The Evangelical Church’s Confused Witness on Race: Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the claims about race and racism from some of the protesters in Minneapolis, noting how some recent pronouncements on racism from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and the Presbyterian Church in America sound quite similar.

The predominant reason behind the Presbyterian Church in America’s (PCA) and Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) susceptibility to worldly influence on the issue of race appears to be white guilt. Yet, it is not real guilt, the kind that comes from sins that anyone actually committed against a particular person.

Rather, the guilt of many white evangelicals appears to be guilt that comes from looking at the condition of many minorities in this country, their poverty, the recent police killings, etc., and simply assuming that whites are responsible. Responsible because of real sins committed 50, 150, or 250 years ago that we just can’t escape the consequences of, which includes today’s white privilege and institutional white racism.

Here is how the PCA General Assembly put it in the PCA Pastoral Letter on the Gospel and Race (2004):

we [address the issue of racism] not because it is politically correct, or out of any pressure from outward society, but simply because it is our desire that the convicting and restoring power of God’s grace in the Gospel be applied to the manifestations of racial sin of which we ourselves are guilty, and that those who experience the negative effects of these sins might know the healing power of God’s grace. (emphasis added)

These predominately white PCA elders have seen the very real sufferings of many minorities in America and simply decided the situation is because of their sins and those of other white people in the PCA and America.

Of what sins are they and we guilty? That is where things get pretty fuzzy.

The PCA’s 44th General Assembly did identify some specific types of fairly distant racial sins in its response to Overture 43 (2016):

• the segregation of worshipers by race;
• the exclusion of persons from Church membership on the basis of race;
• the exclusion of churches, or elders, from membership in the Presbyteries on the basis of race;
• the teaching that the Bible sanctions racial segregation and discourages inter-racial marriage;

There is no doubt that these sins have previously been committed. Yet though the General Assembly, on behalf on the denomination, confessed and repented of these sins, nowhere did it identify who committed these sins, when they were committed, or whom they were committed against.

A bit more specific, and likely more recent, were the sin types identified in this confession from the pastoral letter contained in Overture 55, which was commended by the General Assembly in Overture 43:

During our long discussions [at General Assembly], there were moving testimonies of hearts changed, confessions of and repentances for racist language, attitudes and actions, expressions of brotherly forgiveness, and admissions by some that they are reticent to even talk about the issue of racism in the church for fear of the controversy that might ensue.

While I do not doubt the sincerity of the men who made these confessions, I do question their clarity, wondering if such confessions are driven by the white guilt that comes from believing in the false narratives of intrinsic white racism and white privilege that is being pushed upon Christians by the progressive left. Again, what they publicly confess are not their own specific sins, but the generic sins of white people.

Emory University Professor George Yancy articulated this perspective in his “Dear White America” letter in the The New York Times: “If you are white, and you are reading this letter, I ask that you don’t run to seek shelter from your own racism. Don’t hide from your responsibility. Rather, begin, right now, to practice being vulnerable.”

Further, today’s white racism, we are told, stems from yesterday’s white racism. “Whites start out with an advantage: They tend to get more and larger inheritances. Also, generations of discrimination—including redlining, mass incarceration and predatory finance—have prevented blacks from building up wealth,” wrote Mark Whitehouse for Bloomberg.

This is the same narrative that the Minneapolis protesters were expressing.

Heal Us, Emmanuel is a book of collected writings by PCA elders who also seem to have accepted this narrative. Here is part of Rev. Dennis Hermerding’s contribution to the book:

White people can easily not see how our backgrounds, cultural circumstances, and the issues of the day shape how we read, interpret, and apply Scripture.

Likewise, Rev. Timothy LeCroy explored his racist heritage:

You see, I didn’t hate Black people, but I was still a racist. I was a racist because I looked down on African Americans. I stereotyped them. I didn’t seek to know them or understand them. I may have never called them names or raised a Confederate flag or done anything overtly racist, but I was racist nonetheless—racist in ways that I am only now coming to understand.

