White Evangelicals, Southern Baptists, and #BlackLivesMatter

As several recent posts here show, I’m not terribly optimistic about the capacity of white evangelicalism to confront and correct its longstanding complicity in America’s sins of white supremacy, racism and injustice.

The history, spirituality, hermeneutics and religious ideology of white evangelicalism just seem too intertwined with racial injustice. To sever those connections would require a radical transformation — so radical that it would no longer be white evangelicalism, but something else, something different and new. And evangelicals are conditioned to fear that kind of radical change — to regard it as apostasy, a falling away, a form of rebellion.

Witnessing much of the white evangelical reaction to Ferguson and to the killing of Eric Garner has only made me less optimistic. Consider, for example, the horrible “Christian” responses to Christian rapper Lecrae’s recent tweet about Ferguson. Or the hideous commentary that gushed out when popular white evangelical blogger Jen Hatmaker wrote a modest plea for white Christians simply to listen to what black Christians are saying.

Or consider the many churchified attempts to derail, dismiss or distract from any focus on the black lives taken with impunity. The “black-on-black crime” garbage, or the fatuously pious version of that dodge that focuses on black women and abortion. (Because what could be more “pro-life” than to ignore or defend the killing of unarmed people in the street?)

Hate and ignorance are plenty ugly on their own, but add a thick layer of sanctimony and they look even worse. So all of that has been incredibly disheartening to witness.

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