Rhetoric Race and Religion
The past several weeks, pictures and videos of the response in Ferguson, MO to the shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer have looked eerily similar to protests during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Christians from around the country got involved and insisted that the life and value of all people must be honored. While not a solely Christian movement and not one that originated in the church, the protests and voices coming out of the Ferguson case have called people to both repentance and action: repentance in the face of our country’s still-present racism and action against the injustice that devalues people based on the color of their skin.
I am grieved to note, however, especially in the early voices, that many white Christian leaders were silent. Lisa Sharon Harper points out that in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, “residents of Ferguson, local and national leaders of historic black churches, and some multi-ethnic mainline Protestant and Catholic church clergy engaged. White evangelical leaders largely fell silent.” One of the reasons for this silence is the structural racism still present in our culture and the identification that race issues are a “black problem” rather than a “white problem.” Our segregated Sundays and daily lives make white Christians largely unaware of the realities of life in a black person’s body in the United States today. When one doesn’t personally experience oppression and marginalization, it is unlikely they will have eyes to see it when it happens to others. How can we act and respond to injustice when we are blind to it? It is a rare occasion in a white church when the death of a black man or woman or child warrants the attention or even mention from the pulpit; why would it when the deaths of people of color do not affect the every-day lived experience of our lives? This lack of community, this lack of connection with our neighbors, is one of the sins that we must confess and lament in order to work towards true reconciliation across race.
In my newest book, Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith (Zondervan, 2014), my co-authors Lisa Sharon Harper, Troy Jackson, and Soong-Chan Rah and I look at different sins of which the church must confess and repent. One of these is the history of racism in the United States and the church’s complicity in that sin. Many others have detailed the specific racial tension and history in the St. Louis area that provided a backdrop for the outrage over the killing of Michael Brown. Here I want to encourage Christians — leaders and lay people — to listen and to speak. To lament and confess. To acknowledge the sin of racism that is alive in our country, and therefore in our churches, and to repent of the way that the sin of racism hinders our ability to live into the Kingdom of God.
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