When Protestantism was forming, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the men sitting in the pews on Sundays were spending the other days of the week inventing colonialism and capitalism. How does that fact determine what the church is facing today?
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Presbyterians and the other mainline Protestant denominations have for over half a century expressed a commitment to racial justice. We have firmly renounced racism, and launched ambitious programs aimed at increasing inclusion and diversity. We have elected and appointed people-of-color to visible positions of authority. We have strenuously advocated for public policies aimed at eliminating and correcting centuries of racial bias from our national life. We have even mustered the confessional courage and self-awareness to recognize and name in our history and practices an implicit or even explicit connection to white supremacy. We strongly and unequivocally affirm our intention to root this out.
All of which is very good, as far as it goes.
Which isn’t very far.
I mean, we make good statements. But do good statements substitute for effective and transformative action? How much has all this anti-racism talk actually trickled down into the life of our presbyteries, congregations, and members?
After all this time (65 years seems like forever to Americans) we Presbyterians still register as a denomination that is 91% white. How many Presbyterians voted for the virulently racist former occupant of the White House? My Facebook feed regularly features Presbyterians posting loud demands that we appreciate the police, mourn over the losses suffered by businesses from last summer’s “rioting,” affirm that all lives matter, and mock kneeling football players.
Our regional synod regularly presents in vain overtures to the General Assembly attempting to redress the lack of minority representation in our councils by allowing congregations to elect elders who do not need to serve on a local session. I support this approach, but it only highlights the real problem, which is that congregations do not regularly elect members of cultural minorities to be elders in the first place, often because congregations don’t include many such people, if any. An informal review of our statistics indicates that almost all Presbyterian congregations are over 95% of a single ethnic group. The most recent General Assembly, in the midst of a trifecta of national crises including racial unrest, was presented with several opportunities to express support for “Black women and girls,” and declined to do so.
It makes me wonder if racism isn’t just simply baked into our denominational DNA. Is something about our identity and the way we operate inherently white supremacist? Does this rot go deeper than mere technical adjustments can address? Is it an invisible element of what it means to be Presbyterian, or a Protestant? In recent years we have been discovering how much of our own U.S. political system was designed to accommodate and protect slavery, and therefore racist by design. Is something like this the case for Presbyterianism as well, and we have been blind to it?
The Reformation happened in northern Europe in the 16th century, between the “Renaissance” and the “Enlightenment,” as part of the spawning of the Modern Age. It was deeply influenced if not determined by the tectonic shifts in the culture of that time and place. Modernity came to be characterized by the rise of the so-called middle-class, wanted freedom from Popes, bishops, priests, and eventually kings and nobles. They valued individualism, and advocated for literacy, capitalism, democracy, nationalism, and scientific and technological thinking.
The middle-class should more accurately be called the owner-class. And when they gained power it became apparent that they only understood “freedom” to apply to themselves. Their enthusiasm for “human rights,” at first only included some humans: namely white, male, property owners. They imposed their own brutal, extractive tyranny over others: slaves, women, workers, peasants, and indigenous peoples.
Too often the response of the Protestant churches (in spite of an activist minority that did work to do things like abolish slavery) was largely to ignore, deny, or justify these many atrocities. Since most of those oppressed people were non-white, white supremacy became part of the package. Thus, white supremacy spread around the world in partnership with Protestantism.
The values and preferences of the owner-class were embodied in Protestant ecclesiastical polities. A reflexive and selective individualism showed a libertarian streak that favored those already favored with wealth and power. They imagined that their structures made everyone equal, but in practice they privileged those with the time and money to participate. In America this often broke down along racial lines.
In short, Protestantism features a built-in, implied white supremacy. It is also embedded in our Presbyterian polity. It will not be excised by our merely making grand statements about rejecting it. We need to change (among other things) our ecclesiastical structures, which are based on the assumptions of Modern Age ideology. Specifically, our reflexive hyper-individualism will have to be balanced by a stronger sense of community, freedom by responsibility, and arrogance by humility.
We will have to realize that what matters in the church is less the will of the majority, discovered through an intentionally and artificially adversarial process, and more the will of Jesus Christ, discerned by a community gathered in the Holy Spirit. More to the point, we will have to develop processes that give preference and priority to the voices of those with whom Jesus explicitly identifies: the poor, the powerless, and the marginalized.
In short, the whole culture of Protestantism has to change, including some of its core values, if we are going to follow Jesus Christ, and have a place in the emerging multi-cultural, multi-racial world.
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