In ending apartheid and the manner of its ending, South African s have come to occupy the moral high ground. This will be undermined and totally subverted by our involvement in the arms trade. Those who supported our struggle are the self-same people campaigning for global peace and an end to the traffic in arms.
Racism postulates that human beings from different races are ultimately irreconcilable, that humanity is inexorably divided up into fiercely hostile ethnic camps and the best thing to contain the inevitable ethnic conflict that will result is to keep the racial groups apart. That was why Jews had to wear yellow arm bands with the Star of David embossed on them to identify them and to keep them in a kind of quarantine from their superior Aryan compatriots. That was why apartheid was spawned.
But what does the Bible and Christianity teach? We could say that reconciliation is really the heart of the Gospel message. Therefore to say that people are fundamentally irreconcilable is to deny not just this or that peripheral Christian verity. It is really to deny the central tenet of Christianity.
That is patently so utterly ridiculous. What does the size of my nose tell you of any significance about me? It cannot let you know whether I am intelligent or warmhearted or humorous. Christians have no option. In the face of racism they must stand up and he counted as part of a determined and passionate opposition. Not to oppose this evil is indeed to disobey God. Racism, because it classifies people on the basis of what are biological and other irrelevancies, splits the human family up into mutually exclusive and antagonistic camps.
It claims that we are made for separation, for apartness, for alienation. Normally the former should always be ostracized as untouchables described in derogatory and self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling stereotypes. Otherwise there should ideally be separate residential areas, separate schools, hospitals and clinics, even separate churches, separate public transport or separate parts on the same bus. Yes, and even separate cemeteries. There must be no miscegenation. Without batting and eyelid, racists have used biblical texts prohibiting mixing as justification for prohibiting racial mixing.
This interpretation ought not really to be taken seriously since it is such bizarre exegesis, except that so many did believe they had biblical support for their unbiblical practice that we have to point out two very obvious points about that story. God had not intended to confused human tongues. He was compelled into this action as punishment for the human sin of presumptuousness in wanting to scale heaven and assaults the precincts of God.
It is odd in the extreme to claim divine punishment as what God had intended from the beginning to be the lot of humankind. Second, for Christians the story of the Tower of Babel is considered to have been reversed in the story of the first Christian Pentecost where St.
Luke deliberately and of set purpose describes the ingathering of the people of the oikoumene — the inhabited world of that day — in the list of the nations assembled in Jerusalem and by stressing that these people form different nations heard the Good News preached by the Apostles each in his town tongue.
They understood and they were gathered into a new community, the followers of Jesus Christ. The Bible tells of profound truths through imaginative stories such as those in Genesis Everything is lovely in the garden. The commission of apostles as that of ambassadors to proclaims the central message that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, and to them had been entrusted the ministry of reconciliation.
Sin is basically in and of itself divisive and fissiparous. It breaks up and alienates. Its forces are centripetal, drawing all into a koinonia. Jesus becomes our peace who has broken down all sorts of middle walls of all kinds of separation and makes of all peoples one people, for in Him there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for we are indeed one in Him.
Thus racism is the ultimate denial of the Gospel and it cannot be but that all believers would oppose vehemently this false gospel that would have people place their hope of salvation in a pseudo-gospel.
Saint Paul declared that those who would subvert the gospel are anathema. He, more than most, recognized that ethnicity could not really be set up as a necessary condition or bar to salvation. That was being true to the best Jewish and biblical traditions.
Abraham was blessed so that he could be a blessing to all peoples. Israel was chosen not for her own glorification, but for the sake of the nations, to be a light to the gentiles according to deutero-Isaiah. The books of Ruth and Jonah were composed to counter the chauvinist particularism of, for instance, Ezra and Nehemia.
It is interesting to note the tension in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew between a Jewish particularism and the broader universalisms inherent in the Gospel. It has been observed that monotheism logically demands the recognition that all are ultimately the children of the one God and therefore form one family. Racism attacks the foundations of the biblical faith and the heart of Christianity.
For that reason it is unbiblical, immoral, and unchristian. Moralists will sometimes, when a little uncertain about the ethical quality of an action or policy, examine its consequences.
If the consequences are immoral or evil, then the particular act will be adjudged to be immoral. For instance, in the years since over 3. They were dumped, as you dump rubbish or you dump things, in poverty-stricken barren resettlement camps in the unviable Bantustan homelands.
I once visited such a resettlement dumping ground and saw a little girl with her widowed mother and a sister in their hovel. Children were starving not because there was no food, not accidentally, but by deliberate government policy.
