On Wednesday, July 6, 2016 Philando Castile, a black man, was shot and killed by a police officer while reaching for his driver’s license. He bled to death in his car while his fiancee live-streamed the gruesome scene on Facebook. On July 7, at an otherwise peaceful protest, a gunman opened fire, shooting twelve police officers and killing five. On July 11, I went to church. In fact, I went to church twice that day. Not that I am particularly devout-- the truth is, I had recently moved and had started visiting the church my roommates attended in our neighborhood, but was still also attending the hip, young, and mostly white non-denominational church I had been going to before the move, mostly because there were more potentially single men my age in attendance there. But I digress…
On that Sunday, the news cycle was starting to calm down from the events of earlier in the week, the details of which, I’ll be honest, I had only gleaned from clicking and skimming through a few articles. Like many other white churchgoers that morning, I had been insulated from the gut-punch this week had been to the black community and would have stayed that way if I had only attended one church that day, but we’ll get to that. The lead pastor was actually out of town on summer vacation with his family, so the associate pastor took the pulpit. He opened with something like “Whew, what a week. Last time [Lead Pastor] was out of town [some other national crisis] happened, I need to tell him to stop traveling, am I right?” A few church members chuckled, a few seemed slightly uncomfortable. No matter. The pastor continued on with his sermon as planned, no more mention of the news, no pause to pray for the clear division in our nation. Just the regularly scheduled sermon series, communion, and a couple of worship songs to “close us out.” In all honesty, I didn’t think too much of it either. To me, this felt like a pretty normal Sunday morning response to the newsweek. Ultimately, the events of the week hadn’t made much of a direct impact on many of the mostly white, middle-class congregation, so what was there to lament?
That afternoon, I attended another church, East End Fellowship, which, though far from perfect, strives to be a multicultural church and place of unity in the east end of Richmond. I brought a commitment card with me that had been mailed out a few weeks earlier. The church had been asking its attendees to prayerfully consider what their financial, service, and attendance commitments to the church should be and was scheduled to have a special service that day. I hadn’t filled out my card yet, but as it turned out, I wouldn’t need to. “We’ve got to change gears today. This is a time for lament,” our worship pastor Erin Rose told us. The service that day was different than any I’d attended before. We sang songs that called out for justice, for the spirit of God to pour out and heal our land. Mics were set up for congregants to come forward and pray out loud. Young black men prayed against fear, begging God for protection and justice. Black mothers grieved for the futures of their teenage sons, crying out to Jesus with the opening lines of Psalm 13, “How long, O Lord?” It was a humbling moment for me. Why hadn’t I realized how heavy these events were weighing on the people I had been worshipping with for weeks? For the first time, I was face to face with the collective trauma and grief that black communities feel when they see black bodies being brutalized again and again without consequence. I was far from understanding the structures of systemic racism that lead to this oppression, but I was no longer able to look away from the emotional toll it was taking on my spiritual family.
I recognize that communities where black and white people can worship together are incredibly rare in our country. So rare, in fact, that my friend David & his ministry Arrabon made this documentary about our community (its title, 11AM, is based on a MLK Jr. quote which states that 11AM is “America’s most segregated hour”). I should also say that even at East End, it takes hard, sometimes exhausting work to find unity in our worship as a multicultural community, and a greater load of that work almost always falls on black congregants, whose trauma is re-lived and re-activated every time they have to explain or justify it to a well-meaning white friend. That said, my experience attending a church (in case you haven’t figured out, East End is where I ended up spending the rest of my Sundays, and many other days, after that one) where not everyone looks like me has transformed my understanding and empathy for the lived experience of racism in this country, and has brought me deeper into my calling to live as a follower of Christ. Which brings me to my main point:
If you are a white person in America and you call yourself a follower of Jesus, listen closely: if you are not asking God to help you recognize, call out, and dismantle systemic racism and the lie of white supremacy in your heart, church, and country, you are ignoring Jesus' command to love your neighbor as yourself. Period.
Let me help break it down a little more: we live in a country that from its inception has built social and economic systems that value and protect the majority culture while devaluing and brutalizing the lives of those in the minority. Nowhere is this more clear than in what we are watching play out on national news right now. Yet by and large, a majority of white Christians, myself included for many years, have ignored and minimized the trauma caused to minorities and their communities. I've been disheartened this week as I've watched the social media feeds of many of my non-believing friends as they've condemned racist policing and called for justice, but from former pastors, mentors, and friends who I constantly see posting bible verses and Jesus memes, crickets. Or worse, posts shaming rioters but not speaking a word against the systemic racism that led to the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. (for more context on the history and necessity of violent protest in America, read this).
In his letter to the Phillippians, Paul tells Christians : then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. How can Christians read this scripture and still continue to have a calloused hearts towards the pain and fury of those who don’t look like them? How can we celebrate God’s victory over slavery in the book of Exodus and not hear the voices of his children still crying out for freedom from oppressive systems? How can we read through the Psalms and ignore the laments of mothers crying out for their sons? Are we even reading the same bible?
Part of the problem for white American Christians is that our churches exist largely in communities that are already predominantly segregated by race and class. We spend our time reading our Bibles and working out our theology around other people who look like us and so it just doesn’t occur to us, like it didn’t fully occur to me four years ago, that there is another America processing the world very differently from us. But that ignorance, whether willful or not, is robbing us of our opportunity to bring the hope of unity in Christ into a broken world. Increasingly, Christianity is seen by outsiders as the religion not of the oppressed but of the oppressor. I don’t believe that has ever been God’s vision for his church, but I absolutely think the devil has made centuries long work of tying us (white Christians) institutionally with the chains of white supremacy. If we truly want to defeat “the principalities, powers, and rulers of the darkness of this world” (Ephesians 4) we must ask God to reveal our blind spots and call us to repentance of both the individual and generational sin of racism.
I hope this is getting to you. Maybe you’ve been reeling for the past few weeks already, but feel trapped and powerless to begin unpacking what you, as a white person can do about it. Maybe you’ve been standing on the edge of this conversation for years, afraid of the cost of jumping in fully. Maybe something I said offended you or made you uncomfortable. I would challenge you to lean into that discomfort. Instead of building up defenses, think about why this idea bothers you. Recognizing that systemic racism is a collective sin that all white people benefit from in some way is a really hard thing to swallow. But as Christians, rather than looking for ways we can justify or make excuses for our sin, we can find freedom in the knowledge that “the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit and a contrite heart.” My prayer for all white Christians in America right now is that we would continually be broken and called to repentance over the racism of our nation and that God would give us the humility and power to sacrifice our comfort as we learn to truly and actively love our neighbors as ourselves.
Tomorrow I will be sharing a post with more resources for white Christians to engage better with their understanding of racism. In order to be a witness to our increasingly divided world, it is not enough for Christians to claim that we are not racist, we must learn to be antiracist, and there are many resources out there to equip us to do this work.
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