One of the reasons why I love Dr. Hall is because he's well versed in critical race theory and history. Right, so I want to immediately, I have to fight against the self-righteousness that flares up. It's okay, Lord have mercy on me, because I'm a racist too.
What I'd like to address in this session is the presence of critical race theory in contemporary evangelicalism. In other words, to consider where it is that critical race theory seems to be cropping up. And the simple answer to that question is just about everywhere.
It might be easier to answer the question, where is it not cropping up? It's cropping up, for example, in curricula in Southern Baptist and other evangelical seminaries. It's cropping up in official denominational statements and official statements by various agencies of various evangelical denominations. It's showing up on interdenominational websites and blogs. I'll give a few examples of that in just a bit.
It's showing up in lectures by influential theologians and in sermons by influential... preachers. And now I want to give some more concrete examples of this so that you can see exactly what I'm talking about.
I want to talk first of all about some examples that have shown up in evangelicalism in general recently outside specifically the Southern Baptist Convention. And then after I've done that I want to look at some examples of its cropping up, critical race theories cropping up within the Southern Baptist Convention, which of course is our primary concern. All right, outside the Southern Baptist Convention, where have we recently seen, but in evangelical circles, where have we recently seen critical race theory rear its head?
Many of you are no doubt aware of this interdenominational organization called the Gospel Coalition. It's a group of theologians and pastors, most of them Reformed, who have banded together for various purposes, including the propagation of the gospel. Well, With increasing frequency over the last few years, they have appeared on the Gospel Coalition website more and more articles that seem to reflect critical race theory thinking.
One is by Pastor Thabiti, We Await Repentance for the Assassination of Dr. King, in which he argues that all of society, in particular all of white society, somehow is responsible for the assassination of Dr. King and therefore owes some kind of repentance. Another more recent article by Mika Edmondson, The Reformation is Not Just a White Man's Legacy. The article is steeped in the terminology and the thought of critical race theory.
Christianity Today, a well-known Protestant magazine originally founded by Billy Graham and friends. Same thing we see happening at Gospel Coalition is happening at Christianity Today. Most recently, an article by Amy Julia Becker, White Christians, it's time to stand in solidarity with your black brothers and sisters.
If you go to the Christianity Today website, you pull up this article and you read it, you will see in there elements of critical race theory, as I've explained that theory to you. Another example outside of Southern Baptist circles and very recent, is crew, which is what... We now call what used to be called Campus Crusade for Christ recently had its annual conference.
This is a much reported fact, and that is that the conference was dominated by discussions of the problem of racism. And many of the presentations that were made were chock full of ideas, concepts that clearly are drawn from critical race theory. I encourage you to Google the CRU conference.
and see for yourself. We are not Democrats, we're not Republicans, we are the church! Our fellowships need political diversity because it allows us to welcome in our neighbors. Oneness and diversity is not a political issue. It's not a social or cultural or organizational issue.
It is a gospel issue. Equity in housing and education are not political issues to care about. They're human realities. Just as I'm growing in my ethnic identity, and God is using me to share the gospel, God is also mobilizing others in the spaces that he has uniquely designed for them. I want to come alongside students as they live out their cultural identities and empower them to make disciples of all nations.
Friends, it is important for us to be awakened to the racial inequities. You may not be racist or whatever, but we all still live in a racialized society. Even though you don't see slaves out here, even though you know you don't Jim Crow you don't see the signs in all of that anymore what you have to understand I said that at the very beginning this country was built by white people for white people would know by slaves for white people it was built right so that people could generate wealth we know this sin has implications that go far deeper than what we can ever imagine we know that when we study the real story of our country because when you know what happened to the first Native Americans, the first citizens who were here, when you really begin to study what happened to them, and you look at how they were stripped from them being created in the Imago Dei, and somehow to be put on this European framework as if that was godly. You know what I say?
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. And they would have no idea of the implications of making that, of doing that, because it would rob us of any kind. of identity as a Christian nation but it doesn't stop there we all know the legacy of chains we all know that because of chains and hundreds of years of slavery and why can we talk honestly about that. Why do we have to not be ashamed? Is he going to bring up Whitfield and is he going to bring up Edwards again?
They were just a product of their times. No, they made decisions. Whitfield, the revivalist, the evangelist, made it possible for slavery to still exist in Georgia and even use slaves to build an orphanage.
Father, forgive him because he had no idea what he would do and that it would cripple the witness of the church even today. Just because our country It's unrepentant. It doesn't mean that we have to be unrepentant.
The Slave Trade Act. The Slave Trade Act. Prevention of slaves being imported into the U.S. in 1807, which led to slaves being breeded as cattle. The Indian Removal Act in 1830. This is one of the things where lands were stripped from the natives and given to... Elite white men.
The Dred Scott case. In this case the Supreme Court ruled that basically African Americans were and could never be citizens of the United States. That was stated by our Supreme Court.
We need to understand that. The compromise of 1877, Ruther B. Hayes ushered in the end of Reconstruction and began the reign of terror and domestic terrorism. toward brown and black bodies. The 13th Amendment, it evolved into slavery by another name through mass incarceration. The 14th Amendment granted all citizens equal protection under the law.
Plessy versus Ferguson basically said that after the 14th Amendment that we would have separate spaces, so separate but equal. And this was not overturned until Brown versus the Board of Education. We're so glad we come from so many different places to gather in this space together with no mention of whose land we are standing on and how we got it.
No justice! When they were debating over taxation of the Constitution, and black people were called three-fifths human in the Constitution, it was one of the clearest depictions we ever gave of the lie of racial hierarchy. It was saying white is five-fifths.
Black is three-fifths, and then everybody else has human value. If you're an immigrant from Asia, or you're an immigrant from South America, or an immigrant from Mexico, if you're a native, your value is determined, based on a lie, your value is determined on your proximity to whiteness and your proximity to blackness. This is 2019, and that year is significant because this marks the 400th year of the first African Americans that were brought enslaved to America.
In 1619. And maybe that's something you didn't know. And that's by design. This is the chapel that's in the midst of a slave castle.
This is a chapel that's in the midst of the brokenness. What were they doing singing songs when women were being raped? What were they doing? When the injustice was going on all around them and this put me on notice because one of the things I'm afraid of is that we still have chapels in the midst of brokenness in our culture and we're still singing songs and talking to ourselves.
Listen I'm telling you you had better have conversations on social justice. Immigrant children detained Incarcerated and trafficked are not political issues to speak on. They're my pastoral realities. So I cannot come to you today, crew.
and not speak the place where I stand, watching the church sing their songs in stadiums all across the country, raise a banner for Jesus, and stay silent while we experience another holocaust. You see, Christ died so that we can be reconciled to the Father, and in turn, because of that reconciliation, we can be reconciled to one another. historical truth is important to the work of reconciliation. When it comes to the historical truth, we're often okay with this partial truth. If we're not starting from the same common memory, that creates a barrier.
