Welcome. A review of a Bible Society production. Mine arrives free by post. Contact the Bible Society to get a copy
Reflections on ‘The Church, Bible and Racism’.
‘The Church, Bible and Racism’ is the theme of the Bible Society’s quarterly journal (which is sent free to many church leaders), consisting of eight articles around the theme. I want to spotlight some aspects that I found helpful, and then look at two areas of weakness that I think characterise much of the discussion of racism in the church today and which is exemplified in the journal.
The most heartening theme running through the contributions is their commitment to the church’s living out a common identity. Owen Hylton (pastor of Beacon Church, Brixton, and author of the excellent ‘Crossing the Divide: A Call to Embrace Diversity’) puts it starkly when commenting on Paul’s conflict with the circumcision group in Galatians 2:11-14: ‘Culture is clearly important but it is not sacred, where the cross and culture meet, culture dies’. Hylton, too, is the most emphatic of the contributors about the centrality of our ministry needing empowerment from God: ‘We should be creating an expectation that as we gather, the Holy Spirit is doing that work of reconciliation in our hearts towards one another’. Hylton’s article offers a thoughtful account of the church in Antioch as depicted in Acts as a resource for the church today.
This makes the more serious the neglect of those resources to build a church that is ethnically diverse but united in worship and witness, which is highlighted by Mohammed Girma: ‘The Church, as a crucial storyteller in the culture, has failed to construct a common destiny that transcends tribal fault lines. There is a need, therefore, for the church to take a distance from ideology and draw its message afresh from its original source – the example of Christ’. Girma also provides a sensitive and nuanced discussion of the extent to which statues and other memorials should be removed.
Another strength is the clear eyed awareness of the struggles that black people face in predominantly white institutions, not least the churches. ‘The window of opportunity for black people is as narrow in Christian organisations as elsewhere, if not even narrower. When they get one, those opportunities come with extra struggles in workplaces’ (Mohammad Girma of the Bible Society and Roehampton University). Similarly, Chine McDonald, now Director of Theos, writes of how ‘I too had felt that exclusion as a black woman growing up in majority white spaces, including the Church’. Experiences like these are echoed with uncomfortable frequency by black people, more especially I think as the central institutions of the church are encountered.
The required response is well expressed in the following challenge from Chigor Chike, to which all leaders need to take time to ponder on, as regards how diversity is to be generated:
“This requires both a preparedness and some capacity for both reflection (that is going over experiences to see what might have been missed in real time) and reflexivity (that is examining one’s own attitudes, assumptions, values, prejudices etc, to understand them and their impact on others). A leader who is too afraid or too proud to go over past experiences, or to examine their own values and assumptions, is unlikely to be able to combat racism.”
Despite these strengths I think the Journal’s usefulness is lessened by two related areas of weakness: a poor understanding of what racism is and how it is expressed in Britain today; and secondly the insufficiency of specific examples of racism in practice and how it can be countered. If I treat these at length it is because I think they are indicative of a more general failure found in the churches’ understanding of and response to racism.
1. An inadequate understanding of racism.
The first article following Joshva Raja’s editorial, is on ‘What is wrong with racism? A biblical and theological answer’ by the only white contributor, Joshua Searle of Spurgeon’s College.
As a definition of racism Searle quotes the American author, E A Robinson, that racism posits: “a differentiation and evaluation of superiority and inferiority based largely upon physical characteristics such as skin colour, eye shape, hair texture, and visible cultural characteristics such as language and clothing”. My problem is that if this is what racism is then it probably covers only 10% or less of the British population (though probably more in the USA, which has a history of both slavery within its borders and then officially and violently implemented segregation). Definitions of racism that don’t cause me as a white reader to think ‘Could this be me?’ are inadequate.
