The other night, I was on the phone with my best friend who was telling me about how she pissed off a bunch of rich white people in a Sunday School class at a suburban Baptist church which shall remain nameless. How did she manage to piss folks off? She suggested that acting like Jesus shouldn’t require folks to “pray about it.” It should require people to, ya know, Act. Like. Jesus. Either you believe that Jesus said to help the poor, visit those in prison, and care for the widow and orphan or you don’t. No prayer necessary.
The “Let’s pray about it” of it all gave rich white folks an excuse for inaction, to escape discomfort. And so my best friend called them on it. I told her (after I nearly fell off my couch laughing because...of course her Enneagram 8 self couldn’t keep her damn mouth shut) that I would have given anything to be there--if only to shout a hale and hearty “Amen!” Needless to say, she hasn’t been back.
After a semester in which I walked my History of Religions class through the history of White American Christianity from the colonial era to the present, I have come to several conclusions--all interrelated. I hope by the end of this blog post, all of these conclusions will coalesce into an explanation of why one group has a serious problem with the idea of “critical race theory” whatever they think THAT means (spoiler alert: they don’t have a clue) and why literally no one else does. It’s an answer that applies to all sorts of issues--poverty, church sex abuse scandals, racism, xenophobia, etc.
This blog post is directed at White Christian Americans. It examines the history of White Christian America. I don’t want anyone to get the impression that this is a condemnation of Christianity as a whole; it is not. What it is is a call to repentance from White folks who have overwhelmingly benefitted from 400 years of American history which have overwhelmingly privileged those with light skin. But first, a few threads to pull….
Premillennial Dispensationalism and Evangelical Fatalism
Uh oh….I just introduced a couple of $64,000 words into the discussion, didn’t I? Fear not! They aren’t quite as scary as they seem...except I have to introduce another $64,000 word now too. Oops….Eschatology (the study of the end times) has always played an interesting role in American Christianity. Prior to and, in places, after the Civil War, postmillennialism was de rigueur in most of the United States.
Postmillennialism assumes that Jesus instituted his Kingdom on Earth before his death and through preaching, conversion, and evangelism Christians could create an environment in which Christ would return AFTER a millennium (1000 years) of Christ’s perfect Kingdom on Earth. This was a pretty positive view of society--Christians living in harmony with each other. So it’s easy to see why postmillennialism died off pretty quickly after the Civil War. After all, the whole point of the Civil War was the DISharmony among people.
After the Civil War, a wave of pessimism swept through American Christianity and premillennialism took over as the eschatological position of most American Christians. Premillennialism argues that the world will continue to deteriorate (as it is a result of a sinful and fallen humanity) until Christ comes back to implement his millennial Kingdom. One of the most popular iterations of premillennialism is dispensationalism. Dispensationalism was popularized in the United States by C.I. Scofield and his Scofield Reference Bible.
In essence, dispensationalism argued that God’s people had moved historically through a number of eras or dispensations (the number varies, though Scofield himself held to 7 dispensations). Regardless of how many dispensations one acknowledges, everyone agrees that we are in the 6th dispensation--the age of grace. At the end of the age of grace comes the Rapture (the bringing of all believers to Heaven) and the Tribulation (the earthly era of chaos and calamity for all non-believers in the hopes of bringing them to Christ). Only once God’s wrath has been visited upon the non-believers will Christ’s 1000 year reign come. Everyone with me so far? Okay, good.
Premillennialism sees the problems of our current times as proof of an inherently fallen world that no one can fix because they are beyond humanity’s ability to fix; only divine intervention will set everything to right. Because of its preoccupation with the sinfulness of man, it’s no surprise that many premillennialists are also Calvinists since Calvinism holds to the doctrine of original sin--that is, that Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden has been visited upon all of humanity and so only God’s grace which we do not deserve and cannot earn can save us. More on this later….
The problem with premillennialism and Calvinism is that they both lend themselves to a certain degree of fatalism when it comes to confronting social issues--things are bad because people are sinful, and we can’t make them better so why try? During the Civil Rights movement, Billy Graham exemplified this position when asked for his reaction to Martin Luther King’s speech at the March on Washington in 1963 (the “I Have a Dream” speech). Graham said, “Only when Christ comes again will little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.”
