So, you’re White and you’re feeling frustrated and uncomfortable with all the racial tension happening in our country right now. You are against racism, but you don’t like the tone of the discussion or some of the things that are happening at the protests. You recognize there’s a problem with racism in our country still, but you’re skeptical about “systemic racism”, and you are very uncomfortable with rhetoric that makes you feel guilty for being White. You’re at a loss for how to respond, because so much of what you hear doesn’t fit with your own experience, and it seems that anything you say or do will be misinterpreted and you’ll end up being labeled a racist. So how can someone like you learn, engage, and contribute to solutions on issues of racial justice? In this edition of our Imago Dei series, I would like to lay out a few important lessons I’ve learned in my own personal journey.
Embrace the Discomfort: The devastation that racism has caused in our country is far beyond what most White people can imagine or have begun to process. There is simply no nice, clean, tidy, or orderly way to address it. Truly engaging in the issue of racism is like walking into a city recently destroyed by war- if we think we can walk through clean and unscathed, with our khaki shorts and flip-flops, we are in for a shocking surprise. As White people, we mostly see racism from a distance. If you really want to engage, you will need to be ready to confront the harsh and raw realities on the ground. And, what you see and hear on the ground may seem offensive to you and will challenge what you thought you knew about race in our country. Interestingly, even Dr. King, seen from a distance historically, is now universally praised. Despite what popular quotes and MLK day memes might lead you to believe, at the time- he was extremely polarizing and controversial. His movement sparked bombings, turned cities upside down, included marching on highways, and confrontations with police. I’m not suggesting that you shut off your discernment. However, if you find yourself often raising objections or finding fault, you might be lining up on the wrong side of the field. Your tolerance level for personal discomfort and the messiness of this struggle will have to increase a lot in order to be able to see, understand, and confront racial injustice in any meaningful way.
Learn to Recognize Racism in Yourself: So many White people shut down the conversation about race when they begin to perceive they are being implicated as part of the problem. Sometimes the message we hear is “White people are BAD!”. Rather than listen and process what is really being said, our defenses go up, and we shut down. The challenging truth in all of this is that we really can’t contribute much to progress on racism until we are able to see it in ourselves. It is sobering and painful to admit that we have somehow internalized a belief that we are better than others. However, this mentality is often just under the surface, and it seeps out in ways we often don’t even recognize. Unfortunately, if we can’t recognize our part in the problem, there is no way we can contribute meaningfully to any solutions. Engaging the discussion on racism requires us to take a Psalm 139 posture continuously: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” I lead a multicultural ministry and the only way I have been able to learn the lessons I’ve needed to learn on race is by being corrected. Those corrections have sometimes been painful, but they have been some of the most important catalysts for my personal, spiritual growth. I encourage you to embrace opportunities to explore where the ideology of White supremacy might be hiding in your own heart and mind.
Step Down from the Seat of Judgement: I’m going to say something that might be hard to hear- as a White person: It is unlikely that you have much expertise to add to the discussion on racial justice. Your experience and understanding is most likely theoretical and developed at a distance from the realities that really shape our current situation. We all would agree that there is a big difference between a person who has learned in a classroom and a person who has 30 years of experience in the field. It’s easy to find things we disagree with in any broad movement, but when our learning is done only theoretically, in the classroom (or worse, from the perspective of political commentary), we don’t have the necessary context to apply that learning appropriately. So, we can sound smart when we debate “Critical Race Theory” or cite “Black-on Black” crime statistics, but our understanding and experience is woefully lacking. Unfortunately, as humans, we don’t like to be wrong or for our ignorance to be exposed. And as White people, we are used to taking a superior position of judgment when it comes to other racial groups. If we truly want to learn and contribute meaningfully to progress on racial justice, we must learn to listen to Black leaders, especially Christians, who are actively engaged in racial justice work. As a side note, latching on to Black voices whose views confirm your own but represent only a small percentage of the Black perspective probably won’t get you where you need to go.
