I am a 67 year-old white Christian woman grappling with issues of race and justice in America. I recently moved from Princeton, NJ, where I attended a multi-ethnic evangelical church and was a campus minister for many years. I live now in a Colorado mountain neighborhood and attend a nearby church that are both majority white. In New Jersey, I was part of a church group focused on issues of race and justice. Here in Colorado I am asking how God wants me to use what I learned in Princeton. Here is a sketch describing how God has shaped my thinking over my lifetime and particularly over the last 11 years, through a combination of His Word and my surrounding culture and influences.
I grew up being taught that I should not treat a person differently because of the color of their skin, and that all people, regardless of their race or ethnicity, were created equal. I remember singing “Jesus loves the little children of the world,” sincerely, in Sunday School. They taught me of God’s love for all people and that He felt no partiality towards any on the basis of race.
In 2014, following the shooting of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, I joined a dialogue group at my church. The group was composed of Asian, Black and white congregants. I realized immediately how behind the times I was. My racial conscience as a youth was formed by Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and by (the now discredited) folk singer Buffy Saint Marie in her iconic song, “My Country ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying.” I learned from both sources of the presence and evils of racism in our country, past and present, and that it was urgent to work together as a society to overcome its effects. That was where my racial education stopped. I did not understand terms like “white privilege,” “white fragility,” and “microaggression.” These terms may have come from secular sources, but they dominated our church discussions. I was also encountering topics of race and justice on the university campus. To “catch up,” I began reading lists like this one.
In those days, I encountered a lot of anger and impatience. The possibility of forgiveness seemed unattainable for white people, and it was challenging to have conversations that felt caring to any of us involved in the dialogue group. I took all accusatory messages directed toward white people personally, and wondered when I would no longer be seen as complicit with systemic racism. It seemed to me that secular approaches to combat racism only fostered defensiveness, fear, and judgment rather than repentance, relationship, and action. For instance, no one initially wants to admit that they are either fragile or privileged! These ways of talking about race seemed in the end insufficient to address injustice and they were not grounded in biblical principles of grace and love.
Nevertheless, I learned invaluable lessons about myself and my white Christian theology through these challenges. I saw how defensive and proud I was. I learned to educate myself and to admit the gaps in my knowledge because I was unfamiliar with the ongoing realities of oppression in our country. I had never experienced driving nor reading the Bible “while Black.” We all notice different emphases in the Scriptures and miss others based on our personal histories and values. Because of our discussions and my reading, I saw how the Bible confronted the blindness and corruption of people in power and how much God cared about the poor and vulnerable.
As I became more aware, I committed myself to ongoing reading, talking, teaching and writing about race and justice, because many people of color live in constant consciousness of their race. A posture of humility and a commitment to hearing out the concerns of different political constituencies seems to me to be biblical. I saw from Scripture (e.g., in Daniel’s prayer in Daniel 9 and in Psalm 106), that it is biblical to lament and confess the sins of my forebears even if I have not personally done the same. I deepened in knowledge of the Gospel – recognition of my personal sinfulness, that I had received the necessary forgiveness through Jesus’ death for me, and that my soul would perhaps be healthier if I always reminded myself that I am a wretched sinner, including possibly the sin of racism, which I so desperately hoped was not true about me.
Around 2018, the composition of our group changed and our focus shifted in a more hopeful direction. We began to discuss how to make our church more welcoming and life-giving to our non-white brothers and sisters. The multi-ethnic worshipers around the throne of God in Revelation 5:9-10 gave us the pattern to follow. Books like Divided by Faith, by Christian Smith and Michael Emerson, stressed the importance of forming interracial friendships in multi-ethnic congregations, in order to provide evidence to white Christians of continuing inequities in America and their responsibility to address them. A means to becoming an attractive multi-ethnic congregation seemed to be talking about race. Therefore, we urged our pastors to observe MLK Sunday and Juneteenth and to lament when there were racial shootings in our country. We had Sunday School series on politics and biblical justice. We had events highlighting Asian, Hispanic and Black experiences in our country, both historical and current. We co-labored with other area churches to hold an annual conference on how to foster multi-ethnic growth. We instituted an annual Lunar New Year lunch because Asian congregants wanted to share their culture.
Some in our church loved these changes, but others criticized them. Some congregants and leaders resisted this emphasis on racial justice, especially when its articulation resembled the secular voices predominant in Princeton. We on our team were trying to resist the tendency of a knee-jerk rejection of secular thinking and measure all these inputs with truth from the Scriptures. Our leaders felt the legitimate need to be concerned about a broad range of discipleship issues, including gender, sexuality, missions, evangelism, and care for the needy and racial justice. Congregants of color were disheartened by what they perceived as lessening focus on race and justice. And in individual conversations, talking about race was never easy. It sometimes required a real-time willingness to correct racial insensitivity, and a readiness to empathize and validate suffering of injustice. I got the sense that I was only permitted to correct white people who were insensitive, and always urged to validate the perspectives of people of color, but it seemed more biblical to me that all Christians should be listened to with attentive concern and corrected in love if necessary. Even so, these difficult conversations sharpened my biblical vision: I saw that my biblical ideals needed far deeper application and sensitivity for multi-ethnic relationships. To be honest, I frequently found my experience to be profoundly disheartening, and I was often tempted to quit trying. This did not seem like the right response, but I sometimes felt hopeless to make any difference.
Now I live in the mountains of Colorado. In my present majority-white church and neighborhood, there is no team focused on racial injustice, nor much expressed desire for or emphasis on how to become a multi-ethnic church. Our current president has issued executive orders “terminating DEI offices, positions and programs in the federal government” (quoted from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights), apparently to the relief of many Americans. I wonder, what now is my role? I believe white evangelicals are at a crossroads where we could choose to put these issues on “the back burner” or continue to wrestle with them as an essential part of our Christian walk and witness. While the government is lessening the pressure on us to address these concerns, I believe we are nevertheless called as Christians to grapple with how to “love mercy and live justly” (Micah 6:8).
If I were to begin another team, I would voice how important it is to learn from the “anti-racist” perspectives that have dominated for the last 11 years at least. We don’t have to agree with a whole perspective in order to learn from it. Someone has pointed out that “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” are biblical values. We could contribute to a lessening of polarization by listening to different perspectives, not with a mindset of formulating a way to refute them, but with a consideration of what we might learn from them.
Among Christian writers, I would take my guidance from two authors who stand out among all the books I have read, for their cultural sensitivity submitted to a biblical ethic of love for one another: Isaac Adams’ Talking About Race (2022) and John Perkins’s One Blood (2018). Neither book buries past or present difficulties, but both offer pathways toward reconciliation. Adams acknowledges the ways people of different ethnic backgrounds can easily offend one another and Perkins applies Scriptural teaching to forgive, love and work together, despite our ongoing history of offenses. Another helpful book is Be The Bridge by Latasha Morrison, which gives practical guidance for helpful discussions. There are also some wonderful talks available online like these: https://www.mdiversityconference.com/
Perhaps this could be a moment in which we as Christians encourage one another to grow in skill to love our diverse neighbors as ourselves. Our Scriptures and the gospel instruct and equip us to embrace justice as God teaches justice, with truth, righteousness and generosity, but also with grace and forgiveness. We have been criticized by many for failing to live up to our calling as Christians. Let’s humbly accept that criticism, whether fair or unfair, but know that God is our real guide and judge and Helper!