When “a personal relationship with Christ” Becomes an Idol
Much of White American Christianity, and definitely White American Evangelicalism, maintains the importance of being “born again.” The idea of a conversion experience (first mentioned in John’s Gospel and perhaps most famously portrayed in Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus) is at the heart of many a church narrative. Indeed, this is one of the four parts of the so-called “Bebbington Quadrilateral” which lots of folks point to as the defining characteristics of evangelicalism.
I don’t put much stock in the uniqueness of any of the 4 things on Bebbington’s list to the evangelical experience, so we won’t go into them here. But the idea of “asking Jesus into your heart” and Jesus as a personal savior is rampant in American Christianity. Fun fact, as an aside: I do not consider myself “born again.” I was never “saved.” I simply don’t remember a time when I didn’t believe Jesus was important, so there was no reason to ask him into my heart when he was already there. Just another reason I make a TERRIBLE evangelical. But I digress….
The idea of a personal relationship with Jesus is not bad on its face; like most idols, it only becomes problematic when it assumes an outsized place in a person’s life. Here’s the problem, then. When one’s Christianity becomes about “my” salvation and “my” personal relationship with Christ, any outside factors become unimportant. “My” sins have been forgiven, so I’m good, but the rest of you? Yeah, you’re on your own. AND, as we’ve already discussed, humanity is inherently sinful and we can only save ourselves by accepting God’s undeserved grace. So when any social issue is raised, the response is typically, “Well, I’m not a *insert social problem here* so this isn’t my problem.”
This response assumes that each of us lives in our own little bubble and that the problems outside of the church mean nothing to those in the sanctuary. This insular way of thinking is a big part of King’s critique of his White Christian brothers and sisters in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” A “personal relationship with Christ” is the theological brother of “rugged American individualism.” As long as people see their actions as divorced from the consequences of those actions on those around them, they can absolve themselves of any necessity to take action to solve social problems.
Evangelism vs. Evangelicalism
So, I’ve snuck in another $64,000 word…which might actually be the root of a $64,000 question: what the hell is evangelicalism? Well...no one really knows. Or at least, no one can really define it. The aforementioned Bebbington Quadrilateral lists being born again, activism, a belief in the Bible as the ultimate authority, and a belief in the importance of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to redeem mankind. George Marsden, one of the preeminent historians of American Christianity, once glibly defined an evangelical as “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” When I was in Cairo, an evangelical was anyone who wasn’t Orthodox or Catholic. However, lately evangelicalism has taken on a political tinge: An evangelical is a white person who votes Republican. By the way, the literature review it would take to look at all of the definitional issues on evangelicalism would take PAGES. Go Google it. You’ll find all sorts of sources to walk you through the various approaches to defining the word.
I have this thing about definitions. I think they’re important. But defining evangelicalism is no easy task. The problem is that different groups, different points of view result in different definitions. At its heart, evangelicalism should be about the evangel (Greek for “good news”--what we would call, in English, the Gospel). And, in the early history of evangelicalism, that is what it was about. Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield are considered some of the precursors to modern evangelical movements in the United States. However, with the ascension of religious folks into public, often political, life since the mid-20th century, the term has taken on an irredeemably political meaning as well. And--precisely because I believe definitions matter--this means that evangelicalism should now be viewed as a political movement, not a religious one.
What I believe should take precedence here is not evangelicalism which is an increasingly ideological and troublesome term, but evangelism. “Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” If this is the backbone of the Christian witness, then let’s get back to that. Let’s also remember that the whole purpose of calling ourselves “Christian” is to follow Christ, to live out his example. That’s the whole point of our baptismal covenant (“Buried with Christ in baptism; raised to walk in the newness of life.”). We are followers of Christ. We should look to his example in the Gospels (the evangel) to show us the way forward.
Care for the least of these, be peacemakers, help the poor, the widows, and the orphans. THIS is the way of the Lord. Preach the Gospel all the time; when necessary, use words (NOT a quote from St. Francis of Assisi, to whom it is often attributed. He also, while we’re killing St. Francis quote dreams, did not come up with the so-called “Prayer of St. Francis.”). The evangel was--and is--revolutionary. The last shall be first, and the first shall be last turns the balance of power in society completely on its head. If we stick to evangelism, we might just get a lot farther as Christians than getting stuck in the constant cycle of arguing about whether Jesus was a Republican or a Democrat.
