Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith

The 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity are now all posted. And I'm happy to announce the book is out and available for purchase.

Here's more about the book, harvested from a previous post.


In Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith,  Rusty Hawkins and I co-edited essays that came out of the 2010 anniversary conference Rusty organized at Indiana Wesleyan on Michael Emerson and Christian Smith's book Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford University Press, 2000). Read my posts about the conference here and here.

Here's a description of the volume from the book page at Oxford University Press:

  
Christians and the Color Line analyzes the complex entanglement of race and religion in the United States. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of racialized religion, the essays in this volume consider the problem of race both in Christian congregations and in American society as a whole. 

Belying the notion that a post-racial America has arrived, congregations in the US are showing an unprecedented degree of interest in overcoming the deep racial divisions that exist within American Protestantism.  In one recent poll, for instance, nearly 70% of church leaders expressed a strong desire for their congregations to become racially and culturally diverse.  To date, reality has eluded this professed desire as fewer than 10% of American Protestant churches have actually achieved multiracial status. 

Employing innovative research from sociology, history, philosophy, and religious studies, the contributors to this volume use Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s groundbreaking study Divided by Faith (Oxford, 2000) as their starting point to acknowledge important historical, sociological, and theological causations for racial divisions in Christian communities. Collectively, however, these scholars also offer constructive steps that Christians of all races might take to overcome the color line and usher in a new era of cross-racial engagement. 

Rusty and I collaborated across disciplinary lines with wonderful scholars and some great people. We are grateful to Michael Emerson for writing the Foreword and to Darryl Scriven for composing an insightful Theological Afterword for the volume.

Here's the Table of Contents:

Foreword
Michael O. Emerson

Introduction
J. Russell Hawkins & Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Chapter One
"Neoevangelicalism and the Problem of Race in Postwar America"
Miles S. Mullin, II

Chapter Two
"Healing the Mystical Body: Catholic Attempts to Overcome the Racial Divide in Chicago, 1930-1948"
Karen Joy Johnson

Chapter Three
"'Glimmers of Hope': Progressive Evangelicals and Racism, 1965-2000"
Brantley W. Gasaway

Chapter Four
"'Buttcheek to Buttcheek in the Pew': Interracial Relationalism in a Mennonite Congregation, 1957-2010"
Tobin Miller Shearer

Chapter Five
"Still Divided by Faith? Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, 1977-2010"
Ryon J. Cobb

Chapter Six
"Worshipping to Stay the Same: Avoiding the Local to Maintain Solidarity"
Mark T. Mulder

Chapter Seven
"Beyond Body Counts: Sex, Individualism, and the Segregated Shape of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism"
Edward J. Blum

Chapter Eight
"Color-Conscious Structure-Blind Assimilation: How Asian American Christians Can Unintentionally Maintain the Racial Divide"
Jerry Z. Park

Chapter Nine
"Knotted Together: Identity and Community in a Multiracial Church"
Erica Ryu Wong

Chapter Ten
"Much Ado About Nothing? Rethinking the Efficacy of Multiracial Churches for Racial Reconciliation"
Korie L. Edwards

Theological Afterword
"The Call to Blackness in American Christianity"
Darryl Scriven

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Thanks for reading!  Place your orders here and here.

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #95

Blackness is not a racial designation. Although race can sometimes be a marker of blackness, it need not be. The plight of black people and their collective experience illustrates the framework of blackness. Anyone of any race or nationality can engage in blackness, yet the most vested individuals are always those who have a personal interest in the outcome of racial, class, gender, and spiritual struggle. Blackness is a construction that presupposes solidarity with the downtrodden, the emiserated, the least in society, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, and those who understand the world from the underside. Quite often these are the poorest among us. They are those who are powerless and have experienced generational subjugation in ways that do not allow them to easily emerge from the cycle. Blackness reflects those whom Jesus said that he came to set free. As such, blackness is the frontier for American Christians because it is a call that reflects what it means to deny oneself, take up one’s cross, and follow Christ in a market economy. Consequently, when evangelical efforts toward integration and multiracial churches fail, the unrecognized truth is that in a consumerist culture one cannot simultaneously repair the racial breach among Christians while retaining unearned privilege and embodying a faith that is complicit in the oppression of the population with whom one intends to reconcile. Either one denies him or herself, or he or she does not. It cannot be both ways.

