Dear St. Mary’s Church and friends,
Race can be a difficult topic to discuss, even when there’s so much encouragement to have the discussion. It’s a complicated topic, so excuse a longer message (that still terribly over-simplifies things). I try to avoid baggage that often weighs down the conversation. And I also try to leave room for more hope than is often allowed—hope that St. Mary’s Church might joyfully take her part in bringing real healing to very deep wounds.
There must be a number of reasons why the conversation is difficult. No matter how delicately handled, it’s not easy to hear about the ways other people’s lives are hard. But then the conversations are often not delicately handled. Unhealthy dynamics sneak in all the time. I’ve seen too many interactions where shame tactics are mercilessly used to silence disagreement (part of the problem with these shame tactics is they end up producing a people who are shameless). Or victims can be given an unhealthy kind of honor, where perceived victims are treated as being beyond question. We should have special regard for victims, but fetishizing them causes real problems for everyone, including victims. Another issue is that slogans often take the place of careful reasoning, so that instead of really examining the issues, we jump to sorting out good guys from bad guys based on whether they’ll help us carry this banner or not. (“Social Justice” and “Family Values” are both those kinds of slogans.) More could be said, but my point is just that it’s touchy.
So I’m not interested in shame tactics or sloganeering. But neither am I interested in a callous unwillingness to hear people out. I recently revisited a book by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith titled Divided by Faith, and it struck me as a good example of neither. When these two sociologists discuss race, they don’t focus on prejudice or even racism. Instead they talk about America as “racialized.” They describe our society as being divided along the lines of race, white and black. What’s more, the cleft between white and black seems to have actually grown since the 1960s, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that black folks are facing more overt discrimination than before. A sharp divide runs through our society, and it marks where people live, who people marry, how much money people make, general financial wellbeing, healthcare outcomes, what music people listen to (and how it’s critiqued), what TV shows people watch, and where people go to Church. And the divide is there, even if black folks and white folks hold the door for each other at the post office.
To introduce the idea that America is racialized, Emerson tells about a phone call he made while conducting surveys for research. He introduces himself and asks for Chauntel. The man cups his hand over the phone (Emerson can still hear) and calls out, “Chauntel, the phone.” A distant voice replies, “Who is it?” “I don’t know,” the man responds, “some white guy.” It’s pretty striking how easily we’re able divide each other up as white and black, even if there’s no hostility at all, like with the man on the phone: some white guy, a black neighborhood, a white church, a black church. That’s what race does. It lets us “identify” other people quickly, without having to actually know anything about them.
I wonder if this is part of what makes it difficult for white folks to hear talk about “systemic racism.” Given that we’ve all inherited this way of seeing each other, it’s actually pretty remarkable how far white folks have gone in weeding out prejudicial attitudes. The thing for us to consider, though, is that our deeply ingrained habits of divvying up whites and blacks, even when we’ve managed to cultivate lots of good will, is not the best soil to work with. The weeds of conflict and discrimination and violence spring up readily from it. It’s liable to make someone—in all likelihood a decent person—feel like he or she is entering a foreign land filled with foreign people when leaving one neighborhood and entering another.
Unfortunately, this way of seeing each other first came about in a really nasty way. Willie Jennings (a top-notch professor who was at my seminary) brings this story to light in his book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. People have always known that some folks had lighter skin, some folks had darker skin. But it’s not really until Europeans start sailing the world in the 1400s that it becomes the key identifier of a person. That’s the big shift.
How did it happen? There were obvious economic benefits for European nations conquering people and forcing many of them into slavery, but it was hard on the Christian conscience. Jennings starts off his book recounting the first large-scale arrival of African slaves in Portugal on August 8, 1444. The royal chronicler, Gomes Zurara, weeps when he sees the misery of these dark-skinned people eagerly clinging to their families while their new masters violently rip them from their siblings and children. But there was a justification to soothe the troubled conscience: all in all, this was a good thing because we’ll teach them to be Christian.
You might wonder why Europeans wouldn’t just preach the Gospel to other peoples and, as the Good News bears fruit, embrace their newfound brothers and sisters in a common life. By this point, though, Europeans had come to see themselves as the paragon of Christian existence. By comparison, they came to see “blacks" and "negroes” as people who were inherently unfit for the Christian life. They couldn’t simply be converted. They could only really become Christians (and even then, not really, just kind of) through imposed slavery. Seeing folks as “black” or “white” (rather than as “Northumbrian English” or “Fulani people” from the Futa Djallon region in Guinea) came about to rationalize the new way of things. And it was a profound betrayal of the Gospel.
I wonder about the role Church division played in making it possible to see the world in black and white, starting with the Great Schism in 1054. Cultural differences had grown between the Eastern and Western churches, and somehow each side came to think they could be all they needed to be, even without the other. The eye could say to the hand, “I have no need of you” (cf. 1 Corinthians 12). Before this, European Christians were one body with dark-skinned Christians from the Middle East, North Africa, and even as far as India. But then Eastern Christians suddenly emerged as defective disciples in the eyes of Europeans, and the European saw himself as the quintessential Christian.
A lot has happened between then and now. I go through this history, though, largely to try to bring into view a real problem that exists in Franklin, but also to suggest something about how St. Mary’s Church can help foster real healing. One, we can keep seeking a fuller measure of the Holy Spirit. In the Spirit, we learn to see the world—and one another—in the light of Jesus. It’s no accident that charismatic, Spirit-filled congregations are often the most integrated.
Two, we can work for the unity of the Church (another standard grace of the Spirit), especially if I’m right that racial division is possible because of ecclesial division. Some efforts are in the works on this front, but the heart of this work is learning that we aren’t the ultimate Church and that we urgently need our brothers and sisters and their many gifts in order to grow into the Lord.
My hope is that, little by little, through prayer and repentance and embrace, the whole Church will look more and more like heaven. If it does, Franklin will too.
Yours in the Lord,
Fr. Stephen
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