The View from 30,000 Feet

AG Barr says its not racist... to be racist https://t.co/3dP6Qa7kVF

— Sam Karimzadeh (@KarimzadehSam) September 2, 2020

Don't worry, that tweet ties in with this post before it's over.

Organized religion reinforces the cultural and social standards of the culture it exists in:

“If you were recruiting for a white supremacist cause on a Sunday morning, you’d likely have more success hanging out in the parking lot of an average white Christian church—evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, or Catholic—than approaching whites sitting out services at the local coffee shop,” he writes.

QED.  Same reason we associate burkas with Islam; but we never associate Islam with Asia, because we don't see women in burkas in Asia, or much of Africa, for that matter.  Burkas are Middle Eastern (if you stretch "Middle East" to include Pakistan, because I know people from Pakistan).  Burkas are cultural, not religious garb.  White supremacy is Christian, but not so much, I suspect, in black American churches; or Christian churches in Latin and South America, or Africa.  But we have to face the fact that America is a racist country.  Racism is cultural, but not necessarily religious.  But it is American; it is our hidden wound. We have to see our hidden wound, if we are going to ever heal it.

Not that that argument is going to win any hearts and minds.

I could quote the New Yorker article at length.  Dr. King, if memory serves, observed the old chestnut that the most segregated hour in America was the hour before noon on Sundays.  I remember reading an article by Harvey Cox (he is a Baptist, he tends to favor churches like the one he grew up in; don't we all?) about Pentecostals and how they explicitly organized around mixed-race churches, blacks and whites worshipping together.  Cox hoped that would become a model for American Christianity.  (Sadly, no; and now "Pentecostals" are lumped in with "evangelicals," at least in the popular discourse.)  None of that, though, makes it into the article, which doesn't really deviate much from the popular discourse on Christianity in America.

And instead of Cox's hopeful vision we got Donald Trump and his little piece of bread and his little cup of wine, and "Two Corinthians" and why should he ever repent of anything he ever did?

This, for example, is a brief sketch of the world I grew up in:

After the South’s defeat in the Civil War, Southern church leaders struggled to help their congregants make sense of their loss. The result was the religion of the Lost Cause, a mythology that ennobled the Confederacy and idealized the antebellum South as a bastion of Christian piety and morals. This fusion of religious and cultural values, delivered from the pulpit, helped to legitimize a social order that continued to subjugate Blacks. Later, as evangelical Christianity, anchored in the South, grew to become the dominant expression of Christianity in America, its cultural scaffolding, rooted in white supremacy, spread as well. During the era of Jim Crow, when Southern statutes enforced the strict separation of races and restricted the rights of Blacks, Northern Protestant churches remained largely segregated and muted in their criticism. Many white Christians saw segregation as simply part of God’s plan for humanity.

I knew that was wrong even as I was growing up in it:  the disjunct between "all people are one in Christ" and "except for those dark ones who we hire to clean our houses and take gifts to at Christmas, but otherwise don't associate with."  I wanted to change the church from the inside; radically, when I was young.  Incrementally, when I was older.  I couldn't do it.  I found a church split directly on generational and political lines.  Most of my generation was not interested in anything but comforting platitudes about how much Jesus loved them.  Most of my daughter's generation (or slightly older) was not interested in a religion so tied to an "old" culture.  I wanted to bring the church into the 21st century.  Now my Millenial daughter doesn't see any reason to bother.  I don't argue the point with her.

Which leads me to jump ahead a bit in the article, and land on this rather paltry discussion of theology:

In his book, [Esau] McCaulley outlines a theology of policing, political witness, Black identity and anger, and justice. On policing, for example, many white Christians focus on the opening verses in Romans 13, when the Apostle Paul urges people to submit themselves to the “governing authorities” because they have been “instituted by God.” But McCaulley traces the logic of the next two verses, when Paul writes, “Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval.” McCaulley argues that, while Paul states that the rulers are “not a terror,” he is also articulating an ideal, one that can undergird a Christian approach to the problem of police violence. “Paul recognizes that the state has a tremendous influence on how the soldier/officer treats its citizens,” McCaulley writes. “This is grounds in a democracy for a structural advocacy on behalf of the powerless.” McCaulley also dwells on Jesus’ call in the Beatitudes for his people to be “peacemakers.” Biblical peacemaking involves resolving conflicts between nations and individuals, so it must necessarily involve “making a judgment about who is correct and who is incorrect,” McCaulley writes. A false choice between calling out injustice and preaching the Gospel has burdened American Christianity. “Through our efforts to bring peace we show the world the kind of king and kingdom we represent,” McCaulley writes. “The outcome of our peacemaking is to introduce people to the kingdom.”