Darryl Scriven, “Theological Afterword: The Call to Blackness in American Christianity,” in Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith, eds. J. Russell Hawkins and Phillip Luke Sinitiere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 266-267.

[Read the Introduction to 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity here.]

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #94

The exercise of benevolence is necessary but not sufficient to solve the racial quagmire in which America and its Church find themselves. For too long we have engaged in the abstraction of spiritual and social; accepting the Church as a spiritual institution that might, but need not, surprise us with occasional social activism or pleas for justice. Embarrassingly, this behavior has become normative in many American congregations. But rarely do we annihilate this abstraction by demanding that the Church fulfill its social and biblical responsibility to speak for the voiceless and engage in self-critique to ensure that it does not succumb to the seduction of power. In fact, beyond conceptions of evangelism and benevolence, we are largely unaccustomed to speaking about the “responsibilities” of the Church at all.

Darryl Scriven, “Theological Afterword: The Call to Blackness in American Christianity,” in Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith, eds. J. Russell Hawkins and Phillip Luke Sinitiere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 255.

[Read the Introduction to 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity here.]

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #93

Christian education in a context that is diverse in terms of gender, class, culture, and ethnicity requires a multicultural sensitive pedagogy, or a pedagogy of reconciliation. Such a pedagogy is part of creating a borderland or a space for the discovery of mutuality and common ground amid our differences. The goal of a reconciliation pedagogy is to facilitate a journey whereby we are sensitized to our assumptions about our culture in order to understand another culture’s content and context from within, even while we are without. It allows us to see the structural sin in each culture and how difference has been maintained for empowerment or disempowerment so that we might envision the healing and transformation of the world. Doing this is a process of border crossing that moves us from our ethnocentricities and prejudices to an appreciation of differences. This makes it possible for us to respect and learn from other cultures. It also enhances our ability to understand and interact with biblical texts, themselves a variation of cultures, and to relate them to our present changing realities.

Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, “Prejudice and Conversion,” in A Many Colored Kingdom: Multicultural Dynamics for Spiritual Formation, eds. Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, S. Steve Kang, and Gary A. Parrett (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 105.

[Read the Introduction to 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity here.]

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #92

The first language of the church in a deeply broken world is not strategy, but prayer. The journey of reconciliation is grounded in a call to see and encounter the rupture of this world so truthfully that we are literally slowed down. We are called to a space where any explanation or action is too easy, too fast, too shallow—a space where the right response can only be a desperate cry directed to God. We are called to learn the anguished cry of lament. . . Lament is not despair. It is not whining. It is not a cry into a void. Lament is a cry directed to God. It is the cry of those who see the truth of the world’s deep wounds and the cost of seeking peace. It is the prayer of those who are deeply disturbed by the way things are. We are enjoined to learn to see and feel what the psalmists see and feel and to join our prayers with theirs. The journey of reconciliation is grounded in the practice of lament. 


Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice, Reconciling all Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 77-78.

 

[Read the Introduction to 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity here.]

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #91

Even for God, reconciliation is not an event or an achievement, but a journey from “old” to “new.” As Scripture recounts the specific shape of this journey, God is not inviting us simply to affirm a list of abstract beliefs but rather to set out on an adventure. If this journey calls for great skillfulness and discipline, the most vital skill required is memory. When Christians remember well, we are able to explore the story of God’s involvement with the world and to draw on that story to locate and understand what is going on at any particular time within that story. This is what makes Scripture indispensable to the Christian journey of reconciliation. Scripture both forms Christian memory and shapes concrete possibilities for life in the world. The more Christians are able to ground reconciliation as a journey with God from old toward new, the more we are able to recover the indispensable gifts that sustain that journey and make it possible.

 

Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice, Reconciling all Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2008), 49.

 

[Read the Introduction to 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity here.]