Black Lives Matter

posted 01 Jul 2020

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Black Lives Matter and the White American Church

What follows is not as structured as I would like, but I needed to get this out. It’s been stewing for a while.

My heart continues to be heavy regarding the treatment of black people in the country in which I live. The United States was designed from the beginning to enable and defend systematic cruelty towards a subset of human beings for the sole reason of making money. Wrestling with how I directly and indirectly benefit from that legacy (I’m white) has been uncomfortable for me. I don’t have a sweeping answer for what justice looks like, but I feel very confident saying all the “radical” things people are asking for in response to centuries of abuse does not even scratch the surface of justice; it barely even gets us to water-under-the-bridge-let’s-all-be-equals status.

I have a background with the American church. I was raised Christian and Republican, and it was years before I began to realize that being one did not mean you had to be the other. My nominal religious status is in flux right now, in large part due to the culture of “the church” (i.e. white American Christians). There are many examples of the hypocrisy of the white American Church, but in my mind none are more egregious, depressing, or enraging than how the church has responded to the cry from their black countrymen for justice and equality. I don’t think I will be able to put all of the thoughts I have had over the last few weeks here, but I will put some of the bigger ideas down. I’ll need to take this in chunks because I cycle between shaking with rage, choking back tears, and a deep sense of hopelessness when I look at the church’s response to racism and systemic oppression.

I will make no arguments about the Christian Bible in a larger historical context, but I will lean on it heavily here because American Christians claim to do what the bible says (I think that is a lie that many American Christians tell themselves because actually following the teachings of Jesus is really inconvenient¹). Here are some things the book Christians claim to follow says².

Love Your Neighbor

Matthew 22:39

Literally the #2 thing to Jesus, only barely beaten out by “Love God”. When your neighbor and countryman is telling you that the system we participate in is harming them, the loving thing to do is listen. The loving thing to do is apologize and make amends. The loving thing to do is to fix it.

When Jesus came across a perversion of his father’s house, he performed an act of civil unrest. White American Christians need to stop saying “it’s terrible that all these black people are being killed, but the destruction of property needs to stop”. How is that loving? Implicit in that statement is a value judgement: property is more important than black lives. That sounds like a “slavery isn’t that bad” mindset to me.

I don’t think Jesus really gives a shit about your property. I know he gives a shit how you treat people.

Give Them Your Cloak As Well

Luke 6:29

The context is when you are being robbed. A far cry from “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. If someone is desperate enough to steal from you, Jesus says you should go out of your way to help them, giving them even more money.

I Never Knew You

Matthew 7:23

“Look at all the things I did in your name!” Jesus specifically says there are be people who think they are working for him, but are actually doing evil. The cutting part is they think they are doing the work of Jesus.

Yahweh Detests an Unjust Scale

Proverbs 11:1

I don’t know how you read the Christian Bible and not see that justice is a big fucking deal to Yahweh³. Justice is hard. It’s harsh. It’s painful, unyielding, and at times, brutal. Modern white American Christians love to focus on the grace side of Yahweh. It is not wrong to have a deep appreciation of grace. Grace is comforting and much easier to give a sermon about. But white American Christians have totally taken the teeth out of justice. Perhaps because on some level they know that white American Christians would be the punishees in an ungraceful application of justice. That should be a red flag, but it goes ignored. The scales in the United States are tilted in opposition to black Americans, and it disgusts Yahweh.

They Will Know By Your Deeds

James 2:14-26

You can claim to love people all you want, but James wrote a whole letter saying it means nothing unless you act on it.

Why Are Christians Not Christ-like

Without getting too far into it, I think this is in very large part a result of the Christian Church tieing itself to “The State”. It started with Constantine and the HRE in the 4th century and just continues to be a problem, the modern version being white American Christians tieing themselves to the Republican party in the 1980s.

Christians stopped looking to Christ for how they should treat others and started looking to Reagan/O’Reilly/Bush/Hannity/Trump/Carlson.

The My Response

This is such a big problem, it’s hard to know where to start. My prime strategy so far has been to seek out and listen to black leadership on the subject. One of the themes that keeps coming out is “this is a marathon, not a sprint”. White Americans have the luxury of taking off this problem when it becomes too heavy to bear. Black Americans do not have that luxury. It’s up to us not to set this problem down when it becomes hard and we have been working at it for a long time.

As for practical personal responses, of course helping fund organizations that are focusing on justice and equality is non-negotiable. I cannot claim to care about something and then refuse to provide the only resource that gets anything done in a country as greedy as the United States (yes, that resource is money). But neither can we stop there, because many are affluent enough to toss some money away as a “make my conscience less guilty” tax, then continue to live lives unaffected by the radical injustice they just donated to stop. When it comes to real action, I don’t feel capable of any great feats, but I will commit to do what I can do. I have committed to not back down from these tough conversations when they come up; to be the voice in a group of white Americans who can try to provide any amount of perspective on the matter (woefully incomplete as it is, having not been forced to experience injustices first hand). This doesn’t sound like a big sacrifice, because it’s not. This is the least I can do while I keep an eye out for other actions I can take. All it requires is me making myself uncomfortable, learning, listening, and not backing away from a difficult conversation for the sake of social cohesion. Much of the time I am talking with older, affluent, white Americans who have not been touched by any part of this. The dominating feeling I get from them is confusion. Some questions I have heard and stepped in to talk about:

• “Why are these protests happening?”
• “Why are they happening now, why not before?”
• “It’s not really that bad, is it?”
• “I never thought of ____ as racist, is it racist now?”

Ironically, I’ve been leaning heavily on my childhood apologetics training to handle these conversations. Step 1 of apologetics is study your shit so you know what you are talking about, so that’s what I’m continuing to do.

edit: This has been sitting in my drafts for a while. Since I wrote it up, I have attended the protests in Portland for Black Lives Matter. I’m glad I could add a body and a voice to the cry for justice.