The Manifold World of Biblical Values

Posted on September 1, 2022 by steve.ignell

In my last post I introduced a fascinating debate occurring on the center right about strategies of public engagement given a perceived change in the standing of Christianity in American society. At the center of this debate are a series of questions about the status of the sustained relevance of Christianity: (1) does society have a negative view of Christianity; (2) what does being a Christian really mean; (3) What are Christian moral views; (4) Is Christian morality expressly repudiated in today’s society and (5) will subscribing to Christian moral views necessarily bring negative consequences in today’s so called negative world?

I began by addressing the first two questions, noting how society’s view of Christianity depends upon the type of Christianity it experiences.  Pure Christianity “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” creates an attractive ekklesia marked by spiritual fruit “against which there is no law.”  A combative Christianity focused on “enemies” and aligned with outside interests in the “fight,” becomes an unattractive Christianity marked by works of the flesh. The proof of the pudding comes through dozens of studies providing empirical evidence for these divergent outcomes. 

The remaining three questions focus on biblical values and the reception of those values in modern society.  And like society’s view of Christianity, these questions yield markedly different answers depending upon what we mean by Christianity. 

A Personal Story

Some years ago, an employee at my former job transitioned to a transgender female. Apparently, this was the first such public transitioning in our agency so several of our east coast leadership came to assist, seeing it as a teachable moment for the agency. Although they had ultimate control of the day, I provided the opening remarks and hosted the meeting.

The staff knew something was up. We had not conveyed the intent of the meeting, but every seat in the windowless conference room was filled with people standing and spilling out into the hallway. It was the biggest crowd we’d ever seen with many of the 500 or so staff and contractors in attendance or watching remotely. There was a buzz in the air with a palpable sense of expectation.

It was an honor and privilege to lead this meeting. I advocated for acceptance, insisted we were our “brother’s keeper” and what happened to any one of us mattered to all of us. I spoke about the privilege of serving one another through a posture of generosity, kindness, inclusion, and empathy. Such statements were easy to say as all of them were part of a core values talk I routinely gave.   

The fallout from our meeting was overwhelming. Many came up to us in the days and weeks following to thank us, saying they had never been so proud to be part of an organization. Many knew I was a Christ-follower. It was one of the more significant days of my life.

I was recounting this event with a friend I’ve known since college. Our conversations often turn towards cultural issues so it wasn’t surprising when the topic of transgenderism came up. As I shared, my friend listened. But the more he listened, the more he became seriously troubled. What I saw as an easy decision, he saw as a difficult one. While I viewed it as a posture of love, he viewed it as an abandonment of truth. Whereas I imagined a reflectance of Jesus, he imagined the accommodation of sin.

The Discord in Biblical Values

An alumnus of River Valley High School in Marion County, Ohio recently told students, in a high school graduation speech to “choose a spouse” and when they do, “I also strongly suggest to make sure to choose biblical principles, you know a male with a female and female with a male.” 

Gordon Conwell’s Ruth Melkonian-Hoover sees biblical values through a different lens: “there is an urgent need for evangelicals—leaders and laity alike—to fully apprehend the “moral components of the immigration issue—honoring the Biblical values of ‘welcoming the stranger,’ keeping the families together, considering the justice implications of migration nationally and globally, and acknowledging the conditions in other societies that lead to immigration in the first place,” as has been done before.”

The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod views “Upholding biblical values” as a quartet of beliefs: the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman, the sanctity of human life, constraining sexual activity within confines of marriage, and the exclusivity of males for the role of pastor and the exercise of authority in the church.”

Compassion, a Christian child advocacy ministry, lists generosity, courage, love, respect, hope and peace as their understanding of biblical values.  Such values emanate from those who are Christian as defined by “someone whose behavior and heart reflects Jesus Christ.”

Awake America Ministries, “a trusted source for Biblical insight on Capitol Hill and issues that affect churches and believers across the nation,” puts out a Quick Reference Guide to Voting Biblical Values. Their view of biblical values, given that “the vote of every Christian should be based on the principles of Scripture,” is eight-fold: Life is a sacred gift from God, Marriage is between one man and one woman, personal identity – who God created and intended us to be, stewardship – God owns everything and we are to responsibly manage his possessions, work is honorable and noble and it is our purpose – even before the original sin; role of government, individual rights and responsibility, great commission.

Reconciling the Discord

Like ships passing in the night, “Biblical values” mean different things to different people.  To that Ohio alumnus, it meant a short list of gender understandings.  To the Christian university professor, it meant loving one’s neighbor when that neighbor is an immigrant or a stranger.  To Awake America Ministries, it meant a set of conservative policy choices they believe are supported by scripture.  To me, it meant Christ-likeness, heeding the apostle Paul’s injunction to “clothe yourselves with heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness.” To my college friend it meant confronting the culture with his understanding of truth. 

Such diversity in “biblical values” seems unreconciliable.  Not only do our theological convictions differ, so do our culture and personal histories.  These two dimensions – called our theological and sociological locations – profoundly shape our understandings of faith and are central to the stories we build for our lives.

But what if we could start afresh with some basic or first principles, formed by the gospel and independent of culture. And then see if we can arrive at a few central understandings of biblical values, faithful to the core tenets of the gospel? 

Of course, many any of our first principles will vary.  But perhaps it’s worth a try and for sake of moving forward, let’s start with a small set of core scriptures and gospel teachings which create the foundation for my biblical values: (1) a comprehensive integration of Old Testament laws given in Micah 6:8; (2) the sufficiency of Christ’s two great commandments; (3) the centrality of Jesus’ life and teachings; and (4) our calling to reflect Christ as measured through the fruits of the spirit.

First Principles: The Comprehensiveness of Justice, Mercy, and Humility

Did you know that most of us can distinguish roughly one million different colors? This amazing accomplishment occurs through three color receptors in our eyes.  Working together, those three receptors boil down the vast diversity of incoming light into its three central components. The receptors then provide electrical signals to the brain so it can deliver a one in a million answer. 

Just like the eye parses color through three types of lenses, God condensed His 613 Old Testament (OT) laws into the three biblical standards of Micah 6:8: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

These three requirements – to love mercy, act justly and walk humbly – form the beginning of my benchmark or checklist when evaluating an issue or when considering consider what my “Biblical” view should be. Like a statistic is deemed “sufficient” if it captures all the information within a data set, these three requirements are likewise deemed sufficient through their capture of the entirety of OT law. Omitting or diminishing any one of the three leads to a deficiency in biblical values – a type of moral blindness – just like the diminishment of one of the color-sensing receptors in our eyes leads to colorblindness. 

Benchmark #1 – Micah 6:8 tests our heart.  Do we really “do justice” or would we rather just believe in justice, an easily spoken abstract idea rather than sacrificial and concrete acts focused on others?  Do we really love kindness, a costly state of the heart, rather than a less demanding and often selective practice of performing kind acts? Do we really “do” humility, where humility encompasses every aspect our life and thoughts. Or is our focus on “showing” humility, an externally assessed mode of “walk” we control.

The 800 lb gorilla

Our human nature then throws a monkey wrench into the mix. Like the tip of an iceberg, our failure to act justly or show mercy becomes is easily seen and receives our greatest attention.  But like an iceberg’s undersea portion, a failure to walk humbly has an outsized influence in ways mostly hidden to us.   

I’m reminded of the well-known experiment where subjects were asked to watch a short video with six people – three in white shirts and three in black shirts – passing basketballs around. A reward will be given to those subjects keeping an accurate but silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera, thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Most subjects never see the gorilla when queried following the video.  They are so intent upon their counting mission that they become oblivious to the obvious. 

Our lack of humility acts in the same way. We naturally focus on the visible virtues and aspects of our lives.  But most of us miss the gorilla in the room – how we are naturally disposed to think we’re right and to be certain about that “rightness.”

This lack of humility, made known through by our sense of certainty, is an inescapable outcome of pride, the “one vice no man of the world is free.” And it’s unfortunately a driving factor in our conversion of life experiences into the meaningful narratives which guide our lives.

It’s because our “rightness” gets built into our stories and usually without our awareness. Such stories prepare us for the complexities of life, like a flight simulator teaching a pilot to fly.  They connect us together with likeminded people.  They teach us about values through the example of our forebearers.  And they enable us to efficiently live in a world overwhelmed with sensory input. But all this efficiency comes at a price and makes our stories like a two-edged sword.

Our stories must be instinctive for this efficiency to work, as Kahneman and others have shown.  We do that through mental shortcuts to simplify the complexity in our lives. The cost of these shortcuts however is truth, through compromised judgements now embedded into our stories.  We self-judge ourselves to be evenhanded, but we’re riddled with biases we can’t perceive.   

Our stories are shaped by the communities we join.  Our need to belong creates a new set of values, through a transfer of identity we don’t comprehend.  We protect our reputation in these new tribes by defending their values which have now become ours.   Our cognitive biases then finish the job through a motivated reasoning that binds and blinds.    

Qualifying Principle 1: Humility, Humility, Humility. Because our assertion of “biblical values” cannot be separated from our culturally-infused narratives, how should we then live? Perhaps we should listen to the words of St Augustine “If you should ask me what are the ways of God, I would tell you the first is humility, the second is humility, and the third is humility.”

Qualifying Principle 2: Circumspect in our Language. Given our human disposition to apply motivated reasoning to fit preexisting narratives, held with a sense of rightness sans humility, let us be careful in how we use the words “biblical values.”  To wit: the categorical assertion of “biblical values” when applied with an air of authority too often turns “gospel values” into “my values” which then “misses the mark” – another word for sin.

Qualifying Principle 3: Precautionary Towards Christ’s Mission. A spirit of humility leads to a precautionary gospel protective of Christ’s mission. This mission-first focus, when mindful of the diversity across the traditions of the faith, constrains biblical values to privilege first order faith essentials, adhering to St Augustine’s maxim of: “in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity. 

First Principles:  The Constraints of Love x Love

We often reduce the complexities of life into two-dimensional sets of maxims.  Wise parents balance authority and affection.  Good relationships arise from self-awareness and empathy.  And years ago, while working late into the night to help wire a friend’s house, the electrician abruptly announced that life consisted of “motion and direction.” 

Over the years, I’ve gotten great mileage from that last binary observation, especially in the workplace as a manager. But each of these reductionistic aphorisms eventually break down as the complexities of life refuse such simplistic answers.

Yet when the expert in the law asked “what must I do to inherit eternal life,” he received a binary answer that endures two thousand years later: to love God and love our neighbor with the second commandment as unto the first.  On those two commandments alone, Christ said, “hung all the law and the prophets.” Jesus then made it universal when he defined neighbor as those from a different tribe, race or culture – the ones we naturally reject. 

With just these two commandments, Jesus transformed the entirety of scripture into an interconnected mandate of love. Loving God amounts to loving others with our faithfulness to the former predicting our practice in the latter.  Hence the proof of our heaven-ward love is measured by our love for one another, especially for those who are different than us.  

This gospel of Jesus Christ is good news and our worship of Him and our care for others are two sides of the same coin.  When Jesus launched His ministry, he stood up in Nazareth and said: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Jesus was announcing the coming of God’s kingdom, the dawning of a new world order. Where the proclamation of His kingdom was mixed with hearts of compassion and an attitude of service, all joined at the hip and inseparable.

Benchmark #2: Our love for God and neighbor forms the two goalposts of our life.  Our devotion to Christ connects them together forming a Christ-centered path for our life. Any biblical worldview must be faithful to these boundary conditions, with our worship of God involving a love of people, and with the depth of that worship measured by the depth of our compassion for the marginalized.

First Principles – The Centrality of What Would Jesus Do?

