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Why Evangelical Pastors Have Little Help to Offer in the Public Square

Apparently, best-selling evangelical author, Max Lucado is writing editorials for Fox News. He recently wrote a piece entitled “What is the Answer to Racism: This profound yet simple promise.”

While I know that his numerous books have been helpful and encouraging to many Christian people, his advice on overcoming racism illustrates why evangelical thinking is a dry well when it comes to promoting the public good in society.

Here is an excerpt. I have a brief analysis at the bottom.

Recent racially charged incidents including the tragic death of George Floyd have stirred ensuing riots and torn open the rawest of wounds – racism. Judging a person according to skin color is an ancient sin. For that reason, God gave this ancient solution.

In the earliest words of Scripture, God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature so they can be responsible for the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the cattle, and, yes, Earth itself, and every animal that moves on the face of Earth” (Genesis 1:26).

Embedded in these words is the most wonderful of promises: God made us to reflect his image.

No one is a god except in his or her own delusion. But everyone carries some of the communicable attributes of God. Wisdom. Love. Grace. Kindness. A longing for eternity. We are made in his image.

There you have it in a nutshell. Evangelicalism’s basic problem —  individualism.

And this individualism keeps evangelical leaders speechless on matters of systemic evil, problems that require changes in such things as law, government, and public policy.

Lucado invites his readers to believe in Christ — and I hope many will — as if that is all that needs to happen for the world to be a better place. But calling more individuals to repent and convert offers nothing to relieve the racial distress facing black communities today. Such global transformation won’t happen until Jesus returns.

Besides, a good number of people in the African-American community are already in Christian churches looking for Jesus to come. And they still can’t feel safe in their own neighborhoods when the police drive by.

What does Lucado have to say to them? “Keep praying for the cops to repent so they’ll quit choking your husbands to death”?

I don’t think so.

Revving up the evangelistic engines is great for addressing personal salvation more broadly — something every church should do — but waiting for society to change one soul at a time is a counsel of despair for people suffering beneath a corrupt system of racial discrimination right now.

Besides, a good many of the people who serve the corrupted ends of our corrupted systems of government and policing already profess their Christian faith even as they dutifully play their assigned role in the rotten machine of systemic discrimination.

I wonder how many of the cops who are mistreating demonstrators across this country would tell Mr. Lucado that they have already “asked Jesus into their heart”?  I’d wager a good number of them.

Life is not that simple.

When society needs both/and solutions to its problems, too many evangelicals offer nothing but one-sided answers to complicated questions. And this is our great failure. It is a failure of spiritual maturity, a failure of intellect, a failure of compassion, a failure of cultural acuity, and a pathetic expression of down-right laziness.

 

Now a Word From Our Blasphemer-in-Chief

Not long before this blasphemous photo-op Trump gave a speech in which he expressed his support for every American’s right to protest. (As if the constitution needs any president’s endorsement).

Then, shortly before he spoke on the steps of this well-know church, D.C. police fired tear gas into a nearby group of peaceful protesters, dispersing stragglers by force. I watched the video.

Now, safely rid of those pesky, peaceful demonstrators, the president awkwardly waves a Bible like an unfamiliar talisman and utters the basest expressions of civil religion for the feverish media.

All in all — another disgusting episode from a wicked man who needs to repent, yet is enabled by so-called evangelicals blinded by secularism, self-centeredness, and power politics.

How Media Framing Shapes the Public’s View of Protests

Danielle Kilgo, journalism professor at Indiana University, presents the

Prof. Danielle Kilgo

results of her research into the way journalists present, or frame, protest movements depending on the issues at stake. Her article at Consortium News is entitled, “Riot or Resistance: Media Framing Shapes Public View.”

Her data demonstrates the inherent bias of reporters depending on the issues being protested and the effects of reporter bias on public perception. Below is an excerpt.

My research has found that some protest movements have more trouble than others getting legitimacy. My co-author Summer Harlow and I have studied how local and metropolitan newspapers cover protests. We found that narratives about the Women’s March and anti-Trump protests gave voice to protesters and significantly explored their grievances. On the other end of the spectrum, protests about anti-black racism and indigenous people’s rights received the least legitimizing coverage, with them more often seen as threatening and violent.

