The Art of the Gospel: Christian Ethics, Racial Terror, and Moral Imagination in a Time of White Christian Nationalism

by Elijah R. Zehyoue

Walking to Church in a Militarized City

   I was in Washington, D.C., on a Sunday morning, walking toward Metropolitan AME Church, one of my favorites in the city. It was early, quiet and unusually tense. National Guard troops patrolled the streets—rifles visible, uniforms crisp, bodies stationed at intersections where tourists would normally gather. Concrete barriers lined the roads. The city that I loved felt unrecognizable, suspended somewhere between wariness and fear that perhaps our democratic aspirations had collapsed.

   As I walked toward church, I found myself holding two images together: armed soldiers guarding the symbols of American power, and congregations gathering to worship a crucified Jesus. The juxtaposition was jarring, yet familiar. Christianity and political power have long occupied the same spaces; but that morning the relationship felt more intense, perhaps because it was more in my face. And because it was Sunday morning. The threat that required this show of force had been animated, in part, by Christian language, symbols and appeals to divine authority. White Christian nationalism was no longer an abstract concept or academic category. It was part of the air I was breathing, the streets I was walking on as I headed on my way to worship.

   That walk clarified something I had been sensing for a long time as a Christian leader. We are living in a moment when racial terror, political violence, and Christian identity are once again dangerously entangled in a way that too few people see. Pastors are trying to lead congregations shaped by fear, exhaustion and competing moral visions. Some parishioners long for order and stability at almost any cost. Others are haunted by the persistence of racialized violence and by the church’s apparent inability—or unwillingness—to confront it honestly. In this climate, pastors often feel caught between two unsatisfying options: silence, in the hope of preserving unity, or sharper moral argument in the hope that clarity will restore control.

   Yet neither silence nor argument alone seems to address what is most at stake. What that morning in D.C. made clear to me is that the crisis we face is not simply one of political disagreement or ethical confusion. It is a crisis of moral imagination. We possess the language of Christian ethics, yet we struggle to see rightly—to perceive how power, race and violence shape our common life, and how Christianity itself has been formed within those realities.

   This struggle is not new. It has deep roots in American and Western Christian history, from enslavement through the era of lynching, when white Christians worshiped faithfully while racial terror unfolded in public view. Then, as now, the problem was not the absence of moral language, but the absence of people who truly understood how to be moral beings in the world today. 

   Yet we can overcome this problem when we turn to the Gospel’s passage of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:17–26) for it offers a vital resource for pastors navigating this moment. Through Luke’s reinterpreting of Jesus essential teachings, we see living and leading like Jesus as an art and not a science. The art of the gospel is an aesthetic and embodied ethical imagination that traffics in creativity, refuses domination, and forms communities capable of moral courage based upon how we practice our day-to-day lives.

   Drawing from Kelly Brown Douglas’ analysis of Christianity’s complicity in racial violence, I contend that white Christian nationalism flourishes where Christian ethics has been severed from vulnerable bodies and where faith no longer requires proximity to suffering. Luke’s Jesus begins ethical formation not with certainty or control, but by standing on level ground and retraining how his followers learn to see and then move as artists who have the power to create a different type of world.

Luke’s Sermon on the Plain and the Reordering of Moral Vision

   Luke situates Jesus’s first major teaching not on a mountain, but on “level ground” (Luke 6:17). This narrative detail is ethically significant. Jesus descends rather than ascends. He stands among the people rather than above them. Ethical authority here is not established through distance or elevation, but through proximity.

   The blessings and woes that follow enact a moral reversal that unsettles deeply held assumptions about God’s favor and human worth. “Blessed are you who are poor…hungry…weeping,” Jesus declares, followed immediately by woes addressed to the rich, the full, and those who are publicly praised. Luke’s emphasis is unmistakable: Bodily conditions—hunger, grief, poverty, exclusion—are not morally incidental. They are ethically revelatory.

   This teaching does more than promise future consolation. It renders judgment on present arrangements of power and value. Luke forms moral agents by reshaping what they are trained to notice, whose suffering counts and which lives are deemed worthy of concern. The Sermon on the Plain trains ethical perception before it prescribes ethical action.

   Christian ethics often approaches scripture as a source of principles to be applied to moral dilemmas. Luke approaches scripture as a practice that forms vision. Ethics emerges not primarily from extracting rules, but from sustained exposure to a world reordered by God’s justice. To stand on level ground with Jesus is to have one’s moral field of vision disrupted and re-formed.

   This disruption is precisely what white Christian nationalism resists. Moral systems built on hierarchy and exclusion depend on not seeing too clearly—on maintaining distance from bodies marked as expendable. Luke’s Jesus refuses that distance.

