I asked my friend Jazzy for a good place to start, and she recommended “Jesus and the Disinherited” by Howard Thurman.

I’ve just finished the first chapter, and I’ve underlined a lot, but don’t have any really strong things that I’ve understood well enough to share yet. But there is one thing that really stood out to me.

Thurman makes the case in this chapter that, in understanding Jesus, we can’t ignore the context in which he was born and raised. He describes the context of the Jewish people as an oppressed/marginalized/underprivileged group, and goes into detail about how such groups can respond to their oppression/oppressors.

In the midst of this, he’ll frequently make nods to how this may have informed Jesus’ teaching and thinking. And in one such paragraph he writes:

The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker [(Jesus)] appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus.”

– Jesus and the Disinherited, p18

Every time folks interact with the idea of deconstruction when it comes to religious systems, someone will bring up the idea of reconstruction: don’t spend all your time criticizing the existing systems, also focus on finding what is true. That’s what I want to do more than anything else. And his next few sentences start taking me there:

Wherever [Jesus’] spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them”

– Jesus and the Disinherited, p19

In this same chapter he even speaks to the despair I and many of my friends have felt, in the face of the church’s call (which they represent of that of Jesus) to be quiet and humble, groveling and cowardly, in the face of oppression. But, to Thurman, there’s a big difference between that and the call of Jesus:

All of this would have been quite true if Jesus had stopped [at calling us to humility]. He did not. He recognized with authentic realism that anyone who permits another to determine the quality of [their] inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to [their] destiny.”

– Jesus and the Disinherited, p17-18

I’m not done with the book, so I don’t know how he will flesh this out. But I’m very, very excited to understand how there is truth to the call to inner peace and humility that doesn’t betray the oppressed, but instead frees, supports, and equips them.

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Last summer, I thought the solution was to just write anonymously, so I tried that. It worked, for a while. But after a month or two I once again grew uncomfortable with taking the position of teaching people how I knew things they didn’t, especially as friends started asking me to write posts to address specific concerns they were hearing about as the 2020 presidential election was ramping up. So, I stopped writing again.

In conversations with friends recently, I’ve realized that what I want, and am hopeful will be helpful and sustainable, is to share what I learn… nothing else. I don’t want to write takedown posts, or “gotcha” posts, or convincing-others posts. Rather, I feel like I’m slowly learning things about what part of spirituality and faith actually make sense and I want to put them down in one place… and that’s it. Nothing else.

So, let’s try this experiment, and see if I can do it. For starters, I’ll be importing all the old posts from the other blog (and dating them back to their original dates, so they’ll show up as having been originally posted last summer).

The post Importing all my posts from my other blog appeared first on Matt learning.

In the introduction West is giving context for the book, and he’s beginning to describe how Cone wrote it, among other things, in response to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. He writes:

After 212 uprisings on the night that the bullets went through the precious body of Martin Luther King, Jr., America can no longer deny the fact that either it comes to terms with the vicious legacy of white supremacy, or the curtain will fall on the precious experiment in democracy called America[.]

Cornel West, Black Theology and Human Identity (reproduced in the introduction to James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power)

I’ve been feeling this. I’ve been feeling like, as people describe our increasing fragmented country, we may be seeing the death throes of a nation unwilling to address one of its deepest internal fractures.

In this introduction he also addresses the anger I know so many of us have felt in response to the white people and white churches in our lives; he quotes Cone when he wrote:

This work… is written with a definite attitude, the attitude of an angry black man, disgusted with the oppression of black people in America and with the scholarly demand to be ‘objective’ about it. Too many people have died, and too many are on the edge of death…. Is it not time for theologians to get upset?

Black Theology and Black Power, 2-3

The big question I have, and which I’ve been asked often recently, is, “Is there hope for white people?” Obviously, as a white person, I think there is hope for individuals, but the question, as asked, is talking more about society. Is there hope that the mass of white people and white institutions and organizations and politics and white society can change, fast enough, that everything around us doesn’t fall apart? Again, West writes:

Professor Cone raised a fundamental question that has pervaded the entire black freedom struggle: namely, whether there actually are enough intellectual, political, and cultural resources in American life to fully undermine the vicious legacy of white supremacy in America. I discern in this text a death of faith in the promise of American democracy […] What makes us think that America has the capacity to produce a full-fledge multiracial democracy in which people of African descent are treated as kindly and equally as anybody else[?] What evidence do we have?

