RACIAL JUSTICE AND THE COOPERATIVE BAPTIST FELLOWSHIP: A Crisis of Prophetic Courage in the 21st Century
By Wendell Griffen
This year, 2016, marks the 25th anniversary for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (known more popularly by the initials “CBF”). Organized in Atlanta, Georgia in 1991 by a group of white Baptist clergy and lay persons disaffected with the Southern Baptist Convention,1 CBF celebrates its silver anniversary during its June 22-24, 2016 General Assembly in Greensboro, North Carolina, the birthplace of the non-violent sit-in protests against racial segregation during the civil rights movement during the 1960s.
The 25th anniversary is an appropriate occasion and Greensboro, North Carolina is a fitting place for critical reflection by CBF constituents about racial justice. However, racial justice is not a convenient or comfortable subject for analysis in the United States, whether the analysis is done by Cooperative Baptists or by others. In that sense, the following words of Michael Eric Dyson are profoundly true.
It is not overstating the case to suggest that, when it comes to race, we are living in the United States of Amnesia. America cannot solve its race problem because it cannot afford to remember what it has been through, or more accurately, what it has made its Black citizens endure: the horrible, cowardly, vicious legacy of racial domination stroked by religious belief and judicial mandate. The willed forgetfulness of our racial past continues to trap us. It makes Whites repeat harmful cycles of guilt, denial, hostility, and indifference. It makes Blacks cling desperately to victimization, White hatred, self-doubting, and self-loathing. It appears easier for Whites, and for many Blacks, to reenact a pantomime of social civility through comfortable gestures of racial conciliation than it is to tell each other the story of the colossal breach of humane behavior and democratic practice that slavery represented.2
The challenge Cooperative Baptists face in attempting to talk about and engage in ministry efforts concerning racial justice demands, therefore, the courage to resist what Dyson terms as reenactment of “a pantomime of social civility through comfortable gestures of racial reconciliation.”
In his much-quoted Letter From Birmingham City Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote words that are as true in 2016 as they were in 1963.
…I must confess that over the last few years I have been greatly disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advised the Negro to wait until “a more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time. I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes the ally of the forces of social stagnation.3 …Let me rush on to mention my other disappointment. I have been greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership… In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say, “Those are social issues with which the gospel has no real concern,” and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular.”4
Dr. King’s dire assessment concerning the pervasive injustice within the United States is even more bluntly and eloquently documented in an essay titled A Testament of Hope that was posthumously published in the January 1969 issue of Playboy Magazine. I have not encountered many religious leaders who have read it. But like the clarion cry King uttered in his April 4, 1967 sermon at Riverside Church in New York City titled A Time to Break Silence, A Testament of Hope expresses a prophetic urgency that is unmistakably clear: Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive, and awesomely powerful? The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially. All too many Americans believe justice will unfold painlessly or that its absence for black people will be tolerated tranquilly. …White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.
Stephen Vincent Benet had a message for both white and black Americans in the title of a story, Freedom Is a Hard Bought Thing. When millions of people have been cheated for centuries, restitution is a costly process. Inferior education, poor hous
ing, unemployment, inadequate health care—each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our heritage. Each will require billions of dollars to correct. Justice so long deferred has accumulated interest and its cost for this society will be substantial in financial as well as human terms…
The price of progress would have been high enough at the best of times, but we are in an agonizing national crisis because a complex of profound problems has intersected in an explosive mixture. The black surge toward freedom has raised justifiable demands for racial justice in our major cities at a time when all the problems of city life have simultaneously erupted. Schools, transportation, water supply, traffic and crime would have been municipal agonies whether or not Negroes lived in our cities. The anarchy of unplanned city growth was destined to confound our confidence. What is unique to this period is our inability to arrange an order of priorities that promises solutions that are decent and just. … If we look honestly at the realities of our national life, it is clear that we are not marching forward; we are groping and stumbling; we are divided and confused. Our moral values and our spiritual confidence sink, even as our material wealth ascends. In these trying circumstances, the black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.5
Now, Cooperative Baptists (whether they attend the 2016 General Assembly in Greensboro or not) must decide whether to summon the prophetic courage to see clearly and speak honestly about racial justice (or, more accurately, racial injustice), the most consistently avoided subject in U.S. public and social discourse.
One questions whether the CBF constituency, predominately white, privileged, and lacking a history of prophetic involvement and sacrifice in the struggle against racial injustice (in the United States or elsewhere), has the moral insight and courage to do so. Like the priest and Levite Jesus mentioned in the Good Samaritan lesson in the gospel of Luke,6 Cooperative Baptists and other religionists “passed by on the other side of the road” after Rodney King was brutally beaten by Los Angeles, California police officers in 1991.7 Since then Cooperative Baptists have been consistently and predictably unspoken despite recurring evidence that police brutality, racial profiling, and racially disparate policies and practices are pervasive features of law enforcement in the United States.
When the votes of poor and minority voters were deliberately destroyed and otherwise not counted during the presidential election of 2000,8 white “goodwill Baptists” were conspicuously silent. Cooperative Baptists said nothing as black, poor white, aged, student, and previously incarcerated persons have been routinely disenfranchised since the 2000 presidential election. Apparently, our Bible studies on the Biblical commandment against stealing failed to awaken prophetic consciousness, not to mention to instill prophetic outrage, about blatant, ongoing and systemic efforts to deny marginalized people the right to vote.