Years ago, while building our home, just a day before sheet rock was scheduled, the weather service forecasted an impending severe windstorm. We had just framed the house according to engineered plans, so I’m sure everything would have been fine.  But to allay any concerns about the possibility of wind-driven uplift, I worked late into the night installing additional straps and hold-downs.

Each hold-down, affixed with an epoxied anchor bolt, can withstand 28,000 pounds of force. Now take dozens of them tied into 120 yards of concrete and you have a half million pounds of immovable weight ready and able to take on the southeastern Alaska winds. And when those winds showed up, repeatedly and with great force, I slept well every night knowing that the anchoring system would hold.

When we confess “Christ is the solid rock I stand,” we afix ourselves to Christ making him the foundation for each part of our life.  From our actions to aspirations, every square inch of our lives becomes attached including those things we call “biblical values.”

Such biblical values, when connected to Christ, incorporates a new kingdom ethic and countercultural way of living. They focus on character and the attitudes of the heart.  They arise through an alignment involving every aspect of our life – our thinking, behavior, perspectives, goals, and worldview –with both the teachings and example of Christ.  They make the Christ in us clearly visible to the world, seen within and through us.

NT Wright puts it this way: These qualities [habits of the heart] —purity of heart, mercy, and so on—are not, so to speak, “things you have to do” to earn a “reward,” a “payment.” Nor are they merely the “rules of conduct” laid down for new converts to follow. They are, in themselves, the signs of life, the language of life, the life of new creation, the life of new covenant, the life which Jesus came to bring.

In U.S. constitutional law, the court can apply three different standards when determining if a law infringes a fundamental constitutional right.  Their very highest standard is called strict scrutiny and requires the law to be narrowly tailored to meet a compelling state interest with the least restrictive means.  A law is struck down and deemed unconstitutional when it fails to meet this very high bar. 

Benchmark #3 Strict Scrutiny WWJD Test: In a spirit of humility and with an acute sense for the distorting power of our cultural narratives, are we willing to subject our assertions of Biblical values to a strict scrutiny-like test for What Would Jesus Do?  To wit: are our biblical values narrowly tailored such that they satisfy the compelling biblical interest of reflecting Christ’s nature in the least restrictive or most easily understood manner?  Hence, are we willing to deem anything falling short of a Christ-directed countercultural way of living, of a misalignment with Christ’s Sermon on the Mount ethics, unChristian and struck from our public witness?

First Principles – Spiritual Fruit

Over lunch the other day, Tammy asked a good friend of ours and a theologian by training why the “Christ in us” was so often invisible to our surrounding society. We had been discussing our calling of “image-bearers,” bringing a redeeming love into all the world. It’s a calling of vocation where we become part of God’s kingdom project for the present renewal of creation, as we await the final renewal still to come.

Like in Christ’s parable of the sower, the answers were many and all relevant to the question.  Such invisibility can arise from those who are “Christians in name only” like the seed quickly eaten by the birds along the path.  For others it arises from a superficial faith, a faith without root and hence withers under life’s pressures.  Still others get entrapped by the thorns of competing desires yielding a distorted faith that eventually takes over.

This latter category is particularly common and driven by a host of causes.  Materialism or consumerism hijack people’s loves because you can’t serve both “God and mammon.” Cultural allegiances kidnap Christian imaginations, changing one’s identity to conform to the tribe. Political ideologies exchange gospel verities, privileging a host of unbiblical notions such as individualism, authoritarianism, and populism. Christian Nationalism, formed from a mythic view of America’s origins, seduces many of the devout, turning their focus away from the “good soil” of a pure Christianity to be entrapped in the thicket of “guns, god and country.” 

Yet one category in the parable remains: “Others fell on good soil and yielded fruit: some one hundred times as much, some sixty, and some thirty.”

That’s it.  It’s what God wants from us, at least according to Jesus, and hence a governing basis for any of our biblical values. An inward transformation that yields an outwardly visible people of God principally known by a demonstration of spiritual fruit.  Listen to the words of Jesus: “This is to My Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, proving yourselves to be My disciples.” The apostle Paul then teaches what that looks like calling out love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Benchmark #4: Fruit Any of our values, beliefs, behavior and attitudes lacking in or inconsistent with biblically defined fruit fail the most essential and easiest to understand test of Christianity. 

A Modest Proposal

Let’s go back to the original question: What are Christian moral views? One obvious answer is “many,” of course, given the diversity within Christianity with over 33,830 denominations worldwide – unless we are willing to recuse some of these denominations, a task well above our pay grades.  Here, Miles Law “where you stand depends upon where you sit” rings true given our diverse cultural and religious backgrounds.

But what if?  What if we found common ground to at least reduce the dimensionality of the “many, by creating a small set of principles or standards derived from central themes of the Christian faith?  Like a fence enclosing a large pasturing region, such principles could allow for diverse theological and sociopolitical beliefs given the inherent complexities of life’s issues and challenges while honoring our calling to be “ambassadors for Christ.”

Using the four central themes of the Christian faith I’ve laid out in the preceding sections, perhaps we can ask the following questions given an issue or belief: are our views

  1. Presented in humility, circumspect in language, and willing to listen to competing views?
  2. Precautionary towards Christ’s mission?
  3. Honoring of Augustine’s maxim: in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity?
  4. Able to pass a “strict scrutiny” type of WWJD test, i.e., laser focused on reflecting Christ’s nature?
  5. Steeped in kindness and privileging acts of service, especially for the marginalized?
  6. NOT promoting beliefs, behavior and attitudes lacking in or inconsistent with biblical fruit?

If we can say “yes” to all of these for any particular issue, then we’re likely on the right track.  And if those outside of our tribe say “yes” too, then we have certainly warranted the label “Christian.”

Final Thoughts

Jesus said “blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.”  The Apostle Paul said “Christ within us [is] the hope of glory,” at least as long as that gospel stays pure.

We need a revival of pure Christianity, a Christlikeness that invades ‘every square inch” of our life.  Where cultural change organically occurs through the faithful presence of Christ-like followers. Full of people who look like Jesus in every walk of life.

Exchanging a worldview formed by fear and ruled through power for a worldview formed by the cross and precautionary to His mission: centered in Jesus with Christ-like servant hearts and a listening spirit; choosing unity over division, love over disdain, and kindness over outrage. Marked by spiritual fruit as we show the world we are “God’s picked representatives of the new humanity, purified and beloved of God himself, be merciful in action, kindly in heart, humble in mind. Accept life, and be most patient and tolerant with one another, always ready to forgive if you have a difference with anyone. Forgive as freely as the Lord has forgiven you. And, above everything else, be truly loving, for love is the golden chain of all the virtues (Colossians 3:12).”

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The Sin of Winsomeness

Posted on August 8, 2022 by steve.ignell

I still remember the phone call which launched one of the key changepoints of my life.  It was October 2002 and I was sitting along mom’s bedside in a Wisconsin intensive care facility.  Dad was next door, still in intensive care but doing much better.  At least his alarms were quiet unlike moms.  Both had contracted Legionnaire’s disease and if it hadn’t been for an improbable but minor car accident, neither of them would have made it.  Following the accident, they had been taken to a nearby hospital just to be checked out and within a few hours that initial check-out turned into a month-long life or death ordeal. 

This chapter in their life’s story had a mostly happy ending although mom, known for her singing, lost her vocal timbre.  My folks eventually made it back home and I did too, now in a new position as the deputy director of a medium-sized governmental fishery science laboratory. 

I hadn’t sought the position.  In fact, I hadn’t even applied until the third time it was offered.  I knew it meant a change in responsibilities, from a practicing scientist to the administration of science, from a player to a coach.  I had much to learn but the learning curve had already started. I had previously dealt with administration responsibilities as a science project and task leader. I knew my past experience in construction would prepare me well for the challenges of facilities oversight. 

Being a manager, however brought new challenges and learning opportunities.  With limited leadership training or supervisory guidance, the ball was in my court.  But those challenges became a blessing as it brought me to Kouzes and Posner’s book The Leadership Challenge and their five-step framework for exemplary leadership.  

Something clicked after reading their first step called Model the Way.  I had been wrestling with how to incorporate my faith into this new position. I had seen how some choose to openly display their allegiance to Christianity. Whether a t-shirt with a message or a Bible strategically placed, those options neither fit my style nor something I observed to be productive. 

Years ago, Kuyper’s famous statement “There’s not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not exclaim, ‘Mine’!” had also “clicked.” Kuyper was pushing back against the natural tendency to compartmentalize our lives.  He saw every aspect of a person’s life as interconnected, under the teachings and lordship of Christ. Hence, every part of our lives, to paraphrase the apostle Paul, was like a living letter from Christ. Written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, known and read by everyone.

The text of our living letter is in the language of the fruits of the spirit, the outward evidence of an inward work of the Spirit.  The apostle John says it this way: “let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love. This is the only way we’ll know we’re living, truly living in God’s reality.”

Modeling the Way means finding your voice as a leader – to know what you stand for, what motivates you and what you value.  I immediately saw the development of core values as a vehicle to connect my faith to the workplace.  To embed virtues, Christian virtues such as the fruits of the spirit, into the work environment.

I recognized back then the necessity of virtue, a message David Brooks later articulated in his book the Road to Character.  And how such virtue not only informs a leader’s actions and behavior, but also affects the atmosphere of the organization.  Leaders may exert less influence within an organization than one would think.  But in the area of organizational culture and climate, leaders have a profound influence. 

The Culture Debate

Fast forward 20 years where there’s a fascinating debate occurring on the center right about the proper role of faith in a pluralistic society.  At the center of this debate is the notion of “winsomeness,” a set of virtue driven practices seen by many on the right as outdated, no longer relevant or useful for today’s “war.” The debate is respectful and each article worth reading. 

It starts with James Wood’s article on “How I Evolved on Tim Keller.” Wood expresses a loss in confidence “that the evangelistic framework I had gleaned from Keller would provide sufficient guidance for the cultural and political moment.” Wood relies upon Renn’s breakdown of the present century into three stages of secularization – positive, neutral and negative with respect to Christianity – as a foundation for his analysis.

David French responds to Wood’s critique by asserting Keller’s winsome, missional, and gospel-centered’ approach is still relevant to the society we live today.  French concludes by saying: “We live in an age of negative polarization, when the cardinal characteristic of partisanship is personal animosity. In these circumstances, a Christian community characterized by the fruit of the spirit should be a burst of cultural light, a counterculture that utterly contradicts the fury of the times.”

Rod Dreher of “The Benedict Option” then weighs in twice, affirming Renn and Wood’s critique.  When you live in the negative world where “Christian morality is expressly repudiated,” says Dreher, so that Christians cannot “close one’s eyes to the fact that there are enemies, and wish to do us serious harm.” He believes the moment of winsomeness has past, leaving Keller and by association French “yesterday’s man, fighting yesterday’s war.”

Renn’s Three Stages of Secularization

Renn’s analysis has two general themes: how the standing of Christianity has changed in recent years and the right strategies of public engagement given those changes. Here is his central thesis:

Within the story of American secularization, there have been three distinct stages:

  • Positive World (Pre-1994): Society at large retains a mostly positive view of Christianity. To be known as a good, churchgoing man remains part of being an upstanding citizen. Publicly being a Christian is a status-enhancer. Christian moral norms are the basic moral norms of society and violating them can bring negative consequences.
  • Neutral World (1994–2014): Society takes a neutral stance toward Christianity. Christianity no longer has privileged status but is not disfavored. Being publicly known as a Christian has neither a positive nor a negative impact on one’s social status. Christianity is a valid option within a pluralistic public square. Christian moral norms retain some residual effect.
  • Negative World (2014–Present): Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.