If we're learning history differently, that creates a barrier. America has intentionally erased, misinterpreted, and created new narratives for our history, and we must take this back. Jesus came to start a revolution against evil and injustice.
In light of the incredibly hurtful words being spoken recently in our country about people of color. I am reminded that if one member suffers, we all suffer. Be careful of that American baggage that you have taken on, because when you say minorities, it says less than, and we know as biblical people that one...
have power because he spoke and the world came into order I'm not your inward I'm your brother in Christ but Terry might come with him and say my man you preached that you dropped it I know that's right but I'm allowed and we just move on chasing justice starts with speaking truth to power And about the powers at play, greed, idolatry, white supremacy, let me understand the words of the prophet Amos, not from a place of power and privilege, but from a place that is most acquainted with the injustices. Immigrant neighbors, youth on the West Side, women of color in primarily white institutions, men who are incarcerated, who have spent most of their lives behind bars because of some something they did when they were 16 and 17 and were tried as adults. This generation of God-seeking, good-seeking worshipers resonates with the feeling and the tone of Amos as they look at churches that are disconnected from the reality of suffering and the cries of the people they hear in their own backyard. And our complicity in racist structures, and they want to vomit.
In the book of Amos, over and over again, over again he tells us that trampling on the poor through purchasing from companies that exploit workers and harm and endanger human lives and cause war for our luxurious jewels and our electronic batteries is not worship this should break our hearts this should make us angry because it's making god angry we're called to be connected very america that you defend you have to go in a segregated Army and then you come back home and you don't benefit from the wealth of the GI Bill and he has to put his uniform Away because you see black soldiers would be lynched So yeah, he had problems with the systemic realities. There's something that isn't even real in the first place that was created, this thing called white people. Race is not something that God created.
It makes me crazy when people say there's one human race. No, there's not one human race. Race is a construct.
It was created... Most people who study race would say it's 500 years old or so. Race was created to justify all these barbaric and evil things that happened. And we could talk all day long about the social inequalities that come from race, and those are very real.
But race at its core is a deeply spiritual issue, because it's built on a set of lies. Race is built on a lie that human value does not come from God's authorship. Human value comes from where you fall on this humanly created racial hierarchy. We must understand that God didn't create race. You see, race...
Is a social and political construct. That doesn't mean for us to... She said race doesn't exist. So therefore I don't see anybody.
I don't see your color. I'm not telling you to take a color blind approach. Because that is a lie. To say that you don't see color.
You see me. And if you don't see... First of all if you say I don't see color.
Then you don't see who I am. You don't see my pain, you don't see my joy, you don't see the systemic things that are impacting me. My friend Michael was at a ministry conference, similar to this, where he shared about ways that he had experienced racism while a black student at UCLA.
And he was told by a kind, respectful, loving, older white woman in his small group, Michael, when I see you, I don't see your color. And Michael didn't want to be rude, right? So he didn't say anything back, but he was thinking, I'm a black man from Los Angeles.
I grew up during the LA riots, you know. If you say you don't see my color, you might as well not see me at all. We have been discipled and formed in a theology of intellect and intention, not a theology of embodiment and action. True worship cannot exist without justice.
Young, black, brown, and yellow bodies. Go to Pew Research. I don't have time. Go to Barna. I don't have time.
The research is out. The future of the church looks like me. If you hold a complementarian view of women in leadership and you happen to be the team leader, that doesn't give you the right to make that the de facto position. Cruz's position is we don't have a position, we have a practice, and that men and women can all lead. I'm going to read this and then you say we lament.
Lord, we acknowledge that we have learned to do right. We did not seek restorative justice that benefits all. We have not. defended the oppressed. We have not taken up the cause of the fatherless or pleaded the case of the widow.
Instead, we have mocked and punished the poor with our partisanship and our apathy. Lord, have mercy. We lament that we stood by as systemic and institutionalized racism became founding pillars and structures in America and within the church.
Lord, have mercy. We have allowed agendas of empire to become prominent within your church. We understand that empire aims to take and oppress. We have replaced your kingdom with the empire mentality.
Lord, have mercy. We have formed and developed church structures and denominations while excluding the voice of your global church due to racism and racial segregation. Lord, have mercy. We acknowledge the racial hierarchies and structures of privilege many have benefited from, many have been oppressed by.
Lord, have mercy. We have ignored the cries of children because they were not our own. We have discounted the pain of mothers because they were not our own.
We have turned a blind eye to the affliction of brown and black men and women because they were not our own. Lord, have mercy. We have replaced your supremacy with idealization of a nation and racial identity. Lord, have mercy. We have not required justice.
We have not loved others well. And we have not walked in humility and in our brokenness. Lord, have mercy. We cry out to you, O God, our Redeemer, as the only one who can save us from ourselves.
Show us our blindness. Don't let us hide from you and our shame and guilt. Restore us to your perfect union that can only be found in Jesus Christ.
Lord, show us how to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with you. Lord have mercy. Jesus come to me. Jesus said come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.
Lord with deep sorrow. We lament in the powerful name of Jesus, let it be so. I grew up in Ohio.
My parents were the first ones that went to college. My grandparents, my grandfather worked three jobs in order for his kids to go. Ancestry's been done on both sides. And there's no trace of slavery. That has been a part of my family.
And so, it's so hard for me that I just keep feeling beat up over the issue. When is it going to, when are we going to say sorry enough? Your family. where it was not a part of that, but your family benefited from the opportunities of being white.
The evil one looks to divide. So if you came to this conference this week thinking that the evil one would never attempt to divide, then I think you're going to be disappointed. Okay, those are some examples of where critical race theory is showing up in evangelicalism outside of the SBC. Let's turn our attention now to what really is of greater concern to us, and that is how and where it is cropping up within the Southern Baptist Convention. Let's start by talking about Southeastern Seminary.
If you look at the curricula of Southeastern Seminary, and I'm using that in a broad sense, look at the courses themselves, look at the books and other materials that are assigned in the courses, look at the lectures that are being delivered, you see scores and scores that clearly are influenced by, and some are just shot through with, critical race theory. One of those that falls under the latter category is a piece by Matt Mullins, who's an assistant professor there of English and history, entitled, Is Critical Race Theory Un-Christian? His conclusion at the end of the day is, no, it's not. Alongside these disturbing curricular developments at Southeastern and even to some degree at Southern Seminary, we have statements that have recently been made by various Southern Baptist leaders, not at...
