Our Five Minute Friday leader, Kate, chose the word "compromise" this week because she happened to be reading the same book I was: The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church's Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby. I actually won this book in an online draw a few months ago and just started reading it last week. It is a very timely book to be reading with all the anti-racism protests going on in the US and Canada right now.
As a Canadian who (and I'm only slightly joking) learns most of her American history from Jeopardy!, I found this book fascinating and informative. In clear, concise language, Tisby traces the development of (particularly anti-Black) racism throughout US history, showing how the Christian church has been complicit in perpetuating racism from the early days of African-American slavery, through the Jim Crow and civil rights periods, right up to the present day's focus on Black Lives Matter, monuments and flags, and the call for reparations for the descendants of slaves. The book ends with a chapter on action steps, encouraging readers to become better-informed about racism; develop more interracial relationships; become active through writing, joining or donating to anti-racist organizations; and more.
Here are a few quotes from The Color of Compromise that made me pause, reflect, and sometimes cringe in discomfort:
"[R]econciliation across racial and ethnic lines is not something Christians must achieve but a reality we must receive." (p. 23)
"[Revivalist preacher Charles] Finney and others like him believed that social change came about through evangelization. According to this logic, once a person believed in Christ as Savior and Lord, he or she would naturally work toward justice and change.... This belief led to a fixation on individual conversion without a corresponding focus on transforming the racist policies and practices of institutions, a stance that has remained a constant feature of American evangelicalism and has furthered the American church's easy compromise with slavery and racism." (p. 69)
"Christian complicity with racism in the twenty-first century looks different than complicity with racism in the past. It looks like Christians responding to the phrase black lives matter with the phrase all lives matter. It looks like Christians consistently supporting a president whose racism has been on display for decades. It looks like Christians telling black people and their allies that their attempts to bring up racial concerns are 'divisive.' It looks like conversations on race that focus on individual relationships and are unwilling to discuss systemic solutions. Perhaps Christian complicity in racism has not changed much after all. Although the characters and the specifics are new, many of the same rationalizations for racism remain." (p. 191)
Anyone wanting to learn more about racism in the US and about the role Christianity has played in its perpetuation should read this excellent book.
It's a book with an agenda, and a divisive one at that.
ReplyDeleteThere will be no progress here until we embrace that fact...not the idea, not the 'ideal'...that there is no 'us and them'.
We all bleed red. Every combat veteran knows this, and perhaps it's time to place the fate of the world into the hands of the trained killers.
We can surely do better than the bloody apologists have done.
It has an agenda - tracing the church's complicity in American racism - but I do not believe it is divisive. Have you read it?
DeleteI did read it, and was not impressed. Blaming the church, blaming the 'system', blaming whatever...the only solution to this lies in hearts consecreated to a raceless God, and as far as I have seen, no one wants to go there.
DeleteI thought Tisby was really pretty measured in his discussion. And as he points out, many Christians DO want to "go there," and stay there -- individual acts of conversion without broader structural change. Tisby brings a much-needed corrective to this individualistic way of thinking, in my view.
DeleteSo true, Stephanie. And while our situation here in Canada is not identical, we have a lot to learn from this. And I hear some of the same attitudes from Christians I know as Tisby points to in the book. We really need to do some deep soul searching on this subject.
ReplyDelete