Many readers are likely nodding their head, at least for part of Renn’s analysis.  Yes, they say, secularization is on the rise.  American adult church membership is now below 50%.  About half of U.S. adults believe Christianity’s influence on American life is decreasing (53%) with this sense of decline greatest among white evangelicals.

But does society have a negative view of Christianity, as Renn asserts?  Is Christian morality expressly repudiated in today’s society as both Renn and Dreher lament?  And will those who subscribe to Christian moral views face negative consequences in today’s so called negative world?

Let’s take their first question.  Most Americans hold to a positive view of religion, believing it does “more good than harm” than “more harm than good,” a finding that transcends all age groups.  But do these positive views still hold up if the word “religion” is exchanged with “Christianity?” 

Renn says “no,” asserting without evidence that the prevailing view towards Christians is now negative. Most white evangelicals would likely agree with 66% of them believing that their religious beliefs are in conflict with mainstream culture. They further believe there is “a lot of discrimination against them,” even exceeding levels historically faced by marginalized communities.  To wit: most Americans believe blacks and women face a great deal of discrimination whereas most white evangelicals disagree; most white evangelicals believe Christians face a lot of discrimination whereas most Americans disagree. 

But what if this gap in social perceptions really measures a gap in understandings about Christianity?  What if Renn et al. are correct for at least a specific type of culturally infused Christianity but wrong for a Christ-likeness infused faith?  And because of an in-group perspective which, in the words of Haidt, “binds and blinds,” all they can see is the former?

Which Christianity?

You see, there’s a bigger issue in play.  Those questions Renn, Dreher, Wood (RDW) and others are asking – such as what are Christian moral views or will subscribing to Christian moral views necessarily bring negative consequences in today’s so called negative world – depend upon a more fundamental question: What does being a Christian really mean?  To wit: when DRW assert that the culture’s view of Christianity has changed in the past three decades that being known as a Christian is a social negative, what do they mean by Christianity? 

The study of religiosity in general and Christianity in particular have long faced similar questions.  The scope and practice of Christianity is enormously broad with differences that are real, extensive and consequential in terms of beliefs, behavior, and outcomes. 

In the 1950’s sociologist Gordon Allport tackled this question by parsing religiousness into two orientations.  The first, intrinsic orientation, is where one’s internalized religious devotion becomes the central guiding motivator of life. The second, extrinsic orientation, is where religious motivation arises from social acceptance, security or status within a community or from fulfilling personal needs through achieving comfort or protection from personal troubles.

But even this breakdown of religiosity was too simplistic.  In 1991, Batson and Schoenrade created a third orientation called quest to describe people who treat religion as a search for truth, not as a means or end. Others measures soon followed, such as religious fundamentalism and doctrinal orthodoxy, each showing a different “brand” of Christianity as witnessed by a differing range of belief, attitudes and behaviors of “Christian” people. 

RDW’s Brand of Christianity

When RDW say “Christian,” however, they are not referring to an intrinsic Christian orientation.  Their “orthodox Christians” are “those who hold to traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality and the nature of marriage.”  Any who are “winsomely teaching Biblical principles” instead of speaking about gender ideology are cowards. All who “tend to downplay flashpoint social issues such as abortion or homosexuality” but instead emphasize “priorities such as helping the poor and select forms of social activism” practice an “evangelicalism that takes its cues from the secular elite consensus.”

Core gospel teachings or admonitions of Christlikeness rarely show up in RDW’s arguments. Dreher briefly espouses a love your enemies gospel mandate and, at least for Dreher, I believe that avowal is genuine.  But like a flywheel returning to its original course, he quickly puts the spotlight back on “Christian enemies.” We cannot hate our enemies, he says, but being “winsome world Christians” is a failing strategy for the world that exists today. We have enemies and “winsomeness is not going to prepare the churches for what is fast coming to us.” We “must read the signs of the times and act,” because “you’d have to be crazy to look around our country today and not be afraid of what’s happening.”

Here’s The Problem: A Focus on Enemies Changes our Hearts

Again and again, Dreher returns to his notion of “Christian” enemies.  “The idea they will embrace us,” he says, “or even tolerate us, if we just be sweet is no longer viable.  I don’t advocate at all hating our enemies. Neither did MLK.  But King also recognized that he and the movement he led really did have enemies, and those enemies were willing to do violence to them.”

Yes, King had many enemies.  But unlike RDW, he didn’t dwell on the threat they posed. King viewed his enemies through the lens of the gospel, not through fear. “And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls “the image of God,” you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.”

When we become fixated upon our enemies, something within us changes – as King understood and Allport’s research has shown. In-group/outgroup dynamics organically develop and organize our social perceptions. The Pauline perspective of “neither Jew nor Greek” gets exchanged for a them versus us mindset.  We then sort our affections around “us”-minded communities with religious dogmas amplifying this divide through creating an innate sense of moral superiority.

We become “principled theologians” where we instinctively protect sacred values. In the words of William James, “it turns us into intuitive prosecutors, on the lookout for norm violators as we set boundaries of acceptable thinking.  We easily assign blame and assess penalties, seeing such prosecution as a virtuous upholding of the “social order.”

A Focus on Enemies Changes our Identity

To his credit, Dreher repeatedly warns against “capitulating to apostasy or to hatred” in the fight against Christian’s cultural enemies. Society needs virtuous Christian communities in exile he says to prepare for coming persecution. According to his much-discussed book “The Benedict Option, “if they are not to be conquered, [Christians] must learn how to fight on culture war battlefields like none the West has seen for fifteen hundred years.”

But in our drive to force change – to fight in defense of our “faith,” the outcome is different than we expect. Although we seize the levers of power in support of righteous causes, we find those levers work both ways. The change is insidious as our loves misalign, away from the heart of the kingdom. It’s because our loves are informed by what we are devoted to and our devotions are drawn to the battle.

The battle within the culture war is perhaps the biggest hinderance to the gospel. And once the dogs of war have been unleashed, it’s hard to call them back. The battle pulls us towards our sociopolitical allies, like a tractor beam in a Star Wars movie. Our values change as our identity transforms through an assimilation process that “binds and blinds.” We become citizens of a different kingdom with a syncretistic identity we now defend.  We are what we love and our loves tell a new story of a devotion no longer solely focused on Jesus. 

A Focus on Enemies Changes our Faith

Gordon Allport’s most famous and lasting research finding was that Christianity both “makes” and “unmakes” prejudice. This paradoxical finding seems counterintuitive when considering the teachings of Jesus.  After all, as I wrote above, doesn’t pure religion, or an intrinsic orientation of Christianity, do good and oppose harm?  

Nonetheless his paradox endures when faith becomes mixed with fundamentalist or authoritarian sensibilities. Such individuals, at least within the evangelical tradition, are the most statistically likely of all ethnoreligious groups in America to discount stories of both domestic violence and rape and in doing so rationalize men’s violence against women, to exhibit a hostility towards members of groups different than them, and to exhibit prejudicial views towards racial and ethnic out-groups, Muslims, and those with alternative sexual orientations. 

Yet the same scientific studies show the opposite to be true when our faith is pure.  When you account for the influence of fundamentalism and/or rightwing authoritarianism in people’s responses, leaving an intrinsic religiosity that’s pure – “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” – those same studies then show Christians truly loving their neighbor, even when those neighbors differ greatly from them.

So how does this happen? What is it about fundamentalism and authoritarianism which changes the outward witness of Christianity so profoundly?

Fundamentalists are those who adhere to a rigid belief in inerrant truth. Policing those beliefs creates a focus on threats to those beliefs, leading to amplified ingroup/outgroup distinctions. Authoritarianism is a personality type known for its rigid moralizing of society and is manifested three different ways: by submission to authority, opposition to value-violating actions in society, and intolerance of out-groups. And here’s the problem: both fundamentalism and authoritarianism are prevalent within those highly orthodox in their faith. 

Now threats and enemies are part of everyone’s life but how we respond to them is a tell-all story.  We need the shield of faith and the clothing of love to keep our human nature in check. But we sink in our faith when our gaze is consumed by the angry seas the culture war brings. Galatians 5 tells the tale of the tape, about the battle within us between “flesh” and “fruit” and how the culture war sides with the flesh.  

Conflict and hate are two works of the flesh born of culture war’s outrage and fear.  Fighting, competitive opposition, conflict, and group rivalry are four works of the flesh arising from an ingroup/outgroup mindset. With the rise of these “works” comes the loss of spiritual fruit as scripture says you can’t have it both ways.  It changes our worship through distorting our loves, even corrupting our faith so that “anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”

The proof of the pudding comes through hundreds of studies showing the consequences of an enemy-driven focus. Including the rise of the non-religious (from a baseline of roughly 5% to the current level of nearly 30%), due in part to a backlash from the fight-forward religious right.  

Christianity is a Fruit Forward Faith

Yet those same hundreds of studies show an opposite result for a fruit-forward Christianity centered on love. Our spiritual fruit is a “show and tell” testimony to the extent in which we have “put on” Christ. It opens a window into the heart for “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.  Yet as critical as fruit is to the church’s outward witness (re: Keller’s “winsomeness”), it’s just as essential to the spiritual formation of an ekklesia called to reflect Christ.

Spiritual fruit acts like an indicator, an observable yardstick assessing the formation of Christ’s followers.   On the one end is the Spirit and the other end is the flesh with godliness at stake and “we are His workmanship” on the line. It serves as a guardrail, an external feedback mechanism, to keep us from going astray.  And like a canary in a coal mine when the works of the flesh displace the works of the spirit, we know we’re in deep trouble. Because an absence of fruit emits an unmistakable signal about an urgent need for change.  

The purpose of fruit is to spread a plant’s seed by its attractiveness to birds and other animals. Hence the metaphor of fruit as applied Christ’s followers gives us insight into God’s plan for the church. Our spiritual fruit is an external witness to “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit.” It bears witness to the “Christ within us, the hope of glory” as “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.” It’s a witness to our spiritual health as “every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.”

Penultimate Thoughts

A fight-forward Christianity is a deficient Christianity delivering an upside-down “Christian” witness marked by works of the flesh.  But the worst of its features is the opportunity cost for an “alive in Christ” Christianity to bring about change. 

You see there’s a different type of Christianity arising from those with gaze affixed, to the One in whom “we live, and move, and have our being.” Such an unencumbered focus, free and clear of the cultural fight, yields a Christianity reflective of His nature. That “reflective of His nature” serves as a welcoming beacon to a fallen world without hope.

The early church faced the same type of choice in a world more broken than ours.  They chose a fruit-forward message that became unsurprisingly winsome culminating with Julian the Apostate’s, the last pagan emperor of Rome, dying words in AD 363 “vicisti Galilaee” (You Galileans [Christians] have conquered!). 

Tim Keller’s Jesus-Centric message follows their historic path through a faithfulness to a fruit-forward gospel. It’s a gospel applicable across all ages, cultures, and walks of life without any negative downside.  To wit: in all my years of working within a secular culture, I have never been chastised for a faithfulness to Colossians 3:12 “cloth yourself with compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience.” Or for a Colossians 3:14 injunction to “put on love,” or a Micah 6:8 “Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God,” or a Good Samaritan orientation of Luke 10’s injunction to “love your neighbor.”  There are just no societal negatives to “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” 

A Better Perspective

Two different Christianity’s, delivering two different outcomes, yielding two different worldviews. Translating this into the language of Renn, it means America is simultaneously positive and negative in how it views Christianity, differentiated by the nature of that Christianity: 

  • Positive World: Society at large has a mostly positive view of a fruit-forward Christianity. To be known as a Christ-like person is to be known for a practice of virtue, born of Christ’s nature. Publicly being a fruit-forward Christian is widely seen as a positive breath of fresh air within a dark and hate-filled world.
  • Negative World: Society at large has a negative view of fight-forward Christianity. Being known as a fight-forward Christian is to be known for a privileging of power through an end-justifies-the-means weighted moral compass. Publicly being a fight-forward Christian is widely seen through polarized lens, an ally to one tribe and an enemy to the other.

