Racism contradicts evangelicals’ GOSPEL

I and some other evangelical scholars recently issued a very basic statement (please SIGN and SHARE): addressing racism is not a secondary issue but related to the saving gospel itself. (This posted in mid-June but due to technical difficulties it was not sent to subscribers of this blog site, so I am reposting it today. Although we have come a long way, racial injustice and racial prejudice remain, as noted again in posts over the weekend.)

Although prompted by current events (which rightly merit their own statements), the statement’s focus is how Scripture (my area of competence) addressed ethnic divisions in its world. Its point is that, by analogy, we can’t believe the Bible and not sacrifice for unity and justice today.

Historically, black and white evangelicals led the calls for abolition in Britain and the U.S. (especially in certain periods such as the 1830s). They called people back to biblical messages of justice and liberation, in contrast to slaveholder theologians, who basically proof-texted (“Slavery’s in the Bible, the Constitution, and all respectable cultures in history”) and even continued some racist arguments earlier used in the Arab slave trade since the tenth century. Alas, in the mid-twentieth century, a majority of white U.S. evangelicals either spoke against the Civil Rights Movement or remained silent about it. Today we have videos documenting racist violence and rhetoric, but it has been going on for generations. White and other non-black Christians need to join (and follow) our brothers and sisters in the Black Church in calling for justice and truth.

I recognize that a large proportion of my blog’s readers don’t live in the U.S. Many of you also pray and seek or even march for justice for the African-American community. But a majority of you also live in cultures where ethnic conflicts exist. (My wife, for example, was a refugee for 18 months because of an ethnic war in her central African country.) The same gospel that summoned nineteenth-century abolitionists and demands our attention for racial justice today also applies to ethnic conflicts and prejudices, caste divisions or other divisions in your own country–especially when they surface in the church. May we all hear the gospel that reconciled us not only to God, but also to one another–at the cost of the life of God’s own Son.

The briefly worded statement’s biblical rationale is simple gospel and biblical truth that I have been preaching for three decades. Most recently, I offered such an argument in a 34-minute video here.