There’s a growing rift in the way we posture ourselves toward racial justice, but many from the white Evangelical camp remain true to a long-standing culture of resistance; each time America takes a step toward racial healing, we stand in defiance. A great many Bible-believing Christians opposed the abolition of slavery, and were the cross-section of America most likely to resist the end of Jim Crow. Today, as Black Lives Matter gains momentum, as our cultural lexicon gets a much needed overhaul, and as police brutality and the graven images of slavery’s defenders are under threat like never before, white Evangelicals resist, parroting our antebellum forbears, worried that our religion and our way of life are in danger.

As an Evangelical of 30 years, and a seminary-trained former pastor, I’ve lived in this culture for most of my adult life. I can tell you that we’re good people, trying our best to understand the scriptures and how to apply them, asking difficult questions about our role in a world that is so rapidly changing. We give billions annually to help the poor, and pray non-stop for our country and its leaders. It might be surprising to hear that we care deeply about justice and equity; none of us would say that something like mass incarceration is OK.

But, like any large group of people, we operate under powerful conventions that influence our grasp of politics, and our role in the greatness of America. Our orthodoxy and orthopraxy are deeply enmeshed with a white, straight, conservative way of thinking about God that tends to leave us oblivious to the goings-on of the outside world, suspicious of anyone who doesn’t look, act, or think like we do. From this vantage point we process the death of George Floyd, the protests that have sometimes turned violent, Colin Kaepernick, Donald Trump, and the growing, nearly worldwide accusations that our beloved country has a very serious race problem.

As any pastor who’s tried to change things can attest, this culture isn’t easily moved; it’s just as much a part of our religion as Sunday morning service. And we’ll get frisky when someone tries to mess with it, so it stays intact. In the interest of “church growth” and all the other fish that need fryin’ we choose not to kick this particular hornet’s nest, convinced that one day it will kick itself. As such, we’ve chosen to live with four facets of Evangelical culture that all but guarantee our continued, unfortunate posture.

Segregation

While Evangelical churches in America are more racially mixed than they’ve ever been, that’s not saying much – we haven’t strayed far from where we were in the ‘60s. But white-ness isn’t a sin, and our scriptures don’t condemn us for congregating according to color. When we walk into a Sunday morning service packed with mostly-white worshippers, we’re uncompelled to consider that something might be amiss.

One of segregation’s most egregious fouls is that it insulates us from non-white conversations about race. We’re not victims, and by ourselves could never grapple with what it’s like to be one. Our only shot at a deeper understanding is to have personal encounters with non-whites who live on the other side of this struggle so that we might “experience” the abuse that otherwise escapes our notice. But, because segregation places a great distance between us and them, our perspective goes unchallenged.

We’re politically segregated as well, equally distant from data and media outlets that might invite us into a fuller picture. To us, more than ever, non-conservative voices sound like the insane rantings of an evil despot, dead set on destroying the country we love. So we limit ourselves to the conserative side of the story, one that affirms and secures our status quo.

While we are, again, just as serious about justice and equity as anyone else, our many forms of segregation keep us at arm’s length from the truth, tied to a whites-only story that blinds us to the problems we would bulldoze if we thought they were real. We can’t engage the racism we can’t see, and refuse to question the limitations of our own perspective, much less consider the strength of anyone else’s. So we sally forth, convinced that there’s no such thing as mass incarceration, no reason to protest, and certainly no reason for those protests to turn violent.

Self Preservation

We’ve lost nearly every political/cultural battle we’ve engaged: divorce, sexual promiscuity, abortion, gay marriage, who’s a good president, how to act in a pandemic, etc. In each campaign, we’ve not hesitated to condemn the naughty people, garnering for ourselves a reputation of self-righteous, judgmental, irrelevant prudes.

Now, more than ever, the only people who’ll listen to us are us.

And that’s frightening.

We’ve lost our voice, our seat at the table. What will we lose next? During this pandemic for example, the government has made unprecedented attempts to control our right to worship indoors, leaving many of us in fear that more control is coming. Isn’t it time to fight back?

Equity frightens us as well. The idea that Blacks in particular might soon enjoy the same power, voice, financial resources, and privilege that we do is just as reprehensible as it was to our comrades who opposed abolition and Civil Rights. Equity isn’t progress, it’s loss, added to the loss that we already feel, and to our fear that more is coming.

Despite the Bible’s plea to approach all of this as if God were on our side, we’ve taken a defensive posture. Now, egged on by a not-so-Evangelical president who’s convinced us that America is under threat of internal attack, we’ve set our collective face against any opinion suggesting that America has a race problem that rivals Jim Crow, obviously born from yet another mindless, liberal, nation-damning agenda.

