An Honest Conversation About (my, our) Racism in America

Racism has been called America’s “original sin.”  If this is true, the events of this past week show more of us are willing to confront this sin honestly.

For the past several days, I’ve struggled as I wrote, re-wrote, then re-wrote again, trying to capture facing racism as Christians.  (We all know what to do with sleeping dogs, especially controversial ones!)

I ended up with an essay about worldview, a concept that has helped me immensely as a theology professor, missionary, and now leadership coach working with global church leaders in Africa.

Even though much longer than normal, I think I might have something worth your time. Please read on.

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A Time to Kill is about an African American man accused of killing two white racists who brutally raped and then tried to murder his 10-year-old daughter. His defense attorney (played by a young Matthew McConaughey) gives an impassioned closing argument in which he tells the jurors to close their eyes while he tells them a story.  Watch the dramatic 4-minute video here.

The all-white jury is shocked!  They had automatically assumed the pure and innocent little girl who was defiled had to be white, while her loathsome attackers had to have been black.  Their shock at “now imagine she’s white” reveals that, at least for a moment, a few faced their racial prejudice head-on, and it was uncomfortable.

Now imagine that George Floyd was white.

• Would white Americans turn a blind eye if a black policeman knelt on an innocent white man’s neck for over 8 minutes, choking the life out of him despite his desperate pleas for help?

• Would white Americans shrug off George Floyd’s death as an “unfortunate, isolated one-time event” if white people were four times more likely to be killed by law enforcement in Minnesota than black people?

• Would white Americans not protest for the right to be stopped by the police without fearing for their lives, just as black Americans do?

• Would white Americans not protest they have the same right to equal protection under the law,  especially if they are poor, just as rich black Americans do?

• Would white Americans not declare they have the constitutional right to legitimately protest their grievances without being labelled “insurrectionists, anarchists, or rioters” by black politicians?

If George Floyd were a white man and his murderer a black policeman, I’m guessing many white Americans would have reacted differently to the events of the past week.

Beginning a Conversation About Racism

An analogy that comes to my mind is the coronavirus.

For some, the virus infects major organs of the body and produces virulent symptoms. Get enough infected people together and the virus breaks out–many others get sick and a whole community is impacted.

For a long time, I thought bigoted rednecks (probably southerners) were the only carrying the racist virus in America.  This worldview served me in two ways:
1)  I could feel superior because their bigotry was so obvious.  “Thank God, I’m clearly not one of them.”
2)  It  prevented me from ever considering that the plight of black people in America had anything to do with me.

Others also carry the virus, but without showing any symptoms or ill effects.  They are not physically sick but remain part of the system that keeps the virus alive in the community, even without knowing it.

I am one of these “silent carriers” of the virus of racism.  (I confess at times I also discover active symptoms in my feelings, attitudes or conclusions about other people I consider inferior to me for various reasons.)

One value of my virus analogy is it envisions how the worldviews that shape our thinking are often beneath our conscious awareness. I used to think, “What? ME racist? I don’t have a racist bone in my body!” I was expressing the truth about myself as I understood it.  Then I slowly came to accept there were deeper truths about me. (More on this in a moment).

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.” 

I (we) might see ourselves as the “good people,” but I (we) still have a moral responsibility to confront the evil of racism in our country.  My (our) silence has allowed it to flourish.

For those of us ready to confront the deeper issues of racism in America, especially as Christians, I want to offer a place to begin.

We cannot seek a cure until we understand the disease. We cannot do anything constructive until we realize the problem.  We cannot work for change until we know what needs to change.

I.  What Needs to Change?  Our Worldviews.

A. What is “worldview?”

In Worldview: The History of a Concept, Christian author David Naugle offers 400+ pages analyzing the concept of “worldview” from all dimensions, including biblical faith.  He describes the baseline components of a worldview this way:

In other words, our worldviews determine how we “see” the world; how we see the world determines how we act in the world.

B. Why is Worldview Important to Christians when Considering Racism?

The Pew Research Center (the gold standard for religious statistics) shows that black Americans are more likely to be Christian than Americans overall.  Specifically, 79% of black Americans identify as Christian, compared to 71% of Americans overall who say they are Christian, including 70% of whites.

When white Christians consider whether we will take racism seriously, we are talking about what is happening (and has been happening for hundreds of years) to our brothers and sisters in Christ.  That is a sobering thought.

