There Is No Christian White Supremacy

Any kind of supremacy of one people over another denies Christ.

I am struggling with an emotion that is rare for me when applied to people and their frailties: disappointment.

It is rare because I am both realistic and naive.

My realism is powered by a healthy understanding of sin and it widens my embrace, acceptance, and understanding of human frailties and flaws. Mostly, it causes me to welcome, into the arms of friendship, people like me who struggle with broken places in their lives.

My naivete stems from a less Calvinistic attitude, that there is a pervasive stream of well-meaning compassion in most people, especially Christians.

It is an assumption that when push comes to shove, people who love Jesus, love their fellow human beings from up close and from afar.

It has made it hard for me to accept that more than a few Christians can be cruel, cold, harsh, and judgmental when confronted with human suffering.

It has led me to believe that when confronted with the Bible on one and hand and facts on the other, truth will be embraced and attitudes such as racism, superiority, and indifference will start to disappear. They will stop using their warped theology and crippled hermeneutical tools to justify supremacy, suspicion, or superiority over people who ancestry, heritage, beliefs, cultures, histories, countries of origin, languages, or skin color is different from their.

They would acknowledge our heritage of injustice against the children of enslaved peoples from Africa, original citizens of our continent, Asian workers who built our railroads, Japanese detainees during WWII, immigrants,  refugees, people of Latin descent, and on and on  and on.

It seems that I may have been wrong and it is disappointing.

I am still trying the figure out the dissonance.

I will zero in on racism because I was raised in an time and environment where its stench was strong and putrid while its basic premises were being challenged. I had hoped it would have dissipated into a fog of forgetfulness by now, but with explicit, implicit, and complicit consent, it is showing itself and revealing that it never went away.

I have observed this: It takes a large minority and sometimes a majority to perpetuate racism. That will always include some people who ought to know better and do better.

The three ways it happens are telling and to of them leave people wiggle room to plausible deniability, distance, and self-justification.

Explicit participation in racism is where we initiate the words, deeds, or attitudes plainly and without ambiguity. This is where many people stop in defining what is racist.

Implicit participation in racism is more subtle. It is sometime ambiguous. We imply and support attitudes, deeds, and words that have racist effect and undertones, but we assign them different motives. We support the darkest expressions of racism by defending indirectly.

Complicit participation in racism can involve a range of words, attitudes, and actions. It can be giving material support to racist causes or simply and blindly benefiting from those systems without questioning them. It can also be silence. We support through silence and out of some misguided attitude of neutrality.

The first step toward overcoming this will be a desire to do so and a recognition of the sin of racism. The next step will be honesty and inclusion of oneself in whatever category of participation fits. The next will be confession to whomever confession is due.  The final step will be a process of ongoing repentance and accountability.

In the meantime, we must all be vigilant to ruthlessly expose it as the insidious evil it is and name it as it raises its ugly head.

I never said it would be easy, but don't disappoint me.

I hate racial slurs. They make my skin crawl. I do not use them or allow them in my presence. Yet, even living in a non-homogeneous home, I have heard them.

Frankly, I do not respond very well.

Has this happened to you?

After a lifetime a modeling acceptance, respect, and racial justice, you hear a kid you've raised using terms on the phone or video game to refer to people that you would have never allowed to be used - terms that would gotten you in serious trouble as a youngster.

Immediately,  you intervene and the conversation gets very serious.You are horrified."Where did you learn this? Why did you say it? Don't you know that ... ?"

Let me say, it is not just race, but characterizations of people with disabilities or other identities.

The truth is that the child or teen could have learned it anywhere -- but it came out of the culture, free-floating, peer-driven, sin-infested.

I know know some kids get it from their parents. I am not talking about them.

Nor am I talking about those fully infected with bigotry.

I am talking about culture and communal sin.

Everyone wants to fit in, especially kids. The warped nature inside of us demands that, in order for us to fit in, someone must be excluded. We pick pick those folks that are most vulnerable or under-represented and exclude them.

That is the root of systemic racism, class-ism, and every other form of exclusive-ism.

One group benefits; the other pays.

When it emerges with all of its ugliness, we want to sort it out individually by determining who is or is not a racist or some other form of "exceptionalist."

For instance, a recent event in the news shows young people taunting an older man. Other footage is introduced to suggest he provoked it. Still other footage indicates that he did that after a prior provocation. Still other reports claim it was all a media set-up.

Now people are defending by attacking the older man and the younger man, trying to determine their motives or culpability.

I suggest that it is not the point and somewhat regret seizing upon that incident to make the point as if it depended on one anecdotal incident.

The issue is not who is and who is not.

The issue is that it is.

Racism is systemic. The language, assumptions, attitudes, systems, patterns, biases, and emotions are out there and even land in good homes where tolerance has always lived.

I am far more concerned with the environment where it can happen and when it does, with the sides we choose to defend, ignore, or condemn.

That does not exclude our need for self-examination and personal repentance.

In the same way, I don't want to see some kids become the symbol of the sin and get locked into it as their identity. Kids all have a lot of growing to do and can change quickly with perspective.

Nor do I want to see a respected elder defined by a moment.

I really do not want to talk about the people. I want to talk about the environment where this can happen.

One draw-back, theologically, is the rugged individualism thread that runs through our interpretation of sin, redemption, and forgiveness and focused on the individual heart. I do believe in that theology, but not only in that theology.

Many, who are not personally, or individually, consciously, racist, still drink from the common wells of racism and participate in its systemic evil.

Corporate sin infects corporate thinking and acting.

That is the opportunity for conversation that memes sometimes introduce.

It is unfortunate that we have to get stuck on the circumstance and I take my share of responsibility for that.

But the question remains: What kind of culture do we want to shape?