Decades ago, scholars James Hertog and Douglas McLeod identified how news coverage of protests contributes to the maintenance of the status quo, a phenomenon referred to as “the protest paradigm.” They held that media narratives tend to emphasize the drama, inconvenience and disruption of protests rather than the demands, grievances and agendas of protesters. These narratives trivialize protests and ultimately dent public support.

You can read the entire article here.

Whose Law, Whose Order?

The predictable mantra has begun – “we have to maintain law and order.”

Calls for law and order in the midst of nation-wide demonstrations against police brutality and in favor of racial justice are as predictable as the sunset.  It always happens.

Well timed calls for law and order always served the purposes of the powerful who pretend to care.

Keith Childress, shot for carrying a cell phone

It is always the great “BUT” working to obscure the issue at hand; to distract from the problems of racial injustice and police violence.

Law and order is the subversive language deployed by people who are not at risk as they feign comradeship with those who are. It allows the bogus compatriot to say, in fact, “I am with you as long as you keep your objections within my boundaries of safety.”

When members of the establishment say things like, “I believe in peaceful protest, BUT…I believe in racial equality, BUT…I support the protests, BUT I condemn the looting…BUT we need to maintain law and order,” they merely repeat the establishment code for defending the status quo.

Defending law and order has always been the message of the establishment,

Bettie Jones, shot and killed for helping a neighbor and opening the door to police

allowing it to maintain its mask of humanity while tacitly supporting acts of inhumanity.

We have seen it all before.

Law and order was the message of pro-segregationist governors and mayors in the deep south who believed that ANY expression of civil disobedience, no matter how peaceful, especially when committed by black people and other civil rights advocates, was a dangerous act of lawlessness demanding brutal, police suppression.

Lester Maddox, the racist, segregationist governor of Georgia, always insisted that he accepted black people as equals. He just didn’t want them living next door. And he would gladly sic the police on any black person who tried to move into his neighborhood. (Watch his racist confessions with Jim Brown on the Dick Cavett show here. I recall watching a different Cavett show where Maddox walked off the set).

It was also Richard Nixon’s Republican party code for keeping black people

Jamar Clark, witnesses say he was shot and killed while handcuffed and unarmed

in their place at the height of the civil rights movement in 1968. It was also a very successful code language that spoke volumes to conservative America and led to his presidential victory that year.

But every reactionary plea for “law and order” must first answer the question, “Whose law, and whose order?”

Because the fact is that, in America today, there are two difference types of law and order, one for white, middle/upper-class communities, and another for (poor) communities of color.

As the repeated, public murders of African-Americans demonstrate, law and order for black people in America is unlike law and order for white people. For African-Americans, law and order means (1) people of color are born guilty; they are always suspect, which means that (2) the police are free to treat them as they wish.

Law and order for black people in America includes breaking down their doors for no good reason; shooting them dead inside their own homes, even when police are at the wrong address; planting evidence while making

Michael Marshall, suffered from mental illness; died after being “restrained” into a coma

illegal arrests; and the list goes on.

That is the “law and order” enforced in America’s black neighborhoods today.

So, whose law and order are the public pearl-clutchers advocating and defending when they condemn protesters for violating the norms of “law and order”?

Where were these easy-street advocates of public order when black neighborhoods were being patrolled by cops who viewed community residents as the enemy to be controlled rather than as citizens to be protected and served?

Where were the white marches launched in defense of black communities when they needed defending against a local, militarized police force eagerly searching for excuses to deploy their new body armor, armored vehicles, stun guns, rubber bullets, 4-foot batons, rubber bullets and tear gas?

George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, and Ahmaud Arbery are only the tip of the iceberg.

Unarmed black people are 5x more likely to be shot and killed by police than

Ahmaud Arbery, shot and killed for jogging in a white neighborhood

are white people in America. That shocking statistic alone tells us that murdering unarmed black people (although possessing a weapon is not a significant distinguishing factor) is completely acceptable and well within the bounds of American law and order.

Concerning the present protests, an overwhelming amount of video evidence proves that the police themselves regularly instigate violence where protesters were behaving peacefully.

