95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #28

Salvation does not divide.  Salvation connects, so that one sees oneself in others and others in oneself. . . .Complexity is our only safety and love is the only key to our maturity.  And love is where you find it.  Race and religion, it has been remarked, are fearfully entangled in the guts of this nation, so profoundly that to speak of one is to conjure up the other.  One cannot speak of sin without referring to blackness, and blackness stalks our history and our streets.  Therefore, in many ways, perhaps in the deepest ways, the minister and the sheriff were hired by the Republic to keep the Republic white—to keep it free from sin.  But sin is no respecter of skin: Sin stains the soul.  Therefore, again and again, the Republic is convulsed with the need for exorcism.

James Baldwin, “To Crush a Serpent” (1987), The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 162, 165.

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