As one of the most powerful political forces in America, we’re a bowling ball thrown in the wrong direction, posing just as much of a threat to our country’s greatness as anyone else, poised again to be on the wrong side of a righteous movement.

If It Doesn’t Shock Us, It’s Not A Problem

To many in my camp, thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, racism in the US is at best a wounded animal; still alive, sort of, but not the deadly beast of long ago. Thanks to Dr. King and his followers, great violence was done to the overt expressions of Jim Crow America; no more lynchings, legalized segregation, voting restrictions, etc. We’ve since disavowed the white hoods and their nationalist cousins, now living in what many consider to be a “post-racial” America.

We’ve come so far, and find ourselves befuddled when Black activists and protesters air their complaints, sometimes violently. What more could they want, another skyscraper on top of the one we’ve already built? We expressed a similar exasperation in the late 1800’s, unable to parse the negative sentiments of America’s newly freed citizens. The institution of chattel slavery had been obliterated at great expense to the union that was nearly obliterated with it, and Blacks had the audacity to expect more.

But the Jim-Crow-era expressions of racial injustice didn’t go away, they changed their clothes, learned to blend in a bit better, now showing up in far less shocking attire than something like a whites-only water fountain. A much more sophisticated, systemic racism has slipped under the radar, unfettered to begin its next iteration, transitioning without a hitch into things like wage disparities, employment bias, education and housing inequity, racially motivated police brutality, mass incarceration – a multitude of further perpetrations that have left our Black brothers and sisters disadvantaged, traumatized, and angry.

But we don’t see it. Today’s racism doesn’t look like it’s supposed to. Whatever problems exist today aren’t so bad that professional football players have to kneel during our beloved national anthem, or members of the Congressional Black caucus have to sit in protest while unemployment numbers are hailed as a success by clueless white politicians. You can imagine our disdain for any protest that turns violent.

When racism does manage to look like it’s supposed to, as it did in the death of George Floyd, we’re appalled, but easily dismiss it as a one-off sort of proposition; we shouldn’t blame the entire police force for one man’s racism. The Black community claims that there’s something else afoot, but we don’t listen.

Racism?

Nowhere does our problem show itself more clearly than in our posture toward Blacks when they attempt to invite us into their struggle. There are many reasons why we dismiss them, and many creative methods we employ to do so, but in order for our ears to open, we would have to give them some level of authority.

We don’t do that.

The spirit that called them “slave” is alive and well, driving the brunt of our defiant posture. If Blacks want to talk about Jesus, Bible, morality, or any other beloved pearl, we’re happy to listen, but give them no voice whatsoever when they try to talk about race.

Our bias also shows itself in our fragility; the topic of personal racism truly puts a bee in our saddle. Some faith communities are beginning to broach things like systemic racism, or social justice in general, but few from my camp are asking, “are we racist?”

It’s insulting, a personal attack, so we respond in kind when someone tries to broach this with us, accusing BLM and other protestors of terrorism, defining their movement by it’s weaknesses, categorically failing to understand the problems that drive their activism.

As any pastor worth her salt will tell you, the place where people are the most fragile is the place where they’re the most broken, but questions that threaten to clear the pew are rarely hailed from the pulpit, important as they might be.

There is no shortage of voices claiming that racism is a problem among people of faith. A growing number of these are white Evangelical authors, scholars, and pastors, added to the Black leaders who have been vocal about this for years. As someone who’s spent the majority of his adult life in church leadership, I can attest that this is a big problem, though I’ve only just begun to come to grips with it.

A few years ago, over lunch with the lead pastor of one of the biggest, predominantly white churches in the Denver area, I broached the topic of personal bias and the growing claim that an estimated 30% of white Evangelicals in America might be racist.

“It’s more like 50,” he said.

But that’s hornet’s nest is best left alone.

I don’t mean to characterize my brothers and sisters as a mindless swarm of bigots. I have personally experienced a mountain of transformation in the churches that I’ve served, and would be a different person today were it not for the leaders and friends who’ve invested in my life. I’m also struck by the positive impact that faith communities from all different departments have had on our country. We have so many times shown up as the ambassadors of peace, compassion, mercy, and reconciliation.

The church’s weaknesses don’t exist at the expense of its strengths, and vice versa, but we do have a problem.

And I mourn the various ways that it keeps us on the bench and beyond, the one place Jesus told us not to sit, especially when things are about to change.