Cornel West, Black Theology and Human Identity (reproduced in the introduction to James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power)

One of the biggest limitations I’ve experienced from my time in White Evangelicalism is not allowing myself to feel hopeless, or really even often sad, because that’s not the “correct” response in a world where God is control, etc.

But there’s something… freeing, I think?… about allowing yourself to fully experience whatever the natural next step of your emotional and mental state is. I do feel hopeless. That doesn’t mean there is no hope, or is hope, but just that that’s how I feel. And I think that’s one of the things I’m most hopeful about in reading this intro. In another point in the intro, West writes (emphasis mine):

[Cone is] also dealing with the death of something in him; it is the death of the “Negro” and the birth of “blackness”. It is the death of a certain kind of deferential disposition to white supremacy in the hearts and minds and souls of black people themselves and the birth of a certain kind of self-assertiveness—a courage to be.

Ibid.

West’s final quote from Cone about this piece of the conversation, sad because it’s from fifty years years ago but still hugely relevant today, describes what our country feels like today:

Whether the American system is beyond redemption we will have to wait and see, but we can be certain that black patience has run out, and unless white America responds positively to the theory and activity of Black Power, then a bloody, protracted civil war is inevitable […] The decision lies with White America and not least with white Americans who speak the name of Christ.

James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 143

It feels like, as much as this is just a catchy phrase, America is once again at a point of reckoning. How we respond to the moment we’re in is so vital to the future of our country. As West quotes Farrakhan as saying during the Million Man March, “White supremacy must die in order for America to truly live.”

And, to finish with yet another quote, we choose how we will respond:

[…] Professor Cone has asked us to dip our intelligence into the world of pain and trouble in order to emerge with a response to the fundamental question: energy or despair, courage or complacency, love or might? Professor Cone says quite explicitly that it is all about energy, it is all about courage and, in the end, it is all about love and justice.

Cornel West, Black Theology and Human Identity (reproduced in the introduction to James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power)

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Spoilers ahead for the movie Get Out!

In Get Out, a seemingly friendly progressive white family brings Black people out to their house where the wife hypnotizes them. Each hypnotized Black person’s consciousness is cast into a pit in their own mind; we later hear this place called the “sunken place”. In the sunken place, they lose the ability to make their own decisions, they seemingly no longer can control their own bodies, and they end up either acting white, or acting in caricatured ways that benefit white people—the servant, the yard boy.

Segregationist vs. Assimilationist

In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram Kendi describes the two common attitudes of white people toward race: segregationist and assimilationist. The segregationist is your classic racist, believing that Black people are inferior and therefore deserve subjugation, servitude, imprisonment, and death. The assimilationist, on the other hand, is your “diet racist”, “closet racist”, or “northern racist”: one who believes that Black people are perhaps temporarily inferior, but given some culture, have the potential to be just as good as white people.

Most people can recognize a segregationist, and most of us would call them a racist. But the assimilationist is sneaky, couching their ideas of how Black people need to “grow” in purportedly objective standards—for example, Scripture, or phonics, or fashion, or “decorum” and “civility”. Most assimilationists today don’t even realize they’re assimilationists, assuming instead they hold a single objective standard for all people. Try asking them why their standard is so much easier for white people to achieve and they’ll likely feel very uncomfortable.

I’ve struggled for years to describe what makes me so confident that white supremacy is embedded in White Evangelicalism, but I’ve discovered one key reason: the White Evangelical church in America is assimilationist to the core.

The White Evangelical church as assimilationist

The White Evangelical church believes, more than almost any other church I know, that it has the truth, both spiritual and social. It believes everyone else doesn’t have it nearly as right, and it requires all who encounter it change to conform to its standards of goodness and purity and rightness. But just like all other assimilationists, its standards elevate whiteness, interpreting and augmenting Scripture through white perspectives.

When Black people encounter the White Evangelical church, then, they are told two things: we have the truth, and you must conform to our standards in order to benefit from it. The church is telling everyone this, so many Black people don’t realize that there’s anything off (or they do, but join anyway); they join in pursuit of this truth and thus begins the pressure for them to conform to the standards presented them.

However, these standards require one thing of white members and an entirely different thing of Black members. These standards include how you talk, how you move, how you disagree, how you celebrate, what music and what emotions in music are acceptable, how loud you are, how nice you are, how much you tolerate bigotry, who deserves your time and patience, which theologians and teachers are acceptable to learn from, which “sins” in your friends and family are more or less acceptable, and many more.