So you want to change the world?

And Jesus said: “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven,” Jesus didn’t limit such glorification, as declared by a watching world, to a Renn style “Positive World.”  He saw such acclaim from others as a natural outcome of His followers being “salt and light,” a fruit-forward witness of the Jesus within them irrespective of society and circumstance. Being known as “His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” Establishing, using French’s language, a Christian community characterized by the fruit of the spirit [and] a counterculture that utterly contradicts the fury of the times.

Postscript: I’ll be addressing Renn’s second declaration “Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good” within today’s so-called “negative” world” in my next several blog posts along with a conclusion to this topic. The answers, once again, will depend upon what Renn means by “Christian” as well as his definition of “moral norms.”

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To Do or Not to Do is Not the Question

Posted on April 18, 2022 by steve.ignell

We’ve all heard the venerable proverb “actions speak louder than words.” It’s often attributed to Abraham Lincoln who said those exact words in 1856.  But the general sense of this phrase has shown up in one form or another throughout history.

John Pym, the English parliamentarian said in 1628 “A word spoken in season is like an Apple of Gold set in Pictures of Silver,’ and actions are more precious than words.”  In 1698, Thomas Manton, in his Book of Sermons said “So they would give him Glory, praise him with their Lips, and honour him with their Lives. They would make that their Work and Scope, that this may be the real Language of their Hearts and Actions, which speak much louder than Words.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his tale of Kavanagh, a story about romance set in the mid-1800s, added an interesting twist to this verity when he said “for we judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.” Longfellow’s observation about the human condition, now slightly changed, has endured through the ages.  We judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by what they do.   

A Biblical Worldview Cares About Outcomes

Our speech discloses the state of our heart for “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”

Our behavior and outward attitudes reveal the transforming work of the Spirit for we are judged by our fruit, not our intentions: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”

Our deeds display the reality of our faith for “faith without deeds is dead.”

Our actions announce the truthfulness of our love because “Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?”

Our “doings” show off the depth of our faith since “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.”

Even Jesus’ two great apologetics were based upon actions, not the force of a logical argument. How were people to know the reality of His divinity?  By the outward witness of love and unity from His followers. 

A biblical worldview of racial injustice must care about outcomes

Four questions. First, given the biblical emphasis on outcomes, why is racial reconciliation so difficult?  First, and a big part of the answer – as I addressed in my last post – is the triumph of culture over faith. I wrote: “When people isolate within their tribes and are blind to their biases, uninterested in other people’s stories, preferring instead to sustain a historical and pernicious cultural narrative, they no longer “see” racial injustice.” And if you can’t “see” it, you don’t think any action is needed. 

Second, given the biblical emphasis on outcomes, shouldn’t our posture be precautionary towards love, where restorative action takes precedent over presuppositional beliefs? The Good Samaritan didn’t know the backstory to the injured man.  He could have assumed the man’s injury stemmed from poor choices and just walked away like the others.  But the Samaritan wasn’t interested in assessing blame, just achieving an outcome in accordance with his faith. 

Third, given the biblical emphasis on outcomes, how do we handle scripture’s call for justice to the “oppressed?”  When Isaiah says to “Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow,” doesn’t that mean to tangibly take up the “cause,” plead the “case,” and defend the oppressor?

Fourth, given the history of the church as an enabler of racial injustice, mustn’t the outcome of true repentance include restitution to the injured party?  I’m reminded what Steve Pecota, my former pastor, once wrote “there can be no reconciliation without forgiveness and forgiveness requires repentance.”

Repentance starts with a reckoning, by acknowledging how we have “missed the mark.” It becomes outwardly manifested through a biblical principle of restitution, by making amends to the offended party. Attempts at racial reconciliation without the complete package of forgiveness, reckoning, and restitution will leave our nation’s sepsis of division unresolved – like sewing up a wound without first cleaning out the filth. 

Jesus taught reconciliation as conditional upon agreement, with the thumb on the scale given to the aggrieved party and the burden resting on the offender. White Christians who commend racial reconciliation while stridently opposing black perspectives aren’t seeking agreement in good faith.

Wouldn’t a biblical worldview suggest the very opposite?  Wouldn’t it start with a repentant spirit while leaning into the offended party?  Carefully listening in a spirit of humility ever ready to accommodate, where the coin flip under uncertainty goes towards the historically marginalized? And then ensuring that the fruits of the spirit characterize one’s speech, behavior, attitudes, deeds, actions, and doings in these interactions. 

Impediments to Biblical Worldview: A Magical Gospel

Many Christians believe that if we can just get folks saved, we’ve done our job.  People become good people through a miraculous transformation and then go to heaven. As the quartet song I sang in my youth goes “just a little talk with Jesus makes it right.”

Billy Graham rejected a magical gospel where problems are solved and troubles go away by people getting “saved.”  In his experience, converted hearts didn’t automatically yield converted actions.  He rejected the notion that if there was racial division, then get people just needed to get saved.  Or if there was marital strife and abuse, getting born again would fix it all.

Although many of Graham’s core beliefs remained unchanged over the course of his life, many others shifted as he grew in faith and understanding.  Our emphasis, he believed, should be on spiritual fruit: “the one badge of Christian discipleship is not orthodoxy but love.”  Rich Warren put it this way: “The point of life is learning to love – God and people: life minus love equals zero.”

“Learning to love” is a life-long commitment which scripture calls discipleship, my faith tradition calls sanctification, and theologians call spiritual formation. Such spiritual formation is the process of being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ for the glory of God and for the sake of others. It involves a daily transformation so that we, in the words of Wesley, are “habitually filled with the love of God and neighbor…having the mind of Christ and walking as he walked.”

Such spiritually formed people, a la Graham, are those who manifest Godly affections through both belief and action.  Truth is to be done as well as believed.  They see love as a verb, measured through actions assessed by the other.  Through that, they see racial reconciliation as a mandate of the gospel, measured by outcomes rather than intentions, and assessed by those historically disadvantaged rather than themselves.

Impediments to a Biblical Worldview: Faulty Theology and Church History

Here’s an excerpt from a recent Twitter thread from Dr. Anthony Bradley, a professor at Kings College, who provides an insightful response to a fellow pastor promoting a hyperbolic and nostalgic view of the gospel and church history:

“Evangelicals need to stop teaching their children bad history. Stop lying to them about the role of regenerated Christians in owning slaves, defending slavery, & defending and promoting Jim Crow…Tell them the truth: regeneration will not end racism in America. People not being racist ends racism whether they are Christians or not.

For all of US history, many white Christians have been regenerate and racist. Only unbiblical theology can’t concede that historical fact. This is the problem with the tautology that “the gospel will make everything alright” & that if people just “believed the gospel” issues like race would disappear. That’s not how the gospel works. Ex: Lots people who believe the gospel are terrible & abusive spouses and parents.

“The gospel” is not magic pixie dust that we can through on human action & make things go away. The noetic effects of sin don’t disappear b/c of the gospel. You can be regenerated & lead the KKK or run an apologetics ministry, owning massage parlors & sexually assaulting women…

The reason conservative evangelicals struggle so much with race & church history is that they’ve been fed bad systematic theology & church history.  Proof texting Bible verses doesn’t mean that you’re stringing those verses together properly…the sidelining of dogmatics, systematics, and biblical theology is sabotaging Christian ethics as the intersection of culture and public policy.”

Impediments to a Biblical Worldview: An Individualistic, Gospel

Dallas Willard, in his book, The Divine Conspiracy, laments how “the Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects.  This reduces the Good News to a “gospel of sin management.” It places us at the center of gospel rather than God’s story, where “The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.”

Soong-Chan Rah explains how a truncated, sin management focused gospel stems from an alliance between faith and culture.  “The cultural captivity of the church has meant that the church is more likely to reflect the individualism of Western philosophy than the value of community found in Scripture. The individualistic philosophy that has shaped Western society, and consequently shaped the American church, reduces Christian faith to a personal, private and individual faith.”

This rejection of biblical community in favor of Western individualism helps erode the bonds between sisters and brothers in Christ. Pleas by Christians of color about the continuing legacy of racism fall on deaf ears because of this individualistic perspective: the only sins that matter are personal ones and those have been forgiven.  Hence they can neither “see” the reality of racism or accept evidentiary claims of systemic racial injustice because of presuppositional filters formed by culture.

The choice before the church in every age is always: will our identity be shaped by Scripture or by our culture.  By the biblical story or the cultural story? As Lesslie Newbigin, the famed missiologist, once said “the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”

Impediments to a Biblical Worldview: A Shallow Gospel

Promise Keepers swept through Christian spaces in the 1990s, calling men to honor Christ, build strong families, and live godly lives. McCartney included racial reconciliation as the sixth promise of a Promise Keeper: “committed to reach beyond any racial and denominational barriers to demonstrate the power of biblical unity.” McCartney believed “there is a spirit of white racial superiority that has oppressed, suffocated and strangled men and women of color.” His commitment to end racism stemmed from obedience as early on he felt God saying “you can fill that stadium, but if men of other races aren’t there, I won’t be there either.”

The Promise Keepers pathway to racial reconciliation relied upon a revival of individuals. Speakers denounced the sin of racism; white men were challenged to repent and then reach out cross racially and ask for forgiveness.  Racial reform would occur indirectly through redeemed men, not through directive action.  Human nature was the problem and repentance, personal responsibility, and friendship formed the solution. Walls must be broken though and cross-racial relationships established for things to change. 

In the three years of its heyday, men filled stadium after stadium from the west to east coasts with enthusiasm.  By 2000, however, 10 years after its start, its decline was in full swing.  McCarney saw the drop as a backlash for focusing on racial reconciliation rather than “the gospel.” The magnitude of the push back gave him a “first glimpse of the seething giant of racism lurking within the Christian church.” It grieved him that when speaking in a church, he typically encountered “wild enthusiasm while I was being introduced, followed by a morgue like chill as I stepped away from the microphone.”

C.S. Lewis once said “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise.” Lewis wasn’t talking about any so-called “manly” attributes.   He was talking about the heart, warning about emotions which haven’t been anchored to immutable values through disciplined practice.

Lewis attributed this condition to modern society, but it could also be said of those who have embraced a shallow gospel consisting of saying the right words without the deep roots of discipleship. As Promise Keepers found, such a revival-centered, emotionally oriented, gospel without the much-needed anchoring of spiritual formation just wasn’t enough to defeat the power of culture and create men who embraced true racial harmony. 

Penultimate Thoughts

We revere Wilberforce for his dogged perseverance in seeking laws to abolish slavery.  We laud Martin Luther King today for his non-violent pursuit for rectifying a century of racial injustice in “the home of the free.”  Their sacrifice is now part of story about the culture changing force of the gospel. 

Yet most white evangelicals objected to King’s civil rights campaign on both political and theological grounds.  Their individualistic gospel hermeneutic saw his focus on justice as a denial of the sufficiency of the gospel. “The problem was not skin but sin,” they said.  America’s race problem was a grace problem and “Christ was the cure.”  Just preach the gospel and racial issues will vanish over time. 

Today it’s the same book with different bookmarks.  Racial inequities persist despite nearly 60 years of colorblind” laws.  Patterns of discrimination persist despite the appearance of race-blind policies.  These inequities and patterns are systematic, crossing multiple areas of life, 

Still much of the white evangelical church, like the past, refuse to “see” these inequities, entrapped in a culture that keeps them isolated, blind, and uninterested in knowing the truth.  Others “see” the differences but choose instead to “pass by,” constrained by gospel focused on sin and uninterested in outcomes. 