I. Worldview Is Deeper Than Behavior and Belief

Acclaimed missiologist Paul Hiebert in his seminal book  Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding Of How People Change shares what missionaries need to understand to share the gospel in other cultures. He offers a clear diagram of how worldview interacts with behavior and beliefs.

This is incredibly important!   It demonstrates that following Jesus Christ is not a one-time prayer, but actually many conversions–within our behavior, within our beliefs, and finally, within our underlying worldview supporting it all.

Surface behaviors and conscious beliefs might become Christian, while portions of the deep underlying worldview remain untouched.  Every missionary knows this–it takes a long time to transform one’s cultural worldview into a more biblical worldview.  This is as true for Americans as any other world culture.

Thus, it makes perfect sense that, on the one hand, I might be horrified and recoil from obvious racist violence, such as the brutal murder of George Floyd, and, on the other hand, still retain racist ideas of white superiority and/or black inferiority as part of my underlying worldview.

II.  Worldview Explains Why Even Christians Struggle with Racism

While the cosmic battle between God and Satan is a theme throughout scripture, an overlooked aspect of this conflict, highlighted by David Naugle, is “worldview warfare,” or, to put it another way, an intellectual warfare over worldviews.

“What better way for Satan to deflect the light of truth than by corrupting it and replacing it with false visions of reality that dominate the cultural landscape?  The control of the zeitgeist, or the intellectual and spiritual climate of the age, is a most effective means of controlling what goes into the hearts of men and women, shaping their interests and ruling their lives…If this big-picture strategy succeeds, then there is only an occasional need for personal temptation to sin.”

Evangelicals like me may talk more about Satan than liberal Christians do, but we can actually take Satan less seriously!  We evangelicals tend to conceive of Satan primarily as tempting individual persons to sin and discount systemic evil.

Ask yourself which is more effective: prompting individuals to sin, or deceiving whole societies to sin by simply following “false visions of reality?” If Satan activates the inherent sinfulness in thousands or millions of people through false worldviews, they will then each act in evil or hurtful ways toward others with absolutely no need for further prodding on Satan’s part!

But because this Satanic influence is social rather than personal, evangelicals tend to discount it.  Anything “social” is the realm of liberals.

Naugle proposes “the ‘spiritual atmosphere’ of a culture is the ‘principal source of his [Satan’s] domination”:

“Since Satan and the demons can manipulate men and women only to the extent that they are deceived, what better way to achieve this than by the propagation of fallacious conceptions of reality through the conduit of the spirit of the age from which no one can escape?  To top off this scheme, the principalities and powers under devilish management cleverly cover their tracks and operate in such a clandestine fashion as to suggest their non-existence.”  [emphasis added]

I believe that racism (declaring other human beings inferior to me) can best be understood as a Satanic “fallacious conception of reality.”

In A Time to Kill, it is abundantly clear that it is white worldviews of black inferiority that made them complacent in excusing whites killing blacks (“What’s one less nigger?”), while exacting extreme penalties toward even the smallest sign of black response toward whites (a black man who even “looks wrong” at a white woman gets beaten).

Satan has destroyed millions of lives throughout human history through racism, both the lives of those subjugated as inferior and the lives of the racists who subjugated them.  Christians have been on both sides of this worldview fight.

Ever since African slaves were first imported to America in 1619, Christians actively supported and encouraged slavery, their preachers offering specious biblical prooftexts that Africans were inferior to whites and could therefore be treated as sub-human.

On the other hand, beginning with the abolitionist movement in the 1800’s and the later civil rights movement, other Christians fought back against the worldview below the surface of society that supported racism.

II. If Racism is Serious, even for Christians, What Can We Do?

A. Can Worldviews Change?

We all know our worldviews can and do change.  We all remember times when we questioned and then rejected (sometimes after great anguish) beliefs that were previously baked into our worldviews.

It surprised me to discover that many Americans have been changing their worldviews about race over the past few years, and even the past few months.  Two surprising data points:

• In a Monmouth University poll released last week, 76 percent of Americans — including 71 percent of white people — called racism and discrimination “a big problem” in the United States. That’s a 26-percentage-point spike since 2015. In the poll, 57 percent of Americans said demonstrators’ anger was fully justified, and another 21 percent called it somewhat justified.