Like the Black characters in Get Out, Black members of White Evangelical churches (and, of course, many other white assimilationist spaces) are invited to be present—in fact, are particularly desirable—and then expected to conform and be silent. They’re pressured toward some combination of awkwardly mimicked whiteness and caricatured happy subservience. Often, like Chris in Get Out, they realize the insanity of their situation, and they run.

About halfway through writing this, I googled “Sunken place white church” to see if anyone else had written about this topic. Turns out, they have. In “Get Out Contains a Theological Lesson That is Easy to Miss”, Delonte Gholston writes, “[a]ny time you can walk into so-called “multicultural” worship spaces and not tell the difference between it and a Hillsong or Bethel worship concert [,..] we have embraced a sunken-place theology.” This is because Black people have been invited to perform a particular function—that is, allowing this church to claim diversity—but to do so silently, not bringing their own voices or personalities.

Assimilationist theology

We don’t get assimilationist churches without assimilationist theology. I’m not a theologian or an academic, so I can’t go far here. But I can re-hash what I’ve learned from much wiser friends: there’s a notable lack of theologians of color in the list of teachers who influence Evangelicalism. There’s a notable lack of translators of color who work on the most popular Bible translations. There’s a notable lack of pastors of color under whose leadership white pastors sat as they came up.

When you only learn from and are only led by people like you, it’s easy to form and perpetuate a theology that only benefits and works for people like you. This is a medium-sized problem. But when you’re in power and have been for centuries, and your theology is cast not as yours but as the best for everyone, you end up with our current situation: a system built for one group but sold as the system for all. Like how Jefferson Davis said America was founded “by white men for white men”, so was the American White Evangelical church.

Again, a theologian could do a better job here, but here are a few examples of what I think of when I talk about assimilationist theology and culture in White Evangelical churches:

• The prioritization of thought over emotion
• The definition of peace as absence of conflict (silence) instead of justice
• The prioritization of eternal souls over lived experience
• The prioritization of flattened-to-positive emotions over the full range of emotional expression (“too blessed to be stressed”, the almost entire inability to mourn in church spaces)
• The prioritization of white communication and conflict styles over non-white communication and conflict styles (Black members and leaders in white churches are often corrected for being too divisive, too loud, too angry, etc.)
• The conflation of white cultural values with Scriptural values
• The conflation of mainstream cultural values with Scriptural values (i.e. enforcing American-ness or “normal-ness” as a Biblical mandate for people who dress or talk or act differently even when there’s no Scriptural backing)
• The explicit and implicit suggestion that the faith of non-Evangelical family members is incomplete (e.g. because of their lack of academic Scripture study)
• Inclusion of some sorts of political commentary (e.g. abortion) and exclusion of other sorts (e.g. police abuse) with the suggestion that that’s a framework of integrity
• The culture of smaller groups (prayer groups, “small groups”, home meetings, etc.) being conducted in exclusively stereotypically white manners and without the consideration or validation of how those same groups might look different in different cultures
• People of color in presence but not in culture (churches which change demographics without changing their culture at all)
• The idea that a church can effectively and truthfully serve a diverse people group without any people of color in senior leadership

Where do we go from here?

In “How to Be an Antiracist”, Kendi describes a third way: not segregationist, not assimilationist, but antiracist. This is the goal: for churches and denominations and religious movements and believers and non-believers to be antiracist.

If a segregationist thinks Black people are inferior, and an assimilationist thinks they’re temporarily inferior but can be made to conform, what does an antiracist think? An antiracist thinks Black people need not change at all; instead, an antiracist, seeing Black people as equal to all others, wants to “[reduce] racial inequities and [create] equal opportunity.”

I’ll be honest: if you haven’t read this blog before, you may not know this, but I’m only 34 pages into Kendi’s book and I’ll be on this journey toward being as antiracist as possible for the rest of my life. I don’t have the answers, and I wish I did. But I do have a few ideas.

First, I would suggest that all multiethnic/multiracial churches and parachurches and religious organizations consider whether your organization is acting as if all people are equal, or whether you’re really just perpetuating white-centric theology and cultural norms. Sure, you have Black people on stage. But what happens when they disagree with you? What happens when they get louder than you’re comfortable with? How many of them are in senior leadership positions? What would your church do if a bulk of the Black members came with a concern? Do your cultural standards—not just taught from the pulpit, but also in smaller groups—enforce Godliness? Or is whiteness being taught there as well? How many theologians of color influence your organizational values and theology?