A Full Gospel

There’s an old saying that when all you have is a hammer, then everything becomes a nail.  A theology predominantly focused on individuals going to heaven yields a one-dimension view of Christianity that is overly privatized, horizontally limited, spiritually anemic, and operationally compartmentalized.  

But the plan of salvation and the gospel are not the same thing.  One gets you into heaven, the other joins God in the renewal of all things.  In NT Wright’s language, Jesus came to earth to bring something new, through the launch of a kingdom that was not of this world. As citizens of that kingdom, we are to be instruments of God’s new creation, planting signposts in hostile soil that show a different way to be human. 

This different way to be human invites us, in Jacobsen and Sawatshy’s words, to “mimic God’s own graciousness in our lives.  It calls us to become so enveloped in God’s graciousness that we become conduits of God’s grace and love for others. [This] goes to the very core of the gospel.  It is what makes the gospel good news.”

Theologian Alister McGrath once said, “a theology that touches the mind, leaving the heart unaffected, is no true Christian theology.” Stanley Grenz, drawing from the evangelical tradition, then added a third dimension saying “theology must then add the ‘hand.’ Thus, a truly generous orthodoxy arises when orthodox confession leads to a transformed heart to generosity in life.” 

So what should generous orthodoxy look like in the area of racial injustice?  Drawing upon writings from my last five posts, shouldn’t it be a gospel that:

  • “Sees” others as created in the image of God, carrying the stamp of divine creation on them.
  • Compels us to love through being quick to listen, slow to speak, and charitable in opinion, knowing that understanding conditions us for love.
  • Reaches out to people different than us, willing to cross group lines and establish meaningful relationships, recognizing that where you stand depends upon where you sit.
  • Sees “Learning to love” as a life-long commitment to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.  A daily transformation empowered by the Spirit so that we are “habitually filled with the love of God and neighbor…having the mind of Christ and walking as he walked.”
  • Creates a “biblical worldview” defined by acts of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and generosity.
  • Honors scripture through speaking up for the oppressed, the marginalized, faithful to Isaiah’s admonition to “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.”
  • Is “on guard” against the power of self to deceive through one’s innate biases, to adopt a tribal identity that changes our affections and actions, and to embrace cultural narratives that distort the gospel’s focus.
  • Understands the need for humility and a commitment to diverse faith communities as it protects against theological error while creating an environment conducive to spiritual formation.
  • Stops ignoring or downplaying racial disparities, recognizing all lives aren’t valued the same way.  Hence the church must address systematic racial, economic, health care and opportunity inequity, as well as recognize the systems that work against the fair treatment of all people.
  • “Sees” the struggle of others clearly through a heart that cares, clothed with a compassion that causes one to stop, reset their priorities, and then undertakes concrete action which extend healing and restorative actions in support of the other.
  • Refuses to hide behind a colorblind or individualist half-gospel, but sees racial reconciliation as a mandate of the gospel, measured by outcomes rather than intentions, and assessed by those historically disadvantaged rather than themselves.

Now that’s a full gospel, no?  

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Billy Graham’s Conversions

Posted on April 8, 2022 by steve.ignell

Billy Graham announced in 1992 he had experienced three “conversions” in his life: to Christ as Lord and Savior, to the principle of racial justice, and to “work for world peace for the remainder of his life.”

Four blog posts ago, I began writing about a journey of discovery I’ve been on for an America-I-never-knew.  The journey included several eye-opening conversations with African American friends who described a world very much different than mine.  Their lived experience raised many questions and I was struck with how little I knew. 

I learned about America’s horrifying past where the massacres of Tulsa and Wilmington form the tip of an iceberg filled with centuries of racial ignominy, inequity, and violence.  I learned how America’s racially disparate judicial system didn’t happen by chance.  The creation of dense, poverty-stricken, black neighborhoods throughout the 20th century happened through the force of governmental and private discriminatory actions. Then I learned how the legacy of those past discriminatory policies and actions continues today in a systematic fashion, putting the thumb on the scale in areas of wealth, income, justice, job opportunities, and health.

Throughout my journey I found truth in the maxim “where you stand depends upon where you sit.” The longer my travels, the more my “standing” changed.  As long as I made space for people’s stories, honored the data, critically examined the analytics of racial disparities, and refused to let past narratives cancel new discoveries.

Partway through this journey, I joined Billy Graham and became a convert to racial justice too.

The Priority of “Seeing” “Compassion” and “Doing”

An “expert in the law” once tested Jesus by asking “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers by telling a familiar story known to most of us, whether Christian or not.  A man traveling from Jerusalem was attacked, stripped of clothes, beaten and left for dead.  As he laid along the side of the road, several religious men came and went, offering no assistance to the injured man. 

 “Then a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw the man, he felt compassion for him. Going over to him, the Samaritan soothed his wounds with olive oil and wine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his own donkey and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. The next day he handed the innkeeper two silver coins, telling him, ‘Take care of this man. If his bill runs higher than this, I’ll pay you the next time I’m here.’”

The context to this parable is a most critical part of the story.  Jesus was answering the question “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” His answer – to love God and love our neighbor with the second commandment as unto the first – forms the very core of the Christian faith.  On those two commandments alone, Christ said, “hung all the law and the prophets.”

The Jesus Creed

Our love for God and others forms the two goalposts of our life.  Our devotion to Christ connects them together forming a “Christ-centered or biblical worldview” ruled by love. This two-faceted and interconnected rule of love – called the Jesus Creed – launches a new way of life with a calling to “be like Him.” As we abide in Him, we are transformed, becoming a daily witness of “his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.”

Christianity is a story of grace.  We receive grace through Christ and regift grace to others.  This is the essence of the gospel – how it’s received and lived out with Christ as the Center.  And the more His graciousness envelops us, the more we become conduits of His grace and mercy to others.

Living graciously shapes our behavior as well as our passion and attitudes. It creates a “biblical worldview” marked by compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and generosity (Colossians 3). For it’s impossible to demonstrate kindness to “others” if there’s distain.  It’s impossible to be reconcilers of racial division without a generosity to those historically marginalized.  And our generosity remains incomplete unless we have actions which follow our “seeing,” like the Good Samaritan who “saw” the man, felt compassion, and administered to his needs.

A Biblical Worldview “Sees Clearly” The Other

Jesus saw people too.  Matthew writes: “Seeing the people, Jesus felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd.” When Nathanael asked Jesus “How do You know me?” Jesus answered and said to him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” 

Our ability to “see,” unlike Jesus, depends upon the person being seen. In a fascinating study, researchers subjected white participants to digitally altered pictures of white and black people by various degrees: 30% (minor changes to facial features), 50%, 70% and 100%.  The white subjects reacted strongly to even the most subtle differences in white faces, but not to black faces, even when the differences were large. 

“Own-race bias” is a widespread phenomenon and enhanced through power dynamics. We pay attention to hierarchy and are quick to categorize.  We are more prone to “see” the boss than the janitorial assistant, more prone to see the wealthy than the poor.   

This “seeing” bias is hard-wired within us, yet we each have the ability to change through intentional actions.  Seeing people as individuals rather than a face-less “other” changes our attitudes and our actions towards them.  It means we must be thoughtful in our encounters with people, paying attention to their details.  We must approach people with the expectation of finding nuances and sophisticated behavior.  We must pair honor towards others with humility about ourselves.  We must, like Christ, see others – every single one of them – through the lens of imago dei, as those created in the image of God.   

Impediments to “Seeing Clearly:” Cultural Blinders

Walter Lippman once famously said: “for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define and then see.” We subconsciously pick and choose our facts so that “what is alien will be rejected, what is different will fall upon unseeing eyes…more often without knowing it, we are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy.”

Throughout America’s history, blacks were often “seen” through three pre-defined narratives, all disparaging to their character and abilities: simple-minded, incapable of learning; the “black beast” (a stereotype intended to create fear and outrage among white populations); and a lazy worker.

The first two, especially the one about simple mindedness, are seldom heard today.  Yet the poor work ethic narrative continues to show up in the data.  This accusation seems strange at first since black slaves were responsible for much of American’s economic growth of the 1800s.  Growing and harvesting cotton was incredibly hard work and the South grew 60% of the world’s cotton and 70% of the cotton used for British textiles.  And just this one crop, cotton, once accounted for over half of all US export earnings.

The persistence of this “lazy” narrative by a sizable portion of Americans is helped through two presuppositions: all Americans are created equal and all Americans enjoy equal opportunity in life. Hence, America is structurally colorblind and successful people of any race, creed, or background can pull themselves up by their bootstraps through an ethic of hard work. Given these beliefs, then the equation

Equally Created + Equal Opportunity + X = Unequal Outcome,

when summed across individuals in a population, only allows for a very limited explanation of “X.”  If there are unequal outcomes across different races, “X” can’t be an extrinsic (e.g., systemic) factor because of equal opportunity.  “X” must then be intrinsic, applicable within a particular race and found across a spectrum of individuals.

The enduring cultural narrative of black character deficiencies solves this equation for them. In their culturally defined worldview, bad outcomes stem from poor choices and poor choices stem from character issues such as relationship dysfunction, a lack of initiative, and a lack of responsibility. Much of the fault, their narrative says, lies with the government’s welfare program.  This is the “X” factor as welfare removes the motivation to work which then sets up a cycle of poor choices and the breakdown of the family.

To prove this narrative, they just need just one person of color who has achieved success against all odds.  See, they say, anybody can do it. You just have to work hard enough and want success bad enough.  It’s an argument that ignores the data and is rooted in probability neglect, a classic cognitive bias, in support a pernicious tribal narrative that puts blinders upon what one sees. 

Implements to “Seeing Clearly:” Isolation

“Seeing clearly” becomes impossible when, as Alexis De Tocqueville once observed, societies like the United States order themselves into two disparate or even foreign communities, one white and the other black. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. lamented the persistence of this racial divide by observing “that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.” Today, nearly 60 years later, surveys show that most America’s churches remain racially segregated.  Yes, things are slowly changing but any further integration faces stiff headwinds from the increasingly polarized nature of America where our religious, political, social beliefs all mix together. 

We not only worship separately, we also live separately.  White Americans still live in mostly white neighborhoods even as metropolitan areas diversify. Part of this is unintentional. People tend to sort themselves into like-minded communities, clustering around people who think and look like them.  The wealth differential contributes too, as the entry cost into many of these communities is expensive and beyond the financial capabilities of many people of color. 

All of this separation, whether intentional or not, hinders us from “seeing clearly” people different than us.  We need close relationships, cross-racial relationships, either through close living proximity or friendship before our “seeing” and thinking begins to change. It takes meaningful time together before meaningful change begins. Low to moderate level friendships (“but I have friends”) or contact (“I work with someone”) change people little.  In fact, they only increase racial division through enabling those who deny structural effects to feel justified in their assessments.  Its only when a relationship develops to the point where one can “walk in their” shoes and “see how they see” before the light of discovery comes on. 

Implements to “Seeing Clearly:” Willful Ignorance

The problem is compounded when the lack of understanding is willful, an intentional decision to not care about knowing. Sociologists call this phenomenon an epistemology of ignorance and it arises when people don’t see the benefit of making an effort to understand. They don’t see it worth their time because the outcome doesn’t add value to their worldview. 

We see this lack of understanding most profoundly in surveys of race in America. Most (87%) black Christians believe America has a race problem.  Most (70%) of white Christians disagree even though the data on inequalities is clear.  Most Americans believe there is “a lot of discrimination” against historically marginalized groups in the U.S. Most white evangelical Protestants think there isn’t.  When asked about fairness in hiring, housing, justice, and other societal issues, white Christians are the only ethnoreligious group to disagree that people of color were treated less fairly. 

