Friday, August 02, 2013

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #5


“Evangelicals have some important contributions to offer for the solution of racial division in the United States—such as their stress on the importance of primary relationships, and the need for confession and forgiveness. These may be important because, given the long, tumultuous history of U.S. black-white relations, solutions that call only for structural change are probably as naïve as solutions that merely ask individuals to make some friends across race. The collective wounds over race run deep. They need to be healed. And for healing to take place, there will have to be forgiveness.”

Christian Smith and Michael O. Emerson, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 170-171.

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

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