Does Racism Still Live In The Reformed Church

Jemar Tisby (click here for a bio) recently gave a talk about racism in the Reformed Church in America. The Reformed Church consists of a collection of denominations that rely heavily on Reformers like John Calvin and theological standards like the Westminster Standards. The talk took place at Covenant College and it was about both the past and the present racism. And the talk is as necessary to hear as it is sad to listen to. A link to the talk can be found at the website The Witness: A Black Christian Collective (click here for a link to the talk).

In his talk, Tisby talks about current racism that caused the name of his current website to be changed from The Reformed African American Network. Tisby felt forced that his website was forced out of the Reformed community into a broader community. Here lists some of the horrible racist acts that occurred recently in America. In addition, Tisby felt harsh criticism of and push back to his efforts to call the Church to repentance from even Reformed Christian believers.

Then Tisby mentions American Reformed Christians who promoted racism in several ways. Those ways include owning slaves or supporting slavery, promoting white supremacy, and practicing and defending Jim Crow.

Christian support of racism should be deemed as unconscionable, and yet it occurs. Often we don't care to be honest about the racism because it was practiced by our some of our Reformed heroes. That is because acknowledging that racism makes us feel uncomfortable when celebrating and following those heroes.

Tisby links racism to the violation of the 6th Commandment prohibiting murder. And considering how Jesus interpreted that commandment and how the Westminster Catechism defines murder, he makes a very valid point. For the scriptural prohibition against murder can include anger or not doing what one to preserve life including having adequate healthcare. Tisby goes on to say that we have failed to legitimately use the Catechism to oppose racism. And because racism is a violation of the Commandment, it is a Gospel issue.

Despite racism being such a violation, some of America's great Reformed heroes, like Jonathan Edwards, practiced and promoted racism. He also referred to Robert Lewis Dabney and his defense of slavery and white supremacy. Later on, Tisby gets around to mentioning the racism that was part of the PCA. Before making these points, Tisby could have gone one step better. He could have mentioned Martin Luther's anti-Semitism which went way beyond opposition to the Jewish religion's rejection of Christ. Martin Luther's anti-Semitism was clearly a form of racism.

Tisby notes that many American Reformed heroes from the past were more interested in sanitizing slavery than calling for repentance from it, and thus they were also more interested in sanitizing racism instead of opposing it. And then Tisby makes an excellent point that is not often made by Christians from a Reformed tradition. He notes that much Reformed preaching and theology addresses individual sins while ignoring institutional or corporate sins alone. Those latter sins are sins committed by groups rather than individuals. Here we should note that Reformed Christians who hold to Two Kingdom Theology often reject the existence of institutional or corporate sins because their definition of sin is so focused on the individual.

 Finally, Tisby mentions how current racism in the PCA still exists today, it still exists especially in the form of apathy. Then Tisby talks about the lack of representation of Blacks in PCA leadership.

The talk being reviewed here is the first part of a 3 part message. And care was taken here not to give too much of a detailed analysis because Tisby's message should be listened to more than read about. We should note that when racism, or other forms of tribalism, make their way into the Church, not only do those in the Church become more vulnerable to committing murder as Tisby described, it makes the worship of God in the Church more about one's own groups than about God. And all too often, that has become our worship services have become. Though we invoke God's name in those services, what we are really worshiping is ourselves.







 

 


references

• https://thewitnessbcc.com/the-long-history-of-racism-and-reformed-theology-jemar-tisby-at-covenant-college/
• https://jemartisby.com/about/

Why Are So Many Religiously Conservative Christians Also Politically Conservative?

The question asked in the title of this article has been addressed before. In particular, The Witness: A Black Christian Collective tried to answer that question regarding white Evangelicals. And their answer provided some helpful insights (click here for the article). Their answer revolves around individual responsibility and assigning the cause for our problems on broken relationships, especially our corrupted relationship with God. And thus the more the government steps in to help people, especially the vulnerable, the more it is seen as a denial of those core beliefs.

Now the above summary of the article from The Witness does not do enough justice to the article and so I suggest that everyone should read the article. However, there is more to the alignment of religiously conservative Christians, especially white Evangelicals, with conservative politics and ideology than mentioned in the article. And that commonality has to do with the attributes of the 'conservative' label itself.

Now we should first note that conservatism is relative to the context of its immediate location. What was conservative in the old Soviet Union is still considered to be liberal in the US. And thus, we will narrow this discussion to the US.

Political and ideological conservatism seeks to maintain tradition and the status quo to the extent that the status quo is built on accepted traditions. It resists change especially when change is revolutionary and experimental (click here). Here conservatives exist on a continuum in terms of how much they rely on the past for their understanding of today's world. The more rigid a conservative is in resisting change, the more that conservative exclusively looks at the past in terms of understanding and addressing issues in the present.

