Racism and Discipleship

Carolyn Renee Dupont is a historian at Eastern Kentucky University. She has focused her research on the racial views of Southern white evangelicals. “I wanted to understand what seemed like a central riddle about the South,” she says. “The part of the country that was the most fervent about religious faith was also the one that practiced white supremacy most enthusiastically.” What she found was that white supremacy was rooted in the preaching and the teaching of predominantly white churches. Simply put, they preached racism explicitly. And they rejected racial justice efforts implicitly. This was driven, Dupont argues, from a “theology of inaction.” Evangelicals prioritized an individual’s own salvation experience over social concerns. The primary mission of the church was viewed as “winning souls.” Working for racial justice was just a “political” issue. “In that configuration, immorality only lives in the individual person,” said Dupont.” There’s no conception of systemic injustice and systemic sin.” Civil rights activists who cited the Bible in support of their cause were often dismissed as “a bunch of theological liberals,” Dupont said. “And then it becomes an argument about who really believes the Bible. If Christianity is really about individual salvation, and the mission of the church is to win the lost, then these people who are telling us we need to get involved in the civil rights movement are just trying to lead us astray.”

In other words, racism in the South, and, of course, elsewhere, is a discipleship issue. Predominantly white evangelical churches were intentionally creating programs and priorities that produced disciples who saw Black people as inferior and viewed racial justice as anti-thetical to the “gospel.” 

What we are seeing today only seems to confirm this. A very recent and comprehensive study looked at the differences between white evangelicals and evangelicals who are people of color. They were asked about passages in the Bible like Acts 6:1-7, in which early Christians react to complaints of an ethnic minority group and empower leaders of that group to address the problem. Respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with this application: “Therefore, it is good to listen to the complaints of ethnic minority groups and empower leaders within those minority groups to correct injustice.” The majority of people of color strongly agreed with the interpretation. Less than one-third of whites came to the same conclusion. The same study found that sixty percent of white evangelicals believe racism is not a problem in the U.S. 

Another massive study finds that white Christians are actually more likely than white non Christians to deny that structural racism is a problem, that shootings of unarmed Blacks are not isolated incidents, or even that African Americans still face racism and discrimination. The author of the study says white Christians are not simply complacent. They are also complicit. Something is taking place in our churches that is making white people far less aware of and active in stopping racism. It is a discipleship issue.

Rich Villodas, who peaches in Queens, recently tweeted this conclusion: “Discipleship in the US must consistently be oriented towards freeing the Church from political captivity, pernicious sexism, insatiable militarism, pervasive racism, unfettered materialism, proud individualism, & rampant classism.” One person responded by pushing back: “I don’t disagree, but I wonder if these are the First things of following Christ.” That, in a sentence, summarizes the issue. We in white churches have so misconstrued First things that the humane treatment of people of color has become the Last thing.