The police are masters at escalating violence needlessly as an expression of their own presumption of authoritarian privilege. (Watch this compilation video of cops attacking peaceful demonstrators with impunity).  I have personally experienced how the police use excessive force to instigate violence during an anti-war protest in Chicago in 2012. I then watched as the establishment media turned the facts upside down to accuse the demonstrators  of attacking the police!

By condemning these calls for law and order, I am not condoning violence.

Sandra Bland, arrested during a routine traffic stop; supposedly (and unbelievably) committed suicide in jail

Rather, I am highlighting the fact that we must learn to insist and to resist.

First, we must insist that the public spot light remain focused on the central issues: racism and police brutality. We cannot be distracted.

Second, we must resist the power of corporate media to socialize us into (a) complacency and (b) collaboration. The problem being exposed by protesters right now is not some tendency for peaceful rallies to be exploited by chaotic troublemakers. Don’t allow the media to suggest otherwise.

The problem is white America’s sleepy indifference to the daily mistreatment of our black brothers and sisters – an evil with which God’s people can never collaborate or become complacent.

The problem is white America’s indifference to the fact that a separate code of law and order is applied to communities of color every single day.

The problem is not the disintegration of law and order but the historic

Eric Garner, choked to death by police while pleading, “I can’t breathe.”

application of arbitrary, dehumanizing law and order at the whim of our dehumanized police force.

Here is a basic Christian principle: God’s people must always stand with the oppressed and the disadvantaged, just as we must always stand up for equality and justice. This is God’s way, and it must always be ours.

Thus, the ethics of God’s kingdom demand both pacifism and civil disobedience whenever cultures work to shape kingdom people, both black and white, into ungodly configurations.

Resistance is difficult but essential if we hope to become more like Jesus. Which means that the church cannot lazily mimic cultural mantras, whatever they may be.

Instead, God’s people are obligated to INSIST on justice and to RESIST falling in line.

Police Reform is Not the Answer

Over the past few years, The Intercept has produced a series of investigative articles covering questions of police brutality, budgeting, and reform in America.

Most recently Alice Speri, Alleen Brown, and Mara Hvistendahl have written “The George Floyd Killing in Minneapolis Exposes the Failures of Police Reform” giving greater depth to a point I made here.

Below is an excerpt.

“Reform is not the answer, we’ve been trying it for decades, and as you can see,

Neighborhood protest in Minneapolis

we’re just not getting anywhere,” he said. “We need a new paradigm of policing in the United States. It needs to be completely dismantled and reconstructed, not changing a policy here or there.”…

…“And what does it say about the limits of reform that the city of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis police department could be part of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar national project to enhance police community relations, and after all of that, here we are?”

A niece of Jamar Clark protested with a photograph of the two Minneapolis police officers who were involved in Clark’s murder on Oct. 15, 2016, in Minneapolis. Star Tribune via Getty Images

After years of investment in improved policing with no results to show for it, “the conversation has changed,” she added. “There’s much more of a public awareness and conversation about abolition, and what that means and what that might look like. … I think people were radicalized by Jamar Clark and Philando Castile. And then they saw the contradictions around Justine Damond.”

Montgomery, the director of Black Visions Collective, said that organizers are tired of just calling for prosecutions. “We’re moving past a conversation around prosecuting the police and individual officers — that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t prevent another Philando Castile or George Floyd,” said Montgomery. “To me and many of my comrades, police reform is irrelevant.”

Some demands have shifted to community control. Organizer Sam Martinez told The Intercept that the Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar wants a board similar to a city council or school board to run the police: controlling its budget, approving union contracts, and deciding disciplinary actions. Martinez says the board would have to be fundamentally different from previous civilian police review councils that law enforcement has mostly ignored.

You can read the entire article here.

Cornel West: America is a Failed Social Experiment

Dr. Cornel West was on CNN last night saying what needs to be said.

Every Christian in America needs to join with him in repeating his message.

Is America Now a Failed State?

Umair Haque thinks the answer to that question is Yes. 

His article is entitled, “It’s Not that I’m Negative, America Really is Screwed.” I am not an economist, but my inclination is to agree.