Understand the Importance of Justice in Reconciliation: Do you remember the Promise Keepers movement? They were an organization in the 1990s that encouraged men to be more godly husbands. Part of the Promise Keepers movement included a strong emphasis on racial reconciliation. I attended some of their stadium events and was greatly encouraged by them. Unfortunately, the movement did not produce the kind of lasting racial reconciliation that would be visible today. I believe one reason has to do with the critical relationship between racial justice and racial reconciliation. Many White Christians are longing for unity as their Black brothers and sisters struggle under inequities and injustices that we refuse to see and neglect to address. How can genuine reconciliation occur if White Christians will not join our Black brothers and sisters in their struggle for justice? Is it right to place all the emphasis on unity when the injustices faced by our Black neighbors have a generational link to our own prosperity? Yes, God is a God of reconciliation. But, friends, we must recognize that asking for a unity that doesn’t include justice for our brothers and sisters is cruel and wrong. Let our unity be bound together and validated in Christ by our practical, actionable concern and love for our neighbor.
One of the most meaningful areas of growth for me personally over the last 10 years has been the privilege of beginning to experience what I refer to as a “new we”. I have begun to have fellowship and unity with people of diverse backgrounds and races. Yes, I am still very much a work in progress when it comes to my own racial biases, but I have learned so many important lessons and I am experiencing the kind of racial reconciliation many of us say we want. My own journey has been uncomfortable at times- learning to see racial bias in myself has been confusing and frustrating. I’ve had to embrace my own lack of understanding and become primarily a learner on issues of race. And, I’ve come to understand that one of the most important keys to opening up the door to real reconciliation is joining the struggle for racial justice. It has been one big exercise in humility.
White Supremacy in the American Church
by Jarrett Meek
Will the white, Evangelical church in America ever open its eyes to the devastation that racism and the endemic ideology of white supremacy inflicts upon our black brothers and sisters? The events of the last two weeks have moved more white pastors and Christians to make statements against racism. Unfortunately, however, a barely conscious belief in white superiority and dominance still permeates the white church, our mentality, and our society to a degree that is not so easily undone. The white church in America has suffered this crippling spiritual disease since before the founding of our country.
For more than two centuries, white men and women in the United States of America enslaved our black brothers and sisters. By 1860, the U.S. census counted 31 million people, almost 4 million of whom were enslaved. In other words, nearly 12% of the entire population of the United States of American lived under the brutal weight of slavery. It’s a sick and devastating irony that the Christian church in America not only accepted this horrific practice, but also developed doctrines to explicitly support and defend it. A classic pillar of the “Christian” proslavery argument states: “It is in the order of Providence that one man should be subservient to another.” Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist, denounced Southern Christianity, calling it “corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” While White Southern Christianity was infected and corrupted through and through by these evil doctrines, the white church in the North spent 200 years accommodating their Southern brothers and absorbing a more subtle mentality of white supremacy. 1
In his famous speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, Douglass lamented about the Christian church in the North and South calling the church itself the “bulwark of American slavery”. He challenged Christian pastors throughout the nation saying they “have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system.” In doing so, he charged them with preaching an abominable faith that “makes God a respecter of persons, denies His fatherhood over the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man.”
The institution of slavery was ended violently, through our nation’s only civil war. But the mentality and the doctrines that permitted and supported it naturally did not die when Lee surrendered to Grant in 1865. The evil monster of white supremacy, which had become an active part of the daily life and even of the “Christian” faith of so many, still roamed wild, barely restrained by emancipation and madder than hell. It devised new ways to wreak havoc on people of color. It permeated the laws and the justice system and created a comprehensive code of legal and societal oppression known as Jim Crow laws.
When I was a young boy in the 1970s, I didn’t grasp the recency of the Civil Rights Movement. I learned some things about it, but I never pondered the fact that Dr. King had been assassinated just two years before I was born. “Bloody Sunday” and King’s march from Selma occurred just 5 years before my birth. It turns out I was growing up in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, and I didn’t even know it! My own journey underscores how oblivious most white people are to the near realities of racial injustice in our present and recent past. This lack of awareness afflicts the white Evangelical church and, coupled with a toxic allegiance to a political ideology, is part of our blindness to issues of race that continue today.