Southern Baptist events, but in other events in which they were understood to be representing Southern Baptists to one degree or another. One is a statement made by Matt Chandler, pastor of the Village Church in Dallas, Texas, entitled How to Understand and Address White Privilege. He made this statement at the MLK50 conference, which was a conference put together by theologians, pastors, civil rights activists to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This statement by Matt Chandler, who is one of the preeminent pastors within the Southern Baptist Convention, has all the hallmarks of critical race theory. Even starting with the title itself, the reference to white privilege, but then as you listen to the rest of the sermon, you hear references here and there to unjust social structures and structural racism and so forth. Again, ideas that are drawn from critical race theory. Then there's the statement of David Platt, former head of the International Mission Board, made at a T4G conference recently.
T4G is another organization of pastors who've gathered together for various purposes. The title of his speech, Let justice roll down like waters, racism, and our need for repentance, like these other statements to which I've referred. contains terminology and employs concepts that clearly are drawn from critical race theory.
And then after that, we have the statement of Matthew Hall, who is the provost at Southern Seminary, a video statement not released in the context of any conference, in which he said some seemingly extraordinary things, starting with, I am a racist, I will struggle with racism. and white supremacy all of my life. I have benefited from racism as a white person. Now, he wasn't confessing to having active, personal, individual, psychological racist feelings. Quite the contrary.
What he was suggesting is that because of structural racism and his position as a white person, he necessarily is racist and therefore necessarily is somehow participating in... in a larger racist system. Clearly, these are ideas drawn from critical race theory.
My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.
Ain't that something? Did you get that? He just murdered his brother. And God now has given his judgment.
And he's whining about his judgment. He's complaining the punishment is too much. a light sentence. He's whining that he's been driven from the face of God, but he wasn't living quorum deo before the face of God. He's worried that someone might do to him what he has just finished doing to Abel.
He's not repentant. He's self-pitying. Listen to me.
If you listen to the conversations around racial injustice today, you will hear the voice of Cain. You will hear people who oppose racial injustice saying the remedy is... Way greater than I can bear.
How many times you hear that in a conversation about reparations? Oh, that's going to cost too much. You'll hear people say, we can't fix this problem or that problem because it's too impractical.
On and on it goes. Beloved, it's just the echo of Cain's voice. It's just the echo of a brother refusing to care for the murdered in the street.
streets, pitying himself, worried about his losses when he's standing knee-deep in blood-soaked ground. See, beloved, we cannot have the perpetrators of injustice centering themselves in conversations about the redress of injustice. We can't have the ones who perpetrate the crime sort of saying, oh, no, that's too much. How about this? That's too much.
No, no, no. They don't get to set those terms. We don't want anything in our heart.
I want to sacrifice more of my preferences as a white pastor. I need to grow in my laying aside of preferences for members of this body because I want Christ to be exalted through increasing diversity in our leadership. our membership. On a related note, I do not want to speak from the Bible on issues that are popular among white followers of Christ while staying silent in the Bible on issues that are important to non-white followers of Christ. That's not faithful pastoring.
I actually read this week how studies have shown that white church leaders are less likely to speak and act prophetically on race issues because white church leaders have more to lose when they do. Basically, if you want to draw a crowd in general, stay away from racial issues. And if you want to draw a crowd of white people or black people or this type of person or that type of person, then stay away from saying any one of those types of people is part of the problem on racial issues.
Because the reality is... is many people mainly want to be comforted when they come to church and as people we're we're naturally drawn to that which brings the most benefit most benefit with the least cost so if you give people a choice between the church of comfort and the church of comfort but you need to make sacrifices to change your life people will choose the church of comfort most every time Which is why we've designed so much of the church culture the way we have today. And it's why we're so prone not to talk about issues that are uncomfortable to us. And I just want us to see that the Bible doesn't give us that option. Like Amos 5 doesn't give us that option.
We cannot truly worship God while we stay silent on injustice in all kinds of areas. And I know as a white pastor, I have blind spots. So I am part of the problem. I need friends and fellow pastors around me from different ethnicities who help me see those blind spots.
And I'm committed to listening and learning and loving, laying aside. Whatever contemporary church growth methodology says is the best way to grow the church, i.e. ignore the issues. I want us to do the exact opposite. I want us to hear God's word clearly on these issues.
And then we can trust him with the growth of his church. The gospel is not simply a message for the afterlife. It has real-time, real-life applications for our day-to-day lives. We see it modeled perfectly in the life of Jesus.
We know he met the spiritual needs of people, but we also know that he met emotional needs as well. He met economic needs and also social needs. He healed the sick, challenged corruption in leaders and systems. He honored the poor and the outcasts. Wherever Jesus went, holistic restoration was taking place.
The gospel is not good news without spiritual redemption and restoration. But the gospel is also not good news without emotional, economic, and social restoration as well. The good news of the kingdom is that God is establishing a new order where all things, spiritual, emotional, economic, and social are restored to their original sinless design.
So let's take a look at the gospel using a tool that we have called the three circles. Traditionally, this is how we share the gospel. Right? What we see on here, God's design. What do we mean?
God created the world and it was good. We lived in perfect relationship with God, with one another and his creation. However, sin, Adam and Eve came in, sinned, and the whole world was put under a curse, bringing separation between us and God. And that's why we understand and we look at brokenness. But the problem is, is that we only are addressing spiritual brokenness.
Sin led to our spiritual brokenness. We cannot earn our salvation, but we try to anyway. We look to sex, money, power, fame, and so many other things to try to get back to God, but they only lead us further and further away.
But when we learn the truth of the gospel, we learn that Jesus came to earth, died for our sins and rose again, and that if we repent, and believe that we can have access to God, the Holy Spirit indwells in us, gives us the power to recover and pursue God's design for us to live in perfect harmony with him. But do you recognize how this gospel presentation falls short? Sin caused brokenness to more than just our spiritual needs. I believe Tim Keller is spot on when he says, we must neither confuse evangelism with doing justice, nor separate them from one another. You see, the gospel demands the church engage holistically with our cities.
When it comes to society, the church has often separated the gospel from social issues, causing many believers to believe, to be apathetic in our engagement in our neighborhoods. However, again, I believe John Stott states, and this is what John Stott states. He says this.
He says, I'm sorry, our neighborhood, our neighbor is neither a bodiless soul that we should love only his soul, nor a soulless body that we should care for its welfare alone, nor even a body so isolated from society. He says, God created man who is my neighbor, a body, soul in community. Therefore, If we love our neighbor as God made him, we must inevitably be concerned for his total welfare, the good of his soul, his body, and his community. Dr. Strickland, I want you to respond to this. These issues have historical baggage, and I want you to provide some brief historical perspective on race and the civil rights and how we've made some progress, but not much has changed.
And then, and... Please kind of incorporate the beauty of the black church as they had a healthy orthodoxy and orthopraxy when it came to these issues. In the beginning you said a brief survey. I know. Brief.