Here is an excerpt:

The economics of American collapse say that it’s probably too late to fix America. It’s probable that this is the new normal. Chaos, decline, incompetence, malice, poverty, hopelessness, despair.

Let me explain, as clearly as I can.

You can see, right about now, that America is what political scientists call a failed state. A President who tells people to drink bleach during a pandemic. 90,000 dead, of which 90% are needless. A society that’s not able to provide basics for it’s citizens anymore. A nation in which income, savings, life expectancy, happiness, trust are all in free-fall. This is the stuff of epic social collapse.

Now, the reason that America collapsed is straightforward. Americans never invested in building expansive social systems, unlike Europe. Systems to provide healthcare, retirement, childcare, finance, and so forth.

The result has been twofold. One, the average American now goes without these things. That’s because they’re largely unavailable. For example, the fresh food that I can get on any block in Europe is simply absent in huge chunks of the States. You buy processed food, or you don’t get food. The same is true of many, many things, like, say, education, or income. You don’t have a job with guarantees and protections like in Canada or Europe. You have a lower quality — not just quantity — of income.

Two, the the average American pays prices that the rest of the world considers absolutely absurd — because they are — for the very same things. Having a child? That’ll be $50K, thank you. An operation? That’ll be more than a house. Want to educate a kid? There go your life savings. Want a few fresh apples? That’ll be ten times the price Canadians or Europeans pay. These things — the basics of life — are eminently affordable in the rest of the rich world. In America, though, they cost more than the average person can afford.

How do I know that? Because the average American now dies in debt…

You can read the entire article here.

The Rich Get Richer as the Rest Suffer

Over at the Medium website, Francis Taylor details the many ways that corona virus has exposed the deepening chasm separating the rich from everyone else in America.

His article is “COVID 19 Has Exposed the Class Divide.” Below is an excerpt.

Throughout the pandemic, American billionaires have continued to make fabulous profits. As Tommy Beer of Forbes reports, their total net worth has increased by more than $400 billion since March 18. While the poorest struggle simply to survive, the rich see their fortunes grow. And some have even show their willingness to throw workers into the thresher of capitalism. Both Tilman Fertitta and Lloyd Blankfein have called for the economy to re-open, knowing full well that they will not be exposed to the worst of the risks.

But special mention has to go to Jeff Bezos and his Amazon empire. The massive conglomerate, having provided an extra $2 an hour for the warehouse workers braving a pandemic, now plans to end the increase by the close of May.

It should be noted that the additional wage has been in place for less than three months.

This terminated increase follows Amazon’s decision to scrap unlimited unpaid leave for workers who fear the Coronavirus and its dismissal of Christian Smalls after he spearheaded a walkout at their Staten Island Warehouse over safety concerns. Although the company maintains that Smalls and other protesting workers were fired for violating internal policies, Tim Bray, a former vice president at Amazon Web Services, avers that past workers have been “turfed” for whistleblowing. He also quit the company earlier this May, citing these punitive measures as the main reason.

It would seem then that Amazon is sending a clear message to its workers: the lot of you are interchangeable cogs, and if you squeak with acrimony you can always be replaced.

You can read the entire article here.

Riots are the Language of the Unheard

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “riots are the language of the unheard,” because rioting is the only way for the oppressed to grab the oppressor’s attention.

I can’t help but notice that those who are comfortable, content with the

George Floyd

status quo, and not at risk of being brutalized or murdered by the police, are also first in line to condemn rioting.

Let’s face it. A white person, especially a wealthy, white person, is rarely threatened by police violence – unless you are someone like Jeffrey Epstein who threatens to expose the hypocrisy and corruption of other rich, white people.

The hysterical pearl-clutching we are now witnessing from comfortable, white citizens condemning the riots in Minneapolis is the socially acceptable way of condoning police brutality.

After all, these commentators (like Tucker Carlson) have considerable excess energy stored up from their lack of protesting (much less rioting) against the grotesque acts of excessive force used by police as they regularly murder black people in this country.

Members of the white establishment are free to jog down their streets without fear. Whereas, black joggers are always at risk of being shot by white vigilantes, racists who know they can probably get away with murdering a black person (unless a video of their crime happens to go viral).

