savage.” Enslavement is revised to mean near-voluntary service, done cheerfully for the many good slavemasters. The absolute privilege of dominance throughout the land of the white Evangelical religion is taken as a Constitutional fact. The entire world of white Evangelicalism is formed with the belief that they are the “good guys” who have made, and who keep, America holy, the land that is God-blessed and fortune-kissed.
With that said, then what of the idea that white Evangelicals have made a world that required nothing from them but hard work, rugged individualism, and self-effort unassisted by anyone else but God and his blessings. The past has been invented to render the land of North America simply available for the taking. Pioneers could just hitch their wagon to the western stars and go make a new life for themselves. There is no curiosity as to how this was possible, or why it was that the Indigenous of the “open lands” were rounded up, killed, or moved to reservations, the “free” land stolen from them and given to the pioneers without repayment to the Indigenous. There is no curiosity as to why the pioneers were nearly all white, and why so many of the newly open lands became territories and later states that are uniformly white in population. There is no curiosity as to why the benefits of American expansion were just given to white people at low or no cost, why the Indigenous were violently removed or extinguished, why Black people were so unwelcome, why a century of federal favor to white people, from the Homestead Acts to the FHA programs, produced so much wealth for white people and so little benefit to anyone else.
It was just “hard work.” But the same hard work, when done by the excluded, was not rewarded. Black people could not easily find work or get land or build homes and businesses. Those who did so found that their lands and property were stolen, their homes and businesses burned down by white people, their very selves killed, again and again, by white people in individual actions or with mob violence—with the tacit and sometimes explicit approval of state and federal governments.
The work of Black people, when it happened, was often destroyed. Black people themselves were oppressed, and when successful or when simply attempting to live a life, were hunted down and killed in public to the delight of white spectators who treated the events as a white Evangelical church picnic.
The myth of white success also develops the myth of white innocence. All the successes were due to white efforts that others seemed unable to copy; all the events of terror and destruction were minimized and then forgotten. And white innocence was preserved & confirmed for a people who could gladly declare their devotion to America as the land of “liberty and justice for all.”
So when we have to bring up the hard topics of race and segregation and the terror brought into the lives of Black people by a society that is dominated by white Evangelicals who have used their cultural dominance to inflict their will upon everyone else, white Evangelicals grow uneasy, defensive, and even hostile. They don’t know of their own past, knowing only the glossy sales brochures that are used to teach them of American history. They don’t know of the lineage of their theologies, which come from white supremacist theologians, teachers, pastors, and in many cases, slavemasters. They don’t know of how much the white Evangelical church has established and evangelized white supremacy in America.
And because many white Evangelicals have a notion that their faith emphasizes rightness and holiness and goodness, the revelation of the past causes a reaction of anger and defensiveness and denial. Attacking their foundations is like attacking Jesus. Their religion and their ways are the direct result of obeying Jesus, they say, and none of the things that happened are tied in any way to their faith because their faith is tied to that Jesus. If there have been any actions that are unjust, they are isolated instances, here and there, from truly bad people, not from people who are reacting within a system that nearly always produces the same results no matter the input or the intents. It can’t be systemic racism, because to white people, the fact that the system continues to produce success for white people and not others is proof that white people are more industrious, more blessed, more worthy, and not because there is a system that ensures that white people are not held back simply because they’re white. Anyone can sail a boat if they are trained, but if you have tailwinds, you are going to win a race if your competitors face headwinds. And the tailwinds for white people are the systems that continuously straighten the path and remove the penalties so that it takes work to fail as a white person.
It’s hard, then, to be able to speak truth because speaking truth causes such violent reactions. We don’t want to lose our friends or lose our comfortable relationships or our well-earned status—and this is entirely normal. This is how we are.
I waver between speaking this truth bluntly and remaining silent. When I speak this, I generate anger and denial and the rupture of a conversation or a connection, and I lose that person. When I remain silent, I let this denial continue and I lose my integrity.
But for now, I value my integrity more than I value my social connections. I have enough people in my life who are willing to walk with me—and to push me, sometimes, when I don’t want to walk anymore. And I would rather surround myself with a few people who are willing to stay with me than have the approval of people who, when it comes right down to what’s real, haven’t a concern for me and my own success but only want my adulation of their lives and submission to their demands.
I know which path I choose.