I had only come by
to drop off a book, but they invited me in for a chat. Personal friends of
Francis Schaeffer, he was a committed deacon at our church and for years she
ran a preschool that exposed dozens, if not hundreds, of unchurched
children to the Gospel, touching more families for Jesus than most of the rest
of our congregation, my wife and me included, combined.
As we chatted, she
mentioned that a Kenyan friend—one of scores of saints they have hosted over
the years—had brought his family to visit them years ago. Two things had stood
out to her over the course of their time together: First was the assumption by
their non-Christian neighbors that Africans could not voluntarily become
Christians. Second was an impression they had gathered from living in a black
American neighborhood for some time: though living at an economic level most
Kenyans would die for, the black people in that neighborhood seemed angry with almost
everything, which brought the Kenyan to ask, “Why are black Americans so
angry?”
As my friends spoke
I realized I had just read a thick book on just that subject and am hereby
recommending it to them.
Randy Alcorn’s page-turner
Dominion (Portland, OR: Multnomah, 1996), a whodunit set circa 1996 in
Portland’s ghetto, is a gospel sermon on racial tension, which Alcorn (who is
white) capsulizes in the words of one of the
characters: “We don’t have a skin problem; we have a sin problem.” Alcorn considers the human heart the heart of any
matter, and so while he spins an engaging tale of murder and detective work,
his goal is clearly to put a conservative white
evangelical readership in the shoes of a conservative black man whose
experience in evangelical culture is increasing his skepticism about the gospel
message. In doing so he introduces the reader to heroes as well as villains,
but red and yellow, black and white, all have sinfulness to fight.
The sinfulness we
have to fight is not only our own, but our ancestors’. As a white friend, Jake,
tells Clarence Abernathy, the black protagonist,
I know if my grandfather stole from your grandfather it isn’t my fault. But
if my grandfather used that money to buy a house and send my father to college
while yours couldn’t go because he didn’t have money that was rightfully his,
then not only did your family suffer from the stealing, I benefited from it.
Without realizing it, I’ve been the beneficiary of the exploitation of slaves
and sharecroppers. Their loss has been my gain. ...
[In Daniel 9, Daniel] confesses the sins of his forefathers as his own,
even though he didn’t do those sins. Same with Nehemiah.
...
If [Jesus can hold the religious leaders of his day] responsible for the
blood of prophets shed by [their] forefathers hundreds of years earlier, there
has to be some kind of transgenerational
responsibility. ...
Maybe the only way for descendants of oppressors to get out from under the
curse is to face up to their ancestor’s [sic]
sins, repent, and seek forgiveness from those they’ve wronged.
If we’re responsible for Adam’s sin, obviously we’re responsible for our
grandfather’s.
Not all sins between
blacks and whites are political—i.e., the product of government policy—but
those that are and have been spill over into “everyday life” and give black
people good reason to turn a deaf ear to “gospel preaching” that equates
Christian discipleship with white American culture.
In short, the
powerful see the world completely differently from the way those under their
power see it. (“The guy looking up the barrel of the gun is much more eager to
discuss the situation than the guy with his finger on the trigger,” as I like
to say.) When Jake tells Clarence he has never thought about his own skin
color, Clarence replies,
We had to think about it. With
segregation, busing, voting, separate drinking fountains and restrooms and
schools and what have you, we didn’t have the luxury of not thinking about it.
I first went to integrated school in fourth grade. When I sat down, the chairs
around me emptied like I was a pipe bomb. I was the brunt of jokes, was spit
on, called names. Even the kids who weren’t cruel were always whispering about
me. Most of the teachers weren’t really hostile, but they tolerated the
meanness and that just encouraged it. The color of our skin chased us everywhere.
But Clarence has his
own set of sins to deal with. Like this writer, he writes passionately about
right and wrong as he sees them, is easily angered, and finds out the hard way
that not only does he not always have his facts straight, he is as prejudiced
as those Christians, true, false, and non, at whose hands he, his ancestors,
and his contemporaries have suffered so much.
