Our first-born child didn’t know an unhappy day in their first two years of life. Our second born didn’t have a happy day, suffering with severe colic until nearly 2-years old. Each night Tammy took the first shift and I took the last until our child finally fell asleep around four in the morning. Trips to our pediatrician proved fruitless. He only shook his head and then prescribed “colic” drops. The phenobarbital was all he could do.
For a brief moment we actually considered taking the “drops” ourselves. But we never did. Scripture says “my grace is sufficient” and we can testify to the truth of that during those years. At least for us. Mom lived just down the road but just couldn’t take the loud and unrelenting fussing. Her total time spent alone with our colicky child in the first two years of her life? Less than 45 total minutes.
One of the great memories of that period was listening to Moody Radio. Programs like Tony Evans and the Urban Alternative and Mike Kellogg and Music Through the Night helped immeasurably. Mike Kellogg has since retired after 42 years of hosting that show. Tony Evans though is still going strong and apparently a very busy guy. He continues to broadcast a radio ministry while pastoring a megachurch in Dallas. He’s also authored over 125 books including the first commentary of the Bible by an African American.
Dr Tony Evans On the Need For Racial Justice
Four of Evan’s books and a significant focus of his current ministry deals with racial issues in American. And he doesn’t pull any punches:
“The biggest problem in the culture today is the failure of the church. We wouldn’t even have a racial crisis in America if the church had not consistently failed to deal with racism as the severe sin it is. But because the church has historically ignored and downplayed it, the issue still exists. Where the church is called to set an example, we have cowered.”
Tough words from one of America’s leading evangelical preachers. But also balanced too as Evans recognizes that change must occur at both the personal and systematic levels. On the personal side, his message fits into the traditional evangelical approach to racial issues:
“This change first begins with the individual. We cannot change the nation if we don’t first allow God to change our hearts. We have to develop a heart that cares for our fellow man because they are created in the image of God. Not because they look like us or have what we have, but because they have the stamp of divine creation on them. And that means that you have the responsibility to reach out to somebody different than you, hear from that person, and build a relationship.”
But Evans doesn’t stop there, willing to push the boundaries of his faith tradition towards a posture of justice:
“The harsh reality, yet one we must face, is that unfortunately, all lives aren’t valued the same way. All lives ought to be, because every person is created in the image of God…It is now time…we reverse the course of history that has brought us to this point and that we reverse it on every level…The church must address racial, economic, health care and opportunity inequity, as well as recognize the systems that work against the fair treatment of people…And yes, we should protest evil in a righteous way. We should let our voices be heard, but then we must act because if we don’t act, all we did was have a speech.”
Evans still isn’t through. In fact, he is just warming up, willing to take on the three most feared letters in the evangelical world today. No that isn’t “sin.” It’s something much, much, worse: CRT or critical race theory, which he sees as “a post-Civil Rights social construct that seeks to demonstrate how unjust laws have served as the embedded foundation and filter through which racist attitudes, behavior, policies and structures have been rooted throughout the fabric of American life and systems even after those laws have changed.”
Evans considers CRT useful for addressing institutional racism caused by legacy impacts of past and present racist laws and cultural norms that continue to exist. He also welcomes the Black Lives Matter slogan. Not the organization which he is critical of, but the message of “lives of Black people matter in the same way all of us evangelicals say the lives of the unborn matter.”
Two Gospels
Now there are churches who have sued pastors who espouse just a fraction of what Evans believes. Pastor John MacArthur calls wokeness “the greatest danger to the Church that he has seen in six decades of Gospel ministry.” Theologian Owen Strachen sees wokeness as cause for disfellowshipping pastors like Evans: “In churches and institutions, those who teach and promote wokeness — binding the conscience of people with new unbiblical laws — must face Matthew 18 discipline. The church has tolerated the spread of wokeness too long. It is time for a line in the sand.”
Other evangelical theologians see pastors like MacArthur and Strachen to be directly attacking the gospel. Here’s evangelical pastor and scholar Michael Bird “Churches and Christian leaders who are concerned with racism, police brutality, affordable healthcare, protecting refugees, acting on poverty…as well as defending the unborn, promoting end-of-life care as an alternative to euthanasia, safeguarding religious freedom, opposing the gambling and pornographic industries, they are not whoring or compromised. They are simply doing what Christians have been doing for 2000 years which is loving their neighbor, remembering the poor, being the Good Samaritan, imitating Jesus, hating evil, loving good, and establishing justice in the gate of the city.”
“Having A Heart That Cares”
Multiple studies show a Grand Canyon sized chasm in racial perceptions, especially within the church. Michael Emerson and Glenn Bracey in their upcoming book “The Grand Betrayal: The Agonizing Story of Religion, Race, and Rejection in American Life” show that 87% of black Christians but only 30% of white Christians believe America has a race problem. When surveyed about fairness in hiring, housing, justice, and other societal issues, white Christians were the only ethnoreligious group to disagree that people of color were treated less fairly.
This contrarian viewpoint, rejecting the stories of America’s continuing racial divide, “isn’t a lack of understanding so much as it’s what we call the epistemology of ignorance— willful lack of understanding,” Emerson said. “It’s an investment to not understand, that I will not hear what others are saying, because it doesn’t benefit the way I interpret the world.”
This difference in understandings or beliefs is consistent across survey methodologies. Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) surveys show most Americans believe there is “a lot of discrimination” against historically marginalized groups in the U.S. Most white evangelical Protestants believe otherwise. And they are only ethnoreligious group with a majority of members disagreeing with that statement.
It’s not a slight disagreement either. In the language of that old Merrill Lynch commercial, they are a “breed apart” when it comes to the perception of discrimination against historically marginalized groups such as Muslims, Hispanics, blacks, and the LGBTQ.