Second, if you’re a white person who’s frustrated with the situation, it’s very tempting to seek to identify ourselves as those who think different, without actually taking action to change anything. Let’s seek to learn, and speak truth, but also focus our speech on that which helps others and shy from that which makes us look righteous or whatever. But, more than anything, seek Black teachers. I’m glad you’re reading this, but I have no idea what the hell I’m doing here. Go find the Black teachers and movements who have been out here doing this for decades. Let’s learn from them. And then let’s act, not just get informed.

And third, if you’re a Black person in a white/multiethnic church or organization, I pray that you, whether you stay or leave, have the love and support to know that you, your culture, your worship styles, your way of speaking, your way of handling conflict, your entire being is good. It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful, and you don’t need to change in order to be loved by God. You don’t need to squash the way you grew up, or the way your family is, in order to be Godly. You don’t need to assimilate to white cultural standards to be faithful. I pray that you are surrounded by love and joy and acceptance and affirmation.

If you decide to stay where you are, I pray you find support from people in and outside the church who affirm you and everything you bring. And if you discover that you can’t be yourself there, if you have to swallow your opinions or your thoughts or what your family taught you or how you laugh or how you dance or how you disagree, if you find yourself squashed and unable to be honest to yourself… I urge you.

Get out.

POST SCRIPT
I need to make three heavy caveats for this post:
First, very little of what I’ve written here is my own original thought. Almost everything, perhaps everything, comes from conversations with Black friends and family, and I credit them for their ideas. Second, I believe that I have left many of these things behind, but I am confident there are many I have still not. I am not without this sin. I would normally have used the words we here instead of they but I no longer identify with the Evangelical church. But it must be clear: I am not writing this from a position of being past this, or better than it. I worked in White Evangelical Christian ministry for years and I’m still trying to piece together what I do and don’t agree with from what I was taught and what I taught. I’m not the expert here. And third, as with most of my writing and thinking, I’ve focused on the Black-white dynamic here, because it’s both the most drastic, but also it’s the one I have the most personal familiarity with. I’m aware but ignorant with regard to Native, Latin, and Asian racial dynamics in the church, not to mention those impacting the LGBTQ community and folks with disabilities.

And one more note: I don’t know everyone who’s talking and teaching in this direction, but I can recommend a few. I haven’t listened in a few years, but Pass the Mic and Truth’s Table are both fantastic podcasts created by wonderful and wise people and I used to be a devout listener to both. And after sharing this article with a few friends, they recommended Brandi Miller’s podcast Reclaiming My Theology, which I’m very much looking forward to listening to, and which reminded me of how much I appreciate Erna Hackett, one of her earlier guests. I’m sure there are dozens or hundreds of other amazing voices but those are a few in my close spaces. … even after writing this post-postscript, I watched Brandi and Erna’s Instagram live and it reflects how verrrrrrry far further into these thoughts they are than me.

The post The White Evangelical church is the sunken place appeared first on Matt learning.

I’m listening to the episode “From White Supremacy… What is White Theology? W/Scott Hall” and Scott and Brandi are touching on one of the deepest reasons why I think White Supremacy is deeply at play in white Evangelicalism.

First, Brandi gives a bit of a foundational introduction to the idea that white supremacy in theology means that white cultural values are seen not as white cultural values, but core parts of un-biased theology:

[White supremacy in theology] some times comes through the front door, with, you know, a swastika, a burning cross or whatever. But, more often than that, it’s people saying, whether in word or deed, that the questions they ask, the things they care about, the values that they hold, are the things that matter, are interesting, and that systems need to orient themselves around. That white supremacy elevates values like individualism, the right to comfort, defensiveness, competition, hierarchy, and says, “Oh, those aren’t just a part of white culture, they’re a part of theology, too.”

Brandi Miller, Reclaiming My Theology… From White Supremacy: What is White Theology? W/Scott Hall

Next, Scott talks a bit about cultural lenses:

All of us have cultural lenses. If we are white and have grown up in the United States, there’s just implicit assumptions that we carry that create a lens through which we understand Scripture.

Now, the particular challenge that exacerbates that for white Evangelicals in the US, is that we as white Evangelicals have this sort of swagger about, “We go to the source. We don’t have an intermediary priest or bishop. We see the words of Jesus. My Catholic brothers and sisters, some of them can’t even quote the Scripture!”

[…T]he challenge of that is that, that means, because, anthropology is still true, we all have a lens through which we read the Scripture. And so what white Evangelicals do is that they’re released to read the Scripture for themselves without adequate training of their own cultural lenses—that they therefore project onto Jesus and the Scripture our own context of our own culture.

