The Color of Compromise

by Jemar Tisby

  In addition to movements like Promise Keepers in the ’90s, the start of the new millennium witnessed the growth of intentional, multiethnic churches. The historic dictum that 11:00 a.m. on Sunday is the most segregated hour in America has been challenged by the growth of these churches. A 2010 survey found that about 12.5 percent of churches could be considered multiethnic—meaning no single ethnic group comprises more than 80 percent of the congregation. Contemporary attitudes toward diversity in the church show a desire for even more integration. A 2014 study by Lifeway Research indicated that 85 percent of senior pastors in the Protestant churches surveyed said, “Every church should strive for racial diversity.” Speaking about evangelical pastors and congregational diversity, Mark DeYmaz, founder of the multiethnic church network Mosaix, said, “Increasingly, their question is not, ‘why should I,’ but ‘how can I?’ ”5

  Yet beneath this apparent racial progress, divisions have lingered. Voters elected Barack Obama as the nation’s first black president in 2008, and immediately talk began of a “postracial” society. Obama’s election, however, stimulated racist backlash in some quarters, only to be followed by a slew of grisly videos depicting police officers slaying unarmed black women and men. The ensuing debate over “law and order” once again highlighted the stark racial divisions present in America today. In 2015, a white supremacist entered a Bible study at a historic black church and murdered nine worshipers, sparking divisive debates about monuments to and symbols of the Confederacy.6 Amidst the furor of racist words and events, Christians today remain divided along racial lines.

  One of the challenges we face in discussions of racism today is that the conversation about race has shifted since the civil rights era. Legislation has rendered the most overt acts of racism legally punishable. Hate crimes of various forms still occur, but most American Christians would call these acts evil. Yet the legacy of racism persists, albeit in different forms. Sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith studied white evangelical ideas about race in their book Divided by Faith. To frame their study, they used the concept of a “racialized” society which they defined as a society “wherein race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities and social relationships.” It is, as they say, “a society that allocates differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines; lines that are socially constructed.”7 Racialization functions differently from straightforward racism. Emerson and Smith go on to explain that discrimination in a racialized society is increasingly covert, embedded in the normal operations of institutions, and it avoids direct racial terminology, making it invisible to most white people. The relative invisibility of these racialized structures to white Christians often leads them to unknowingly compromise with racism.

  This chapter examines the ongoing conflicts between black and white Christians today and offers some suggestions as to why racism remains a persistent problem—even in the twenty-first century. We will examine how the racial divide between Christians has, in some ways, become even starker in recent years. Through an analysis of the role of contemporary black activism, stubborn patterns of segregation, and political polarization (especially in the presidential election of 2016), we will take a closer look at why the American church is in the midst of a reevaluation and a reckoning about its identity and future.

  THE WHITE EVANGELICAL CULTURAL TOOLKIT AND POLITICS

  In Divided by Faith, Emerson and Smith introduce the notion of a “cultural tool kit.” They explain that “culture creates ways for individuals and groups to organize experiences and evaluate reality. It does so by providing a repertoire or ‘tool kit’ of ideas, habits, skills, and styles.”8 The particular religio-cultural tools that white evangelicals use to understand race actually tend to perpetuate the very racial problems they say they want to ameliorate. A brief explanation of the white evangelical cultural tool kit will help explain how Christians from different racial backgrounds can have such different views of contemporary racial and political problems.

  Accountable individualism means that “individuals exist independent of structures and institutions, have freewill, and are individually accountable for their own actions.”9 This belief promotes skepticism toward the idea that social systems and structures profoundly shape the actions of individuals. The white evangelical understanding of individualism has this effect, and it tends to reduce the importance of communities and institutions in shaping the ways people think and behave. Another belief in the cultural toolkit is relationalism, “a strong emphasis on interpersonal relationships.”10 According to relationalism, social problems are fundamentally due to broken personal relationships: “Thus, if race problems—poor relationships—result from sin, then race problems must largely be individually based.”11 And antistructuralism refers to the belief that “invoking social structures shifts guilt away from its root source—the accountable individual.”12 In other words, systems, structures, and policies are not to blame for the problems in America; instead, the problems come from the harmful choices of individuals. “Absent from their accounts is the idea that poor relationships might be shaped by social structures, such as laws, the ways institutions operate, or forms of segregation. . . . They often find structural explanations irrelevant or even wrongheaded,” Emerson and Smith explain.13

  While black and white citizens in general exhibit vastly divergent views of American life and governance, these differences tend to be especially pronounced among American Christians. Speaking very broadly, black Christians tend to agree that a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is necessary for a saving faith. However, they also recognize that structures influence individuals and that addressing America’s racial issues will require systemic change. In accounting for the black-white wealth gap, for instance, black and white Christians have remarkably different understandings of the problem and the solution. Sixty-two percent of white evangelicals attribute poverty among black people to a lack of motivation, while 31 percent of black Christians said the same. And just 27 percent of white evangelicals attribute the wealth gap to racial discrimination, while 72 percent of blacks cite discrimination as a major cause of the discrepancy.14 The differing cultural tool kits applied by black and white Christians help illuminate some of the conflicts over racial justice at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

