Category: racism

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Equal in God’s Sight

Monday will be Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the United States. His memory is honored in America and around the world because of his leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. He influenced many Americans to better understand the plight of their neighbors who experienced racial prejudice every day simply because their skin was black.

As a pastor, I preached against racial prejudice. I tried to show from the Bible that God welcomes the worship of people of all  races and cultures. The apostle John wrote about the heavenly scene and the multitude assembled around the throne of God: “from every nation, tribe, people and language” (Revelation 7:9). If God accepts them, how can we reject them? If God loves them, how can we hate them?

Yet as a boy growing up in the South in the 1950s, I accepted the institutionalized racism that was a way of life in my city. African Americans were allowed to attend the church in which I was reared, but they were relegated the back rows of the balcony. In the department store downtown I drank from a water fountain labeled “Whites Only.” Black people were required to sit in the back of city buses. Their children had to attend inferior schools.

I knew these things but as a boy I did not have the wisdom or the vocabulary to understand or oppose racism. White supremacy was everywhere. It was the air I breathed. The adults in my life did not so much indoctrinate me in the belief, as they passively accepted the prevailing cultural assumptions of racial bias.

The closest they came to undermining it was to teach us the Sunday School song “Jesus Loves the Little Children of the World. Red, and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.”

The Civil Rights Movement under Dr. King became a social force that influenced the attitudes of many Americans. Some whites became hardened in their opposition to integration in public schools, voting rights, and equal opportunity in the workplace for black Americans.

Some opposed the Civil Rights Movement with violence. I remember when, in 1963, white supremacists bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama, on a Sunday morning killing four young girls as they attended Sunday School, and injuring 20 other black worshipers. Whites infected with racial hatred murdered many civil rights activists, including Dr. King himself.

Others, myself included, began to better understand the plight of our African American neighbors who lived under white supremacist ideology. I began to actively oppose racial discrimination. I hope I have outgrown the attitude that one’s skin color has anything to do with one’s value, intelligence, dignity, or human potential. I fervently believe that racism is not only sinfully wrong, it is stupid.

Some of the people I knew  as I was growing up in the 1950s tried to use the Bible to teach that people of some races were meant to be slaves (the curse on Ham; the fact that slavery was allowed in Hebrew law; the fact that Paul did not teach against the institution of slavery in the Roman empire).

In view of this, it is amazing that so many enslaved people and their descendants became Christians. Could it be that they saw in Jesus the one who took on himself the form of a bond slave and died to save us (Philippians2:7)? Could it be that they felt in him the love and acceptance they did not feel from their bigoted white neighbors?

Throughout my ministry as a pastor I taught against racial prejudice. I called attention to what the Bible says in Acts 17:26– “From one man (Adam) he (God) made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.”

Since all humans are descended from one man, they are equal in God’s sight. This cancels any theory of inherent racial superiority. God’s word tells us not to show partiality (James 2:1). Peter rightly learned that “God does not show favoritism, but accepts men from every nation” (Acts 10:34). Because this is God’s attitude, I want it to be my attitude toward people of other races.

I will have these things on my mind as I remember Dr. King on Monday.

Pastor Randy Faulkner

 

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Confession of a Recovering Racist

With Martin Luther King Day approaching, I am thinking about the lily-white world in which I was reared. The adults in my life would have abhorred racial hatred. They would have never admitted to being racists. Yet bigotry was all around us. White supremacy was the air we breathed.

As a youth, I did not have the wisdom, maturity, or the vocabulary to challenge the institutionalized racism in that Southern culture. I live now with a sense of shame because of my lack of empathy at that time for black Americans. I have confessed this to some of my African American friends who have been exceedingly gracious, more understanding to me than I deserve.

I have just finished reading the excellent memoir by Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell. This spiritual autobiography tells about his growing up in the racist South, one strand in his complex story. He grew up in a fundamentalist subculture that preached racial segregation and practiced ecclesiastical separatism.

Yancey’s background was similar to my own: a fundamentalist church, authoritarian leaders, the cultural milieu of white supremacy, and attempts to justify it theologically. His spiritual and social awakening paralleled mine: frustration with a rule-based religious life, a spiritual crisis while in college, and a growing understanding of the inherent dignity of people of all races, created in the image of God.

Yancey wrote about how he has attempted through his writings and personal relationships, to promote racial harmony and understanding. Throughout my ministry, I have tried to preach against racism and to promote inclusion. I have learned, instead of wallowing in regret, to accept God’s forgiveness for the racism of my youth.

More than that, I am called to take positive action. I serve as a volunteer chaplain in the Oklahoma County Detention Center. Most of the inmates I meet with are African American. It is a joy to bring God’s word and God’s love into that environment. My wife ministers as a tutor to an African American schoolboy and his family.

I am called to confess and openly acknowledge the stupidity and wickedness of racism. Several years ago I wrote a letter to my adult children in which I attempted to lay out my concerns about white supremacy and racial bigotry in our nation. I wanted them to know that I believe these have no place in the life of a Christian. I encouraged them to actively oppose structural racism.

I am called to recognize and support the legitimate concerns of my black neighbors: policing, voting rights, housing, health care. I will vote for and support political candidates who take seriously these concerns.

I am called to seek understanding. I may never fully appreciate how it feels to grow up as part of a racial minority group in this country. But that doesn’t mean I should not try to understand. That means I will listen. I will cultivate friendships. I once asked an African American friend, what I could do to promote racial harmony. His answer was simple. “Show up,” he said.

So that is what I am called to do. On this coming Sunday afternoon I plan to do what I have done for several years now. I will show up at the annual Martin Luther King Memorial Service at Saint John Missionary Baptist Church, where my friend Dr. Major Jemison serves as pastor. I will be a racial minority in that environment.

But I will gladly join the congregation in singing a song written by James Weldon Johnson that carries deep meaning for the African American community. I will sing enthusiastically as an act of love for my brothers and sisters: “Lift every voice and sing/ till earth and heaven ring/ ring with the harmonies of liberty/ Let our rejoicing rise/high as the listening skies/ let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

“God of our weary years/ God of our silent tears/ Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way/ Thou who hast by Thy might led us into the light/ Keep us forever in the path we pray/ Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee/ Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee/ Shadowed beneath Thy hand/ may we forever stand true to our God, true to our native land./ Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us/ Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us/ facing the rising sun of our new day begun/ let us march on till victory is won.”

Pastor Randy Faulkner