Other survey organizations report similar findings. The Barna Group, an evangelical survey organization, shows 94% of evangelicals believe “Christian churches play an important role in racial reconciliation,” yet only 13% approve of the message “Black Lives Matter.” They summarized their data by saying “If you’re a white, evangelical, Republican, you are less likely to think race is a problem, but more likely to think you are a victim of reverse racism. You are also less convinced that people of color are socially disadvantaged. Yet these same groups believe the church plays an important role in reconciliation. This dilemma demonstrates that those supposedly most equipped for reconciliation do not see the need for it.”

The Barna Group continues: “More than any other segment of the population, white evangelical Christians demonstrate a blindness to the struggle of their African American brothers and sisters…By failing to recognize the disadvantages that people of color face—and the inherent privileges that come from growing up in a ‘majority culture’—we perpetuate the racial divisions, inequalities and injustices that prevent African American communities from thriving,”

Impediments to “Seeing Clearly:” A Colorblind Gospel

The apostle Paul’s declaration “there is neither Jew nor Greek…for you are all one in Christ Jesus” became the rallying cry for those who sought to end racial segregation in America.  Using language such as “unity in Christ,” “the body of Christ,” and Jesus died for all,” they saw such colorblindness as the solution for America’s racial divide. After all, the breaking down of walls of enmity forms the very core of the gospel itself.  And if only Christians could walk in love, uniting together under their commonness as believers, the walls of prejudice could be broken.

It wasn’t long before these same statements became the rallying cry for those opposed to addressing racial inequalities through societal measures.  The racial divide must be settled in the hearts of man, they said, not on the streets of our nation. A message of sin, repentance, and regeneration of the heart changed society, not a focus on social justice.  Civil disobedience was not only an affront to law and order, it was a denial of the sufficiency of the gospel.

A colorblind society, they said, kept an eye on the root problem: sin, not skin. It announced “all lives matter,” seeking a day when race was not an issue and skin color was overlooked. Slogans such as “black lives matter,” they said were racializing, moving society away from the aspirational vision of Martin Luther King who said “one day every Negro in this country, every colored person in the world, will be judged on the basis of the content of his character rather than the color of his skin, and every man will respect the dignity and worth of human responsibility.” 

Yet King later lamented the disconnect between his aspirational vision and the reality of America as he “moved through the ghettos of the nation and saw [his] black brothers and sisters perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity, and saw the nation doing nothing to grapple with the Negroes’ problem of poverty.”

Assertions of colorblindness without accompanying action are like the Levite who looked but walked away. The mandate to act in response to a need will be addressed in a subsequent post.  But I think the Levite’s problem was even more elemental.  What did he see when he passed by the injured man?  What narrative did he imagine that caused him to keep walking?  What distortion in his understandings kept him from following the Hebrew scriptures which are clear about the mandate of doing?

The problem with most present assertions of colorblindness is not just a “walk by” of the data, but that it’s not a neutral and fairly constructed character trait.  When people isolate within their tribes and are blind to their biases, uninterested in other people’s stories, preferring instead to sustain a historical and pernicious cultural narrative, any insistence of colorblindness becomes meaningless. 

It’s like missing a gate in a ski race. When we diminish the past, ignore the data on inequalities, and miss-see the present through a “seeing” formed more by culture than other people’s stories, we veer off the course and fail. For if we can’t see people clearly, we misunderstand their world – their joys and challenges, their strengths and weaknesses, their aspirations and needs.  Such distorted “seeing” then corrupts our first-order gospel callings: to walk in unity, be ministers of reconciliation, and to be His hand extended, like the Good Samaritan who saw and then acted to bring healing to the needy man.

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Wilmington’s Lie

Posted on March 13, 2022 by steve.ignell

My journey of exploration for a United-States-I-never-knew took another turn once I read Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. It received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and is a fascinating read.

Now 1898 may seem awfully long ago so one could ask: why the significance?  But when looked through the context of lifespans, it’s really not that long ago.  For example, I figure have roughly 62 years of memories accumulated in one form or another.  Although I was born in the 50s, I remember little before 1960, the year my brother was born and I went to first grade. I’ll be reliving some of those memories during my 50-year high school reunion this year. 

From one perspective, much has changed since 1960.  People have come and gone and I’ve experienced a rich lifetime of work, events, a new family, and experiences. Yet much has remained roughly the same.  Planes, trains, and automobiles still look and function similarly.  Houses are still houses and boats still boats. The world’s gotten smaller, but it wasn’t that large before. 

As an aside, Alaskan king salmon are smaller too, but still have their legendary incredible taste. As long as you get the very best product, don’t overcook it, and use minimal seasoning (I use a baste of salted butter and brown sugar).  That’s the secret to amazing salmon. Take it off the grill or out of the oven just before it’s done. Let it cook to perfection on the plate as people sit down to eat. And make sure you primarily taste the fish and not the seasonings.

The 62 years prior to 1960 tell a remarkably different story. Think about life before cars, telephones, cordless drills, flush toilets and expresso machines.  The mere thought of fastening thousands of long deck screws by hand brings pain to my right arm. But maybe that’s why God made hammers before he made drills. 

Looking back in history, 1898 was quite the year! The year began with the USS Maine sunk in Havana harbor.  Soon the Spanish American war was on and then it was off by the year’s end.  Not quite as short as the 100-hour Gulf War of 1991, but still pretty short as wars go.

Annexation was in the water that year.  New York City annexed the land around it to create five boroughs.  The United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands. John D. Rockefeller’s merged a bunch of oil companies to form Standard Oil Company which then controlled 84% of the United States’ oil.  And the Democratic party led by white supremacists led a coup d’état against a democratically elected government in America.

I wonder how many Americans have ever heard about this armed uprising leading to a successful overthrow of a legitimate government in the “land of the free”?  It took me 67 years before I did.  But then again, it took me 66 years before I learned about the Tulsa massacre. Maybe I’m just a slow learner.

Wilmington in 1898 was one of those rare anomalies of the Jim Crow south. A few years earlier, the Populist Party had joined forces with the Republican Party to form a winning coalition which included blacks. Other communities may have been racially mixed, but Wilmington’s elected leadership was also biracial.  Blacks held important government positions with authority over both the white and black parts of the community.

This was a bridge too far for many whites.  Having suffered through the loss of a war and new constitutional amendments, “Negro Rule” was a nonstarter. Plus, given the populist influence, many of the new legislative priorities – lowered interest rates, new tax laws, and new railroad regulations– harmed Democratic interests.

So the Democrats hatched a plan to overthrow a legally elected government.  They drafted a Wilmington Declaration of Independence calling for enlightened men who refused subjugation to an “inferior race.”  They formed white supremacy clubs such as White Government Unions to help plan the insurrection and whip up anti-black sentiment.  They launched an inflammatory propaganda campaign.  They set up armed “vigilance committees” and “citizens patrols” for each block. Lists of white women were kept to sustain the fiction that blacks were plotting to rape white women and burn homes. 

Then the Democrats did it, with gusto and brutality.  The massacre began two days after an election on November 8th. They wanted a chance to win outright through a campaign of intimidation, a combo of ballot box stuffing and ballot destruction, and teams of armed men prohibiting blacks from voting. Since they could not outnumber the blacks, they must “either outcheat, outcount, or outshoot them.” With the first two of that triad accomplished, phase two began and the massacre was on.

Armed mobs backed up with state militia hunted down blacks.  Blacks were usually shot in the back according to records from the local hospital.  Many in the mob saw this as great sport with one white man declared “we are just shooting to see the niggers run.” Hundreds of “Red Shirts,” a white supremacist paramilitary group, coursed through the black areas of town, breaking into homes, spilling blood while looking to lynch. Blacks fled the city into the surrounding swamps and forest, leaving folks like the Red Shirts frustrated.  Yes, they had shot their share of black men, but there hadn’t been a single lynching!  The armed crowd forcibly removed all the black and white Republican officials and ran those they didn’t kill out of town. “White niggers” were fair game too, including the Republican governor who was in town for the election. 

None of this happened spontaneously.  It was the climax of a full court campaign by the press and Democratic Party to demonize blacks and amplify the myth of an impending “black uprising.” 

These lies are perhaps the worst part of the story.  Sure, the killing fields are hideous, an unthinkable part of our history that infuriates any patriotic person to ask “how could something like this happen in America?” Yet it was through those enabling lies that the stage was set for the extremists to enlist the ordinary white citizen of Wilmington.  They needed to create an atmosphere of overwhelming fear and outrage.  And they did.

No story was out of bounds.  Blacks were deemed incompetent with poor character. Newspapers portrayed black men as beasts, sexually insatiable. White men’s “manhood” were challenged for not protecting white women enough: poor white girls on secluded farms needed men with courage, ready to enact justice at a moment’s notice. Trivial incidents became amplified into front page stories.  Innocent events twisted to increase white folk’s fear.  Rape epidemics declared although the statistics showed otherwise. False reports of blacks stockpiling weapons were printed.

No one was ever charged, something the insurrectionists relied upon before the massacre and found true following it.  Might made right, hence murder, ballot box stuffing, voter intimidation, and home invasions to whip and terrorize families were all fair game as long as the victims were black. 

Emboldened by their November 10th insurrection success, the white supremacists of the Democratic Party then set out to eliminate any future black vote.  The poll tax and literacy test were obvious tools, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898, but such actions could disenfranchise poor white voters too. 

Louisiana offered the perfect solution.  Called the grandfather clause, men whose fathers or grandfathers had voted before 1967 – two decades before the 15th amendment of the constitution – were exempted from the poll tax and literacy test.  This provided, in one white senator’s words, an “election perfectly fair.” Prior to its 1898 passage, 3000 blacks and 380 whites in St. Joseph, Louisiana had registered to vote.  Following its passage, white voters outnumbered blacks 369 to 14.  Its application in North Carolina found similar success. Registered black voters dropped from 126,000 in 1896 to 6,100 in 1902.

The spin following the massacre was unrelenting.  For years, this massacre, plotted and executed by white supremacists, was portrayed as a “race riot” instigated by the black community. The coup was framed as a righteous return to law and order.  The new mayor Waddell declared “I believe the negroes as much rejoiced as the white people that order has been evolved out of chaos.” Newspapers downplayed the destruction. The Morning Star first asserted “not the hair of any man’s head was hurt” and then backtracked to say that no unarmed black man had been shot.

Both were lies.  The Washington Post saw the uprising not as a mob but against conditions that had grown intolerable.  Northern newspapers deplored the violence but welcomed the change back to the “natural order,” where the “weaker race must bend to the stronger.” Victory celebrations commenced in several southern cities.

There were some who got it right, basing their stories on eyewitness accounts.  But their voices were marginalized until recent years.  The intimidation by the white supremacists with their skill in whipping up fear and outrage were just too much to overcome.  Even McKinley, who had a long and storied history fighting slavery and racial division, kept silent.  Bombarded on both sides but in the midst of the Spanish American war, he and his administration stayed neutral, reluctant to antagonize folks in the south. 

School textbooks began to tell the same mythical stories. Blacks had only themselves to blame.  After all, the Ku Klux Klan were assets to the community, bringing law and order through the intimidation of lawless men (read blacks).  As the truth slowly emerged over time, the spin continued to evolve.  It became just another incident of “racial violence” done in the distant past by people no longer with us. 

Quite the story isn’t it?  You should look it up someday because it’s a most relevant story for six important reasons.