So really a lot of what we've been talking about is a brand of Christianity that somehow doesn't allow itself to engage these issues. So what we have to understand is that. Christianity and race in America were intertwined at its inception because Christianity was the thing used to be able to say how can we enslave these people yet evangelize them and so So how is it that we can construct or imagine a faith that sets somebody's soul free but keeps their body belonging to us? But the issue is, is that as that gospel was preached to slaves to keep them in check, the people who were propagating that gospel to them actually took it on themselves. And so now we have a gospel that's a half gospel that says, you know, your soul can be free, but your body doesn't matter.
So then, you know. the weighty matters of law, KJ, get relegated to, you know, piety. And so then justice gets cut out from the idea of the chaos or the justice, righteousness, sort of two parted reality of the gospel and what it does. And so over time, we've seen, you know, people just try to figure out how do I, you know, do racial reconciliation with this faulty theology?
And it really becomes the fact that. that people still want to punt, hey, we're brothers and sisters in Christ, to the end times. Like, hey, Jesus is going to bring together this people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, and amen. Because the blood of Christ can do that.
And so people are prone to, you know, for this brand of Christianity that you're talking about, KJ, put this hope in the already, like we are already brothers and sisters spiritually, but then people of color are like, but what about the not yet? What about the fact that we ought to work out these sins, right, Katie? That, you know, where we have to be able to see something and name it as what it is, because oftentimes it's like there's a hesitancy, I feel amongst my brothers and sisters who are of a fairer complexion to. You're being nice, though.
I'm trying because, you know, yeah, that's true. But to see this almost as such an unpardonable sin that they don't want to engage it themselves. And so it's seen us so bad.
That we don't want to deal with it, but our theology doesn't force us to deal with it for many people. And so what I'm trying to say is that we have to begin to understand, yes, we are family in spirit. The cross of Christ did accomplish that.
But in the right now, we have to work out every sin, every unrighteousness from like the extreme of, you know, KKK type stuff. To even the bias in the supremacy, the white supremacy in our own hearts or whatever it is. have to begin to deal with the full spectrum of these things. And what you said about the historic black church is that the black church, we didn't have a choice. You know, we had to see this spirit reality and the bodily reality as having robust implications, you know, as robust implications of the gospel.
And so this sort of orthodoxy, this right thought and this orthopraxy right practice had to be wedded together because we didn't have the government pleading our case. The government wasn't the ones that was trying to... trying to protect our bodies, you know, and then the church can just protect our souls or feed our souls. But the church had to be everything, a one-stop shop as the gospel ought to be to care for the soul, to embolden people, to do the work in the streets, to plead for justice, to do the work of righteousness in public.
I think that's one of the unintended gifts that black Christians had had. That we weren't allowed to or given the ability to imagine a Christianity that didn't engage both. Right, yeah. And so this, so as I'm telling you, talking to my brothers and sisters who are white, it's almost like they said, you know what, this issue that you're talking about is going to be fixed then.
So let's be brother and sister now. Let's kumbaya and let's not address what's what's pressing on us. day but the gospel that I've had to you know have to keep my faith and that's that's real to keep for me to be a Christian the gospel had to engage these things or it's not good enough for me which is why people say that Christianity at times is a white man's religion because if it doesn't engage these things then what good is it you know I'm not saying the Christian faith is just pragmatic but what I'm saying it is right thought but then it engages real things So therefore, you know, this is actually a way I think white Christians can learn from this gift that black Christianity has had. And Pastor Tony mentioned, if we're not reading books by people, you already quoted Pastor Jerome. If we're not reading people like that and beyond, which we can give a whole list.
I mean, we can put up a little slide at the end of this thing. I'm not telling you what to do, Pastor, but we're just not reading it. That of people whose faith didn't allow. allow them to dichotomize it such that it would give us an out on these issues of justice.
Now, thank you for that, because I call it hermeneutical gymnastics because you always one of the scriptures that references Act 16, where Paul preaches the gospel, the Macedonian call Lydia, the slave girl, the Philippian jailer. But I want to zoom in on the slave girl. She hears the gospel. And not only does her eternal status change, but her social status change. And we know that because she's beat because the.
The Bible says her owners saw that as a result of her responding to the gospel, their chance of financial gain was taken. The magistrates, which translates as police or officer, beat Paul and they have a crowd also beat him. What was Paul's response when they tried to release him silently? He said, no, you beat me publicly, but yet you try to release me silently. Certainly not.
Paul didn't just get to the gospel eschatologically. He was beat. because of the gospel and he confronted the injustice so it's biblically inconsistent to do what you're saying some of these people are doing I want I want you to chime in dr. Morita because I know you're working with a good friend of ours Doug Logan with Green Pea where the president of I do think we we need to do something structurally on the education level how do you respond yeah which part of the water did just the seminary semi seminary is needing to know more about We need more diverse voices and imagery.
Yes, absolutely. You know, when we talk about these African church fathers, none of them look African. Yeah.
On the cover of the books. Yeah. You mean Augustine was from North Africa? Right, right.
The darker guy. Yeah, darker guy. I remember when I was in seminary, I was halfway through a PhD in preaching, and nobody in the class knew Gardner Taylor.
We had studied the history of preaching, and nobody knew Gardner Taylor. There was a guy talking about doing a dissertation on Gardner, and nobody knew who he was. And I was like, how can you make it halfway through a PhD program and not know this name, at least the name, right?
I think we need a lot of work in this area, a lot of work. And I want to contribute to that work and not just criticize it. I want to fan it in the flame. I want to champion the stuff you guys are doing here.
We need more and more of it. We need more models. We definitely need a better understanding of church history.
I mean, even back to the Book of Acts. Like. The gospel got to Africa long before it got to America. Like, we're indebted to Africa. And I think people need a whole re-education of some church history.
It doesn't start with the Protestant Reformation, as grateful as I am for the Protestant Reformation. And so many of our heroes are people of color. And so we need a lot of work there.
And that's one of the reasons we named our seminary after Grimke. We want to raise the profile of one giant. in pastoral ministry one incredible leader and even naming the school grimke like half of the guys i talked to basically like who's grimke why'd you name it grip and so we want to do some education even with the naming and thank you for that because one of the things when we end this we'll talk about what are some actionable steps we can take and this is one of them is uh it's a black president doug logan but we have someone with dr marita stature serving alongside and then putting those those voices out there.
We've seen countless videos, yet some of these are labeled isolated incidents. And I want to get to this question. When we talk about systemic injustice, many question the systemic nature of it. They say that we shouldn't look at this collectively, but these are all isolated incidents.
So, number one, are these systemic issues? Then if so, how? Dr. Strickland, I want you to start.
Yeah, and so... I honestly think that many evangelicals, broadly speaking, just misunderstand what systemic injustice is or systemic racism and how it even comes about. So just a real quick biblical theological sketch. created he declared everything good then he gave us the task of vice regency of creating things which is actually great this is where entrepreneurship comes from this is where enterprise comes from this is where people organizing themselves for for a common purpose comes from but the issue is is as we try to do this post fall post Genesis 3 our blind spots biases and prejudices begin to emerge in the systems and structures that we inhabit and build to organize our lives together In schools, churches, and society at large. And so what I'm trying to say is that the way that we organize our being together reflects the shortcomings of those who constructed it.
