The Evangelical Church’s Confused Witness on Race: Part 1

Only hours after one of her churches had been set afire by rioters in Washington, D.C., the Right Reverand Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, chose to aim her harsh words at President Donald Trump.

“We align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless others. And I just can’t believe what my eyes have seen,” she said.

What had drawn her ire was the president holding up a Bible while visiting St. John’s Episcopal Church.

It is not just the so-called mainline churches, though, that turn a blind eye to the damage being done to buildings, culture, and race relations in our country by the rise of progressive liberalism. Churches considered to be conservative and evangelical also suffer blindness in this area as worldliness slowly displaces biblical wisdom.

Filmmaker Ami Horowitz just released a video of interviews he conducted with some of the Minneapolis protesters. One female protester told him, “This country was built on violence and when people had enough of the violence y’all have against us and we give it back to y’all, y’all wanna be mad.”

A male protester spoke in similar terms, “Google, Microsoft, all that bull****, that’s all built up, that’s all slavery money. So when we take it back, or we burn it down, yeah. We gonna take what’s ours. You ain’t gonna give it up? Okay you ain’t having it no more.”

Another protester added, “America has it coming.” Finally, when asked by Horowitz if “we have to burn it down to rebuild it without racism,” a female protester responded, “Yes, that makes total sense.”

Where did these protesters get the idea that America was built on the backs of slaves? That big businesses today have been financed by slave money? That the only way to eliminate white privilege and systemic racism in the United States today is to burn it down and rebuild?

In recent years, these ideas have been pushed through such secular concepts as Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality. Unfortunately, these worldly ideas have also crept into many Christian denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).

The result is portions of these concepts have become part of the formal and informal language of these denominations. Thus, not only are they unable to counter the false teachers of the world on racial issues, too often they actually assist them in building the narrative that is driving the protests taking place in our country today.

In 2019, the Southern Baptist Convention took a resolution designed to warn against Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality and turned it into a resolution in support of those concepts. Josh Buice explains what intersectionality is:

intersectionality as it has been defined, is discrimination based on overlapping layers of individual classes of discrimination. It’s when a person is subjected to discrimination for more than one classification such as a woman who is black and lesbian. She would classify, under this line of reasoning, for three basic discriminatory marks—being a woman, who is black, and is also a lesbian. According to the definition of intersectionality, where these three marks “intersect” is the focus of her greatest and most severe discrimination which places her at the greatest risk of oppression in our culture.

Yet the SBC officially proclaimed that “Critical Race Theory and intersectionality alone are insufficient to diagnose and redress the root causes of the social ills that they identify, which result from sin, yet these analytical tools can aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences …”

On June 4, a group identified only as “PCA agency presidents and permanent committee coordinators” weighed in on the recent racially-tinged disruptions in our society. More accurately, the group weighs in mostly on the problems of living in a country, the United States of America, that perpetrates “the systemic mistreatment of so many other people of color.” In a 1,353 word document, only 31 words addressed the violence and destruction of rioters across our nation. And even in those words, the group essentially justified the intent of the protests: “We lament that peaceful protests, offered in good faith to highlight racial injustice, have occasionally turned violent, and we mourn with the victims of that violence, and pray for its end.”

It seems that the PCA leaders justify the protests because of “the evils of personal and systemic racism in our country, our church, and our own hearts.” While their statement does not put the terms ‘white’ and ‘privilege’ together or directly blame whites for their inherent racism, the PCA leaders words of repentance appear to be not so much for themselves but for all whites, or at least white Christians:

In humility, we repent of our ongoing racial sins. We repent of past silence in the face of racial injustice. We repent of a negligent and willful failure to account for our unearned privilege or to surface the unconscious biases that move us to protect our comfort rather than risk speaking against racial injustice. We repent of hearts that are dull to the suffering of others.

This language is more condemnation of whites overall than confession because it does not actually speak of the leader’s specific, individual sins. Instead, it is only a list of types of sins that could have been committed by anyone, or at least anyone white. Which is in keeping with previous language coming out of the PCA. As we will see in Part 2, the PCA’s previous statements of repentance generally lack specifics about the sins that took place and their direct connection to those who were harmed.

These pronouncements from the SBC and the PCA are not the language of Scripture, but language influenced by progressive liberalism. This causes problems for the church’s witness to believers and unbelievers.

Generally speaking, believers don’t have so much a knowledge problem–they already know Christ and His forgiveness–as they have an obedience problem; they don’t do what they know is required of them. And if white Christians are continuously told by the church that their obedience problem is racism, they will be sidetracked from discovering what it is they really need to repent of, part of which is surely not spending enough time speaking the good news of Jesus death for the sins of the world to unbelievers.

Unbelievers, of course, also have an obedience problem. But their bigger problem is a knowledge problem; they do not know Jesus Christ or His forgiveness of their sins. And if they are continually told that whites, especially white Christians, are racists, they will be focused on the sins of the white racists–just take a look around you if you are unsure of this–rather than seeking God’s forgiveness for their own sins.

The declaration of inherent white racism coming out of today’s “evangelical” church simply does not provide a good foundation for the church’s witness of the gospel to the millions of confused, unbelieving Americans concerned about race relations in our country today. Or for helping believers apply Christ’s ministry of reconciliation to the problems our country is facing.

In Part 2, we’ll look more closely at SBC and PCA pronouncements on race and the progressive concepts that have influenced them.

Read Part 2 and Part 3.