•  In 2009, the year President Barack Obama took office, just 36 percent of white Americans said the country needed to do more to ensure that black people gained equal rights, according to a Pew Research Center poll. By 2017, four years after the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, that number had leapt to 54 percent of white people and roughly three in five Americans overall.

Could the ongoing reaction to the senseless deaths of George Floyd and those before him lead to a major worldview change in America?  Some think it might. Let’s briefly look at how worldview change works and how that impacts each of us.

B. How Do Worldviews Change?

Paul Hiebert suggests that worldviews change in two basic ways—through slow growth and paradigm shifts.

Slow growth involves a constant adaptation of the underlying worldview (Hiebert characterizes this as remodeling an existing house). Paradigm shifts involve demolition of the old house and re-using its materials to re-build with a better design.

But whether slow or fast–whether re-modeling or re-building the house–the key ingredient in worldview change is accepting NEW DATA.  We learn. We have new life experiences. We are exposed to facts that challenge old ways of thinking. We realize there is “more reality out there” than we previously realized.

In his classic study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn suggests shifts in worldview only happen when new data will no longer fit into an outdated worldview.

“For example, the Ptolemaic universe (earth at the center) became increasingly cumbersome as new astronomical data was generated.  Even so, many valiantly tried to squeeze the new data into the old earth-centered paradigm.  Eventually, however, the old house collapsed under the weight of all the new evidence, and the sun-centered Copernican paradigm took its place.”

Here is an obvious but crucial point: Our worldviews filter reality to us, but they are not reality itself!

Throughout all the debates, the positions of the sun, earth and other planets never changed!  Shifting to a new worldview helps us get more of the reality that was there all along—our older worldview just prevented us from seeing it.

Eugene Peterson, one of my favorite Christian authors, writes that such a paradigm shift immediately…

…expands our sense of reality past understanding, sets us down in a world far, far larger than anything we could have dreamed of, and makes it possible to travel, build, heal, learn and experience in ways impossible previous to the paradigm shift.  The paradigm shift didn’t create more reality; it made it possible for us to be adequate to far more of the reality already there.
(emphasis added)

I deeply resonate with Peterson’s desire to “to be more adequate to the reality already there!”  Is that not what all of us deeply desire–to know as much of the truth about ourselves, about the world in which we live, about God?

We must not be naïve, however.

Most of us will try to ignore new data or squeeze it into our existing worldviews for as long as possible, just as the medieval Church doubled-down on their earth-centered worldview and lashed out towards anyone presenting new data or questioning the status quo (like Galileo) as “enemies of the faith.”

Researching this article, I found that that in 2012 the Vatican proclaimed the church was in error by condemning Galileo in the 1600’s for teaching that the earth revolved around the sun, saying “Galileo Galilei was a man of faith who saw nature as a book written by God.” Sadly, it took them 400 years to admit their error.

Sadder still for us, last year we celebrated the 400^th anniversary of the first slaves arriving in America in 1619. After 400 years, we still have so far to go.

C. If Worldviews Can Change, How Does This Happen?

Paul Hiebert in his ground-breaking study suggests three consecutive steps resulting in worldview change.  In this article, I’ll consider only the first two steps.

First is “surfacing” our worldviews to conscious awareness, so they can be understood for what they are—not reality, but only a model of reality.

For example, we Christians know only the tiniest fraction of the reality of God’s being, God’s ways, God’s creation.  We can be confident in what we believe, yet still be humble about all that we don’t know.  In fact, true wisdom is “knowing how much we still don’t know.”

While a missionary in Ethiopia teaching theology to graduate students, I was daily confronted with the fact that I had absolutely no comprehension of the actual lives of my students.

So I began inviting them to have tea with me before or after class at the café across the street from our college.  These hour-long personal conversations with almost every student in every class I taught–usually around 60 students per semester over four years–became one of the highlights of my years in Addis Ababa.  Although these conversations still barely scratched the surface of my ignorance, they did offer me the invaluable service of “knowing how much I didn’t know.”

How my students saw their world greatly increased my appreciation for the fact that how I saw my own world was not how it was, but how a white, middle-class Westerner saw it.  They did me a profound service.