And so why are we even surprised when we're talking about systemic sin and systemic racism? Because as individuals, we are that. And when we organize things, and even something as benign as you not having a view of a group of people and their needs, you're not... considering their needs in your constructing of a school or in a church or anything like that. So you're just a person.
And so that's the best case scenario. And then we have the more malicious scenarios where people are intentionally trying to oppress people. So the spectrum is there, but the reality is anybody on the spectrum is building things, even their own family rhythms, that can disallow them to see people.
And so are these things a part of a larger systemic reality? Of course. they are.
How can they not be? Because they all happen within a system of even understanding the world in which we live. I mean, we have to even, I mean, even the way that we're doing training for law enforcement, we have to consider these shortcomings in ourselves as people. And then those who are doing the training, where does it come from?
How does it go? I mean, so even in those sorts of particularities, I mean, so, I mean, these things are a part of a system. and because we all are prone to look out for number one. Who do you look at first in a picture? You, sir.
Because you want to see everything from you outward, and we make everything from us outward to be comfortable for us, and who has been in the seats of constructing the reality of America? And that's a question that doesn't even need to be answered, because we know. And then to undo that is a drastic and massive undertaking that takes... Lord knows how long, but it takes people willing to actually engage the issue, which is what we're trying to impress upon us even now.
So are these things a part of a systemic reality? I mean, of course. But then what we have to do is the work of identifying what structures and systems and practices and policies and procedures that even could have been put in place in good spirits, disadvantage some and really privilege the experience of others by considering their concerns.
and not considering the concerns of others. And so, yeah, this is always a tough question because the things that, this is a question that has to be contextual for every person. So the thing that I would say is to imagine every sphere that you have influence in.
Because I think what we think about, oh, in this situation that we're in right now, I need to be the mayor, or I need to be someone who has ridiculous amount of means to do something that's huge. But the thing is, you do. control your home how do you steward that home for the sake of justice and righteousness you know like how do you organize your being with your family you're teaching your family what do you talk about what do you watch what books do you read your kids how do you you know translation to the workplace how do you like what sphere of your company do you have you know jurisdiction over it might be all of it it might be a little tiny piece of it but examine that piece for all it's worth and see what can I I do in this to make others flourish? And so, I mean, even if you are tending to and developing play dates for your kids, where are we playing?
With whom are we playing? How can I help facilitate that coming together? with the resources that I have as a believer and so monetary resources relational resources so everything that you have shaping power over must be taking the time I mean it takes time don't be like oh I couldn't think of anything well that's doing the work take time and agonize over those things in community somebody was saying because you can't do it yourself because you can't see in a blind spot because that's why it's a blind spot by definition so get people around you examine your life figure out where you have your jurisdiction, if we all do that, we'll actually see widespread change taking place because if we all sort of pull our weight, if we all work on our part of the wall to use that sort of Old Testament example.
Thank you. We tend to find that people split up these ideas of liberation into one or two camps. On the one side, you have what some have called the church of the ghosts. This side only focuses on the spirit. On the other side, you have what some have called the church of the corpses.
This side only focuses on the body. only focuses on political or economic change, but there's this Argentine concept known as solidarity that really, in a very biblical way, combines both. And we can see it in Matthew 4, 23, where it reads, Jesus went throughout all the towns and villages of Galilee, teaching and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, healing of every disease and every affliction, so much so that his fame spread and people began to bring the sick and the oppressed. to him. Did you catch that?
Jesus both proclaimed the message that spoke to the soul and that helped people understand how to be right with God, as well as a message that spoke to the needs of the oppressed. So I was just sitting, this is my little at-home office above our garage, and I sat here with one of our members a couple of weeks ago, and we was talking about, it was a great conversation. Um, he, like, in his, when he heard the, the, the, the phrase systemic racism, What he thought that was talking about was a group of powerful white elites somewhere that were building systems and structures in order to hold other people in check.
And I was like, no, no, that's not what systemic injustice or racism is in any way. And then we just walked through the Bible and we looked at how Israel would behave in certain ways when it had. uh, idols instead of God as their greatest treasure.
And that there are sins of a nation and that there are systems built in the nation that, that started out for good. They got twisted over time because of the sinfulness of man. So a lot of times the systemic racism can't even be seen by the people that are in the system. Like the priests, they were given terrible sacrifices at the temple in the old Testament. I don't, I don't know that they know in that moment.
that what they're doing actually is contrary to the word of God. Gosh, the Bible vanished for a few hundred years until Josiah and them found it in the temple. There was no way for them to even know that what they were doing was wicked in the sight of God.
And so sometimes it's just, let's talk about, like, when you say systemic racism, what do you think I'm talking about? And, man, my guy a couple weeks ago was telling me there's a group of very wealthy, influential, powerful white people that are trying to keep black people down. And I was like, no, no, I don't think. That's what that means.
I think as Christians, our theology is that humankind is sin, their heart is sinful until it is redeemed in Christ. Now, what kind of systems do sinful people build? Do they build righteous systems or do they build sinful systems? Well, that's why even the reformers talked about always reforming.
That every system needs to be reformed from the police to the government to the education system. Everybody needs to grow until. we're into god's good design which by the way we don't get to this side of glory we get to move the needle a little bit but until christ returns this is the work there's something called the noetic effects of sin the noetic effects of sin is the negative effect of sin on the minds and thinking of humankind causing the reasoning ability of fallen humanity to be corrupted especially degrading the understanding of spiritual things all so called the noetic effects of the fall where do we find this in the bible ephesians 4 18. it says having the understanding darkened being alienated from the life of god through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart whiteness has caused blindness of heart whiteness has caused blindness of heart the noetic effects of the fall have made you create and brand black people globally Everybody, no matter where you go, view black people in a particular way.
America has taken it on and Western culture has taken it on. And all we can do is dance and sing and shoot each other. And you brand that out there when that's not a comprehensive truth about black people.
But because you want to subjugate us and keep us, that's not a curse. Curses aren't man enforced. What happened and what's going on in this culture is this happened. because of man and because this happened because of man, because of some of the strengths that God has given black people, which he has given us a lot of darn strengths, a to the doggone men, because the contamination of the fall has caused this.
That's what's caused this, not a curse, the contamination of the fall and its effect on you and us. What does it mean that even now in 2019, as I speak and someone watches and maybe Hello. What does it mean that we literally are still having debates about whether or not the Elosians who owned slaves were racist? What does that mean? What does it mean that we're debating about the morality of segregation and apartheid?
All of these things are indictments of our lovelessness. But more specifically, here's another question. Why is the topic of social justice so provocative in Christian circles in America?
