Theological Journal – August 7 Evangelicals and Racism
James K. A. Smith helpfully diagnoses some key difficulties evangelicals have in responding to racism. The first is a commitment to individualism (a person’s relationship to Jesus in their hearts).
“When all you have is a hammer,
everything looks like a nail; and when your hammer is “accepting Jesus into
your heart,” every nail is an affair of the heart. So when white evangelicals
do recognize racism, they tend to see it as a “personal” sin requiring
repentance, not a structural injustice demanding rectification. When the sin of
racism is reduced to personal animosity, the “solution” is simply
relationships.”
Thus “reconciliation” to others
rather than social justice addressing the systems and institutions is the
accepted way of dealing with racism (bad attitudes/actions towards black
people).
This is a common complaint about evangelicals.
But Smith unearths another one often noticed but seldom applied to racism. And
that’s evangelical rationalism.
“So by ‘rationalism,’
I mean this tendency to construe Christianity as a set of beliefs, ideas and
doctrines — a kind of ‘talking head’ version of religion that makes saying ‘yes’
to a list of beliefs central to the faith. So central is this idea of faith
that some may wonder what else it could mean. But in other streams of
Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, religion is something that you do,
putting the emphasis on habit-forming practices and disciplines.”
Further, he adds:
“If white evangelicals'
focus on belief might recognize racism as ‘false doctrine,’ it misses racism as
perceptual vice: a disordered habit of seeing others. Such vice is carried in
our bodies more than it is articulated by our intellect. Philosopher George
Yancy has noted what he calls “the Elevator Effect”: the bodily gestures and rituals
of the white person when a black man steps on the elevator. If you ask this
white person what they believe, of course they’ll disavow racism as an ideology.”
Smith claims
evangelicals (of whom he is one) must find other spiritual resources for
broadening and deepening their perceptions and experiences of racism to better
and more faithfully respond to it.
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