The video of George Floyd’s murder shows not one but three police officers kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s passive body, pinning him to the ground. His hands are secured behind his back as he repeats his last words, “I can’t breathe.”

The cop looking towards the camera is unmoved, ignoring the dying man’s pleas for help, for just enough room to breathe. His conscience is unfazed as he literally snuffs the life out of Mr. Floyd.

It’s not the first time America has heard a black man’s suffocating request for breath. Nor will it be the last. At least, not as long as there are public officials like this Mississippi mayor who defended the police by saying, “If you can say you ‘can’t breathe, then you are breathing.”

Prosecuting the cops involved is just another sop thrown from the master’s table.

Yes, prosecution and conviction need to happen. But America’s violent, over-the-top policing problems are not due to a few bad apples. No, the bad apples are spilling out of rotten barrels.

Don’t forget that the cop pressing his knee into Mr. Floyd’s neck had been reported for the excessive use of force numerous times. Yet, no action was ever taken to discipline him, to address his misbehavior, or to evaluate his penchant for cruelty, much less to get him off the streets.

The state prosecutor is already talking about the extenuating circumstances that may work in the policeman’s favor when the case finally goes to trial.

Week after week we see the class-based, racist, violent culture of America’s law enforcement establishment. All of it testimony to the fact that our police academies, training, and supervisory mechanisms are all broken. In fact, the entire policing establishment of this country needs to be torn down to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.

Our police are too militarized. They are obviously trained to protect themselves first instead of serving their communities.

Too often they approach the public as it we are the enemy – an attitude entrenched by America’s ludicrous cross-training with the Israeli military, an army which exists only to pulverize Palestinians. It’s no wonder that pulverizing people of color has become a weekly news item for us.

The well-known “solid blue wall” of uniformed unity, where all cops are expected to cover for other cops no matter their crimes, weeds out the honest men and women who refuse to conform to the prevalent culture of might makes right.

What else can we conclude but that there is an element in police culture that condones sadism.

Let’s be honest. Power is intoxicating. Holding power over others can be an elixir to certain pathological personalities. Giving a gun and a badge to someone with an authoritarian personality, twisted by psychopathic tendencies, is a recipe for policing disaster.

Put that person in an environment where his love of control and leanings towards violence are rarely if ever rebuked by his peers (because they have been weeded out as unfit weaklings), and you have what we see in America today.

The police murder people in our streets with seeming impunity.

God’s people need to wake up.

The comfortable white church must shake off the scales of its class-based slumber. The police don’t look at us and assume that we must be criminals, unless perhaps you are among the white under-class struggling to survive. Whereas, that is exactly how they look at people of color, and the poor of all colors, who dare to get too uppity.

Our black, Latino, and Native brothers and sisters live in a completely different world. Frankly, had I been born and raised in their world, I probably would be rioting, too.

Now is a time for white leaders, especially white leaders in the Christian church, to stand up and shout like hell, to rock the boat and insist, not just on prosecutions against murderous cops, but on a complete overhaul of the American system of policing, as it currently exists.

The problem is not a few bad apples but a nation filled with rotten barrels, all spilling rotten, racist, violent thugs into our streets cloaked in blue uniforms. (No, I am not describing all police officers. But don’t evade the point by resorting to straw-man bluster.)

Now is not the time for white Christian leaders to condemn rioting.

Now is a time to repent for our decades of inattention, while we ignored our fellow citizens of color, refusing to take their stories seriously.

Now is the time to listen to the stories of non-white Americans and to confess our self-centeredness that says, “If it doesn’t happen in my neighborhood, then it ain’t my problem.”

Except, wherever the Image of God is being oppressed in this world, it IS the Christian’s problem.

Whenever flagrant, systemic injustice digs its privileged knees into the exposed necks of people loved by God – in a supposedly “Christian country,” no less! – God’s real people must see our national illness as the church’s problem to address.

No, now is not the time to condemn rioting.

Now is the time to condemn the establishment’s war against the poor, the weak, the sick, the powerless, and the marginalized.

Now is the time loudly to condemn social injustice. Now is the time to condemn the power-brokers who exploit their power at the expense of the powerless.

Now is the time for Christian leaders of all colors to stand and shout together, “No more. We demand change. We demand justice for all. And we demand it right now.”