And so… we wouldn’t say Jesus is white, most of us, but there’s an implicit assumption of the whiteness of Jesus, of Jesus being from mainstream culture[. W]e have all of these assumptions and so therefore we read Scripture out of context.

And I think what’s so significant about that, is that we look at Jesus, and think we’re going right to the source. […O]ur white American Christian ancestors, with [the lenses of the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and capitalism], as they read Scripture, were comfortable exterminating Native peoples, enslaving Africans as property, and using Chinese and Mexican people as a commodity of labor with almost zero human rights. Our Christian ancestors did that in “good faith” and as Bible-believing Christians.

Scott Hall, Reclaiming My Theology… From White Supremacy: What is White Theology? W/Scott Hall

(I never finished and published this post when it was published on “White Guy, Black Liberation”, but I decided to move it over here and publish it anyway).

The post The White Evangelical Fallacy of Un-biased Engagement with Scripture appeared first on Matt learning.

The long answer will have to come from a sociologist or whoever it is that studies these sorts of things. But I can try to give a medium answer.

The medium answer: race is, indeed, socially constructed. Not only is it socially constructed, it’s socially constructed intentionally to privilege whiteness and white people. There is no biological support for the concept of race.

However, society—both our natural casual interactions and also the structures and concepts we’ve constructed, like government and laws and race—still have a huge impact and great power in our lives. Further, that great impact applied to groups of people over time can create or enhance differences that were there before.

For example, people from Europe would already be different than people from Africa in some ways—different languages, different religious values, different marital rites, and more. So if you were to take the two groups and throw them into a new country, there would already be some differences between the two, regardless of whether you called their groupings races.

Now, if you were to identify everyone from Africa with a star tattoo, and everyone from Europe with a circle tattoo, and then every new system in your country privileged the people with star tattoos, the gap would widen. Consistently being unable to get enough food or good jobs, being treated unequally by the medical and police systems, textbooks written about how they’re less-than, and many more factors would draw the circle tattoo bearers further away from the star tattoo bearers culturally and relationally.

This is all, of course, without the foundational change that, instead of both groups coming of their own volition, the Europeans were instead captured out of their villages, beaten, bound, crammed into ships where many of them died, and then put into many generations of forced servitude.

We could carry this conversation on for much longer, but the primary point is this: race impacts us today, race impacted our ancestors (which impacts us today), race was involved in the creation of all of our systems of government and law and education and medicine and more, and it continues to be involved (or inappropriately ignored) in most new systems that are created. And that’s un-just.

So, yes. Race is a social construct. And, just like many other social constructs, it can have dire impacts on our lives.

The post Common Questions: Isn’t Race Just a Social Construct? appeared first on Matt learning.

My working definition:

As with White Supremacy, I don’t have a perfect working definition, but a friend reminded me it’s important to not just use terms that people who think like you “know when they hear it.” I want the terms I use to be clear to anyone reading.

The Short Version

Here’s the short version which I just made up and will probably modify a hundred times or even totally decry at some point, who knows:

White Evangelicalism is a subset of Protestant Christianity that suffers hopelessly from white supremacy, focusing on its white historic and present leaders, theologians, concerns, and cultural values to the exclusion of all else.

The Long Version

I’ll start with what I know off the top of my head.

Evangelicalism is a particular branch of Protestant Christianity, coming out of Enlightenment-era Europe and founded and led almost exclusively by white men. It’s the largest religious group in America, and the Christian group most associated with fundamentalism and conservative politics.

Most American Christian denominations are either exclusively Evangelical (Assemblies of God, Baptists, Evangelical Free, Evangelical Covenant, Salvation Army, Vineyard, most nondenominational churches, most or all Pentecostal churches) or have large Evangelical subgroups (Anglican, Brethren, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, most or all Reformed churches).

The meaning of the term Evangelical has shifted a lot over the years. While Evangelicalism technically started hundreds of years ago, the Evangelicalism we talk about today sort of started in the 1940’s, but didn’t evolve into its current form until much later–the actual timeline of that I’m not sure.

Evangelicals theologically are “born-again Christians”, evangelistic, “Sola Scriptura”, and probably more terms that feel a bit inaccessible to non-theologians like me… substitutionary atonement and all that. Basically, if you imagine a generic Protestant in the U.S., they’re probably Evangelicals.