As far as I understand my fellow white Britons theoretical abstractions of ‘superiority and inferiority’ are alien, rather it is pragmatic considerations that underlie racist attitudes. In this respect, whilst Robin D’Angelo’s emphasis on ‘white privilege’ can be clumsy and inappropriate in some ways, nonetheless it captures an important perspective: that is, for many white people a racially unjust status quo has served us well and we are resistant to attempts to change it. D’Angelo rightly observes that most Americans (at least from the comfortable business circles she works with) are offended by the accusation of being racist, it is precisely because they don’t fit with the vulgar superiority/inferiority schema that Joshua Searle puts forward. Their racism is of a much more subtle and elusive variety. Again, to take another progressive American, Ibrahim X. Kendy, with whom I mostly disagree, but who is surely correct in saying that the motor for racism in America has been maintaining economic advantage, with theoretical formulations merely secondary.
As regards Britain, ‘Race, Community, and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook’, by John Rex and Robert Moore back in 1967 saw competition for scarce housing resources as the main fuel for racial hostility. Eric Kaufmann’s ‘Whiteshift’ locates the white move for racial separation in a greater desire for cultural homogeneity. Whilst Anthony Reddie saw Brexit as nostalgia for the great days of Empire, I think nostalgia for Britain’s victory in World War 2 was a far more potent reference, thus Boris Johnson presenting himself as the new Churchill. So Brexit was driven not primarily by issues of colour and racial superiority but by very concrete concerns about being undercut by cheap and willing (even though very white) Eastern European labour; as well as discomfort with growing cultural and linguistic diversity, as David Goodhart argued in ‘The Road to Somewhere’. Surely if white people in substantial numbers believe that they have a deep-seated ontological superiority over black people then how to account for the fact that Britain’s 5% black population feature so disproportionately often in tv adverts? This may feed the comforting and too-easy illusion that Britain is a harmonious, fair and inclusive society, but such advertising is hard to square with a theory arguing that white viewers are being asked to identify with people whom they consider to be intrinsically inferior.
Even more significant is the high number of inter-ethnic marriages , that has been a surprise feature of the past few decades in Britain and is now rarely seen as an issue; whilst in the USA approval amongst whites of black-white intermarriage was at 84% in 2013 – as opposed to 4% in 1958. Many of Searle’s sources are American from several decades ago, and the working definition he gives is now less appropriate in the USA, and even less appropriate in Britain.
If white racism is not based on an abstract ranking of races but on people’s estimates, conscious or unconscious, of what works for their personal advantage, then aspects of it are much easier to understand. For example personal inconsistency becomes much easier to understand and identify. I think of the old lady who generously and warm-heartedly provided treats for the Asian children in her block of flats, whilst uttering hair-raisingly incorrect denunciations of immigrants. Her delight in relating to the children was at war with her discomfort at cultural diversity. Or the church member who could thoughtlessly usurp the authority of minority ethnic church members, yet was spoken of in glowing terms by their Zimbabwean neighbour: the love of power going alongside decent and helpful neighbourly friendliness. It is people like this who can often present church leaders with dilemmas: do we confront the negatives head on, or allow time and deepening relationships to let the positives slowly gain ascendance over the negatives. As I shall say below, the articles offer little wisdom on such a specific point.
2. Failure to look at specific issues.
Joshva Raja’s Editorial summarises the journal’s articles, but there is a disappointing sameness about the themes:
* ‘gospel imperative to confront and combat racism’ (Joshua Searle);
* ‘prophetic role in challenging and changing the sinful and discriminatory structures’ (Jason Shields);
* ‘actively breaking down the dividing walls of hostility that exist between people’ (Chine McDonald).
Time and again we are beginning at square 1, but not taken beyond saying that racism must be opposed on towards actually helping us recognise how specifically it can be manifested, and more importantly showing how it can be and has been opposed. At least three of the contributors are in positions of pastoral leadership but we are not given any examples from their experience of how they have dealt with racist situations that have arisen in their congregations. Too often the stories told are from past times or distant places, where the examples of racism are clear and stark. A too rare here-and-now example is Chine McDonald’s account of her family visiting a church where the lady on the welcome team ‘warmly invited us in, but asked us why we had chosen that church to attend that day, rather than the black church down the road’. In its small scale but all too typical detail it is precisely incidents like this that will determine whether churches become robustly cross-ethnic communities of love and service. Mohammad Girma recognises the challenge: ‘There is no ready made answer for the challenge of unconscious bias. However, Christian organisations should be more intentional about addressing it’. By and large the churches have been latecomers in identifying the importance of such intentionality. So what is needed is greater coaching in being aware of the damage done by the sort of very specific incidents that Chine describes and how churches might develop policies to obviate them.
