National Public Radio has been running a lot of content about racial injustice in the past seven weeks since the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Some of their pieces have been about religion and race and what’s slowing up response from many evangelicals.
To focus on Southern evangelicals is an interesting choice, in that other groups: Jews, mainline Protestants, Muslims (who have their own race issues) aren’t covered in this NPR project. The three presentations I listened to all focused on evangelicals in the South, as if that’s the only region where you will find real racists.
There are plenty of evangelicals elsewhere: New York, Denver, Los Angeles, who would have a different read on this, so why NPR front-loaded their stories by only visiting southern locales is a mystery. A June 6 presentation by Tom Gjelten illustrates the disconnect.
For evangelical Christian leaders, however, crafting a response to Floyd's killing is complicated by their view of sin in individual, not societal, terms and their belief in the need for personal salvation above all. Evangelical theologians have long rejected the idea of a "social gospel," which holds that the kingdom of God should be pursued by making life better here on earth.
Most evangelicals are old enough to remember what happened last time American denominations focused on social change. Mainline Protestants embraced the civil rights movement, abortion rights, demonstrations against the Vietnam War and when the dust cleared, they were losing members by the millions. Followers wanted to hear about God’s power from the pulpit, not politics.
When I was a teenager at an Episcopal parish in the Baltimore-Washington suburbs in the late 1960s, I saw this first-hand. After one of the priests preached on the evils of American involvement in Vietnam, people left the church.
A June 12 broadcast by Rachel Martin shows the stunning cluelessness of evangelicals on this issue, specifically Todd Wagner of Watermark Church in Dallas.
Considering how controversial this church is, Wagner is an odd choice, if the goal is understanding what mainstream evangelicals are doing or saying.
Although the sub-head says it’s about how evangelical churches are grappling with issues of race and racism, it’s really about how they aren’t dealing with it. A sound bite from a Wagner sermon is as follows:
Let me tell you what I'm not going to talk about today, and that's racial reconciliation. And the reason I'm not going to do that is because that's impossible. First of all, when you talk about race, you may as well be talking about unicorns. And forgive me if you're here with your child, but unicorns don't exist. And neither does race.
I was trying to help people understand individual responsibility. So many times, like, I've had friends for four decades that have been praying for revival like it's this invisible thing that will happen out there somewhere, that there'd be a group of people that would be magically and mysteriously revivified that would lead to transformation and peace in our world.
And what I always want folks to remember is that revival happens in individuals, not in some mystical group that's out there. And the same is true with racial reconciliation. And again, I even defined race. Race is not a biblical term. It's a social construct. So there's one God, one Father, one Lord. And so we're all of one blood.
So … what does one do with that?
The interviewer does a good job of letting Wagner hang himself with his own words with him saying that, in the larger picture, racism is merely personal sin. Well, yes, but, shouldn’t individual sins be named and dealt with? If someone is stealing your things, shouldn’t you call it theft rather than consigning to generalized sin?
I wished the interviewer had asked Wagner if he takes a similarly passive attitude against sex trafficking.
You see, evangelicals do understand social reform because they’re out there protesting abortion and, to a lesser extent, euthanasia and assisted suicide. As they see it, people are literally dying; either the pre-born, the elderly or the terminally ill. But lots of evangelicals are not out there demonstrating about racial justice issues (nor other ones like animal rights, nuclear power or climate change).
These folks will always say they only focus on the Bible and issues pertaining to the text. As someone who’s tried –- and failed — to get pastors to preach about sexuality and singleness over the decades, I’ve learned that clergy don’t want to wade into risky waters. If they’re not going to tackle sexuality — yes, most pastors rarely address sexuality — they’re not going to speak out on race, either. The series needed a wider context, in other words.
The most recent — and the longest — broadcast, on July 1, was on how racist ideology has long been present among southern evangelicals. It opens with an anecdote about a white, church-going mob that attacked the Freedom Riders when they arrived in Montgomery, Ala., in May 1961. (A video explaining this is atop this post).
They quote a Texas-born historian who explains how evangelicals’ theology and teaching from the pulpit gave them no conceptual tools for seeing segregation as a moral evil and instead believed that God had ordained the separation of the races.
(Carolyn Renée) Dupont, now a historian at Eastern Kentucky University, said the experience with her grandmother spurred her to focus her research on the racial views of Southern white evangelicals. "I wanted to understand what seemed like a central riddle about the South," she said. "The part of the country that was the most fervent about religious faith was also the one that practiced white supremacy most enthusiastically."
… A belief in white supremacy was a foundational part of Southern culture, which is one reason some otherwise devout Christians have failed to challenge it.
Do listen to these pieces, as they try to explain the “why” behind what many — not all — Southern evangelicals believe.
But also realize that the leaders included in this series are a subset of a larger subset in American religion, and that many evangelicals vehemently disagree with the mix of religion with racism.
For example, read this CBN piece about how two evangelical churches, one black and one white, merged in Cedar Rapids, Iowa last year. It would have been good to have talked to leaders in the Assemblies of God, one of America’s most racially diverse denominations. Why not talk to black pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention, since black churches (Floyd’s funeral was in a Southern Baptist church) are a growing presence in the SBC? Those pastors know the good and the bad in evangelical life in the South.
However, these kinds of people are not getting interviewed by NPR.
These issues are complex. Maybe evangelicals are OK with denouncing racism, but they don’t like what the actual Black Lives Matter organization says on its website about other causes — including many that have nothing to do with race. If they sign onto one thing, will they get dragged into something else? Will the same kind of mission creep happen to them that emptied mainline Protestant churches several decades ago?
I do hope that NPR leaves the South at some point to look into what evangelicals are doing elsewhere in the country. Or looks into what other religious groups (Latter-day Saints? Catholics? Mainline Protestants? Orthodox Jews?) have done about racism. And it’s important to focus on deeds, as well as words.
Thankfully, American religion isn’t just about what happens among selected groups of white evangelicals south of the Mason Dixon line. We need to see a bigger picture.