Here’s what I know about the history: in the 1940’s the National Association of Evangelicals was founded and Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham and John Stott led the way for Evangelicalism to become one of the three primary groups of protestants: fundamentalists, liberals (or “modernists”), and Evangelicals. My best understanding of the distinction between the three comes from Stott’s book Evangelical Truth; what I remember most is that he distinguishes them based on their approach to the Bible, where, in his view, liberals treat it loosely, Evangelicals believe it but allow for contextual understanding, and fundamentalists are more literal. That’s a huge dumbing-down of a conversation better served by a historian, or at least Wikipedia.

Today, however, Evangelicals seem to have most of the fundamentalists, too. It’s the group most associated with the Religious Right, the Republican Party, anti-abortion, anti-immigration, anti-gay marriage, and more. Many criticisms of Evangelicalism come from its conservative nature (e.g. how 81% of white Evangelicals voted for Trump, which is basically a reflection of pure evil), but I think the most nuanced–and the most useful–conversations look more at the group’s flaws even considering its more progressive members.

The reason I choose the term “White Evangelicalism” instead of “Evangelicalism” is not to suggest that there’s an explicit and well-drawn “Black Evangelicalism” and “Latin Evangelicalism” and so forth. Rather, it’s to draw attention to the fact that my primary concern with Evangelicalism is not its majority’s political and social stances, which I happen to find mainly abhorrent, but the way those stances derive from the white supremacy that’s deep in the heart of Evangelicalism–even theologically, and even in a way that affects many progressive Evangelicals.

Jemar Tisby, in his article One Black Man’s Experience with White Evangelicalism, wrote:

I quickly learned that in the United States to be evangelical meant much more than assenting to a set of theological beliefs. Evangelicalism encompasses a culture, an aesthetic, a discourse, and a way of viewing the world. All of these elements tend to be filtered through white racial lenses.

Jemar Tisby, One Black Man’s Experience with White Evangelicalism

This is what I mean when I say and write White Evangelicalism. Not just the theological beliefs, although I’d contend that even those are strongly informed by the white racial lenses. It’s that the entire movement is white-centering, white-led, white-accommodating, and white-affirming. And that means that, just like you can be a person of color and perpetuate white supremacy, you can also be a person of color and subscribe to White Evangelicalism. It’s not about your color, it’s about whose color is centered in your beliefs.

I have a book on my table titled “Still Evangelical?” which contains an essay from my dear friend, Latina teacher and preacher Sandra Maria Van Opstal, who rejects white supremacy but still remains in Evangelicalism because she aligns with its theological foundations. People like Sandra make me think that there may be a future Evangelicalism that isn’t White Evangelicalism, and reminds me that there are people within Evangelicalism who aren’t in bed with white supremacy.

So, that’s my best take at what White Evangelicalism is.

When I write often that I “broke up with White Evangelicalism a few years ago”, what I mean is this: I grew up conservative Evangelical; in college I became a progressive Evangelical; and then I realized that the issues I thought I had escaped by becoming progressive were still right there with me. My theology and much of my worldview had been formed in a white-racial-lens bubble, and while I had spent a decade trying to escape it by learning from and listening to my friends and teachers of color, I was still just running out to the edges of the bubble. I had to escape the bubble in order to even begin identifying the ways white supremacy (and patriarchy and other fun -y words) had insidiously infiltrated my understanding of Godliness, the Bible and its actual meaning, and so much more. I’ve been doing so passively until now; this blog is me working through doing so actively.

The post Definition: White Evangelicalism appeared first on Matt learning.

My working definition:

I don’t have one yet. If you made me write out a working definition on the spot, I think I would say “the belief, and any actions and words and policies that come from that belief, that white people and their ideas and culture are better and more important than all others.” But I bet that’s super incomplete.

Definition from Brandi Miller:

In the introduction the episode “…From White Supremacy: What is White Theology? w/Scott Hall” on Brandi Miller’s “Reclaiming My Theology” podcast, she describes it:

White supremacy and the culture it creates is the idea that white people, and the ideas, thoughts, actions, and beliefs of white people, are superior to that of people of color.

White supremacy is white people saying, whether in word or deed, that the questions they ask, the things they are interested in, and the values that they center are the only ones that matter.

In theology, it means that white values, and views of God, are seen as truth or central, and that other people’s theologies are seen as optional or elective at best, and at worst they’re seen as heretical. It places whiteness as close to Godliness and at the center of the world.

White supremacy culture presupposes that white theology is a neutral and infallible lens with which to view the Scriptures. White supremacy in theology happens when you have the equation of highly contextualized theology–in this case, white theology–plus the power to enforce it personally, culturally, and systemically, particularly in our case in the church and in public life.