It Reminds Us That Wholeness In America Needs Wholeness In Storytelling

The older I get and the more I read, the further I realize how little I know of our nation’s history.  Now some of this shortfall is surely memory related, as I’ve forgotten much of my past learning. Other parts may due to whitewashed curricula.  To wit: a Connecticut social studies textbook said slaves were treated just like “family;” a Texas geography textbook referred to slaves as “workers;” and an Alabama textbook called slave life on a plantation “one of the happiest ways of life.” Maybe that happened in the Alaska of my youth.  I just don’t know.

I do know that other parts of my shortfall have been self-inflicted, a selective use of facts, interpretations and memories to fit the dominative narrative of my youth. We are storytelling people acutely committed to defending our narratives. Our need for coherence trumps our desire for truth. And the stories we tell ourselves provide insight into our values, aspirations, and what we see as meaningful. 

I grew upon a conservative culture that fused a fundamentalist view of Christianity with nostalgic stories about America’s past.  America was a shining city on a hill, a nation of divine beginnings with a divine calling central to God’s purpose for his world. Stories like George Washington’s Farewell Address reinforced those narratives.  Stories of 400 years of abuse to African Americans, like the story Wilmington’s Lie’s tell, did not. 

John F. Kennedy said “Perhaps our brightest hope for the future lies in the lessons of the past.” There are still too many silent chapters in America’s history and too much of that silence is about the black experience. An America restored to wholeness needs to correct a nostalgic understanding of our past through a revival of remembrance. We need diverse perspectives from both inside and outside of our groups.  We need an inclusive society, where people arising from vastly different backgrounds are equally welcomed and accepted into our nation’s discourse and civic life. Zucchino’s book Wilmington’s Lie is one small but important step there.

Fun fact: the power of independent judgments was famously demonstrated by Sir Francis Galton in 1906 where he took guesses of the weight of an ox at a local fair from 787 different people and calculated the average, which came to 1,197 pounds. The actual weight of the ox was 1,198 pounds.   

It Teaches Us About the Dark Side of Human Nature

Stories like Wilmington’s Lie instructs us about the power of affective polarization which thrives on an antagonism towards the other.  Affective polarization creates a binary worldview of us versus them.  It welcomes anything which confirms that antagonism, opening the door to false narratives, distortions, and embellishments. Fear and outrage are its bread and butter.  It takes us down tribal rabbit holes as our identity becomes owned by our political or social group.  Then as we live in those echo chambers, the law of group polarization moves us towards more extreme positions driven by reputational needs and of the limited argument pools within our group.

It Exposes the Unbounded Destructiveness of a Media Amplified Lie

Joseph Goebbels once said “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” When that lie is shaped to invoke fear, we begin to hate without thinking.  And the rest is observed in history with Wilmington in 1898 being a prime example. 

Daniels, the editor and publisher of North Carolina’s most influential paper, and other newspaper men of that time understood the power of the press to move people. Especially white people and there was no greater motivator than the twin menaces of black suffrage and black beast rapists.  Daniels needed white men to “take the law in their own hands and by organized force make the negroes behave themselves.” So he launched a constant barrage of inflammatory lies and succeeded. 

It Shows Us Our Theology Can Be Wrong

Many in that era thought they were doing the Lord’s business.  Leading theologians like Thornwell taught slavery was normative from a scriptural perspective: any other opinion was extrabiblical and vain philosophy. Some pastors stayed neutral or did what they could to reduce the violence.  But many pastors joined the mob or supported the insurrection. Three days after the massacre, James Kramer of Wilmington’s Brooklyn Baptist Church said: “God from the beginning of time intended that intelligent white men should lead the people…In the riot, the negro was the aggressor. I believe the whites were doing God’s services, as the results have been good”

The idolatry of the god, guns and country face of Christian Nationalism shone brightly in the story. One letter to President McKinley said “men with white skins, sons of revolutionary ancestors…lovers of the Union and the constitution…are leading the victorious column this morning and will rule North Carolina ever hereafter.  No need of troops now.  Praise God!”

It Reveals the Vulnerability of Liberal Democratic Principles

Waddell, the insurrectionist made Mayor after the massacre, dared federal authorities to intervene in their affairs. His words: there aren’t enough soldiers in the US Army to make whites give up the vote.” The Wilmington story is a story of intentional disregard for the constitution, the rule of law, and democratic principles.  This disregard was created through a steady diet of lies with malicious intent to whip up fear and outrage. The fear and outrage tapped into a moral depravity deep in the hearts of the white citizens of the area, removing any barriers to the outbreak of evil. 

This just wasn’t a story about a few bad apples taking control of the city.  Yes, I’m sure there was nuance with many citizens uncomfortable about the events which took place that day.  Yet the underlying support was broad enough and the force of intimidation strong enough to overcome any moral or constitutional principles in its way.

Final Thoughts Without Commentary

Wilmington’s Lie is a relevant today because of a critical need in America today to understand how: (1) wholeness in America requires wholeness in storytelling, (2) hope for the future requires a full uncovering of the past, (3) there is a dark and innate side of human nature itching for division, (4) bad theology can enable racial division, (5) liberal democratic principles are vulnerable to the lie and the mob enabled through polarization, (6) the unbounded destructiveness of a media amplified lie.

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Matters of the Heart

Posted on March 7, 2022 by steve.ignell

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?”  

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Houston, We Have a Problem

Posted on February 28, 2022 by steve.ignell

My journey of exploration for a United-States-I-never-knew took a new turn following a movie in North Seattle just before the pandemic hit. Tammy and I along with four other couples from one of our church’s small group fellowships were there to see Just Mercy. After the movie we gathered at a nearby coffee shop to download and process our reactions. 

Many of us were still in shock.  The story we had just experienced was infuriating, devastating, and damning.  Things we sort of knew, but only in an abstract, clinical way, became visible in living color and imprinted upon both our mind and spirit.  I teared up at several points, something I never do in movies, moved by not only the enormity of the story, but with a disquieting sense about the scale of this issue throughout an aspect of American history still largely unknown to me.

Just Mercy is a true story about one young man’s extraordinary efforts to free an innocent man on death’s row.  Bryan Stevenson, fresh out of Harvard Law, travels to Alabama and finds a deeply racialized society with the justice system and political power all stacked against African American community.  The blindfolded Lady Justice as represented on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t exist here.  Instead, her scales are rigged and the blindfold ripped off even though it’s been decades since the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

Stevenson eventually succeeds in overturning his client’s conviction, but only with great difficulty, skill, and personal cost.  He then goes on to create the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) which provides legal representation to those who have been denied a fair trial, wrongly convicted, or without sufficient funds to hire effective representation. 

Stevenson declares “My faith influences and shapes everything I do.” He quotes Micah 6:8 as his calling: ‘What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’  He sees this calling as non-negotiable given the estimated 1 – 5% of those incarcerated to be innocent.

Thumb on the scale: Racial Disparity in a One-of-a-Kind Criminal Justice System

The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners.  U.S. incarceration rates in 2008 exceeded that of the Soviet Union during its infamous Gulag system. Today about 7 million adults representing 3% of the U.S. population are under some sort of prison control.

War on Drugs

Thirty years ago, the story was much different.  Then Nixon’s War on Drugs was launched and in less than 30 years, the U.S. prison population rose from around 300,000 to 2,000,00 with most of the increase arising from drug convictions. 

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The soaring arrest and incarceration rates came from disproportionately targeted African Americans. Despite roughly similar rates of drug usage between the races, drug-related imprison rates for blacks became 6 times greater than whites. Even though 5% of illicit drug users are Blacks, Blacks who represent 14% of the U.S. population have made up 29% of those arrested and 33% of those incarcerated for drug offenses.  

Compounded Selectivity

Such disparities don’t happen by chance.  They are the outcome of sequential inequalities against blacks at every stage along the criminal justice system.  Like interest in the bank, these inequalities compound stage after stage until the disparities reach improbable levels.  Here’s how this works.

It starts with selective targeting by police, focusing efforts according to racial composition rather than actual crime likelihood.  Even when crime is not at issue, such as in highway stops, racial targeting remains extensive.  Not only do multiple studies bear this out, so do the personal experiences of many African American such as Senator Tim Scott from North Carolina who has been personally stopped 18 times for “driving while Black.”

These targeted searches mixed with police discretion too often yield a fishing expedition composed of pretend traffic stops and bullied consent.  Plus, there’s financial incentives too, from federal arrest incentives to liberal forfeiture laws which then feed back into the targeting strategies.

Selective sentencing then piles onto selective targeting.  Race matters whether a person is sentenced to incarceration or community “supervision.” Young, male, or unemployed Black and Hispanic offenders are more likely than whites to be sentenced to prison for the same crime.  This disparity deepens when considering sentence length with Blacks receiving a 20% longer sentencing period than whites for the same crime.

A vicious feedback loop develops when prior criminal records carry substantial weight in sentencing. Inequalities (e.g., the initial 6:1 disparity in arrest likelihood per crime event) get amplified again and again increasing racially disparate justice.   A study of Minnesota’s imprisonment rates show that two thirds of the racial disparities were due to criminal history factors imposed at sentencing. 

The severity of the sentencing can also be racially disparate.  The historic (but now modified) 100-to-1 rule for crack versus powdered cocaine possession is one of the best known examples. Under the old “War on Drugs” inspired law passed in 1970, it took 500 grams of cocaine to receive the same 5-year mandated sentence for 5 grams of crack. So why the difference in severity as both drugs are chemically similar?  The most telling difference was in user profiles with crack used primarily by impoverished minority users and powdered by more upscale users.  

But the disparity has only begun.  You can serve your time and pay your debt to society, but life after incarceration brings its own form of prison.  Convicted felons lose rights and face a world much different than before their “time spent.”  It varies state by state but for many, their ability to vote, own firearms, and be a juror is taken away.  Employment becomes restricted along with access to federal or state grants, public housing, and many federal benefits. Their unalienable Rights, such as Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness have now become alienable, unprotected from the whims of the majority. 

A new class of Americans

  • 1 of 3 Black, 1 of 6 Latino, and 1 of 17 white boys born today will likely be sentenced to prison;
  • 1 of 8 Black men in their twenties are locked up on any given day;
  • 3 or 4 black men in Washington DC can expect to serve time in prison
  • 4 of 5 young black men in many cities have criminal records and face a lifetime of legal discrimination
  • 50% of wrongly accused exonerations as documented by the National Registry of Exonerations were Black.
  • Black defendants are 22% more likely to have convictions exonerated due to police misconduct

Thumb on the scale: Modern Day Wealth and Income Disparities as an Outcome of Legacy Discrimination

America’s racially disparate judicial system couldn’t have happened without the legacy impacts of past discriminatory policies and actions.  The creation of dense, poverty-stricken, black neighborhoods throughout the 20th century happened through the force of law and the force of majority actions.  Limited housing options absent the power of choice imposed a heavy toll upon much of black America.  It led to urban crowding and rise of the urban ghetto.  It amplified socioeconomic vulnerabilities as it shoehorned crime into small, easy to target, areas.  It set the stage for wealth and income disparities that continue today though decades removed from the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. 

Wealth Disparities

In 2019, the median white household held $188,200 in wealth vs $24,500 for black households with 25.8% of blacks and 10.6% of whites having negative wealth. After controlling for education, median black household wealth remained substantially less (70%) of the median white household.  Age-adjusted wealth of blacks nearing retirement is 10% of the wealth of whites. There is a 6-fold difference in per capita inheritance (30% of white households received an average inheritance of $195,500 compared to 10% of Black households with an average inheritance of $100,000).  There is a 2.7 -fold difference in home value (73% of white versus 42% of Black families own homes with an average value of $230,000 for white versus $150,000 for Black families). 

Underlying Causes?