I have not had hundreds of similar conversations with my fellow African Americans. Hence, the black experience in America is every bit an unknown and foreign world to me as Ethiopia was when I moved there. (Indeed, I now know more about the black experience in Ethiopia than I do in America.)

This means that I need to approach the protests around our nation with humility.  I need to approach them the way Job’s better friends approached him.  They simply sat with Job in his despair.  I should not shoot off my mouth (as Job’s first friends did), making pronouncements about what is going on when I don’t know the first thing about what black Americans face every day.  Instead, I need to sit quietly and listen to the voices of those who are hurting.

Second, Hiebert says we must step outside our own culture and see it from a new vantage point.  He makes this point with great clarity:

“As we learn to see the world through the eyes of others and then return to our own culture, we come back as ‘outsiders’ and begin to see it through new eyes.”

Let me introduce you to two people who are helping me “begin to see through new eyes.”

This past week, I started reading one of the many books in my “to read” pile.  In Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race, Debby Irving chronicles the many ways she “woke up” to discover the racist worldview lurking beneath her conscious awareness.  Here’s how she explains it in her introduction:

“No one alive today created this mess, but everyone alive today has the power to work on undoing it.  Four hundreds of years since its inception, American racism is all twisted up in our cultural fabric. But there’s a loophole: people are not born racist.  Racism is taught and racism is learned.

Ironically racism, the greater divider, is also one of the most vital links we share, a massive social dysfunction in which we all play a role.  Perhaps the greatest irony for me has been the discovery that after all these years of trying to connect with people I was taught to see as different and less-than, I’ve learned that the way to start is to connect with the parts of myself lost in the process of learning to be white.

I invite you to use my story to uncover your own, so that you too can discover your power to make the world a more humane place to live, work and thrive.”

Phil Vischer is a Christian filmmaker, the creator of the “Veggie Tales” videos teaching kids Christian principles that have been viewed 65 million times worldwide.  A friend shared Phil’s eloquent post Racial Injustice has Benefited Me – A Confession.

He talks about the “story he used to tell” about himself–how his family, and then he himself, overcame great setbacks to achieve success.  He then tells the same story again, only this time showing how, every step along the way, his favored position as a white person in America contributed to his success in ways not open to a majority of black people.  I was deeply moved as I read it, and then re-read it, and then re-read it again.

He concludes:

“So when I see people of color protesting injustice or living in poverty in wrecked communities, people in Ferguson, MO or Minneapolis or Chicago or Flint, MI, and I feel the urge to say, “Well, if you just worked harder you could do what I did…”

That is a lie.

We built a system to favor ourselves.  And it worked amazingly well.  Every generation of my family has benefited from the color of our skin.  Every generation.  It didn’t stop with the Emancipation Proclamation.  It didn’t stop with Brown v Board of Education.  And it still hasn’t stopped today.”

So I will strive tell my story honestly.  Especially to myself. And I would ask you to do so also.  It’s not much, but it’s a start.

I read some of the Twitter feed tweets on Phil’s website.  One person wrote in response to this post: “I liked Veggie Tales.  I’m sorry you’ve become a leftist.”

Anyone who has seriously tried to “see the world through the eyes of others so they could see their own lives through new eyes” will meet obstacles. Simply taking racism seriously might bring labeling, judgment, or worse.

Some Final Questions

A one sentence summary of my message to myself and to you is this: we must deal honestly with our own worldviews about race to be responsible Christians in today’s environment.

Paul wrote: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28)

Let me repeat again: The Pew Research Center shows that black Americans are more likely to be Christian than Americans overall.  Specifically, 79% of black Americans identify as Christian.

Who are the vast majority of black Americans (79%!!) whose lives have been prevented by racism to flourish as people created in the image of God?  They are our brothers and sisters in Christ!

Will I (we) as white Americans open our minds and hearts to the data documenting the injustice and inequality suffered by our brothers and sisters in Christ?  (Or will we allow politicians to continue to weaponize race to distract us from the data, manipulating and dividing us from our black brothers and sisters for their own political ends?)

Will I (we) accept the possibility that a new worldview regarding race helps me (us) get more of the reality that was there all along—reality that our older worldview just prevented us from seeing or comprehending?

Will I (we) do the hard and courageous work of telling our stories about the disparities of growing up white or black in America honestly, especially to ourselves?

Now imagine that George Floyd was white.

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