Later, she characterizes it such:

[White supremacy in theology] some times comes through the front door, with, you know, a swastika, a burning cross or whatever. But, more often than that, it’s people saying, whether in word or deed, that the questions they ask, the things they care about, the values that they hold, are the things that matter, are interesting, and that systems need to orient themselves around. That white supremacy elevates values like individualism, the right to comfort, defensiveness, competition, hierarchy, and says, “Oh, those aren’t just a part of white culture, they’re a part of theology, too.”

I expect to add later definitions here as I discover them. I know for sure I’ll discover more definitions both in the remainder of this podcast episode with Scott as I listen to it in fits and spurts, and also later as I dig into Cone and other authors talking about Black Liberation Theology.

The post Definition: White Supremacy appeared first on Matt learning.

I may write more later about all of my fears and concerns around writing these blog posts, about why I started the anonymously, and why I’m afraid to publish this post I’m talking about. But it now.

A glimpse of light!

When I shared a draft of that post with some friends, they recommended a podcast called “Reclaiming My Theology” by Brandi Miller, a Black woman theologian and teacher. I’d never heard of the podcast, but just looking at the episode titles I knew I was interested.

The entire first season is about “Reclaiming My Theology … From White Supremacy”, and talks about perfectionism, paternalism, individualism, and more. Many of the guests are people I either admire (Erna Hackett) or know a little and really appreciate (Scott Hall, Jazzy Johnson, David deLeon).

I’m very excited to dig into the podcast, for many reasons.

Not alone

First, I feel like I’ve been figuring this out on my own. But not only that, I know so many other people who also feel like they’re figuring it out on their own. Each of us has asked that question at some point—where are you going to church? Who are you learning from? Are you going to church? How do you even feel about Christianity and Jesus?

Many, many, many of these folks have answered that they still want to follow Jesus, but we just don’t know who to trust or what does or doesn’t need to be thrown out as we try to figure out what we believe. Someone along the way introduced the term “deconstruction” and it’s definitely appropriate—taking apart the systems of everything I’ve been taught for so many years to try to figure out what’s true and what’s just someone’s opinion presented as truth.

Anyway. All of that said, I’m overjoyed to have found a resource like. I’m only minutes into the first episode, and this quote—which is what originally drew me to the iPad to write this post—made me confident this is where I need to be right now. If you can throw a phrase like this out confidently in an introduction to the first episode, I’m ready to hear more.

“I grew up thinking that white theology was just objective theology, and not subject to a lens”

Brandi Miller, Reclaiming My Theology … From White Supremacy: What is White Theology? W/Scott Hall

I’m excited to listen more. As with everything else I’m reading and thinking about these days, I’ll share more here as I do.

POST SCRIPT:
I just realized that, in the past, I listened to the “Pass the Mic” and “Truth’s Table” podcasts, and I stopped when I got too exhausted from thinking about religion to actually give myself any time to just process what was in my head. Now that I’m tentatively putting my toe back into this water, I should probably A) acknowledge that Brandi’s podcast is certainly not the only one touching on these topics and B) catch up on the last several years of those as well.

The post A modern resource! Finally! appeared first on Matt learning.

When these folks talk about an individual human’s racism, they usually define it this way: this person (Donald Trump, for example) intentionally, in their heart, believes that people of another race (or all other races) are worse because of their race.

What I mean when I say “he is a racist” (and how it’s probably different than what his defenders mean)

So, for starters, let’s say one thing clearly: I don’t know what Donald Trump thinks in his head. I can only presume what he thinks by what he says and what he does. And I think this is scary to a lot of white people who don’t feel entirely up-to-date on how to behave in what they often call a “politically correct society”—there’s an underlying fear that, “if that famous person is called a racist for behaviors that don’t seem all that bad to me, then I will also eventually be called a racist.”

Before we go any further, then, let’s remember a previous blog post in which I referenced Ibram Kendi writing the following: “racist and anti racist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an anti racist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what—not who—we are.”

I’m not saying that I can tell you exactly what Donald Trump thinks in his head. But I can look at the things he does and describe that A) they are racist and B) they reflect racist ideologies. Does this mean he can’t change? No. Does this mean you’re “a racist” (meaning a horrible person who hates Black people) if you do or would do any of these things in his stead? Not really. But it does mean that Donald Trump, you, me, and everyone else we know have racist moments and we need to identify them and try to stop having them, not run away from the word racist.

