Evangelicalism Doesn't Possess A Language For Talking About Injustice

Thabiti Anyabwile says there must be a robust White evangelical response to the issues raised by Ferguson:

Otherwise, orthodox evangelicalism is dead. It’s dead to oppressed folks in our back yards who need to hear the word of God spoken into their situation with all the prophetic unction our Lord would give. It’s dead to grieving parents required to have closed casket funerals for their children because racist systems and people so disfigure the body it can’t be shown. Orthodox evangelicalism is dead to the marginalized because it’s so allergic to the margins. It wants its mainstream, its tree-lined streets of cultural acceptance, its reserve and respectability. So it’s dead.

To be clear, evangelicalism’s quietude is not a case of not knowing what to say, how to say it, or being too distant from the problem. It’s not merely a case of leaders and people staring into an isolated incident and needing to collect data before they act. It’s not a case of not having media outlets and channels of its own. No. In incident after incident—proving a pattern, a systemic problem that requires eyes-and-mouth-wide-open denouncement—the church has turned her head, closed her eyes, and pressed tight her lips. The problem dominates local and national news. But evangelicalism changes the channel and carries on with regularly scheduled programming. Even if the revolution is televised, evangelicalism ain’t even willing to watch much less join.

And this call isn’t an attempt to guilt people who have nothing to do with some far off situation. No. This post is a recognition that evangelicalism is useless in its own back yard, with its own neighbors, while it changes its twitter avatars to identify with persecuted Christians half a world away. Evangelicalism should show outward solidarity with persecuted Christians. But it should also be the good Samaritan religion, a religion of justified people who demonstrate their justification in practical acts of compassion for its beaten, robbed and left-for-dead ethnic-other neighbors. Do we see that from national evangelical ministries and leaders? No, we don’t. Ours appears to be the religion of the Pharisee who asks, “Who then is my neighbor?”

Who is evangelicalism’s neighbor? Is Michael Brown? How about Kimani Gray, Kendrec McDade, Amadou Diallo, Ousmane Zongo, Timothy Stansbury, Jr., Sean Bell, Orlando Barlow, Aaron Campbell, Ronald Madison and James Brissette, or Oscar Grant? Or let’s just take the unarmed persons shot and killed in the month of August: Eric Garner, John Crawford, Ezell Ford and Dante Parker. Has evangelicalism recognized these men as neighbors? Does it recognize that their being made in the image of God requires the protection of their lives and the expression of our neighborly love? An evangelicalism that does not know its neighbor is a dead evangelicalism, an unjustified evangelicalism.

We must join people in their suffering or else say goodbye to evangelicalism. The righteous and carefully channeled anger Anyabwile displays here must pierce our hearts. In a more eloquent and fulsome way than I could say it, he is repeating my point that we, the White evangelical church, do not fully recognize Jesus when he comes to us in unexpected forms. One of the most discouraging and painful things about this is that many White evangelicals have strong opinions on issues of race, poverty, and justice, despite living in church cultures that have never taught them what Christianity has to say about these matters.

We haven't heard sermons about systemic sin. We have not had a Bible study about racism. Our pastor has not told us that Christianity values both individualism and collectivism but we're living in a culture that has made individualism an idol. Our leaders have never told us that the inability to think systemically as well as individually distorts our view of self and others and makes us blind to much of what Jesus accomplished on the cross. We've not been challenged to give thought to our class and racial privileges and forsake them in the way the Apostle Paul did so relentlessly. We have not been confronted about our preoccupation with American nationalism. If we've been lucky enough to be in a church that teaches us to care for the marginalized, our church leaders still probably shrink back from telling us what it might actually mean and cost in our own country and community.

Our sin is so engrained -- woven into the very fabric of our religious tradition well before we were born -- that we take strong and opinionated positions about race without any sense of shame or self-awareness, without even realizing that we're not using Christianity to support our views. Our certainty is reinforced rather than tempered by our ignorance. It is not caused by a bunch of bad people in the church being mean. It is precisely the sort of systemic sin we have trouble seeing. Laboring under the weight of generations past, constrained by secular cultural norms and patterns of thought that were long ago baptized as "Christian," we treat race and justice more as an issue to be argued over in the vein of politics than as an inextricable part of the Gospel. Anyabwile goes on:

Around the country evangelical leaders participate in “racial reconciliation” conversations and repeatedly ask, “How can we diversify our church?” or “How can we attract more African-American members?” Why would diverse groups want to belong to an evangelicalism that does not acknowledge their diversity where it hurts when it matters? You want diversity in your membership roles? How about forgetting your membership statistics and further diversifying the picket lines and protests thronged by the disenfranchised in their just fights? We don’t want to be your statistics—whether wrongful death statistics or church membership statistics. We want a living, breathing, risk-taking brotherhood in the gospel lived out where it matters. Until evangelicalism can muster that kind of courage and abandon its privileged, “objective,” distant calls for calm and “gospel”-this or “gospel”-that, it proves itself entirely inadequate for a people who need to see Jesus through the tear gas smoke of injustice.

It can no longer be the case that to be “evangelical” means to care about either the gospel or justice. Evangelicalism must come to understand that justice and mercy flow inextricably from the gospel—both at the cross of Christ as well as in the daily carrying of our crosses. Micah 6:8 is still God’s requirement of us. And it will not do to position one injustice against another, as if to say we need only focus on one thing, or as if to say until this one “greater” injustice is dealt with then all “lesser” crimes need not be attended. Don’t place abortion in opposition to persecuted Christians in Syria or persecuted Christians in Syria in opposition to the Mike Browns. Can not the evangelical heart and mind expand to care about and act against all these things? Should not we risk a bursting heart in order to live a vibrant Christian life? If we can’t, then we should confess and repent of our hypocrisy and partiality, else be done with calling ourselves Christians. True religion cares for widows, orphans and the like.

Anyabwile calls for the formation of a new conservative evangelical organization to promote sound theology for justice as well as a program of activism aligned with that theology. As I ponder this, I think a big part of the challenge for us is that there is no widely accepted language for talking about justice that is indigenous to evangelicalism. This has some lamentable consequences. Those who have begun to see evangelicalism's failures try to speak to their fellow evangelicals about it, but often do so by borrowing words and phrases that, to most evangelicals at least, are associated with the academy or secularism, and have developed political connotations. How can we avoid this when there is no established evangelical language for discussing these issues? It becomes very tempting to borrow words such as racism, white privilege, social justice, and more. The Bible addresses all of these ideas extensively, but the use of these phrases can throw up walls among White evangelical listeners right away.

The severity of the difficulty is revealed when we consider what happens when we try to discard these buzzwords and speak in specifically Christian terms using scriptural evidence. When we take this approach we encounter two dangers. The first concern is that in using specifically Christian language and lots of scripture, we make the message too opaque and generalized for White evangelicals to even understand that race and privilege and justice are the topics at hand. The second problem arises when White evangelicals understand the point we're driving at, but are utterly baffled by our use of scripture. Because we have been immersed in a cultural milieu that does not address systems and justice and racism -- because we have imbibed the false belief that these issues are not just superficially political but fundamentally political -- when we read scriptures that explicitly give us teaching on precisely these things, we often fail to see it. Having never seen a scripture used in this way before, it is extremely easy to reject its plain meaning.

Perhaps the kind of organization Mr. Anywabwile calls for can address this problem in a substantial way. In the meantime, it is important for us to begin to understand that our leaders have let us down. They have sold us a distorted and incomplete Gospel that harms others while leaving us without credibility before a watching world.