Though I don’t know any Christians who would openly embrace the ideology of white supremacy, that doesn’t mean the mentality doesn’t continue to live in our hearts and find expression in our actions today. We didn’t mind putting a white nationalist in the White House. We adamantly deny the existence of systemic racism. We disparage black athletes who use their platform to call attention to racial injustice. According to many white Evangelicals, our first black president was a Muslim, a socialist, was going to take away our guns, hates America, and wasn’t a natural-born citizen. Many of us express a condescending view of black people as we dismiss their experiences and believe that they lack the intelligence or education to think for themselves. Some assert that our black brothers and sisters blindly follow political leaders who are just trying to make them dependent on the government. In white circles, we complain that black people would rather live on welfare than work for a living. When it’s just the good ‘ole boys, we compare one minority group to another, making judgments and generalizations about which one has a better work ethic and which group values the family more. We criticize the music, the wardrobe, the culture, the purchasing decisions, and the hairstyles of people of color. We sit in the seat of power, judgment, leadership, wealth, resources, education, and theological orthodoxy, enjoying prominence in every area of our society, and we are indignant if anyone dares to suggest that we set it up that way or that we receive any benefit from it that might be called “privilege.” At the same time, we’ll fight tooth and nail to keep from losing this position of privilege we deny we have. We refuse to affirm the value of black lives. And, we believe in our hearts that the reason black people are dying and being incarcerated in higher proportions has something to do with their inferior character. To top it off, we feel really great when we talk about “racial reconciliation” and “unity”, but we recoil at the idea of “racial justice”. White Church, I hate to break it to you- we still have a serious problem with white supremacy.
Frederick Douglass: American Prophet, D.H. Dilbeck, The University of North Carolina Press, 2018, p.3
Suffocating the Imago Dei
by Jarrett Meek
Shining In George Floyd’s eyes, as he struggled beneath the suffocating knee of an officer of the law, was the image of God. God’s eyes shined in George’s eyes, God’s heartbeat in George’s heart, God’s breath moved in George’s breath- until George’s life was extinguished.
Amaud Arbery ran because he loved to run. He ran on legs, with lungs, with a heart given to him by his Creator. Two white men chased him down in their pickup truck with guns. Confrontation, struggle, shotgun. The Imago Dei bled out in broad daylight on a Georgia street.
Breonna Taylor slept, safe in her own apartment. Rest is built into the fabric of creation, because our Creator worked six days and then rested. Day turns to night, summer turns to winter, and Breonna Taylor, even as she rested, displayed something of the image of God- until officers, in careless disregard, broke in and shot her to death- by mistake.
“The whole concept of the imago Dei, as it is expressed in Latin, the ‘image of God,’ is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. Not that they have substantial unity with God, but that every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: there are not gradations in the image of God… We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every man.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” - Genesis 1:27
So much of Christian theology is established in the first three chapters of Genesis. Who is God? Who are humans? Any serious study of the doctrine of mankind includes the concept of Imago Dei. Like so many other core Christian doctrines, the foundation that is laid in Genesis is then expanded and applied in the rest of scripture. When Jesus connects the two Greatest Commandments, He is saying that loving God and loving neighbor are inseparably intertwined. If you don’t love your neighbor, who you can see, how can you possibly love God, whom you cannot? You see, our neighbor is stamped with the Imago Dei. When Jesus says “whenever you’ve done it to the least of these, you’ve done it to me”, He is challenging us to see the Imago Dei in our brothers and sisters and act accordingly toward them. Likewise, if we ignore or minimize our brothers’ suffering, we ignore and minimize the suffering of Jesus. The doctrine of the Imago Dei places a unique and immense value on the life of every human being. Racism strips a life of this value. It is not only an affront to our neighbor, but it is an affront to the God whose image He bears.
Weeping, gut-wrenching pain, hearts ripped into a million shreds, black hearts bearing the burden of centuries of injustice and oppression in the land of the free. Cold, white knuckles grasping power, defending the indefensible, excusing the inexcusable, elevating ideology to justify the unjustifiable. Heaping scorn on people protesting oppression from a comfortable place of privilege. Smoke-screen arguments, intentionally misunderstanding issues to uphold agendas. Ideologies of white supremacy permeating churches and institutions- insidious, clandestine, unrecognized by those who reap its reward. Is the White, Evangelical Church really still on the wrong side of racial justice? Latino brothers and sisters- where are you? You receive racism, do you also inflict it on others? Refugee friends- will you receive mercy one day and judge your neighbor without it the next?