Why Evangelicals don’t do Sociology
A couple of weeks ago, one of my fellow teachers posted on Facebook, regarding all of the anti-Critical Race Theory legislation being passed around the country, that as history teachers, we cannot, nor should we shirk our responsibility to teach the good, the bad, and the ugly of our nation’s heritage. One of the pastors at the church she attends commented (predictably) that racism was about the inherent fallenness of mankind and anything that looked at class-based theories put kids on a slippery slope toward Marxism.
It was at this point that I realized that the primary disconnect between evangelicals and sociologists such as myself. When people who have made an idol of a personal relationship with Jesus, who believe that all of the bad in the world is the result of the fallenness of man, only see social problems through an individualistic lens, they cannot, will not, see the social forest for the individual trees. As a sociologist, I don’t have the time to look at each individual’s actions, beliefs, or level of sinfulness. It’s simply impractical. Sociology is the study of society, of social groups. Sociologists must necessarily transcend the individual level in order to get anything accomplished because 7 billion case studies would be...a LOT.
When evangelicals look at racism, they see their own lives: “I’m not a racist.” But individual racism is only the tip of the iceberg. Restrictive housing covenants, criminal codes regarding drugs that unfairly target minorities, literacy tests given only to Blacks trying to register to vote, redlining and predatory lending practices, food deserts, underfunded schools, and the hyper policing of Black and Brown communities are among the things sociologists talk about when we talk about structural or institutional racism. Falling back on the individualist view of sin and social problems absolves evangelicals of looking at how generations of white folks have benefitted from policies that not only helped them, but actively hurt minority communities.
This individualist vs. structural divide informs a number of social debates in the United States. Sex abuse scandals are a result of the sin of those who have abused their power, not the misogyny that permeates complementarian doctrine or the structures and institutions that enabled that abuse to happen in the first place. Gun violence is the result of the sinfulness of the individual gunmen, not the structures of toxic masculinity, the glorification of militance as manliness, and the idol of “individual protection” that lead people to act out in such ways. Poverty is the result of individual choices, not the generational passing down of wealth (or the lack thereof) that affects an individual’s starting point in life. Evangelicals simply cannot see the world in sociological terms because they have a blind spot to the interconnectedness of people groups, social problems, and the very real fact that nothing, not one thing, in life exists in a vacuum.
When my best friend pushed back against the idea of “praying about it” before helping the poor (the context of this particular discussion in Sunday School), she was challenging the idolatry of a personal relationship with Jesus. Before anyone can act or address an obvious social problem, they should pray about it as an individual because their salvation, their sin is paramount. This is a total subversion of the Gospel message. Jesus didn’t pray about whether he should help the poor; he just helped the poor. Jesus didn’t pray about whether he should heal the leper or help the lame to walk or the blind to see; he simply did it--even when doing so was sure to irritate the religious leaders of his day. A more truthful response would be “I don’t want to do this because it makes me uncomfortable.” Not spiritually satisfying, but certainly more truthful.
Furthermore, the obsession with the inherent sinfulness of people (the Calvinism of it all) and the fact that said sinfulness is so deeply entrenched that only the second coming of Christ can serve as a corrective (the premillennialism of it all) means that evangelicals can simply throw up their hands and say, “See? We can’t do anything about it!” Again, this is a complete subversion of evangel, the Good News of Jesus Christ. Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers.” He didn’t have a lot of patience for those who wanted to preserve the status quo. He wanted his disciples to go and change the conversation. He upended the status quo just as surely as he upended the money changers’ tables in the Temple. At no point in his ministry did Jesus throw up his hands and say, “Oh well….Guess that’s just the way it is.” If we claim to be followers of this Jesus character, we shouldn’t do that either.
If White evangelicalism is a corrupted movement, then what should we do? How, then, shall we live? We should live out an example in the image of Christ. We should love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, upend the status quo when it inhibits progress (which is almost all of the time), and confront structural factors that maintain White supremacy. We should be comfortable with discomfort, ready to confront our own biases, and accept that life has been unfairly good to people who won the genetic lottery.