For a much more nuanced treatment of how to better talk about racism, and how our fear of being called racist has made white people really bad at having these conversations (and a hopeful approach for how to fix it!), check out the first few chapters of Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist.

How I know Donald Trump Is Racist*

OK, so now that we’ve established that this statement is not entirely true, but instead that *I can say that Donald Trump consistently acts, speaks, and legislates in racist ways, let’s talk about just some of those ways:

• He called Latin immigrants animals, depicted them as primarily criminals and rapists, and campaigned around a wall to block them out of our country (source)
• He campaigned on the promise of “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” (source)
• He has constantly called his Black critics “stupid”
• He claimed immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS” (source)
• He called white supremacists “very good people” (source)
• He is reported by a former close employee having said “Laziness is a trait in Blacks” (source)
• He claimed “the overwhelming amount of violent crime in our cities is committed by blacks and Hispanics”, and retweeted a false claim that “81% of white murder victims were killed by black people” (source, source)
• He ran full-page advertisements against the Central Park Five, calling for their execution, and continued to support his idea that they were guilty even 17 years after their exoneration by DNA evidence (source)
• His hotels and casinos have been fined and constantly criticized for racist behavior (pausing here, will keep adding sources for the rest as I find time)
• He frequently describes cities like Oakland, Chicago, Ferguson, Atlanta, Baltimore, and others as “hell”, where “you walk down the street and you get shot”, frequently describing any Black people who disagree with him as “thugs”
• He ran ads suggesting Mohawk Native Americans would do cocaine and bring violence to an area to try to keep their casinos from competing with his own
• He pardoned Joe Arapaho, the sheriff who was responsible for “the worst pattern of racial profiling in U.S. history”
• Multiple former employees have described his anti-Black behavior as the owner of casinos and hotels
• When he was required to hire a certain number of minorities in order to get a building contract in Gary, IN, he A) underhired employees of color compared to what he was supposed to and B) hired those employees on only menial, temporary positions, giving all the good jobs to white employees
• He accepted, benefitted from, and refused to denounce the support of former KKK grand wizard David Duke (and many other white supremacists). Caveat: he did eventually denounce him.
• Many members of the cast and production team from The Apprentice have recorded him using racial slurs
• He frequently has tweeted or spoken criticism against Black and Latin politicians by deriding their home districts, saying things like “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came,” or describing their districts as “infested”, regardless of whether those areas were or weren’t doing poorly crime-wise, and not specifying exactly what they are “infested” with.
• He was sued for discrimination against Black renters by the Department of Justice, and he settled the claim; they sued him again five years later because he was doing it again
• He was one of the loudest voices in support of “Birtherism”
• He said AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Presley came from countries with corrupt governments, suggesting they “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”.
• He described having seen TV reports (which did not exist) about thousands and thousands of Arabs in New Jersey celebrating during 9/11.
• He called Haiti, El Salvador, and several countries in Africa “shitholes”, suggesting the U.S. should encourage more immigration from “places like Norway” and countries in Asia
• He frequently refers to Jewish people using stereotypes about money, and suggested that if any vote for Democrats, they’re “disloyal”
• He banned Syrian refugees from entering the US, and also temporarily banned any immigration from six other primarily Muslim nations
• He’s frequently suggested that the majority of welfare recipients are Black
• He constantly retweets White supremacist accounts, memes created in White supremacist Reddit groups, and directs U.S. attention to overseas concerns that are supported by American White supremacists — for example, the purported mass murders of white farmers in South Africa
• He rejects taking down confederate monuments, requests that they are put back up, and also rejects renaming military institutions named after Confederate generals.
• He has hired multiple white supremacists, including Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, and many others with ties to or some actions suggesting white supremacy, including Larry Kudlow, Kris Kobach, Ian M. Smith, and many more.

Why It Doesn’t Matter (and, of Course, Why It Actually Does)

So, let’s start with why it doesn’t matter if Donald Trump is a racist.

If “Donald Trump is a racist” means “I know the insides of his head and heart and can speak to what’s in there”, then we can just fight all day long about how “I know he is because of his actions” vs. “You can’t know how someone thinks!”

So… in the end… it doesn’t “matter” what he thinks in his heart. What matters is what he says and does.

So, that’s what matters more. Not how Trump feels or thinks, but what Trump says and does. And what he says and does? Those things are racist.

The post How I Know Donald Trump is Racist, and Why It Doesn’t Matter appeared first on Matt learning.