Searching Questions

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 the betrayal of the genius of the religion, 

or is it due to a basic weakness in the religion itself?

The question is searching, for the dramatic demonstration of the impotency of Christianity in dealing with the issue is underscored by the apparent inability to cope with it within its own fellowship.

-Howard Thurman, The Preface to Jesus and the Disinherited

They are taking the Confederate Flag down, but honestly it's only because it's politically necessary, not because anyone really repents of the systemic disease of racism.  Another African American Church burned and who knows what the motives were, but it would take a pretty naive or willfully ignorant person to not at least suspect it was about race.

A week after the Emmanuel AME church killings, the person responsible is in custody and the nation has progressed rather quickly through the stages of grief.  For a few days the conversations about race and justice burned hot, people rallied, people prayed, flags were taken down, and I suspect that now life is pretty much getting back to normal as the burners of hatred are getting turned back down to simmer.

I decided I would re-read Thurman this week, to keep myself from moving on too quickly, because I'm white, and we do that (shrug and move on) when it's not at all appropriate or healthy.  Thurman is prophetic voice to me as a person who is utterly ensconced in white privilege and the ivory tower of intellectual, middle class, mainline protestant Christianity in America.  I'm going to have to take this reading of his rather thin little book very slowly.  I didn't even get through the preface before these questions smacked me upside the head.

I think the question of why Christianity (particularly American Christianity) is "impotent" to deal with the problems of racial justice is actually rather closely bound to why our nation is "impotent" to deal with them "radically, and therefore effectively,"  Like it or not, a certain manifestation of Christian faith is encoded into our national DNA.  You can argue about whether it's "authentic" Christianity, or some strain of Deism, but the fact remains that it almost always pranced about wearing the costume of the Church.  The discussions were different when our nation was founded, and the Church could only sporadically bring itself to say that "maybe" slavery was wrong, and "freedom of religion," basically meant you were free to be Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Unitarian or Quaker, and the government wasn't going to kill you for it.  Separation of Church and state was primarily to make sure that the government didn't have the power to meddle in the affairs of the church, read persecute certain people for their faith.  One wonders if the founding fathers could have ever envisioned the rise of the "religious right" or a "moral majority" as a political force.

But I digress, my point is that it is either the "betrayal of genius," or "basic weakness," that Thurman is talking about above has been coded into our national identity.  As a big fan of Jesus, I tend to want to think of this flaw as a "betrayal of genius," rather than a fundamental flaw.  I think that to use the teachings of man who did not grasp at power or seek to rule an earthly kingdom as a blueprint for a nation in the modern sense is fraught with danger. Take deistic humanism, gnostic denial of "the world,"the over-realized eschatology of millennialism, then throw it into a broth of worldly power and wealth the likes of which the world has never seen, and you have a soup that stands little chance of actually tasting anything like the recipe of a poor first century Jew.

I'm being a little bit negative here, because you do have to acknowledge that the better angels of our nature are also probably rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition as well, and when you compare how we are doing with how much of the non-Christian world is doing, things don't look quite so grim, but you have to admit, as Thurman insists repeatedly, that the majority of men at any moment in history stand, "with their backs against the wall."  What the church does about this can be our greatest glory and our greatest shame, and sometimes it can be both almost simultaneously.

We can be great servants of the poor, alleviating symptoms and ills of oppression, like hunger and homelessness, and we can be utterly silent about the systems that create these ills, and indeed we can even defend the very nature of the oppressor.  We can welcome the stranger into our midst and almost with the same breath say that a symbol of hate is just a "part of our heritage."

We may give our dollars to the poor, or the disinherited, or the ones with their backs against the wall, but will we give them our voices and our votes as well?  Will we speak of the injustice that doesn't effect us directly to those who are bound to represent us?  Will we move beyond mere self interest and actually care for the least of these?

I would ask these questions of Christians and Americans alike.