Why does that cause people to get all out of sorts and in their feelings? You see, for we as Christians serve a God who is decidedly social in God's being. The Trinitarian God, the one who made us as image bearers who are interconnected and interdependent social beings.
God's gospel is shown via the redemption and resurrection of the greatest act of injustice, the death of Christ on the cross. And God is just, even just, gracious, and loving to the undeserving. And those who call this God Father are to be like this God as well.
Yet here we are at this moment that echoes through American history, where to be very specific, white Christians feign confusion about the call to love our neighbor. I know that's hard, isn't it? It's true. We preach the cross to the neglect, though, of the crown. Flipping that crown, that coin over and helping people to understand the crown.
Because salvation, if you don't be careful, can be very personal. And it could be about, its end goal was to save me from hell. And once I received... a get out of jail free card, I don't necessarily see myself as belonging to this beloved community, Martin Luther King called it, which is another way of describing the kingdom. Or I can look at you because of age or race.
You look at me, you know, a whole lot of reasons. If I don't understand we belong to the same kingdom, it will give me a license to do what my denomination. Southern Baptist Convention has done for years.
It took them to 95 to apologize for slavery because they had a perverted view of the kingdom. To some degree, it was like the Jehovah Witnesses. In some ways, Jehovah Witnesses had a right view of the kingdom, but a wrong view of the king.
And Minerva... baptist and evangelical brethren had a right view of the king oh they could tell you he was eternal he was omnipotent and he's immutable and they could wax eloquent about god manifest in the flesh and the incarnation of god i mean they you know how jesus was existed in heaven without a mama born on earth without a dad i wrote i mean i think uh They had a, we understood the king to a great degree, but what we missed it was the kingdom. What I'm saying is I'm just giving them and you all a lesson.
Yes, that's right, that's right, Adam. Adam Coleman, True ID, shout out to him. He said the three Hebrew boys protested bowing like Daniel protested by praying anyway.
Like what in the world is wrong with these people? And so what I'm saying is I just don't like this right here to me is the greatest form. I'm going to just say it.
Demonic blindness. The demonic. blindness in in evangelicalism is um it's scary like like the the level of blindness is um is it's demonic it's demonic it's demonic the Bible says in Isaiah 6 he says seeing they don't see hearing they won't hear Jesus user utilizes this yes Jesus protested the temple why do we have to even talk about this Steve you know I'm sorry you're right he protested the tax gatherers by he did in the temple it's just doesn't you know but but but this is the issue i have done so i've done a lot of i mean what basically what what people are trying to do and i had to just respond to that one because i don't usually even respond to all this stuff but what they're trying to do is find any type of any loophole they can to shut down the the the the um the challenges like like i'm like like i i really I think in the last 24 hours I really literally came to the conclusion that there is a demonic haze over Western Christianity like I believe that the spirit of the enemy has really darkened the understanding I'm just really like blown away, like some of the ways in which you can just clearly... That's right, Mary, the donkey protested the Balam. Andrew Walls, former professor of missions at the University of Edinburgh, helped me deeply to see the implications of missiology.
For my personal church life, family life, neighborhood life, what I mean is this. As the gospel of Jesus Christ spreads through the world for 2,000 years, it encounters thousands of new ethnicities slash cultures. And given the power of the Holy Spirit and God's design for diversity, it penetrates, permeates, incarnates in all those cultures. It's part of the miracle of Christianity that it doesn't move throughout the world bringing all cultures into a monoculture.
It incarnates itself like Jesus into the world in those cultures. That means, he says, that there is always at play a pilgrim principle and an indigenous principle intention every time the culture is penetrated by the gospel. The Pilgrim Principle says, when the gospel comes and a new people is brought into being, some aspects of the culture are going to come into conflict with Christianity with the new life in Christ and when those cultural features don't change which they won't all change then the people of God have to assume a pilgrim mentality which means we're not at home in this culture. We are marching to the beat of a different drum that Jesus is beating because our citizenship is in heaven. So that's the pilgrim principle.
But there's also this indigenous principle, which means that in every culture where the gospel penetrates, there are cultural aspects, cultural dimensions, which are not necessarily sinful and which without changing will become incarnations and expressions through which Jesus Christ and his ways can be expressed. And these two principles, the indigenous and the pilgrim, are always in tension with each other. And that tension needs to be owned by everybody. And most minorities feel it. They're compelled to come to terms with the fact that they have a culture and that they're encountering other features of culture as they try to be Christian.
The problem for whites, for... centuries in this country is that we have felt so at home as Americans, so at home with our civil religion, Christianity, that we haven't even by and large thought in terms of, oh, I have a culture and my culture is in tension with the claims of Christ on me. And I got to work at this. I got to work at how. My culture and my faith might be at odds.
My commitments to certain things in America, certain aspects of nationalism, certain ideologies, certain priorities have to be thought through more carefully than many of us have. That's why this pilgrim indigenous tension has proved to be so helpful to me. The more dominant the culture is, the more invisible it seems to us.
And I think it's true that there is more cultural captivity in our churches and in our lives than most of us realize. So that's the first thing I wanted to say to us who are white. This summer I was on a live stream with the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. That's basically in the SBC as high as you can go. I don't fully understand the SBC and I got maybe that's a whole nother kind of mosaic topic.
It's culturally we are not SBC. It's just a whole lot of other kind of drama there. But I'm on this livestream with several other black pastors around the country and the president of the executive committee and this is after George Floyd's death and in typical Charlie Dakes fashion, I mean, I'm just kind of like, why are we on here? What's going on?
And I asked him, I say, hey man, say Black Lives Matter. My man couldn't even form his mouth to say Black Lives Matter. And it occurred to me again, anew and afresh, that it seems to be those with a conservative theological bent, with an evangelical bent, who for whatever reason cannot. form their lips or their lives to say Black Lives Matter.
So if you, during the time that I was at TEDS, if you were to take a church history course with Dr. John Woodbridge or Dr. Sweeney, or even, I studied with Dr. Manich at one point, but was one of his advisees, you would notice that there was a heavy emphasis on the Puritans when it came to American church history. And I brought one of the books, I pulled it off of my shelf today. This is one I remember reading.
It's called The Reformed Pastor, and it's by Richard Baxter. I even read a prayer that I wrote in here back in 2003 after reading this book. Long time ago, long time ago, I was so taken by this guy.
I didn't know what reformed was. I didn't realize that reform would later become a kind of political movement within evangelicalism. That's a whole other thing.
But I was just taken by the fact that this guy, this pastor, would go and like catechize members within his fellowship. And that he would pay particularly close attention to how people were developing. And I thought that was remarkable. It wasn't until later that I realized this guy was rather sympathetic to slaveholding.
Not only him, Ibram Kendi does this for us in Stamped from the Beginning. draws a line between Richard Baxter and Cotton Mather, a kind of theological line. Cotton Mather becomes the most well-published theological person in Massachusetts during the colonial period.