When Christian Ethics Becomes Disembodied

   Kelly Brown Douglas offers a crucial diagnosis of how Christian ethics became capable of accommodating racial terror. In What’s Faith Got to Do with It? Black Bodies, Christian Souls, she argues that dominant forms of Christian theology developed within a “platonized” framework that separated soul from body, elevating spiritual purity while rendering material bodies morally suspect or expendable. When combined with what she calls closed monotheism—a theological posture that treats one’s own understanding of God as absolute and violent toward alternatives—Christianity became capable of sanctifying domination.

   Lynching reveals this ethical failure with devastating clarity. White Christians sang hymns, attended worship, and spoke fluently about salvation while participating in or condoning racial terror. This was not a failure of ethical knowledge. It was a failure of ethical perception. Black bodies were no longer recognized as bearing moral claim.

   White Christian nationalism inherits this disembodied ethic. It proclaims Christian identity while abstracting faith from the concrete suffering of marginalized communities. It appeals to moral order while remaining indifferent—or hostile—to the bodies harmed in the name of that order. The danger is not merely political idolatry, but ethical blindness.

   Christian ethics fails when moral reasoning is allowed to proceed without interruption from suffering bodies. Once bodies are detached from ethical concern, violence becomes imaginable, even righteous. Douglas’ work reminds us that ethics must be accountable not only to theological coherence but to bodily consequence.

The Art of the Gospel as an Ethical Practice

   Against this history, I propose the art of the gospel as a way of practicing Christian ethics. By “art,” I mean a way of knowing what matters that is shaped through imagination, narrative, memory and embodied encounter. Art trains perception before it adjudicates behavior.

   Jesus teaches ethically as an artist. He employs parables, reversals, metaphor and embodied presence to expand moral imagination. His teaching resists closure and certainty, inviting participation rather than compliance. Ethical insight emerges not through mastery but through engagement with a world rendered strange and newly visible.

   The Sermon on the Plain exemplifies this artistic ethic. Its blessings and woes disrupt settled moral categories, exposing the gap between social valuation and divine concern. This disruption is not rhetorical flourish; it is formative work. Ethics, in Luke’s vision, is learned through proximity, attention and transformation.

   This does not mean abandoning moral reasoning. It means recognizing that reasoning is only as trustworthy as the imagination that undergirds it. Without formation of vision, ethical principles become tools of self-justification rather than instruments of liberation. The art of the gospel insists that Christian ethics must begin with learning to see.

Pastoral Formation in a Time of White Christian Nationalism

   For pastors, the implications are unavoidable. Pastoral leadership is always a form of ethical formation. Sermons, liturgies and communal practices shape how congregations learn to see the world. The question is not whether pastors form moral imagination, but toward what ends.

   In a moment when white Christian nationalism offers a compelling but destructive moral vision, pastors are called to form communities capable of seeing differently. This work cannot be reduced to denunciation or debate. It requires practices that cultivate proximity to suffering, honest engagement with history, and resistance to abstraction.

   Preaching, then, is an art of the gospel and so are the other ministries of pastors. It can reinforce distance or cultivate attentiveness. It can harden fear or open imagination. Practices of lament, remembrance and embodied witness—such as attending to the history of lynching and contemporary racial violence—are not distractions from faith. They are essential to ethical formation.

   Christian ethics cannot be reduced to teaching what is right. It must also form communities capable of recognizing what is wrong. The art of the gospel invites pastors to embrace formation as slow, risky and deeply embodied work.

Conclusion: Learning to See before We Act

   Walking to church through a militarized city made visible what Christian ethics often obscures: That the struggle before us is not simply about positions or policies, but about what we see or choose not to see. Luke’s Sermon on the Plain confronts the church with an ethical vision that refuses abstraction and demands accountability to suffering bodies before us.

   In a time marked by racial terror and the resurgence of white Christian nationalism, Christian ethics cannot remain disembodied. The art of the gospel names the kind of ethical imagination required for faithfulness today—one shaped by encounter, memory and moral reversal. Only by learning to see rightly can the church hope to live justly.

Bibliography

Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011.

Douglas, Kelly Brown. What’s Faith Got to Do with It? Black Bodies, Christian Souls. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005.

Gafney, Wil. Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017.

González, Justo L. Luke. Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.

Gorski, Philip S., and Samuel L. Perry. The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Jones, Robert P. White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.

Smith, Ted A. The End of Theological Education. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017.

Smith, Ted A. Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2014.

Reverend Elijah R. Zehyoue, Ph.D. serves as the co-director of the Alliance of Baptists. In this role, he is leading through an effort to become an anti-racist organization.  As a historian, theologian, pastor, preacher and professor, Elijah is committed to using his many gifts to help people of all walks of life do the head, heart and soul work required for our collective liberation.

Share on Facebook

Tweet

Follow us