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