And there are several decades between Richard Baxter and Cotton Mather, but they become the kind of theological architects, the framers, as it were, of American Christianity in a real sense. And what you discover is that Cotton made their own slaves. I'm not sure that Richard Baxter did, but Cotton made their own slaves. And the problem for Cotton Mather and Richard Baxter.
is that they felt like the slaves needed to be evangelized. But in order to evangelize the slaves, they had to actually admit that the slaves had souls. Because what are you going to evangelize somebody for if they don't have a soul?
And so they had to construe a theological framework that honored the soul component of slaves, and yet could... commoditize the black bodies of slaves. And this is very important.
I think even to where we are, as I'm watching election results down the way in my study, there has been this bifurcation ever since from curse theory to climate theory to whatever you want to call it, to justify the greed, I think, of broader American evangelicalism, the racism, the broader American evangelicalism. that will affirm the spiritual lives of Black and Brown people, but will demean Black and Brown bodies. So there is something I suggest, I propose, within the way that American evangelicalism has been put together that inherently disrespects Black lives. If we do not deal with it historically. We cannot deal with it contemporarily or practically.
And so, I think there is theological reason, quite frankly, why some within evangelicalism cannot say Black Lives Matter. But then I also think very practically that there are sociological blind spots within evangelical theology that pushes people toward all lives matter. rather than Black Lives Matter.
Why is there such a strong pushback for this? And some of it is when we hear the stories of brokenness in our narrative and the sinfulness that is a part of our history, about everybody's history. You know, as an individual, we're fallen human beings. As a society, we're fallen and broken. And so when that narrative gets challenged, I think that's when the pushback comes.
And Black Lives Matter is a statement that challenges American exceptionalism to say we have not always done this well. and we're still not doing it well and we've got to deal with that reality. Man, that's a good word.
And what you're pushing up against, as I listen to you recount that, is you really are pushing up against pride, Artie. And for as much as it chafes some people, even the language of white supremacy or the language of racism and alleging racism, when you see some of the strident pushback and this inability even to acknowledge that the extermination of native peoples was what it was. It was a genocide.
You realize that there's a root of pride there that is resistant to repentance, is resistant to culpability, is resistant to any form of redress or reparation. This strong hold of sort of whiteness and white identity and pristineness. is really part of what keeps us from making progress on this. Because for Christians in particular, it should not be any threat to admit wrong. We have a Savior that atoned for it.
We have a cross that carries it away. We have a resurrection that brings justification and righteousness. But it requires repentance. And the other thing you get is this refusal to sort of acknowledge any kind of group level systematic kind of sin. and injustice, right?
It's all boiled down to this individualism, this American individualism that goes along with that triumphalism and those stories. And as long as people are resistant to that, it's going to mean a number of things. It's going to mean that our progress will be slow.
It'll be hard fought and slow. But it also means that those Christians are going to be unable to read their Bibles, significant portions of their Bibles, particularly the prophets. who speak to Israel and speak to power and called them to repent of those same kind of systematic injustices and systematic sins and called them to smash the idols of pride, of national and nationalistic pride that God disdains. And it's the same kind of sin that we see in this country, that triumphalism, that exceptionalism.
It's the same kind of sin that the prophets railed against. But there's a blindness over the eyes of Israel. There's a blindness over the eyes of America.
when it comes to repenting of that, of seeing it, man. And so we need prophets. If we're thinking about this from inside the church, we need prophets who will thunder the dust of the Lord and who will smash these idols and pull down these asteroids, man.
What response do you guys give to someone who says, okay, I understand what you're saying, you know, but when is the time to move beyond all that? Like, we're talking about, you know, yes, there's injustice against black people, but when are we going to address black-on-black crime? When are we going to address the abortion rate amongst black, the black community? How do you respond to those discussions? After I take a time out and pray, It's curious that for some people, black on black crime or black abortion rate doesn't ever seem to come up until you're talking about these justice issues.
And when they raise those issues, they're not weeping. It's angry, you know, oftentimes. It's again, you can smell the defensiveness of it. It's really only raised as a deflection to ward off this other discussion. And part of what I want to say is we need to have.
have all those discussions in the appropriate context. So what about black on black crime is not an appropriate response when we're talking about an unarmed man shot by people who are pledged to protect them, whom we assign lethal authority and whom we must hold to account for the proper use of that authority. That's a conversation in and of itself.
It's not all together conceptually disconnected from these other conversations, but raising one to answer the other seems to me to just be suffering. And so, you know, we want to talk about black on black crime. First, let's also talk about white on white crime.
People do crime where they live. We want to talk about the disproportional rates of black on black crime, and they are disproportional. Then we also want to talk about the disproportionate inadequacy of investment in African-American communities.
We want to talk about the factors that lead to that, not the least of which, I mean, just to pick one example, a policy example. We have ghettos. as an intentional policy decision to racialize space, to sort of carve out space that's white community, that's black community. Now that's no longer legal, but it lives with us, right? The history ain't passed, right?
The history is still alive. So you want to ask about why do you have a South Side Chicago? Well, it's because some people who weren't African Americans decided that the rest of Chicago was going to be non-African American.
And then there's redlining. And then there's predatory lending practices and all these practices that lead to that kind of segregation still. And that kind of entrenchment of poverty still.
So if we're going to have that conversation about crime, which is a necessary conversation, and oh, by the way, we've been having it in our community forever. We've been having that conversation. Y'all are late to the party when you're raising that issue.
But if you want to join that issue, then join the whole conversation. Still, don't bring that same tendency to deflect and deny and to defend. Let's have the whole conversation. So we can also have a whole remedy. There's other thing I would say is, there's a variety of this that says, what about black and white, and then says, all we really need to do is preach the gospel.
I tire of that. I don't tire of the actual preaching of the gospel. I tire of the gospel being a palliative.
I tire of it being a sugar pill that people think is a quick fix. If we're going to preach the gospel, let's preach the whole gospel and its requirements and its implications, part of which again is you don't say, just preach the gospel in these conversations. You lament, you enter in with empathy, and you serve. That all too grows up out of the gospel. And so there's a shallowness in these conversations that I find increasingly irritating, and I have to pray for the Lord to give me patience in those interactions.
And I just want to say let's have that conversation, whichever conversation we're having, let's have it in its proper space and time, and let's give to it all of the attention and the inputs that need to be given to it. Lest all that becomes is another form of blaming the victim. Lest all that becomes is another form of sort of prejudice being expressed in the selective use of statistics and the selective use of those statistics at the wrong time.
Yeah, so we need to be genuine in these things. Yeah, and we've got to deal with the full statistics. That's exactly right.
I mean, it's just human nature, sadly, in a very difficult way. Black and black crime is mirrored largely by white and white crime statistics. That's exactly right.