At the time I swore I would tell her story everywhere in the world I could until apartheid was destroyed. I tell it here so that we should never suffer from a convenient amnesia and ever reckon that racism could somehow be a benign thing, that it could be made respectable.
During a crusade in Jackson, Mississippi, in the summer of , he told the audience that segregation had no place in the church. Graham would later invite the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. By the nineteen-nineties, the evangelical movement had come to embrace racial reconciliation as a Biblical mandate.
Repenting of racial divisions became a pillar of the Promise Keepers, a Christian ministry that drew tens of thousands of men to stadium revivals. Yet there were clearly limits on how far white evangelicals were willing to extend the ministry of reconciliation.
In , at a triennial student missions conference organized, in St. In surveys that measure how warmly people say they feel about Black people, the sentiments of white evangelical Protestants exceed those of the general population. Yet the vast majority of white Christians remain indifferent to the symbols of white supremacy and skeptical of the realities of racial inequality.
Emerson and Christian Smith suggest a cultural and religious framework for understanding this inconsistency. The Roman Catholic Church in the United States has its own ugly history of promoting slavery and resisting integration. When Black people fleeing discrimination in the South streamed into Northern cities during the Great Migration, many white Catholics, in particular, fought to keep them out of their neighborhoods and parishes.
The fact that history, theology, and culture all contribute to the racist attitudes embedded in the white church makes dislodging them especially difficult. One potential pathway is for white church leaders to absorb exegetical lessons from the Black church. Black Christians share many of the same broad faith commitments as white Christians, but the African-American ecclesial tradition also has a long history of confronting injustice.
He recounts his own journey, growing up in the Black church in Alabama, studying African-American history in college, and then attending a mostly white seminary to pursue a master of divinity. I swam in this disdain. Left unsaid is that it can also speak powerfully to white Christians. White Christian churches have not just been complacent or complicit in failing to address racism; rather, as the dominant cultural power in the U. Through the entire American story, white Christianity has served as the central source of moral legitimacy for a society explicitly built to value the lives of white people over Black people.
And this legacy remains present and measurable in the cultural DNA of contemporary white Christianity, not only among evangelicals in the South but also among mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast. I strive to conduct research and write as an impartial observer. For white Americans, the data suggest that Christian identity limits their ability to see structural injustice, and even influences them to see themselves, rather than African Americans, as a persecuted group.
For example, attitudes about what the Confederacy symbolizes today are one of the most noticeable differentiators among these groups. Last year, in a national survey of more than 2, Americans, PRRI found that 86 percent of white evangelical Protestants, along with 70 percent of white mainline Protestants and 70 percent of white Catholics, believe that the Confederate flag is more a symbol of southern pride than of racism. By contrast, only 41 percent of white religiously unaffiliated Americans and 16 percent of African American Protestants agree; approximately six in 10 religiously unaffiliated white people and three-quarters of African American Protestants see the Confederate flag mostly as a racist symbol.
Stephanie McCurry: The Confederacy was an antidemocratic, centralized state. Similarly, nearly two-thirds 64 percent of white Christians see the killings of African American men by police as isolated incidents rather than part of a broader pattern. There is some daylight here among white evangelicals 71 percent , white Catholics 63 percent , and white mainline Protestants 59 percent , but the differences are more a matter of degree than kind.
And there is a percentage-point gap between white Christians overall and religiously unaffiliated whites 38 percent agree they are isolated incidents and a nearly percentage-point gap between white Christians and African American Protestants 15 percent agree. In order to see this more clearly, I developed a Racism Index comprising 15 separate questions that cover four broad areas: attitudes about Confederate symbols; racial inequality and African American economic mobility; racial inequality and the treatment of African Americans in the criminal-justice system; and general perceptions of race and racism.
Analysis of the composite Racism Index confirms the general pattern: White Christians are more likely than white religiously unaffiliated Americans to register higher scores. The median scores reveal similar attitudes among white Christian groups. Not surprisingly, given their history and strong presence in the former states of the Confederacy, white evangelical Protestants have the highest median score 0.
But the median scores of white Catholics 0. These numbers stand out compared with the median scores of the general population 0. Even when employing more sophisticated statistical models that control for a range of demographic characteristics, holding more racist attitudes is independently predictive of identifying as a white Christian and vice versa.
The results of these models lead us to some remarkable and damning conclusions:. Putting this in plain language, our models reveal that the more racist attitudes a person holds, the more likely he or she is to identify as a white Christian and vice versa. Today, years after the first enslaved African landed on our shores, and more than years after the abolition of slavery in America, a combination of social forces and demographic changes has brought the country to a crossroads.
We have inherited this tradition with scant critique, and we have a moral and religious obligation to face the burden of that history and its demand on our present.
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