At Manna House, most of our friends who are experiencing
homelessness, and most of the poor who also come each morning that we are open
are African American. Memphis
is a majority African American city, and Memphis
also has one of the highest poverty rates among U.S.
cities. Homelessness and poverty
disproportionately affects African Americans, and so do imprisonment and the
death penalty. In all major indicators
of health and wellbeing, African Americans continue to fall below that of
whites in U.S.
society.
I just finished reading Charles
Marsh’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The moral failure of churches, both
Protestant and Catholic, to resist the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis,
along with the Holocaust, is damning. I
have also just finished reading two others books, both about the ongoing power
of racism in American life. The first is
specific to Memphis, Laurie B.
Green’s Battling the Plantation
Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle. The second is more broadly focused, though
primarily about the South, Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the
Civil War to World War II. I also
just completed Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article in the May issue of The Atlantic Magazine, “The Case for
Reparations.”
These three readings in conjunction
with Marsh’s book on Bonhoeffer, leads me to this question: Is the moral failure of white churches in the
United States with regard to slavery and the neo-slavery that followed the
equivalent of the moral failure of churches in Germany with regard to the Nazis
and the Holocaust? And a second
question, are there theological parallels to be drawn between the churches in
the United States
and those in Germany?
I believe that the answer to both
questions is “yes.”
Glen Stassen
in his last book before he died, A
Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age, urged that “we
scrutinize historical times for which almost all of us are now clear about who
was faithful and who was unfaithful” (13).
He describes Bonhoeffer in his resistance as one of the faithful. He also identifies the U.S. Civil Rights
Movement as another time of testing, and he points to Clarence Jordan and Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (among others), as two examples of those who were
faithful.
Stassen does not engage in a
detailed analysis or comparison of the challenges Bonhoeffer faced with those
faced in the Civil Rights Movement. He
also does not examine the era of slavery and the era of neo-slavery after the
Civil War. However, an examination of those
times, plus the Civil Rights Movement era, easily reveals that few white
Christians, and few white churches resisted slavery and neo-slavery, and that
this failure continued throughout most of the Civil Rights Movement.
I would go further and say that today
few white Christians and churches are actively engaged in active resistance to
ongoing White Supremacy, also known as racism. Dr. King’s assessment of the church hour on
Sunday being one of the most segregated times of the week continues to be
accurate today. Further, the pealing
back of gains made during the Civil Rights Movement has gone largely
uncontested by white churches with many white Christians actively supporting
this reversal.
What kind
of Christianity is needed that would provide resources for resistance to White
Male Supremacy and other injustices in U.S.
society? Stassen identifies three
dimensions of what he calls “Incarnational Discipelship” that were shared by
Bonhoeffer, King, Jordan, and others that he identifies as faithful in times of
testing.
First, they all had “a thick,
historically embodied, realistic understanding of Jesus Christ as revealing
God’s character.” This stood in contrast
to the unfaithful who reduced Christ to an abstract principle or high
ideal. This “thin Jesus” was open to
“ideological manipulations” such as the Aryan Jesus of the Nazis and the “white
Jesus” compatible with slavery, neo-slavery, and racism.
Second, they all had “a holistic understanding
of the Lordship of Jesus Christ or sovereignty of God throughout all of life
and all of creation.” This stood in
contrast to dualisms which privatize Christian life, reducing it to individual
concern for salvation of the soul, while abandoning the public spheres of
politics and economics. In both Nazi
Germany and racist America
there has been a gospel of individual salvation and personal orderliness and
status quo. The cross (and life) of Christ has nothing to do with
social/political movements or realities beyond the church; it is a matter of
individual salvation. The emphasis is
upon “Jesus died for me.”
Third, they all expressed and
enacted “a strong call for repentance from captivity to ideologies such as
nationalism, racism, and greed.” It was,
of course, those ideologies that dominated the public sphere in both Nazi
Germany and the United States
of slavery, neo-slavery, and today’s White Supremacy.
I would add
two additional dimensions for Incarnational Discipleship, which I think are
also evident in those who were faithful.
So, a fourth dimension is solidarity with persons on the margins rooted
in a preferential option for the poor and oppressed. Bonhoeffer wrote, “There remains an
experience of incomparable value. We have for once learned to see the
great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts,
the suspects, the maltreated — in short, from the perspective of those who
suffer.” Bonhoeffer began his solidarity
with the Jews while he was in the U.S.
