By Dr. Lewis Brogdon
For nearly 400 years, the church in America has struggled and mostly failed in its attempts to address racism within its own ranks and to give witness to the gospel in a way that significantly improves race relations. My thinking along these lines is influenced by a question from Howard Thurman raised back in 1949:
Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin? Is this impotency due to a betrayal of the genius of the religion, or is it due to its basic weakness in the religion itself? The question is searching, for the dramatic demonstration of the impotency in dealing in dealing with the issue is underscored by its own inability to cope with it within its own fellowship.
For years, I have thought about the question raised by Thurman and how best to answer it. I have wondered why Christians in America are so stymied and impotent in dealing with racism. When I use the word “racism” here, I am not talking about individual prejudice against blacks, but rather systemic racism that is a product of the legal enslavement of millions of Africans for over 240 years followed by over a century of legal discrimination.
I see two big problems that contribute to the impotence of Christianity in America regarding race and racism. First, white Christians continue to think racism is synonymous with prejudice. Many sectors of white Christianity still do not understand how to think of racism as a form of systemic injustice. Second, because of their lack of understanding about systemic racism, many white Christians have not grappled earnestly with the benefits and privileges centuries of slavery and racism have given them.
As a result, much of the theology and preaching suggesting solutions to the material impact of this history of injustice on black Americans mostly revolves around using the language of reconciliation. Then, while ignoring or misunderstanding the effects of history while offering apologies or confessions, nothing is offered to address the damage done. There is rarely, if ever, substantive theological reflection and solutions that involve repairing the effects of this history.
This is why The Angela Project is so prophetic and important for the church. It represents the first time that multiple Baptist denominations have carefully examined our nation’s history of slavery and discrimination with the intention of repairing what was done. This three-year process of examination is a critical first step in a new four-hundred-year trajectory in race relations. Leaders of The Angela Project, such as the Rev. Dr. Kevin Cosby, who envisioned this, along with the Rev. Joe Phelps, the Rev. Dr. Suzii Paynter and members of EmpowerWest in the city of Louisville, challenge Baptist churches and the nation to chart a new path. After all, it was the church that taught the country how to divide over and justify injustice. So it is the church’s responsibility to show the country how to unite over justice.
As a scholar who is a part of this movement, I have sought to help the church understand its role in this history in supporting the enslavement and disenfranchisement of African Americans.
The church’s support of this injustice has come in the form of using the Bible to defend slavery. The more pernicious forms of support come in the form of neglect and the refusal of white churches and theological institutions to assess its complicity in the suffering of African Americans and the ways their support benefitted white Americans. Concomitantly, they have also failed to develop theologies and methods of reading the biblical text that model ways to repair what was done. I am honored to play a small role in this great movement and to offer my gifts as a scholar of the Bible and religion to unpack this history and articulate a biblical and Christian response to the history of slavery and racism.
The theme of this special edition of Christian Ethics Today is "Privilege and Reparations." The essays aimed to teach readers how to think biblically and theologically about two seminal issues related to the history of slavery and racism: privilege and reparations. The reason for the dual focus is because understanding privilege and how to respond to it are the keys to moving the church to reparative measures in the coming decades. Dr. Patrick Anderson and I reached out to scholars, pastors, and other Christian leaders to write essays that unpack privilege and reparation for readers. We also gathered essays that stress the absolute importance of understanding systemic racism and its manifold implications before wading into justice and reconciliatory work. Too often, “well-meaning Christians” have been too quick to rush toward forms of reconciliation that do not take seriously the systemic and ongoing nature of racial disadvantage and an accompanying unwillingness to relinquish the advantages slavery and legal discrimination affords white Americans. In other words, they want reconciliation without changing the system that injures and exploits people of color and reconciliation without giving up white privilege. Contributors stress the hard work that white Americans must take up and the important work of addressing racial disadvantage by doing justice as a precondition for racial reconciliation.
I am sure readers are challenged not only by the connections these writers make to the painful history of slavery and racism, they will be challenged to think about privilege and reparations in a Eucharistic sense. In fact, The Angela Project is a thoroughly Eucharistic project during a time of increasing racial polarization and violence. The words of Paul spoken to a church where there were divisions and people being excluded by fellow believers ring true of our time today. Paul responded by calling the Corinthians to the Eucharist, to the bread and wine of Holy Communion.
For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. 28 Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup. 29 For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves.30 That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. 31 But if we were more discerning with regard to ourselves, we would not come under such judgment. 32 Nevertheless, when we are judged in this way by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be finally condemned with the world (1 Corinthians 11:23-32, NIV).
What Paul wanted the Corinthians to see was the connection between Christ’s body and the people around them. Because the Corinthians failed to see this important connection, they were comfortable excluding and mistreating one another, which was why there was weakness, sickness, and death among them. Think about this. Their own actions were bringing condemnation on themselves and releasing sickness in the body they were a part of as believers. Paul called it “sinning against the body and blood of the Lord” (11:27). Their sin was making them weak, sick, and deathly. Therefore, by lifting up the command to partake of the bread and the cup and to remember the example of Jesus, Paul called the Corinthians to self-examination in relation to the other as the primary expression of a Eucharistic and “self-giving” faith. That is exactly what American Christianity needs today and what The Angela Project is calling for in the coming years. We cannot number the ways we are making our churches and this country weak, sick, and deathly by our intentional mistreatment of people of color, members of Christ’s body. These essays call for “self-examination in relation to them” and lay before us opportunities to give up privilege, repair damage done, and move toward the realization of healing and reconciliation.
Our hope and our prayer is that God will use these essays and The Angela Project to give witness to God’s vision of justice and righteousness for the world and the gospel of Jesus the Christ that liberates the oppressed and transforms the world.
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Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), preface. ü
Lewis Brogdon, Same Name Different God? White Christianity and the Question of Idolatry (Unpublished Manuscript), 15-16. ü
Lewis Brogdon, A Companion to Philemon (Eugene: Cascade, 2018); “Reimagining Koinonia: Confronting the Legacy and Logic of Racism by Reinterpreting Paul’s Letter to Philemon,“ in Ex Audito (Eugene: Pickwick, 2016), 27-48; Not a Slave but a Brother: An African American Reading of Paul’s Letter to Philemon (Germany: Scholars Press, 2013). ü
Lewis Brogdon, Same Name Different God?