Let me ask you where you stand. WHERE DO YOU STAND? As for me and my house, we will repent of the hidden sin in our own hearts. As for me and my house, we will choose to see and value the image of God in each person. As for me and my house, we will plant our feet firmly in solidarity with our black brothers and sisters and join them in the cry for justice. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
Overlooked | How Immigrants Are Saving our Cities from the Inside Out
When Discipling Our Kids Includes Discussing Racial Injustice
Lucy had to leave the room. The graphic cruelty and brutal suffering was beyond what her eleven-year-old mind had imagined possible among human beings. She endured the first several scenes, the capture, the slave boats, the attempted escape, but the lashing of Kunta Kinte was more than she could bear. We set her up in another room with a different movie, while the rest of the family continued watching the 2016 release of Roots.
We've prayed for our daughter, Lucy, since before she was born. She's learned and memorized scripture and we've talked a lot about Jesus, as a family. She still goes to sleep listening to the CD of Bible songs that we played for her when she was a baby. In 2014, I had the privilege of baptizing her into the faith. Like all of our children, much of her discipleship has included an emphasis on things that are beautiful and pleasant. Yet, facing the ugliness of human sin in our world must be part of our growth in faith. How else will we learn to oppose injustice in the world around us and see the depth of sin in our own hearts?
We brought the DVD's of the Roots miniseries on vacation with us to New Mexico this summer. Teaching my kids to love God and to love their neighbor is my most important responsibility as a father. Helping them understand and connect with biblical themes in the context of our history and our present is a huge part of this. Discussing and processing slavery, Jim Crow laws, the civil rights movement, mass incarceration and current events related to racial injustices, racial bias and the devastating effects racism has had in the lives of African-American people throughout the history country is a very important practical part of our journey together.
One of the most beautiful and beneficial aspects of our experience living in the urban core in Kansas City, KS has been the opportunity to share life with people of different races and cultures. In addition to our ministry involvement with Mission Adelante, our neighborhood and Sumner Academy, where our kids have attended high school have given us the special gift of seeing life through diverse perspectives and learning from people of color. Sumner Academy, one of the best high schools in Kansas, has a student population that is comprised of 42% Hispanic, 34% Black, 15% White, and 8% Asian students. Growing up in this context has given our kids a respect and admiration for people from diverse backgrounds. Being part of such a rich community has given our entire family the blessing of interacting with gifted students, talented musicians and athletes, and coaches from different racial and cultural backgrounds. Proximity helps; it's a little easier to avoid unhealthy biases when the reality you see around you doesn't reinforce the stereotypes the dominant culture is trying to sell you. But, I should emphasize that despite proximity, a pretty high degree of intentional effort is needed to counter the world's pervasive, destructive, and anti-biblical messaging about race.
Our discussion of Roots couldn't have been more profound. We broke it up into four nights, watching two episodes each night and then spending some time after each viewing to share thoughts and observations. Lucy watched other shows in a different room, but joined us for the discussions. The kids noticed the striking incoherence of a version of Christianity that supported and promoted slave-holding and slavery as an institution. They called out the twisted irony of Christian slave-holders who were "nice" to their slaves. We discussed the separation of children from parents, the rape of black women, the erasing of family history and cultural identity, and the comprehensive nature of oppression that affects people physically, emotionally, and psychologically for generations. Charlie asked, "Why don't we have a holiday in the U.S. that celebrates the freeing of slaves?" (Good question, Charlie!) We discussed racism and racial injustice as an affront to the foundational, biblical truth that all people are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Our discussion led us to process together how the history of our nation continues to impact our present. And, we asked ourselves how we would have responded had we lived in those times and how we should respond in our times.
There were many memorable moments during our New Mexico vacation. We rode horses, hiked to the bottom of the Rio Grande gorge, and watched dozens of hot air balloons launch. But, in five, ten, and thirty years, I'm quite sure that our discussions about Roots will be what marked our lives the most.
