The Good News for people of privilege has long been Bad News for people of color. One of the most daunting walls dividing us from each other derives from an enduring distortion of the gospel.
When I was a college student in New Mexico, the campus ministry I served in was asked to assist with a church’s evangelistic effort in a nearby town. We were (briefly) trained to go door to door and ask one question of whoever courageously opened their door on a sleep Saturday morning to a couple of strangers. Here’s the question:
“If you died tonight, do you know, without any doubt, that you would go to heaven?”
That, I was taught, was the essence of the gospel. We might get one shot (literally and metaphorically) at these folks. So, we’d better go straight for what matters most. We were equipped to explain the gospel in one question, one that emphasized individuals, death, heaven and spiritual guilt. It was aimed at the soul and the soul’s eventual home in heaven.
That question was short-sighted. In his book America’s Original Sin, Jim Wallis writes about how the gospel has experienced “personalization” and “privatization” by predominantly white churches. I’ll add one more word: “spiritualization.” In many churches, the gospel addresses personal (not societal) sin, private (not public) sin, and spiritual (not earthly) sin. It’s primarily God’s answer to the question: If you died tonight, do you know, without any doubt, that you would go to heaven?” The gospel, in this framework, is about the soul, not the body. The gospel is about spiritual well being, not material well being.
This way of framing our faith is not only too limited. It’s too dangerous. It’s a view of the gospel declared by a man at a church I know. When asked, “Would you teach about racism?” He stated, “I would never teach about racism. I would only teach the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Seen this way, the gospel has nothing to do with social sins like racism. It’s about the saving of a soul and not a body. And as a result, seen in this way, the gospel is also about tolerating the oppression and abuse of the bodies whose souls we’re seeking to save.
The roots of this gospel run deep. George Whitefield, the famous eighteenth-century revivalist illustrates. On the one hand, he preached the equality of white people and black people. On the other hand, he supported slavery in the U.S. and owned slaves himself. He and other American Christian leaders …
“managed to separate the idea of spiritual emancipation from the idea of social emancipation in their preaching and practice of the gospel. Converting to Christianity might set a slave free from sin, but not from slavery. A Christian slave was equal to his master “in the Spirit” but not in the flesh. Otherworldly spiritual equality had nothing to do with inner-worldly social equality.”
Even Charles Finney, America’s leading revivalist, and a major figure in the abolitionist movement, came to view the abolitionist movement as a hindrance to the gospel. He argued that while slavery was a sin, there should be no “diversion of the public mind” from the task of converting people and filling their minds with “the gospel.” To press for the just treatment of black people was seen as a diversion from the preaching of the Good News.
Mark Baker and Joel Green explore the history of American interpretation of the gospel and reach this conclusion:
“A gospel that allows me to think of my relationship with God apart from the larger human family and the whole cosmos created by God–can it be said that this is any gospel at all?”
But too often, this is exactly what happened. The gospel is divorced from any larger social or societal implications and limited only to me, my sins, and my God. The Good News for the white elite becomes bad news for everyone else.
