Incarnational Discipleship and Resistance to White Supremacy

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.