  BLACK LIVES MATTER AND CHRISTIAN RESPONSES ACROSS THE COLOR LINE

  On July 13, 2013, Alicia Garza, a black activist and writer in Oakland, California, sat down at her computer to pen what she called “a love note to black people.” In the brief post she wrote, “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Her friend and fellow activist, Patrisse Cullors, responded to the post with the words, “Declaration: black bodies will no longer be sacrificed for the rest of the world’s enlightenment. i am done. i am so done. trayvon, you are loved infinitely. #blacklivesmatter.” Together with their friend Opal Tometi, these three black women started a hashtag that flowered into a movement that would significantly change the conversation about race and justice in America.15

  The event that prompted Garza’s initial post was the news that George Zimmerman, a Hispanic and multiracial man patrolling on neighborhood watch, had been acquitted of all charges in the killing of Trayvon Martin, a black seventeen-year-old high school student. On February 26, 2012, Martin had been walking back to his father’s fiancée’s townhouse, a place he had visited several times before, in a gated community of Sanford, Florida. He wore a “hoodie” sweatshirt and had Skittles and an iced tea in his hand. Zimmerman, who happened to be driving in the neighborhood at the time, called the police to report Martin as a suspicious person. A transcript of the call records him saying, “We’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there’s a real suspicious guy.” At some point, Martin started running. Zimmerman pursued him, even though the dispatcher told him that was not necessary. Zimmerman can be heard saying, “These assholes, they always get away.”16

/>   What happened next remains a mystery because only one person remains alive to tell the story. Somehow, Zimmerman and Martin got into a physical altercation. In the ensuing battle, Zimmerman, a licensed gun owner, shot Martin once in the chest. Zimmerman phoned police at 7:09 p.m., and paramedics pronounced Martin dead at 7:30 p.m. In the span of a few minutes an innocuous walk to the local convenience store for snacks had resulted in a homicide.

  Police eventually arrested but then released Zimmerman, who claimed to have acted in self-defense. Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law permits the use of lethal force if citizens feel threatened in a given situation. A jury acquitted Zimmerman. Black and white citizens viewed the incident from drastically different perspectives. A Pew Research poll found that 49 percent of whites were satisfied with the verdict that acquitted Zimmerman, while just 5 percent of black people surveyed agreed with the trial’s outcome. When asked whether Trayvon Martin’s death should spur further conversations about race, 28 percent of whites agreed that more discussions needed to take place compared to 78 percent of black people surveyed.17 Trayvon Martin’s death became a proxy for age-old debates about law enforcement, respectability, and criminal justice.

  Just a year after Martin’s homicide, Patrisse Cullors first used the #blacklivesmatter hashtag, but the phrase did not become ubiquitous until 2014 when another black teenager, Mike Brown, was killed. On August 9, Mike Brown and a friend, Dorian Johnson, were walking in the neighborhood of Ferguson, Missouri, near St. Louis. Video camera footage shows that a short time before, Brown had stolen a pack of cigarillos from a convenience store and forcefully shoved the clerk out of the way as he left. Darren Wilson, a white police officer, spotted Brown and Wilson walking in the middle of the street and ordered them to move. Wilson stopped his police SUV very close to the two youth. According to Wilson, Brown reached in the car and attempted to wrestle a sidearm away from the officer. Wilson fired the gun twice while in the car with one of the shots hitting Brown in the hand. Brown and Johnson then fled. At some point, Brown and Wilson faced each other again, and Wilson continued firing at Brown, hitting him several more times. The final shot entered the top of Brown’s skull and killed him. Initial witness reports indicated that Brown had his hands up in a gesture of surrender when he was shot, prompting protestors to chant “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” in the following days. A Department of Justice report released in March 2015 indicated, however, that all the shots had hit Brown from the front and that he likely did not have his hands up when this happened. After he died, the teenager’s body lay in the street for several hours in the summer heat in front of an ever-growing crowd of community residents before officials finally removed him from the scene.18

  After a highly atypical grand jury procedure, District Attorney Robert P. McCulloch announced that Officer Wilson would not be indicted. Black people and their allies across the nation responded in outrage. Protestors took to the streets in more than 150 cities. The reality that yet another unarmed black youth had been killed and no one would face legal penalties communicated a message that black lives could be extinguished with impunity.19 Observers not only considered the isolated incidents that led to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown, they looked at the longer history of similar events, from the absolute power of life and death slaveowners had held over black slaves to the decades of lynching during the Jim Crow era, when few of the murderers had paid for their crimes against black people and their communities. Even in the past few years, the list of black human beings who have become hashtags has grown ever longer—Stephon Clark, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Jamar Clark, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, to name just a few. Activists have deployed the phrase black lives matter because the cascade of killings indicated that black lives did not, in fact, matter.

  Black lives matter served as a rallying cry for protests, but it also acted as an assertion of the image of God in black people. In Christian anthropology, saying that black lives matter insists that all people, including those who have darker skin, have been made in the image and likeness of God. Black lives matter does not mean that only black lives matter; it means that black lives matter too. Given the racist patterns of devaluing black lives in America’s past, it is not obvious to many black people that everyone values black life. Quite the contrary, the existential equality of black people must be repeatedly and passionately proclaimed and pursued, even in the twenty-first century.

