Defeater Ethics: Racism
Christians have had a profound impact on slavery and racism, both for it and against it. But there's no question as to where Jesus stands.
In our last post, I addressed the ethical dilemma of Christian misogyny by admitting its complexity. Christianity has both perpetuated misogyny and offered the most significant protest against it. The answer will be equally complicated as we turn to our next defeater ethic. As racial justice continues to permeate public discourse, Christianity’s racial sins remain in the spotlight with an exposure that disqualifies the Christian faith for some.
I have no interest in suppressing Christianity’s lamentable history in this area. Christians were once ardent defenders of American slavery and segregation, providing religious support to institutionalized evil. This is a historical fact that we cannot in good conscience deny. However, there is more to the story. While it is undeniably true that Christianity has perpetuated racism, it is equally undeniable that Christianity has been racism’s greatest enemy.
Human history tells the story of tribalism competing for supremacy. Sinners want supremacy, both for themselves and their tribe. And those who gain supremacy, exercise that superiority in evil ways. Any honest assessment of history shows this to be normative. America’s declaration, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” may be self-evident to us, but it is not historically self-evident. Tribal, national, cultural, and racial supremacy, and the subsequent subjugation of those deemed inferior, has always been the self-evident reality of this fallen world.
How did we then arrive at the norm of liberty and justice for all? It all started with a Messiah who began his campaign by opening a scroll and declaring, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” And then the followers of this Messiah formed a community unlike anything the world had ever known. Religions had always followed the predictable lines of tribal and cultural divides and were, therefore, always married to the sinful quest for superiority. Thus, the ancient world did not know what to make of these followers of Jesus and their communities where “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus gave way to a peculiar religious movement that overcame historical boundaries with a counterintuitive ethic of neighbor love rather than neighbor domination.
This movement eventually reordered human affairs such that all created equal with unalienable rights has become preeminently self-evident. If you prefer a world that seeks to repudiate racism and eradicate slavery, then thank Christianity. Again, I am not denying there were no glaring hypocrisies along the way. In fact, one of the most significant obstacles Christian abolitionists faced was fellow Christians. For example, in 1780, the New Jersey Gazette hosted a series of essays publicly debating the issue of slavery. And what’s fascinating about the debate is that both sides invoke the Bible to prove their point. But Christian duplicity aside, the greater arc of the Christian movement bends towards justice.
Nowhere is this more evident than among the very ones who were oppressed. If Christian slave owners wanted to maintain a world where slave labor was acceptable, they should have never introduced their slaves to Jesus. Granted, they tried to control that introduction. Through illiteracy, they kept slaves from reading the whole council of God and instead offered selective sermons and proof texts that never threatened slavery’s institution. But once you let the Lion of Judah out of the cage, Jesus begins to roar.
One might expect the enslaved to hate the religion of their enslavers, but the opposite happened. The oppressed found hope in Jesus, who is familiar with suffering and acquainted with grief and sets the captives free by humbling the proud and exalting the lowly. Christian slave owners unwittingly let Jesus loose on their plantations, and Jesus, in turn, devoured their religious hypocrisy. The oppressed discovered that Jesus was actually on their side. So, they started praying prayers for deliverance, singing songs of deliverance, and gathering to worship beneath the good news of deliverance. If racism is your reason to reject Jesus, do not bring that objection to the Black Church tradition. They will tell you the story of Jesus, the Savior of their souls, and their story.
Why did those in opposition to civil rights bomb black churches? Why not black restaurants, schools, sporting events—why churches? Because they knew the movement found its fire within those sacred walls. If they wanted to stop the march of justice, they knew they needed to stop those churches. But they couldn’t because the Christian gospel of love is unstoppable.
Consider MLK with echoes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We will match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we will still love you…Throw us in jail, and as difficult as that is, we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators and violence into our communities at the midnight hours and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half-dead and we will still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And one day we will win our freedom but we will not only win freedom for ourselves. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience, that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory.”
Amen. Jesus and his command to love neighbors and enemies alike cannot be stopped. It transformed our world, and its transformation continues to this day. Once again, I am not denying glaring hypocrisies along the way. But if Christianity’s complicity in racism disqualifies Christianity, then we are surrendering the very faith tradition that has resourced racism’s demise. One might argue that we can simply borrow the Christian ethic while rejecting Christ himself. That, it seems, is what our society is attempting to do. But this is proving to be an unsustainable option because, in so doing, we have forfeited the moral foundation and spiritual power.
Without God, there is no ultimate Judge nor standard of justice, and we are left with this vexing dilemma: Why is racism wrong? What’s wrong with my tribe over your tribes? What’s wrong with the strong of this world dominating and exploiting the weak? In a world of pitiless indifference, governed by selfish genes and survival of the fittest, this is precisely what we should expect and even pursue. But Jesus sees it differently. Jesus says what is natural to sinful humanity is not good for humanity. My invitation is to follow Jesus and devote yourself to the counterintuitive ethic of selfless love that has transformed the world as we know it, with more transformation yet to come.