In the end, however, ameliorating the theology of white Christianity is likely inadequate. In “Taking America Back for God” (Oxford), published earlier this year, the sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry examine racist and xenophobic attitudes among white Christians through the lens of a distinct set of cultural beliefs—most notably, the idea that America is, and should be, a Christian nation. They find that this collection of cultural markers, which they call “Christian nationalism,” was a better predictor of support for Trump in the 2016 election than economic discontent, religious affiliation, sexism, or any number of other variables. The defining concern of Christian nationalism is the preservation of a certain kind of social order, one threatened by people of color, immigrants, and Muslims. 

The sum of American theology is salvation, and salvation in general means being "saved" from your
"sins" by accepting Jesus into your heart (I would ask people in high school how Jesus fit in there; they never liked that question).  It means very little about you really has to change, except now you don't have to worry about going to hell.

Jesus famously asked his followers to give up all they had and follow him.  American Christianity, for the most part, just asks followers to feel even better about themselves.  You can't do that if you feel like you should atone for slavery or how we regard immigrants who are the wrong color or what we think of the "Middle East" (a region we mostly know absolutely nothing about, but think we know who the "good guys" and "bad guys" are, as if it were a movie series).

Actual theology has changed radically since the 18th century, but American churches are still mired in the 17th century (Pietism) or the 18th century (Great Awakening) and the hymns of that era, most of which I grew up on and still love inordinately.  Church theology is still stuck there, too, despite the Biblical scholarship of the 19th century and the scholarship of the late 20th century.  Theology, soteriology, Christology, ecclesiology; most have been scoured with new brushes and have given up some of their Hellenistic deadwood, but no one outside of seminaries knows or cares, or wants to know.  I speak to that from personal experience.  Theology that should be as lively and engaged with the laity as Twitter is instead as dead as the Thanksgiving turkey, and not nearly as useful or even ornamental.  Christianity has withered into a lifeless husk that clings to American culture as its raison d'etre.  It is useful to one or two as a true faith, and perhaps that is as it should be.  But the cultural Christianity of America is no more a shining city on the hill than Rome was when it dominated Europe from the Vatican.  Same as it ever was, I suppose.  But all of that is a dead hand on the present, one younger generations are happy to crawl out from under.  And no wonder; it's all as relevant to life in 21st century America as the Pelopenessian Wars (unless you can make comic-book fodder and a comic-book movie out of them; and even then, that's all now passé).  Actual theology won't change the church because actual people in the church won't change because the change that is needed is cultural, not sociological (the article makes much of sociology and studies of the church, some of which I've even read) nor theological nor even political.  The root problem is cultural, and that's about as easily changed as skin color.  I take it back; it's easier to change skin color.

Culture is damned near immutable.  And that's the fundamental problem of Christianity in America.

This bit of the article is a bit interesting; but, I think, completely wrong.  It could only have been written by someone who remembers the 90's (maybe), but only read about the '60's in a book somewhere:

The boundaries that evangelical leaders draw around “reconciliation” may help explain a seeming contradiction in the polling data on race and religion. In surveys that measure how warmly people say they feel about Blacks, the sentiments of white evangelical Protestants exceed those of the general population. (Other white Christians’ responses fall close to the mean.) Yet the vast majority of white Christians remain indifferent to the symbols of white supremacy and skeptical of the realities of racial inequality. In “Divided By Faith” (Oxford), published in 2000, the sociologists Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith suggest a cultural and religious framework for understanding this inconsistency. Evangelical theology is individualistic and interpersonal—it stresses both a believer’s relationship with Jesus Christ and the way that forgiveness from God impels forgiveness of others. As a result, white evangelicals’ understanding of the race problem tends to be rooted in beliefs about individual decisions and shortcomings rather than the ways that broader social forces, institutions, and culture can constrain and shape them. It’s as if they’re wearing reading glasses when their problem is nearsightedness—a failing, Tisby showed in his book, that has troubled the American church throughout its history.