I mean, are there disparities? Yes, but by and large, we're looking at percentages. for whatever reason, and part of it is domestic violence is a big part of violence within communities. It just happens that violence usually occurs within the racial category. So black and black crime is reflected in white on white, Asian on Asian, and Latino on Latino.
So that does feel like very much a deflection. But the other thing about black and black crime is I've had the real pleasure of working in urban ministry for many, many years and working under African American ambassadors. And I would say, look, I went to a lot of meetings in the Boston area. where African-American pastors were directly addressing black on black.
Ten Point Coalition, some of the best work. I was part of Ten Point. I was mentored by Gene Rivers and Ray Hammond. These folks were doing the work. They were on the street.
And this was when Boston was Chicago. That's right. Boston had one of the highest homicide rates among young people. And the clergy said, we're going to do the work. And I went to these meetings.
I was oftentimes the only non-African American. And I was usually the only non-African American evangelical. Right, so my question is, all right, for the 10-15 years that I was ministering in Boston, when I went to these meetings that were very directly addressing black-on-black violence, and really, and doing it well, they got rave reviews, Harvard University to study on them, this was the good work that was already happening. I didn't see white funders there. I didn't see white evangelical churches coming out on weekends to walk the streets and to ride around in police cars.
No, we were there. in those areas working with black-on-black violence, but you can't bring that up now, when for 15, 20 years these black churches have been doing this in very powerful ways, and say, well, that's the excuse why we don't deal with it. Because the black-on-black violence has been addressed in very significant and powerful ways by many of the black churches in the urban centers. So they have a right to...
say black lives matter when that's been happening on multiple levels not just black on black violence but also the violence we're seeing now let me give you another example that might be a little bit more difficult to grapple with and that is the perspective of whose gaze g-a-z-e whose perspective determines the perspective of society and willie jennings talks about the four quadrants of relationship, a four-part relationship between the white male, the black male, the white female, and the black female. And that interrelationship between these four oftentimes is determined by the gaze or perspective of the white male. In other words, how the white male views the others determines how the rest of society views the other.
So for example, when the white male gazes upon the black male, how is that black male perceived? The black male is perceived in such a way that the rest of society views the black male in the same way. So when the white male sees the black male, that black male is a threat. In fact, if you think about the 6 o'clock news and what leads every single news report on the 6 o'clock local news, what is the most scary, threatening person in our society, according to the 6 o'clock news?
It is the unidentified black male. Today on the north side of Chicago, an unidentified black male. knocked over a liquor store. Today on the west side of Chicago, an unidentified black male was involved in a gang shooting. Today on the south side of Chicago, an unidentified black male was involved in a drive-by.
This unidentified black male is approximately 15 to 45 years old, weighs anywhere from 150 to 300 pounds, and is anywhere from five foot eight inches to six foot eight inches tall. If you have seen such a black male, you must report him immediately. Because this unidentified black male is a threat to your neighborhood. That is some of the narratives that get embedded into our society. Now, that threat of the black male is translated in a lot of different ways.
And one of the ways it's translated is the gaze issue again, the perspective. When the black male looks at the white female, that is oftentimes conceived as a very real threat. This was noticed very recently at an incident in Central Park.
where an African-American bird watcher is literally bird watching. And he is confronted by a white female who calls the police on him and is very clear to identify, I am afraid of a black male, an African-American male. And so that perspective of the white female is being threatened by the black male.
That makes that person even more of a threat. We know this in history. One of the most tragic stories in American history is the lynching of Emmett Till. Emmett Till was a 17-year-old teenage kid from Chicago, goes down to the South on summer vacation, and he goes to hang out with extended family. He is accused of whistling at...
or speaking to or looking at a white woman. By the way, on her deathbed, she claimed, actually, this never really happened. But he's accused of that.
And that simple accusation gave permission for Emmett Till to be lynched, to be brutalized. And it's one of those historical moments that we realize that the black male, no matter how young, 17 years old, is conceived as a threat. You can be a 17-year-old with just a hoodie, and you're a threat because you are an unidentified black male.
You can be 12 years old playing in a playground in Cleveland, and you are the unidentified black male, and so even a 12-year-old is considered to be a threat. These are the narratives that have gotten embedded into our society, into our story, and we react out of those narratives. I want to give you an example about what narratives are. Narratives are like a good actor in a good TV show or in a movie. So there are good actors who use something called method acting.
In method acting, what they do is they embody the character so deeply that they reflexively and improvisationally, impulsively act out of that character. So, for example, if Robert De Niro is playing a mobster in a movie shoot and you run into him at a Starbucks, don't talk to him. Because he's so into that character, he'll respond to you like he's an actual mobster. So that embodied character, that getting so deeply into that character. that your instinct, your reflex, what you improvise comes out of that character, that's what narratives do.
And so these narratives have been played out over and over again. The unidentified black male, the superiority of white culture over other culture, the demeaning of other cultures and the elevating of this culture. When that narrative gets played out over and over again, we end up embedding that character into our imagination, our value system, our worldview. And we act improvisationally, instinctively, reflectively, reflexively out of that character.
One of the questions we want to grapple with as we go through this material is what are the ways that we act instinctively to preserve that narrative of white superiority, white primacy? What are the ways we act naturally, instinctively to preserve or to act into that narrative of white superiority? Earlier, when I was defining the prophetic voice, I mentioned a kind of prophecy called a prophecy of deliverance. I talked about Genesis 3.15, the offspring of the woman crushing Satan under his heel.
And I said, test the spirits. And the way to test a foretelling spirit is to see if it came true. Well, brothers and sister, that prophecy of deliverance prophesied all the way back in Genesis 3.15 came true. It came true when Jesus Christ, the Son of God, took on flesh and became a person and entered into our experience so that he could identify with us and express solidarity with us.
Jesus Christ announced his public ministry by describing his role as a prophetic foreteller. He said that he was anointed by God the Father to proclaim good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, the recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. That prophecy came true. And because it came true, you now who believe in Jesus enter into that prophetic role of forth telling the truth, even the truth about racism and white supremacy. And on the cross, Jesus Christ tells those who have been bent low because of oppression, you can stand up straight.
And he tells those who have bought into the myth of whiteness and superiority. That you too are in need of a savior. If you have repented and believed this morning, then despise not the prophetic voice of the black experience. Amen and amen.
The reality is that whiteness is rooted in plunder, in theft, in enslavering, right, enslavement of Africans, genocide of Native Americans. We're sitting on stolen land. If you're in America, we're sitting on stolen land. Everywhere in America, this is the reality of land that was stolen from Native Americans.
We have to recognize that and acknowledge that. So that is not, so it's a power structure is what whiteness is. And so the thing for white women, because women in here, to do is you have to divest from whiteness. You have to divest from whiteness because what happened was that your ancestors actually made a deliberate choice to rid themselves of their ethnic identity and by doing so they actually stripped Africans in America of their ethnic identity, right?