That “breed apart” outcome persists in PEW surveys of whether or not blacks are treated fairly across a range of societal situations and institutions.
The Gospel Priority of Compassion
Honest question: WWJT (what would Jesus think) of the attitudes as measured in the graphs above? What would be his response to the massive disparity between two groups of people created in His image?
To wit, where would the Jesus in Matthew’s gospel who, when “Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd,” land on these issues? Where would the Jesus, as described in Hebrews 4:15 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin,” come down? Do you think Jesus would, as portrayed by the prophetic declaration in Mary’s Magnificant “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things,” discount the testimony of the historically marginalized?
Following Christ’s death, the apostles doubled-down on the priority of compassion. It was an emphasis of Peter “all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.” And Paul too: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” Not to be outdone, John raised the standard even higher: “If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?”
Compassion, which means “to suffer together,” begins by recognizing someone’s pain. It’s realized when someone else’s heartbreak becomes your heartbreak, when another’s suffering becomes your suffering.
Sounds pretty similar or at least connected to the Cambridge dictionary definition of wokeness as “a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.” Wokeness, a controversial word today, began as a part of African American Venacular English where it meant ‘well-informed’ or ‘aware’, especially in a political or cultural sense. It became increasingly used by the late 2000s and then popularized through the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then, definitions have proliferated and for many, it acts like a Rorschach test showing the projection of someone’s worldview onto current cultural issues.
So why don’t Christ-followers own this word, and through our ownership stamp a Christ-like definition on it? To wit: why can’t we embrace a Cambridge-defined concept of wokeness in a fashion following the example of Jesus, Peter, John and Paul? Where we wear the label “woke” courageously and without reservation? Showing a heart of compassion to those who are suffering, historically marginalized, and yearning for acceptance? First observing and listening through eyes and ears of a Christ-like nature, thereby enabling us to “suffer together” as we see the world through their perspective instead of ours. Then following up with action cast in concrete steps, unwilling to be ignorant nor silent.
Thumb on the Scale: Maternal and Infant Mortality
One of the first and easiest acts of Christ-like “wokeness” is to stop the epistemology of ignorance and begin listening to the stories of the marginalized and paying attention to the data.
Take the maternal and infant mortality of black women in America. Infant mortality rates of black babies are more than double that of white babies: 10.8 vs 4.6 deaths per 1000 live births. Because of such racial disparities, the United States ranks 33 out of the 36 OECD countries with only Turkey, Mexico and Chile below it. If Mississippi were a country, it would be somewhere between Botswana and Bahrain. Pregnancy related deaths for black women exceed 3 times that of white women: 41.7 vs 13.4 per 100,000 live births. Here, the United States ranks 60th in the world, just after Moldova and before Latvia.
Its A Complex and Troubling Story
Multiple academic studies show a strong association between race and pregnancy-related death, even after adjusting for potential predictors and confounders. Part of this may be due to differing health care coverage with 13.6 percent of Black adults uninsured, compared with 9.8 percent of white adults, according to the CDC.
But the data suggest a darker and more complex story. According to data from Florida hospitals, Black newborns when attended to by white doctors experienced 430 more deaths per 100,000 births than white newborns. But if the attending doctor was Black, excess deaths dropped to 173 per 100,000. Whatever the reason, the data is clear: a Black newborn’s “mortality penalty” is more than halved when cared for by a Black physician.
The differential in cumulative stress between Black and white women is another likely factor. Data show that the cumulative burden of chronic stress and life events, called the allostatic load, of Blacks exceed that of whites. Poor Black women have the highest scores followed by nonpoor Black women. These differences are small in the late teens and early 20s, but then quickly diverge. Poverty matters but is not the principal cause.
More generally, racial differences in health occur at all socioeconomic levels. Blacks experience earlier deterioration of health than do Whites. In each age group, the mean health scores for Blacks are roughly comparable to that for Whites who are 10 years older.
Final Thoughts
Tony Evans challenges the Christian church to stop ignoring racial disparities or downplaying them. Michael Bird challenges the church to avoid framing these issues through a culture war lens. Concern about racial injustice and prioritizing its redress is a gospel priority, not a Marxist or socialist-driven ideology.
The preponderance of wealth, income, health, and housing disparities I’ve written about in this and the previous blog should be alarming. We can differ in views on root causes and policy fixes, but a love-of-neighbor gospel priority supersedes those differences. Such a priority takes those disparities seriously from a heart rooted in understanding, compassion, and then action. Any other response is, in Bird’s words, a “derogation of a Christian’s duty to be concerned about the welfare and just-treatment of their neighbor [and] an attack on the biblical love command itself.”
The Good Samaritan didn’t know the history of the half dead man lying by the side of the road. He hadn’t seen the robbers and for all he knew, perhaps the man had it coming. He only had eyes for the need and a heart that cared. His compassion caused him to stop, reset his priorities, and then extend a healing and restorative response to the man.
Such a response is what the prophets commanded, what Jesus expects of his followers, and what the early church saw as normative. The 21st century church can do the same. But we must first see our current shortcomings as sin – including our posture of “colorblindness” which too often is a manifestation of Emerson’s epistemology of ignorance – and then develop a Christ-like heart that cares.
Then the work begins. We have a responsibility to listen and build cross-racial relationships. The church must tackle head-on the difficult issues of racial, economic, health care and opportunity inequity. We need to recognize where the problems are systemic and then work to change systems, like the civil rights struggles of the past. We must call out racial injustice in a righteous way. And we must act.
And for those who continue to insist that such social action isn’t a first order issue of faith, I would merely note that Jesus set up the Good Samaritan parable as a response to an expert in the law who, in an effort to test Jesus, asked “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”