The conservative reaction to the Parkland student's gun control activism serve as an example of how conservatives depend on the past. While the experiences of those student with a mass shooting prompted them to ask for something new, new gun control measures, conservatives balked at their demands Why? It was because, according to many conservatives,  the problem of mass shootings was not caused by a failure of current gun control laws and the 2nd Amendment. The problem was caused by people rejecting the values that served our ancestors so well. Thus, the conservative solution to the problem of mass shootings did not even include any introduction to any interim gun control laws while we wait for societal values to change. Instead, conservatives demanded that enforcement of current gun control laws be enforced and that society changes its values while rejected any changes in our gun control laws.

Another example of how conservatives look to the past to understand and respond to the present can be seen in how many religiously conservative Christians view Socialism and Marxism. R. Scott Clark, in his most recent article on Marx and Marxists, writes about today's Marxists solely through the lens of what Marx wrote and nations like the Soviet Union practiced. He didn't account for variations and some disagreements that followers of Marx have shown over the years or that many Socialists vehemently disagreed with Lenin's politics (click here for a Socialist's disagreement with Lenin) or Stalin's rule over Russia (see Gorbachev's comments on Stalin in his book, The New Russia). Instead, he presents Marxists as a monolithic group who have never developed from the time when Marx wrote (click here for his article and there and there again for additional blurbs by Clark).

Thus, conservatives tend to live on one end of a continuum where they look solely to the past for understanding the present and addressing its problems. The more that political and ideological conservatives look solely to the past for living in today's world, the more resistant they are to even listening to or considering to  try anything new. For these conservatives, their reverence for our nation's Founding Fathers prevents them from listening to anything new and thus causes them to see all of our problems as they view how our Founding Fathers would have interpreted our problems.

Now we come to white, religiously conservative Christians in America. Our belief that the Scriptures are complete for telling us how we should live makes us lean to treating the Old Testament prophets and New Testament Apostles as political and ideological conservative reacted to the Founding Fathers. And because we tend to believe that our nation was founded on Biblical principles, the reverence we have toward the Biblical writers when it comes to understanding life and our relationship with God is then extended to our nation's Founding Fathers in terms of what we need for a healthy political system. Here we should note that there is a certain level of self-exaltation with the view that our nation was founded on God's principles. But regardless, it becomes a reason for why what the Founding Fathers wrote is regarded as a canon of sorts for measuring all that followed in our nation.

So here we should note that what unites white, religiously conservative Christianity with conservative politics and ideology is the shared conservative leaning toward looking SOLELY to the past in order to understand and respond to the present. What follows that tendency is to interpret any modern approach understanding and responding to the present as an indictment on revered conservative sources, on accepted traditions. To use any other approach other than the accepted traditional approach to understanding and responding to the present is to imply that accepted past sources and traditions were either inadequate or flawed. 

But what also accompanies a high reverence for the past and accepted traditions is authoritarianism. And part of authoritarianism includes hostile and aggressive responses to any challenges against recognized authorities and traditions. This is what white, religiously conservative Christianity and conservative politics and ideology have in common. Certainly, these conservatives do not form a monolith, they do vary. Some conservatives are willing to look at more than the past to understand and respond to the present. But the scope of their vision to look beyond the past is very limited. And that leaves the rest of the conservatives who look solely to the past to discover today's solutions.

So the common fault of all these conservatives is how much they look SOLELY to the past to understand how to live in today's world. It's not the mere looking to the past for help that is the issue, it is how much one looks exclusively to the past that get us in trouble. 

But the counterparts to these conservatives have problems with the past as well. For while conservatives might look solely to the past in order to understand how to live in today's world, those who totally refuse to earn from the past are showing signs of narcissism. For one who believes that they have everything to teach one's ancestors and has nothing to learn from them is guilty of the same character flaw practiced by one's conservative counterparts. So how much we use the past to understanding today and solving its problems becomes a balancing act. To look too much to the past that we ignore new perspectives means that we have exalted those from the past above ourselves. But to never look to the past because we believe that those who preceded us have nothing to teach us is the result of exalting ourselves above all who preceded us, it is a sign of narcissism.



While we can use other insights, such as those that come from The Witness, to understand conservatives, we must also include how conservatives reverence the past regardless of whether we are dealing with a religious or secular conservatives. And though we might rightly find fault with the conservative approach to depending so heavily on the past, we must admit that all of us struggle with how to balance our dependence on traditions and the past with our acceptance or creation of something new to live better in today's world.