A thick book short
on action passages and long on discourse will be preachy, but Jesus commands us
to preach, and Alcorn is a dynamic preacher. He preaches what William
Wilberforce would have recognized as the whole gospel: not only that all have
sinned and salvation comes only through Christ, but what heaven will be like
and how our view of heaven should affect our lives on earth, particularly how
we treat our neighbors—those we know in our families and circles of friends,
and in our churches, but also strangers whose lives we affect in chance
encounters and especially through our political systems. His message to white
America is essentially, You’re not responsible for the
injustices of slavery, Jim Crow, and the welfare state, but you have benefitted
from it, and blacks still suffer from it. You don’t have to think about race
because you’re the dominant race, but race affects everything your black neighbors
do.
This hit home to me
for many reasons, but one that’s not so shameful I can’t bear to share it is
that twice during my commute to Philadelphia I was walking on the street and came
to places where either a black person or I would have to stop to let the other
pass. Though I was clearly the one who should have stopped, before I had a
chance to get my mind around the situation, the black person simply stopped
well short and let me pass: a black man let me cut in front of him when I
crossed the street in the middle of the block onto a narrow sidewalk, and a
black woman stopped halfway down a staircase when I could have easily moved
over to make room for her at the bottom. In both cases, the expression on their
faces made me think they were doing it not because they were being polite but
because they felt I expected them to, and I was so disoriented I didn’t even
thank them.
Alcorn presents
anecdote after anecdote of interracial sin, mostly white on black, but also
black on black and black on white, in conversations on earth and in scenes
viewed from heaven. Whether heaven will be as Alcorn describes it is certainly
open to question, but I for one am open to the idea that we will be shown the
consequences of our actions so that we may be rewarded for the good and truly
repent of those sins Jesus has forgiven. And if Jesus taught by telling
stories, Alcorn is certainly within his rights to do the same, and he does it
in a way that should keep anyone from teens to antiques engaged.
Having preached, I’m
a-gonna meddle a bit.
If Clarence
Abernathy, who lived the American rags-to-riches dream, finds white US Christianity
hard to swallow, is it any wonder that those who don’t make it out of the ghetto,
let alone the projects, shun the church? If blacks are disproportionately targeted
for drug law enforcement and sentenced more stringently than whites—let me
state here that Alcorn is no foe of the War on Drugs—is it any wonder that Islam
is spreading much faster among blacks than Christianity in US prisons?
It is fashionable
for white Christians to disparage the black community for its illegitimacy rate
and for playing the race card at every opportunity. But have whites ever really
taken seriously the residual effects of slavery and Jim Crow?
If we have been
guilty of excusing white people’s sin against black people in the past, is it
possible that we are now excusing our sin against blacks or against some other
group of people that is “not our kind”? I know I have been: in the weeks after
9/11, I was all for bombing the Kaaba, the Mosque of
Omar, and every Muslim city from Marrakesh to Jakarta, one at a time, after any
event that could be taken as Muslims taking revenge on the US for US revenge
for 9/11. After all, they had attacked us.
However once I
considered the possibility that a federal government that has committed atrocities
against its own people—Roe v. Wade and No Child Left Behind, not to mention the
conquest of the Confederacy, Prohibition, Social Security, and the War on
Drugs, and such atrocities against others as the murderous Trail of Tears and
the executions at Wounded Knee—might commit atrocities against Muslims
overseas, somehow the idea that 9/11 was a response to Uncle Sam’s evil didn’t
seem so far fetched, and I wondered aloud whether the
question might at least be worth considering by the elders of any church that
prayed for the troops fighting the post-9/11 wars.
It seems, though,
that just as Bible Belt Christians never wanted to shine biblical light on
slavery and Jim Crow, today’s US Christians don’t want to consider the
possibility that overseas Muslims have legitimate complaints against Uncle Sam.
My prediction is that just as the barbarism of the Obama presidency can be
traced back to centuries of injustices and careless subjugation of blacks in
this country, God will place much of what is today US territory under Shari`a law by exposing the hypocrisy of the church in
regard to such things as nationalism and collateral damage.
Meantime, Alcorn’s
book is a great read and belongs in the library of any primarily white church
that seeks to reach out to the disaffected black community.