  The words black lives matter also function as a cry of lament. Theologian Soong-Chan Rah explains in his book Prophetic Lament that in the Bible lament is “a liturgical response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and suffering.”20 He goes on to say that it is a way “to express indignation and even outrage about the experience of suffering.”21 Racism has inflicted incalculable suffering on black people throughout the history of the United States, and in such a context, lament is not only understandable but necessary. Black lives matter presents Christians with an opportunity to mourn with those who mourn and to help bear the burdens that racism has heaped on black people (Rom. 12:15).

  CHRISTIAN RESPONSES TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

  It may be helpful for Christians to distinguish between Black Lives Matter as an organization and black lives matter as a concept and movement. Many Christians, including some conservative black Christians, have rejected the concept or phrase black lives matter because of the Black Lives Matter organization. The organization that developed to channel passion into long-term change includes a strong platform advocating for gay, queer, and transgender rights, a position that is contrary to a conservative evangelical definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. The Black Lives Matter organization does not identify itself as a faith-based organization like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other organizations that formed during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. As a result, many evangelicals have distanced themselves from or even opposed both the Black Lives Matter organization and the phrase. But the American evangelical church has yet to form a movement as viable and potent that addresses the necessary concept that black lives do indeed matter. This is not to suggest that evangelicals have not responded to present-day racism but that the national presence and influence of Black Lives Matter, as both an organization and a concept, should prompt critical engagement rather than a reflexive rejection.

  Although opinions about the organization vary widely, the phrase itself resonated at a deep level with numbers of Americans across the nation, and in particular it spoke to black people who sensed those words addressing a deep and painful longing—the longing for others to recognize their full, unqualified humanity. Sadly, many white Christians did not realize this, and they responded with opposition.

  Many white Christians viewed the killings that made national headlines as isolated events, and they could not understand why black people and other keen observers had such strong reactions. Evangelicals would agree that black people should be treated fairly and have all the civil rights other citizens have. But the root of the disagreement over racial issues lies deeper beneath the surface. It is a failure to acknowledge the subtler ways that racism operates today. Because their religious beliefs reinforce accountable individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism, many white Christians wrongly assume that racism only includes overt acts, such as calling someone the “n-word” or expressly excluding black people from groups or organizations. It is good that black and white people generally can agree that racism of this type is wrong, and it usually elicits swift and unequivocal condemnation in public discourse. But the longer arc of American history reveals that Christian complicity with racism does not always require specific acts of bigotry. Being complicit only requires a muted response in the face of injustice or uncritical support of the status quo.

  When Grammy-winning hip hop artist Lecrae, who is both Christian and black, began speaking up about Ferguson and black lives matter, the bac
klash from his white evangelical fans came swiftly. In response to his posts on social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, commenters said he was playing the “race card” and creating division.22 And when Lecrae said he was praying for Ferguson, the first response in a long thread of replies reads “#Pray4Police” as if in rebuttal to the need to pray for the black people affected by the tragedy.23

  After repeatedly using his platform as a famous artist to speak out against racialized injustice, Lecrae wrote an op-ed in the Huffington Post expressing the frustration he felt from battling the misperceptions of conservative Christians. “I hit a serious low on tour at one point. I was done with American Christian culture. No voice of my own. No authenticity. I was a puppet.” He went on to explain that his difficulties in talking to white Christians about race in America even affected his relationship with God. “I’d seen so much fakeness from those who claimed to be my brothers and sisters that I didn’t even know how to talk to my Heavenly Father.”24

  Early in 2016, while black lives matter and discussions of racial justice still inundated blogs and social media timelines, Thabiti Anyabwile, a black pastor and writer living in Washington DC, expressed empathy for black people in the midst of the ongoing criminal justice crisis. Because of his comments, he lost support among some white evangelicals. In a blog post early in 2016, Anyabwile pointed out that his rejection came not as a result of changing his positions on the longstanding “culture war” issues of the Religious Right and evangelicals such as gay marriage, homosexuality, and abortion. Rather, the controversy began when he started talking about justice. “But mention ‘justice’ and that wall of evangelical troops splits like the Red Sea and turns against itself. Men who worked as fellow combatants in the traditional ‘culture war’ begin to suspect and even attack one another when ‘justice’ becomes the topic.”25 Anyabwile wrote his post in response to a message posted by another Christian, Phil Johnson, who served as the director of a prominent evangelical ministry. Johnson posted a video of Anyabwile at an evangelical conference in 2010 preaching a message called, “Fine-Sounding Arguments: How Wrongly ‘Engaging the Culture’ Adjusts the Gospel.” Along with the video came Johnson’s caption: “Before he became an agitator for the radical left wing #BlackLivesMatter movement, Thabiti Anyabwile was arguing for a more biblical, gospel-centered approach.”26 As Anyabwile pointed out in his blog post, Johnson’s implication was that speaking about racial justice somehow indicated a drift away from the “true” gospel.