Now is the time for Christian leaders blessed with the expertise, ability, access, and opportunity to roll up their sleeves and work for a more equal, more just society.

The time for peace and quiet is loooooooong gone.

Jogging While Black in America

Ahmaud Arbery was murdered last February while jogging in the state of

Ahmaud Arbery

Georgia.

Mr. Arbery was black. His two murderers, a father and son, are white. Neither of them has been arrested or jailed. The father is a retired police officer who worked as an investigator for the state attorney’s office. The son killed Mr. Arbery with a shotgun at close range (as you can see in the video below).

The two men saw Mr. Arbery jogging through their all white neighborhood and immediately saw him as a criminal. So, they jumped into their pick-up truck and hunted him down, killing him in the street.

They claimed he looked like a burglary suspect – probably because all black men look alike to them. Their defense claims that they acted in accordance with Georgia’s Stand Your Ground law, even though they had driven blocks away from their home in order to ambush Mr. Arbery, who was shot in the middle of a public road.

Ironically, their “stand your ground” defense is actually a testament to their own racist sensibility. Obviously, in their minds, all of America is the white man’s ground, where all black Americans are trespassers and criminals.

Their actions unveil the deeply ingrained suspicion throughout white America that all African-Americans are suspect, guilty until proven innocent.

Imagine how differently this incident would have been handled if two black men had shot down a white jogger running through the neighborhood. The shooters would have been beaten by the arresting officers, thrown in jail without bail, and quickly convicted with life sentences.

Mr. Arbery’s murderers have not suffered any of these things. They are white men living in white America, an American where black people are still – in 2020 – considered to be inferior, a genetically criminal underclass.

White protesters at the Michigan state capitol building

[I have often thought of this racial double-standard when watching the white, anti-government demonstrators protesting their governor’s stay- at-home orders. A good number of these protesters arrive at their state capitols with guns, often semi-automatic, high-powered rifles. Oh, my goodness, how very, very differently these demonstrators would be handled by the authorities if they were angry black Americans doing the same things.]

Three state attorneys have been taken off the case for conflicts of interest. The Arbery family lawyer will soon have a chance (finally) to present his case before a grand jury, where the proceedings will probably remain closed.

Had the video recording of Mr. Arbery’s murder not been disclosed, the two murders would undoubtedly have gone free after being declared innocent.

When the local police informed the victim’s mother about her son’s death, they simply repeated the murders’ version of the story.  They told Mrs. Arbery that her son was a robbery suspect and that he aggressively started the confrontation that ended in his death.

But the police version of the story merely repeats a long-standing racist trope: whites are driven to defend themselves against the aggression of inherently violent black men.

Look at any photograph of an American lynching, for that is what we are talking about here. What do you see? A crowd of armed white people looking at the mutilated body of a black man accused of some crime against a white person.

America is still infected with such racism.

Examples similar to Mr. Arbery’s occur regularly all throughout this country, month after month, week after week. Often the assaults are committed by uniformed police officers – perhaps you have seen the recent videos of policemen beating black citizens for not wearing face masks in public. [So, why haven’t the Capitol police punched Donald Trump in the face?]

White America’s suspicions about the racial inferiority of “colored people” continues to cast a heavy, destructive shadow all across in this country.

African Americans live with the weight of that oppressive shadow every day of their lives.

So my question remains: what is the white church in America doing to help eliminate that racist burden for our brothers and sisters blessed by God with a different skin color?

Update 1: Please take a few minutes to watch political activist and former Ohia state legislator Nina Turner’s response to Ahmaud Arbery’s murder on HillTV’s program “Rising.” She speaks from her heart as an African-American mother, poignantly describing the effects such crimes have within the black community.

Update 2: I just read a southern pastor’s blog post lamenting Ahmaud Arbery’s death. It is a good example of what is wrong with so much of white American Christianity.  His analysis is entirely emotive and individualistic. In his mind, Arbery’s death is one more example of “sin in our society.” His solution is to “hold your children close” and “pray for Jesus to come quickly.” He has nothing more to offer. Frankly, it’s pathetic. No wonder African-Americans attend their own churches, while seeing white congregations as out of touch.