All of us swim in waters fouled by racism. Some are horrified at the filth, others gleefully stir it up before jumping in, and others tend not to notice, as long as it refreshes them. We know what racism is, we don’t generally see it in ourselves, we prefer not to see it in others, and unless it smacks us in the face, we think it’s no longer much of an issue — an indifference we can claim if we are of the Anglo majority culture, forgetting that that very indifference has allowed racism to flourish from the moment of this country’s birth.
And flourish it has, primarily through the failure of the Christian Church to condemn as sin anything that violates the spirit of the Gospel described in Galatians 3:28, the most revolutionary passage in the New Testament that announces that race, class, and gender were no longer barriers to full partnership and equality within the Body of Christ. Throughout history, the Church has acted as both a seething factory of prejudice and a soothing incubator for the prejudiced. Whether in 1860 among “Christian” slaveholders or 1960 among “Christian” pastors, the most hateful, virulent racist behavior was safely enabled, blandly accepted, and genuinely accommodated by an impotent, irrelevant Church bent on conforming not to the character of Christ but to the comfort of its own sinful culture. Where racism flourished, faithful, Spirit-led women and men often acted to confront and correct it, and all too often were derided as “Godless liberals” and agitators. (There is no revision of history that allows Quakers, abolitionists and social reformers to be cast off as “Godless,” when the majority saw fidelity to Jesus Christ as the single motivating factor for their efforts). God help a church unwilling to agitate for justice; God have mercy on one, then and now, that would condemn its brothers and sisters in Christ for fighting against the very evil they insist on holding on to.
Thus the Christian Church’s efforts to eradicate racism were defeated by others who took the name of Christ, preached it from the pulpit, and then fattened themselves off the blood and sweat of men and women purchased as livestock, refreshed themselves at segregated lunch counters and fountains, and applauded the formation of a society that, in violation of the ethic of Galatians 3:28, insisted on a “God-given” social order that knelt to white patriarchy while bringing the poor to their knees. The horror of racism outside of the church is surpassed only by the horror of racism within, and while there are skinheads, neo-Nazis, and kinists in “Christian” churches all over the country, most of society now sees them as evil, and most pastors shy away from anything that even appears to flirt with racist thought or behavior.
But we’ve gotten comfortable, and we’ve gotten sloppy. We believe ourselves to be free from racial prejudice, we act outraged when we see instances of racist behavior, and we assume that this is one problem society, and the Church, can cross off its list. And so we accept revisionist history, bad theology, simplistic political theory, and a definition of racism either so bland or so irrelevant as to guarantee safe passage when it does arrive. We condemn only the most egregious actions and lack the willingness to examine less-obvious examples, the discernment to understand the lofty speech that often uses code words — “states’ rights,” “traditional,” “social order” — to allow racism to seep into every crack of American society. We want racism to announce itself, big, bright, and ugly, if it’s going to appear at all. But like all evil, racism is crafty. And I fear that we are not far from the time that, lulled into a sense of complacency after a job neither well done nor finished, we’ll find that “the new normal” in the Church may well be the vicious toxins of old, repackaged for a modern audience that won’t notice and won’t care.