Perhaps the highest profile PCA proponent of the intrinsic racism of whites—and their blindness to it—is Alexander Jun, a professor who was elected in 2017 as the PCA General Assembly’s moderator. He explained the concept to students with a tale about a giraffe who had invited his friend the elephant over to his house:

The elephant could not fit through the door. The giraffe made accommodations to overcome this, but they soon ran into other challenges. When the giraffe went upstairs for a few minutes to take a phone call the elephant tries to make himself at home. Kinda walking around, walking through the halls. And he realizes another problem. The halls are really narrow, right, because it is built for giraffes. Can’t look out the windows because it is for long-necked giraffes. Tries to walk up the stairs but he is too heavy—the stairs start to break. He backs down and knocks over furniture cause it’s so narrow and small.

The giraffe comes back downstairs, finds the mess, and after pondering the situation exclaims:

“Ah! I know the problem. You’re too fat. If you lost some weight, you’d fit in here just fine. Or maybe if you took ballet lessons you’d get light on your feet. I love having you here and I’d love for you to keep coming back but you kinda have to change if you are going to stay here.”

Jun notes you almost feel sorry for the giraffe who had been so hospitable to his friend. And then adds that “it’s not the individual necessarily who is at fault. It is not that you are a bad person. You’re not a bad giraffe. But your worldview is that of a giraffe.” He continues:

That’s the window that we are looking at. But let’s flip it around. Let’s ask it another way. What is it about the institution that makes it so difficult for African Americans? … What is it about the culture that makes it so difficult for women to succeed? You shift the blame and you shift the gaze away from the individual and onto a system.

Of course, in majority white America, the system onto which the blame is laid is whiteness, and white culture is what must be deconstructed, or burned down, to foster racial reconciliation in our church and culture and allow blacks and other minorities to recover from the impoverished conditions brought about by white racism.

The PCA is not alone in its struggle to shed progressive notions of white privilege and guilt.

In February, the SBC’s 2019 Resolution Committee doubled down on its adoption of Resolution 9, which claimed that “Critical race theory and intersectionality [as] analytical tools can aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences:”

We want to be clear that we acknowledge CRT/I originates from people who are not Christians and hold views that oppose the Gospel. No one is claiming that CRT/I is Christian or that all of its cultural applications are in line with Scripture.

At the same time, as with other secular theories, not every observation is wrong, sinful or unhelpful. But even insights that describe the social dynamics of our society accurately remain insufficient to address the sinful heart of man.

Well, sure. God’s common grace means that some secular observations can be quite helpful. But critical race theory is not one of them:

“racism is engrained (sic) in the fabric and system of the American society.” This assumption means that “the individual racist need not exist” in order for “institutional racism [to be] pervasive in the dominant culture.” This presupposition, combined with the Marxist view that all relationships are best understood in terms of power dynamics, causes CRT to assert that existing power structures “are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color

The SBC also has its own self-proclaimed white racists:

The approach of leaders in both denominations is turning them into serial repenters; the PCA has been repenting for almost 20 years. They simply can’t stop confessing how racist they are and repenting of sins past and present. This fails to witness the gospel to the unbelieving culture in two ways.

First, serial repentance brushes aside the truth that Christ died one time for all of our sins: “And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God …” (Hebrews 10:11–12 ESV). Because of this, we need only to confess our sins once. Serial confessors do not communicate to unbelievers the magnitude of Christ’s work on the cross. It is almost as if Christians have turned back to relying on daily animal sacrifices on a stone altar.

Second, serial repentance fails to communicate to unbelievers the necessity of forgiveness. We can see this anywhere we look today. The more often white Christians say white people are racists, the angrier non-believers get. Yet it is not white racism that is fueling the anger of many, if not a majority of, the protesters. It is their hatred of God and their inchoate fear of God’s judgment (see Psalm 2). Telling them their main problem is with white people rather than with God is turning them away from seeking God’s forgiveness and offering forgiveness to others.

In Part 3, we’ll discuss why the concepts of white privilege, white guilt, and inherent white racism do not fit with the facts in the world around us or with the teachings of Scripture.