What Are The Ties That Bind White Evangelicals To Republicans

Why do so many Evangelicals vote for Republicans, even for Republicans like Donald Trump and Roy Moore despite their checkered pasts or the allegations made against them? This is a question that Jemar Tisby (clich here for a bio), who is from The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, attempted asked in a recent article.

Tisby ends up giving a partial answer to the question in a blogpost from The Witness (click here for the article). Citing the book Divided By Faith, by Michael Emerson And Christian Smith, he identifies 3 'cultural tools' from a 'religio-cultural tookit' that seem to draw Evangelicals to the Republican Party and its candidates. Those tools or ideas are 'accountable freewill individualism, relationalism, and anti-structuralism.' What we will find when reflecting on the definitions of those terms is that the third term naturally follows the combination of the first two terms. In addition, evangelicals are not totally consistent in their thought here. And what else we discover is that while Tisby's article provides some very useful information, it does give an exhaustive list of reasons why Evangelicals tend to vote for Republican candidates.

What is accountable freewill individualism? According to the book Tisby cites, it is that each person is totally accountable for their actions because the reasons for one's actions can be reduced solely to the exercise of one's own freewill. Thus, neither institutions nor society's structures for our choices and thus can control what we choose to do. Every choice we make is due solely to how we exercise our free will. That idea is rooted in the belief that we are totally accountable for our sins and thus answerable to God for what we have either done or not done.

So when it comes to explaining why people commit the sins they do, all the blame goes to the individual and that there is no context that helps explain why we choose what we do. Thus, the person who has lived in deprivation and has been exploited their whole life is as free from a past that includes the impact of institutions and societal structures when it comes to choosing what and what not to do as a person who has lived in privilege and has enjoyed a comfortable life.

If we stopped right there, we would fail to notice that evangelicals do not regard family life as having no or a minimal effect on the decisions we make. That is why evangelicals invest a lot in learning about the impact that different parenting styles and kinds of families can have on children. And since the family is considered a social structure, this shows an inconsistency in this belief by Evangelicalst. In fact, one of the objections of Christians to things from the legalization of same-sex marriage to a Bolshevik (a.k.a., Communist) state is that things interfere with the kind of family life which Evangelicals believe God intended each person to have.

There is an out for this inconsistency that allows for an appreciation of the effect that families and other relationships can have on our lives. That is what the second term addresses. Relationalism identifies people's basic problem as coming from 'broken interpersonal relationships, especially one's relationship with God. These broken relationships cause a separation from God. And separation from God and others are the root cause for all of our social problems.' And thus, restoring these relationships, starting with our relationship to God by faith in Christ, is the only solution to our problems.

Once we sufficiently understand the first two terms, we see that the third term, anti-structuralism, logically follows the ideas from the first two terms. In anti-structuralism, there is the fear that our decisions and problems are, in any degree, the fault of our institutions and societal structures. For assigning any blame to them is seen as  rationalizing or excusing our bad choices by blaming someone or something else besides ourselves Thus, those who have been victims of racial injustice, as Tisby points out, or we could also include economic exploitation, have only one explanation for the wrongs they have committed: personal choice. Here, institutions and societal structures cannot share the blame in any way shape or form.

Perhaps for different reasons that White Evangelicals have, the Republican Party has traditionally and most strongly stood against expanding institutions and social structures that would help those who are neglected or exploited by what maintains the status quo.And Tisby asks why White Evangelicals have embraced a set of religious beliefs that keeps them so loyal to the Republican Party while other Christians groups, who share the same basic beliefs, have shown that they are independent of the Republican Party.

Tisby does well in noting the 3 tools of accountable freewill individualism, relationalism, and anti-structuralism and partly describing what they are. But we should note that he is unclear as to whether other Christian groups besides White Evangelicals share the same cultural toolkit. And we should also note that the 1st and 3rd belief or tool is not necessarily Christian or religious. How our nation reacted to the 9/11 terrorist attacks demonstrated that. Much of the nation didn't want to hear that those attacks could have been a result of blowback from U.S. foreign policies. Thus, regardless of what those attackers had witnessed or experienced from U.S. foreign policy, to blame U.S. foreign policy for the attacks is to make an excuse for their atrocities. 

And what is being asked here is whether these 3 cultural tools or ideas are syncretisms, rather than expressions of religious faith only, that result from many White Evangelicals trying to merge some social/political ideologies or group identifications with their Christianity. And thus most White Evangelicals have embraced a political party whose platforms best reflect those tools. That is a question, whether or not we believe in those 3 tools or ideas,  that all Christians, not just White Evangelicals, must ask ourselves lest we too have created syncretisms from attempting to merge our own pet ideologies and group identifications with our faith.