Instead the nearest we have to a case study is Joshva Raja’saccount of opposing caste discrimination against low caste Dalit workers on a South Indian tea plantation. He describes how the church encouraged the Dalits to organise so that they made progress in negotiating better conditions with their employers. This incremental and collaborative approach was disrupted by the arrival of a new pastor advocating a radical, confrontational approach, which led to strikes, internal divisions and a number of murders. When Joshva returned to the post he refocussed on the more mediating and conciliatory position, leading to improved working conditions and pay increases.
Interestingly, this approach to countering an injustice seems to be strikingly at odds with what is advocated in Jason Shields’ article, where he argues that ‘Brueggemann’s understanding of the Exodus narrative is pertinent because he makes the argument that a reform of Egypt was not on God’s agenda. The mild adjustments to a violent and oppressive system and structure of disempowerment were never going to be God’s intent.’ Brueggemann/Searle then seemingly advocating not the ‘mild adjustments’ of Raja’s approach but much more the dramatic but destructive intervention of the radical pastor.
So the appropriateness of the two different approaches needs seriously weighing. Shields argues that prophetic ‘imagination must come before implementation’, but that simply escapes the need to identify specific structures or stories that exemplify racism and how they were or can be responded to. Broadly speaking these are two different approaches where week-in, week-out church leaders need to choose which to follow. Incremental, unifying change; or confrontation and possible conflict and division. To be helpful the Journal needed to have moved beyond abstract exhortation to clearly setting out alternatives, along with stories and case histories about different approaches
Jason Shields writes: ‘The Church has been part of the problem and must dismantle the structures that have upheld racism. We must also think creatively and develop alternative structural arrangements that make a real difference and bring about meaningful change’. My problem is that behind such high-sounding abstract language there is absolutely no identification of what the structures are or what meaningful change looks like. References to the need for ‘discomfort’ or changing the ‘status quo’ run through the Journal, but they are never earthed in real situations. The result of this weakness, which as I have said I think is alarmingly widespread, is to create in the churches a sense of dis-ease, but with too rare real-life pointers to what actually does bring about change. The result is guilt and disempowerment; when what the churches urgently need is an accumulating deposit of experience and wisdom of not just the theory but also the practice of being ethnically diverse yet inclusive communities of faith. Chigor Chike refers to a research project on several churches in this country. Surely it must be rich in stories and examples. Why has not such a potentially valuable resource been widely publicised? (I offer this Blog as an outlet for it!)
To end with a controversial point: there are too many references to the death of George Floyd. That happened in a society with a significantly different racial configuration. It didn’t happen here; and couldn’t happen here. The nearest British equivalent, the shooting of Mark Duggan in controversial circumstances by the police here in Tottenham in 2011, led to an outbreak of violence and looting, but had no traction in the wider community. See my blog # 42. In 2019 in the USA 1,670 people of all races died at the hands of the police. In the UK it was 3. To keep on using Floyd’s murder as a touchstone for Britain’s different and more elusive pattern of racism is to my mind a ‘displacement activity’: a preference for the easier task of focussing on a stark, awful event which happened elsewhere, rather than giving close attention to how specifically to respond to the much less dramatic but nonetheless real, damaging and painful expressions of racism in this country.
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Add Ons
Following the Review of ‘Healing the Divides’ by Jason Roach and Jessamin Birdsall two weeks ago you can hear a podcast of her recent talk on ‘Should Christians be Anti-Racist’ on the web-site of English L’Abri, in the Resources file.