Dr. King's famous letter, directed at white church leaders who won't follow the gospel but instead follow the culture, is mentioned only in reference to Billy Graham:

In April, 1963, shortly after King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Graham declined to characterize himself in an interview with the Times as a “thoroughgoing integrationist,” and said that the civil-rights protesters ought to “put the brakes on a little bit.” 

If you don't know King's letter, you don't even get the irony of Graham's statement.  The article also quotes Graham's autobiography on his encounter with Dr. King:

In his autobiography, “Just as I Am,” Graham writes that King encouraged him to “stay in the stadiums, Billy,” because his impact would be greater there. King also told Graham that “if a leader gets too far out in front of his people, they will lose sight of him and not follow him any longer.” Graham wrote that he followed King’s advice.

Again:  not exactly what King said in his letter.  And given how King broke with even his "liberal" supporters over Vietnam, and was shot fighting for economic justice (the March on Washington had the same purpose as his visit to Georgia that fateful day), not really that believable an anecdote.  But so the argument discards the ‘60’s and then by the turn of the century, hope supposedly appears, only to be snuffed out by indifference to "broader social forces, institutions, and culture"?  In the '60's, we called the attitude described in that paragraph quoted above: "I've got nothin' against 'em, I just don't want my daughter to marry one."  The irony here is the article opens with a long passage from Frederick Douglass about how his master became a Methodist after a revival, and became even crueler for it (a non-change "conversion" I saw played out again and again in the Southern Baptist dominated town I grew up in).  Did Douglass' master just fail to see the "ways that broader social forces, institutions, and culture can constrain and shape" him?

Bill Barr (see?!) insists he's not racist because a racist is an ignorant in-bred backwoods knuckle dragger who hates all black and brown people.  Of course Strom Thurmond had a black mistress, but that didn't keep him from being an unrepentant racist (doesn't keep Thomas Jefferson from being a racist, either, but we refuse to acknowledge that, too).  Racist is bad, and William Barr doesn't think he's bad; well, not that bad.  Racist is beyond the pale; racist is unfit for human society.  Racist is that guy; not me.  I just don't want my daughter to marry one; that doesn't make me a racist.  These things are cultural, and they are nearly ineradicable.  As the country's population shifts from majority to minority white, the culture will inevitably shift.  And the greatest fear of white people is that justice will be done, that they will be treated by black people the way whites have treated blacks in this country for over 400 years.  There's gotta be a reckoning, and don't we know it.  Which makes me think of another church song, but one from the black church; a fitting one.

Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
All on that day

Run to the rock, rock was a meltin'
Run to the rock, rock was a meltin'
Run to the rock, rock was a meltin'
All on that day

Run to the sea, sea was a boilin'
Run to the sea, sea was a boilin'
Run to the sea, sea was a boilin'
All on that day

Run to the moon, moon was a bleedin'
Run to the moon, moon was a bleedin'
Run to the moon, moon was a bleedin'
All on that day

Run to the Lord, Lord won't you hide me?
Run to the Lord, Lord won't you hide me?
Run to the Lord, Lord won't you hide me?
All on that day

Lord said "Sinner man, you oughta be a prayin'"
Lord said "Sinner man, you oughta be a prayin'"
Lord said "Sinner man, you oughta be a prayin'"
All on that day

Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
All on that day

Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light.

As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.

Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?

Amos 5:18-20, KJV

Yeah, when justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, who is it gonna roll right over?  Not us!  We didn't do nothin' wrong!  Been watching "Lucifer" on Netflix, a Neil Gaiman version of Satan come to El A for a vacation.  In this version Hell is not a place of torment but of guilt, where the damned suffer their own self-inflicted punishment like nightmares, but rooted in their guilt and sense of how unjust they were.  Interesting concept, that we punish ourselves (steps neatly around the problem of God's damnation of humanity, for one thing.)  But it's a very American hell, it seems to me; as if we know this fabulous life we lead (L.A. is a glittering playground in the series, where every day is beautiful and meant to be enjoyed as hedonistically as possible) must someday, somehow, be paid for.  Lucifer says the damned could walk out of hell whenever they want to; but their guilt won't let them.  "Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to"?

I still think it should be to a new theology.  But I'm not sure what real good that would do, when there are so many problems not touched on by theology, when our culture is so deeply rooted in the racism we dare not accept, dare not deny.