Rhetoric Race and Religion
Racism and state-sponsored violence nullify another sun-kissed life in America. Innards, as the Black Youth Project laments, cover boulevards across the land. Law enforcement divisions spin truth into fiction. Red herring press releases abound and critiques of deadly force are misconstrued as resentment of police officers. Part of our democratic dilemma is that law enforcement personnel too often shoot first, draft talking points next, and then grudgingly investigate after residents organize for equal justice under the law. Meanwhile, from sea to shining sea, black folks are being brutalized, stripped naked, executed, maimed — in a word, crucified — on the asphalt of our suburban settings and central city cores.
As a millennial minister of Jesus Christ, I fear that our ideas about the Master of misphat cannot sustain the leadership our times demand. Theology alone doesn’t undergird social movements or faith, but without coherent reasons — including transcendent rationales — both movements and faith fizzle out. Outraged tweets and incendiary Instagram pictures aside, the Jesus of most Christian sermons would not be in Ferguson, but inside the corridors of a storefront congregation or suburban megachurch calling saints to praise through pain, worship through worry, and utter positive confessions — above all, speak life! — into the atmosphere of America. Praise is always due God, but praise unhinged from protest in this hour dishonors God and disfigures those who do the praising. When the ever-present wounds of racism are this open, worshipping the Lord in spirit and truth means confronting the bitter reality that America has spoken of New Deals, Fair Deals, and Square Deals, but never implemented an equitable deal for people of color. The Christological consensus of American Christendom — and its corollary ecclesial equation — is that our Savior changes persons that, in turn, change the world. No sense of institutional iniquity or social sin here, just an excessively voluntarist, volitional account of discipleship and good works. This Christology does not resemble the Jesus of the Gospels or Paul’s epistles, is politically untenable, sociologically flat-footed, and inadvertently anoints hierarchies of power, wealth, and opportunity. Further, this self-help Savior is a privatized pardoner of individual indiscretions and secret sins — not the Righteous Reconciler, Palestinian prophet, and cosmic Lord of the New Testament. Let us bury the New York Times-bestselling, life coach Jesus, along with the ecclesiology of egoism it implies.
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