Through his experiences in Harlem
and the Abyssinian Baptist
Church and in his travels in the
American South, he came to see the parallels between the treatment of Blacks in
the U.S. and
the treatment of Jews in Germany. Those who were not faithful in Germany
went along with the dehumanizing characterization of Jews, while those who were
not faithful in the U.S.
have gone along with the dehumanizing characterizations of African Americans. Theologically, in both cases, Jews and Blacks
were regarded as brutes, sub-human, and therefore, dispensable.
A fifth
dimension of Incarnational Discipleship is the Cross, the recognition of and
acceptance of the reality of persecution for those who will resist the
powers. The cross is envisioned in two
ways. First, the way of Jesus calls those
of us who are complicit in White Supremacy (which includes more than whites) to self-giving for the sake of love of and justice. This self-giving requires the renunciation of
one’s own privileged position and power, as Jesus himself rejected the
temptations of Satan for political, economic, and religious power over
others. Second, this way of Jesus
engages one not only in renunciation, but also in costly struggle for justice
as those in power will use every means available to them to maintain their
power. The cross here reveals God’s
confrontation with injustice. As Miguel
De La Torre writes, “God does not stand aloof…
God understands the plight of today’s crucified people, who hang on
crosses dedicated to the idols of race, class, and gender superiority…” (Ethics from the Margins, 36).
Bonhoeffer
wrote extensively of Christianity without the cross, a “cheap grace” which
saves without moral transformation or commitment. Dr. King wrote often of “redemptive
suffering” by which persons expose and confront injustice as they put their
lives on the line to witness for justice.
Christianity without the cross, without realism about sin and the cost
of confronting sin in one’s own life and in institutional sin, simply goes
along with the ruling ideologies of the day.
The Nazis harped upon the regaining of the glory of Germany;
in the U.S. we
are regularly engaged in an American exceptionalism and triumphalism, “We’re
number one!” Both affirm an innocence
which rejects responsibility for the suffering of others.
Approximately
six million Jews died in the Holocaust.
Approximately half a million Africans were brought to the U.S.
as part of the slave trade (many more went to South America,
up to 10 million). The numbers that died
on their way to slavery is disputed and range from one million to five
million. Deaths due to slavery itself
through its approximately 250 year history in the Americas
are even harder to calculate, though approximately half of all children born to
slaves died in infancy.
It is also difficult to put a hard
and fast number on the economic benefit to the U.S.
economy from slavery and neo-slavery.
However, we need to face facts such as the following from Ta-Nehisi
Coates’ article “The Case for Reparations” that point to the extensive economic
importance to African American slavery: in the seven cotton states, one-third
of all white income was derived from slavery; by 1840 cotton produced by slave
labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports; in 1860, slaves as an
asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the
railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,
and slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the
entire American economy.
Beyond the
slave economy, neo-slavery and White Supremacy have continued the economic exploitation of African Americans
in wages and housing, which adds to the wealth created by African Americans and taken
by whites in the dominant economic and political structures of the U.S.
So where
does this leave the churches and Christianity today? What would it mean to be faithful in our
current context along the lines of Bonhoeffer, King, and others identifiable as
practicing an Incarnational Discipleship in relation to White Supremacy? Advocacy for reparations as part of the
struggle for racial justice would be a good place to start. Support for policies in education and the
economy such as affirmative action are also necessary. Changes in the criminal justice system which
Michelle Alexander has deemed “the new Jim Crow” are also required, along with
the elimination of the legalized lynching called the death penalty. The “Moral Monday” movement in North
Carolina provides an important contemporary example
of what Christian involvement in these and other issues look like.
Attention
to the five dimensions of Incarnational Discipleship can have an important role in
inspiring these types of engagement in U.S.
culture, economics, and politics. It is
past time to acknowledge that the dominant form of Christianity in the U.S.,
primarily present within white churches, needs to be not simply critiqued but
rejected as false, due to its failure to resist the exploitation and deaths of
millions of people of African Americans.
A similar statement can be made regarding Latinos and Native Americans. Both have histories that point to the central
role of White Supremacy in their exploitation and death. This further underlines the importance of the
theological and practical work to critique and reject faithless White Supremacy Christianity. And within that critique and rejection to also construct a faithful
Christianity that witnesses to an inclusive and just Beloved Community, a
concrete alternative to White Supremacy.