One wonders whether Cooperative Baptists have the courage to confess and repent from their collective and institutionalized judgment to avoid becoming involved in prophetic struggles surrounding mass incarceration. As much as one should applaud CBF congregational actions to protest the predatory evils of payday lenders, no similar attention has been given by Cooperative Baptists to the equally blatant and routine civil asset forfeiture practices that are ancillary features of the mis-defined “war against drugs” whereby the homes, money and other property of people accused of committing drug offenses are seized and declared forfeit without the suspected drug offenders being convicted of any crime.9
As U.S. military adventures continually cause death and disability to children of God in this society and wherever else the long-running “war on terror” is professed to be conducted while draining the national treasury of money desperately needed to address systemic poverty, income inequality, inadequate healthcare, homelessness and other social needs, Cooperative Baptists (and other religionists) must summon the courage to repent for willful indifference about those realities. Baptist platitudes and programs about global mission efforts, however well-intentioned those platitudes, programs, and global mission efforts may be, do not hide and cannot soften the painful and ugly reality that Baptists, including Cooperative Baptists, have “passed by on the other side of the road” throughout the fourteen year old and ongoing “war on terror.”
While Cooperative Baptists celebrate their 25th anniversary during the General Assembly in Greensboro, North Carolina, the voting rights of poor and black voters in that state are being systematically eroded and attacked. Efforts to protect the rights of workers from mistreatment are being politically undercut. The ability of North Carolina localities to enact measures protecting people from bigotry and discrimination has been legislatively eliminated. Persons who are transgender have been marked for state-sanctioned bigotry and discrimination.
These and other oppressive realities present Cooperative Baptists with a prophetic crisis. We must decide and our conduct will show whether we have the prophetic courage needed to exemplify the power of God’s liberating love. We must engage in the challenging effort to learn unpleasant truths, put aside comfortable and longstanding myths, and develop relationships with
prophetic people and entities we have not previously taken the risk to know, let alone join in collective efforts for justice. Doing so will require willingness to embrace the realities and uncertainties associated with prophetic living and interactions.
I hope that as Cooperative Baptists gather in Greensboro, we will affirm and rejoice in our call, mission, and Holy Spirit-given strength to “bear the cross” as agents of the inclusive and liberating love of God presented to us in the life and ministry of Jesus. We must be willing to ponder about and prepare for costly discipleship concerning racial justice, not indulge ourselves in the easy and attractive opportunity to engage in the talk and walk of “cheap grace.”
I hope we will affirm that Jesus and the other Biblical and post-Biblical prophets are compelling witnesses and guides for courageous and hopeful living that requires willingness on our part (as persons, congregations, ministry partners, mission field personnel, pastoral counselors and others) to endure the sacrifices of redemptive struggle against oppression and its many intersecting realities. If “there is a cross for everyone,” then CBF leaders, congregations, partners, mission field personnel and other constituents must understand that racial injustice is part of an intersecting chain of oppression.
This means, among other things, that CBF must resist the temptation to “ghettoize” racial injustice. As Haile Selassie of Ethiopia first said (followed years later by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The evil of commercial red-lining of black and brown neighborhoods in the United States is a variation of the same evil that supports Israeli government actions to erect a wall separating Palestinians in the West Bank from Jerusalem. A threat that is constant everywhere cannot be met, let alone overcome, by an opposing force that is fearful and fitful.
I hope CBF will choose to meet “the intersectionality of oppression” with the unconquerable force of divine love by exhibiting a courageous determination to speak and live prophetic truth.
We should have learned long ago that the forces of oppression are represented by people willing to take bold unjust actions. That oppression and those forces must be met and overcome by people willing to be bolder, not timid.
Cooperative Baptists can choose to be bold, courageous, and prophetic agents at Greensboro and thereafter about racial justice, the intersectionality of oppression, and the liberating power of divine love. I hope we make that choice so the 2016 General Assembly will mark the beginning of a new and hopeful era about racial justice for CBF with unimaginable potential for justice, peace and joy to our oppression-weary United States and world.
Wendell Griffen is Circuit Judge in the Sixth Judicial District of Arkansas (Fifth Division) and Pastor of the New Millennium Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. He is a frequent contributor to Christian Ethics Today and is a member of the Board. This address was presented in a breakout at the General Assembly of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in Greensboro, NC in June, 2016.
1 A succinct summary of the origin of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which includes discussion of the political and doctrinal disputes within the Southern Baptist Convention that resulted in formation of the progressive group known as the Alliance of Baptists and the moderate group which organized as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, can be found at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Baptist_Fellowship.
2 Michael Eric Dyson, Introduction to WILLIAM A. OWENS, BLACK MUTINY (Black Classic Press 1997) (1953).
3 Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham City Jail, in A TESTAMENT OF HOPE: THE ESSENTIAL WRITINGS OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., (James Melvin Washington, ed.) 295, 296 (HarperOne 1986).
4 King, supra note 4, at 298, 299.
5 King, supra note 4, at 314, 315.
6 Luke 10:29-37.
7 See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Baptist_Fellowship.
8 See www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/1million-black-votes-didn-t-count-in-the-2000-2747895. php.