There are many hypotheses explaining these inequalities and it is beyond the scope of this blogpost to fully adjudicate between them. I will say, however, that I spent most of my life in a world where folks like Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell and George Guilder associated racial inequalities to the breakdown in black family structure, the unintended consequences of welfare programs, and the harm of moral decay. Discrimination wasn’t a factor, racism wasn’t systemic, and the welfare program was government’s only enduring sin. The onus was on blacks and they held the key through the power of self-determination.  Just as long as the government got out of the way and they were up to the task.

But are blacks truly up to the task?  Now there’s an inflammatory question.   But it’s a sad fact that a dominant answer throughout most of American history has been “no.” Prior to 1700, most whites viewed black slaves as not human and incapable of learning. Then came the notion of a simple-minded, docile black man as stereotyped by the Sambo image.  The blackface stereotype became popular in the 19th century when white actors or singers darkened their faces with burnt cork, painted grotesquely exaggerated white mouths over their own, and wore woolly black wigs to create the “city dandy,” a northern counterpart to the southern “plantation darky” Sambo.  A third stereotype saw African Americans as “shuffling and drawling, cracking and dancing, wisecracking and high stepping” buffoons.  The 1915 released movie “Birth of a Nation” portrayed blacks (many of which were white actors in blackface) as stupid and sexually aggressive toward white women.

The belief that black Americans lacked motivation to work was also a dominant narrative.  The Washington Post correspondent Henry West called “the typical black man of North Carolina to be a “thriftless, improvident, does not accumulate money, and is not accounted as desirable citizen.” Southern legislatures adopted black codes centered around vagrancy laws where it became a criminal offense to not have proof of a job, opening the door to convict laws which returned black labor to the plantations in a slave-like fashion.  Those codes, rationalized through a disparaging narrative of the black character, were eventually overturned through federal legislation and constitutional amendments.  But many of those sensibilities have remained.

The graph above measures racial resentment using Kinder and Sander’s metric of how much white Americans “attribute socioeconomic disparities of black and white Americans to racial discrimination or to a lack of hard work and perseverance by black Americans. The more one agrees with the general sentiment that black people’s lack of effort is the primary reason for racial disparities, the higher that individual’s racial resentment score.”

So, are the large and enduring wealth inequalities an outcome of poor work ethics? 

The Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank disagrees.  They see the current racial wealth gap as systemic, a legacy of our past with persistent staying power: “The current racial wealth gap is the consequence of many decades of racial inequality that imposed barriers to wealth accumulation either through explicit prohibition during slavery or unequal treatment after emancipation. Examples of post emancipation barriers include legally mandated segregation in schools and housing, discrimination in the labor market, and redlining, which reduced access to capital in black neighborhoods. And…it may be surprising how little the racial wealth gap has changed over the past half century, even after the passage of civil rights legislation. In fact, the 2016 wealth gap is roughly the same as it was in 1962.”

Income Disparities

In 1962, black households earned 52% that of white households.  Little has changed since then with the percentage increasing to 58% in 2007 and then falling steeply after the recession of 2007 – 2009.  The black unemployment rate roughly doubles that of white unemployment. Whites seeking employment receive about 36% more callbacks than blacks given similar qualifications.

Does the blame for the large and enduring income inequalities reside with deficiencies in black communities? 

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco says no: “a significant portion of the wage gap between blacks and whites is not traceable to differences in easily measured characteristics [demographic, education, job type, socioeconomic, etc}, but rather is unexplained…the consistency of the black-white wage gap across the full spectrum of subgroups in our data indicates that the forces contributing to the wage gap apply to the entire population of black workers.”

The Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank agrees, calling us to look elsewhere: “closing the racial income gap…leads to another broad set of questions…such as racial discrimination in the labor market, incarceration policies, and skills…the role of factors such as deindustrialization, neighborhoods, and schools…the intergenerational transmission of income is lower for blacks than for their white counterparts at all levels of income.”

Synthesis

In my old job, “they” made me take a course in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970.  This law saturated our agency’s business and although my work never directly required this expertise, employees I supervised did and someone upstairs determined that folks like me needed to know.  Mostly likely to feel their pain, but in any event, to at least understand how this legislative act was important within our agency and hence connected to our mission. 

I intentionally left the textbook upon retirement. I’ll never used it nor will I ever need to use it.  And if that black swan event ever arises and NEPA enters my life, I’ll invoke the famous “I don’t recall” line of criminals/politicians and then run and duck for cover. 

I did, however, learn one useful concept in my training. Though many development activities may be individually minor in effect, over time the cumulative effect can often be highly significant.  Even exceeding the severity in impact of a major direct effect.  Because it’s the cumulative effects that make the biggest difference.

One way to “see” the impact of the many legacy creating cumulative effects is to borrow the following language from our Declaration of Independence: “The history of the present King of Great Britain [insert United States] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations…To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”  The United States government:

  • chose to build racially separate public housing in cities without a segregation history.
  • gave developers FHA guarantees for building segregated housing.
  • urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws enabling white flight.
  • allowed State courts to evict black homeowners in neighborhoods with racially restrictive covenants
  • allowed churches, universities, and hospitals restrictive covenants while keeping their tax-exempt status.
  • allowed police to support leaders of mob violence when blacks tried to move into white neighborhoods.
  • allowed state real estate commissions to ignore brokers who imposed segregation in neighborhoods.
  • allowed school boards to place schools and attendance boundaries to separate black from white students.
  • allowed highway planners to run new highways through black neighborhoods helping create urban ghettos.
  • denied equal labor rights to black workers, helping to trap them in low-income neighborhoods.
  • provided tax breaks to the suburbs while neglecting giving support to the inner city.

All of these actions by state, federal and local officials fueled the division of our country by race.  It gave cover to the majority white population to do the same through their own discriminatory actions such as redlining. It led to the creation of ghettos and the restriction of wealth building by black families.  It created an acute sensitivity to inner-city employment dynamics. 

Then as they were forced to live packed together in confined urban areas while being shut out of the suburbs, globalization and de-industrialization brought the perfect storm to black America.  More than 70% of inner-city blacks held blue-collar jobs in 1970.  By 1987, however, industrial employment of black men dropped to 28%.  Many of the jobs had moved to the suburbs or overseas, but the legacy housing policies kept blacks hemmed in the city. A whole generation of inner-city black men became isolated, jobless and only 18% of them had access to a car.

Crime rates rose but rather than addressing root causes, the War of Drugs became a war on symptoms. Enforcement agencies placed a target on urban communities where they could get the most “bang for the buck.” And then through feedback mechanisms of selectivity begetting selectivity, the war on symptoms created a new caste of Americans: young black men with criminal records permanently sidelined in society. 

Final Thoughts

Throughout my journey I found truth in the old maxim “where you stand depends upon where you sit.” And the longer my travels, the more my “standing” changed – as long as I made space for people’s stories and the analytics of racial disparities. I refused to let past narratives, formed in cultural echo chambers, cancel new discoveries. I needed, in Galef’s language, to adopt a scout rather than a soldier mindset.  Soldiers prioritize defending themselves and their tribal narratives.  Scouts prioritize discovering the truth independent of those narratives. In doing this, scouts prioritize listening to others, heeding Baldwin’s words. “If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected — those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! — and listens to their testimony.”

Isn’t it time we hold in abeyance our hypotheses and preconceived notions and just begin to listen?  Intentional about becoming a scout, able to change where we stand as a posture of listening changes where we sit.   

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A Journey of Discovery

Posted on February 22, 2022 by steve.ignell

It took me nearly 60 years before I finally understood. Yes, the ground had been laid in the preceding decade as I increasingly challenged some of my past tribal narratives. But it took two separate events within the space of a week to nail this lesson home once and for all. That there was structural unequalness between the races in society and that my understandings on America’s racial issues were woefully incomplete. 

We are storytelling people acutely committed to defending our narratives.  Changing those narratives is hard work, especially when they arise from a cultural tradition embedded deep within our subconscious. It usually takes life events of great love or pain to push through those boundaries.  In my case, it was love.

I can still picture myself sitting in a friend’s living room.  There was an event that day and the house was packed.  Most people had moved into the kitchen and family room. That’s where the food was and it was time to eat.  Just a few of us remained in the living room and while waiting for the lines to shorten, I struck up a conversation with an African-American woman whom I had seen for years but never spoken to one on one. 

We talked about work, family, church, and life in general. She was a professional woman, well-educated and respected.  Somehow, we got on the subject of cars. They had an expensive European car and an older American car which had seen better days.  The older car was a burden to drive and on one of her travels in that car to a professional meeting in Kirkland, she recounted a story of how she got lost and kept circling and circling trying to break free of Kirkland’s confusing back streets.

She spoke about feeling trapped.  The more she tried to find a way out, the greater the fear.  She just knew someone would call the police, believing she had no business in such an upscale neighborhood.  It was a scenario she had experienced before, a perverted form of Newton’s 3rd law of motion.  To wit: a black woman driving a run-down car in an affluent neighborhood yielding a likely reaction from the police and all of the uncertainty that follows.

I’ll never forget the sense of terror she conveyed that day.  The residual fear was palpable just like it was a week later when we had another professional African-American woman in our home.  Her son was embarking on a journey from college to another part of the country where a new job awaited him.  His journey required traversing vast remote areas noted for aggressive policing, especially towards people of color. As long as he started early enough, all would be fine. He’d be able to pass through these areas in daylight with the rest of the journey in more friendly territory. 

But his day had started off with a broken-down car and by the time it was fixed, the morning was gone.  It meant driving at night through a region with a reputation and all of the uncertainty that follows. Once again, I witnessed the emotions from a terror-filled woman. We prayed and she paced, and she paced and we prayed until she heard from her son that he was in a safe place. 

A Journey of Discovery

Walter Lippman’s observation “for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define and then see,” rang true that week. I found a world of discovery awaiting me.  I listened to a friend about the “talk” he gave to his racially different adopted son, a “talk” he never had to make with his naturally born white children. I began reading books, embarking on my own journey of exploration for a United States I had never known. 

I read Martin Luther King’s (MLK) book Stride Towards Freedom and his Letter from a Birmingham jail.  I discovered an insightful, godly, and learned man different than the communist and womanizer man I had been taught. I then read MLK’s “Where Do We Go From Here” where he lays out a vision for achieving equality in jobs, wages, housing, and education. He saw the racial problem in America as systemic, where “the persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society.”

I read The Warmth of Other Sons, a beautifully written book, and learned about the “Great Migration” – a phrase I had never previously heard.  It’s a story about six million African-Americans fleeing the harshness of the Jim Crow South to the supposedly “better” cities of the North and West.  Once there, however, they find a different kind of thumb on the scale, encountering a new form of discrimination through housing and jobs.  As MLK once said: “Let us not fool ourselves, we are far from the Promised Land, both north and south.”

I read The Color of Law and discovered that urban ghettos didn’t happen by chance.  They were created over decades through a private-public partnership with a goal of protecting white interests.  At the core were a range of de jure discriminatory actions (government based) in areas such as zoning, taxation, federal financing and subsidies, and highway construction routes. Private discriminatory actions (de facto) such as redlining and urban flight then filled in the spaces, leveraging the federal, state, and local government policies for maximum impact. 

I read The New Jim Crow and learned how the war on drugs put a thumb on the scale for black men in America. It was a war unequally waged, marked by decades of racially selective targeting, sentencing, imprisonment, and parole enforcement.  It left a racial legacy of unequal impacts through a gauntlet of private and legal restrictions imposed on those who have served time.  Although the causes are highly debated, the statistics are shocking and cannot be swept under the rug.  And whatever the cause, justice has not been blind and the scales rigged for a whole class of Americans.

I read The Color of Compromise and learned how much of the church promoted or at least accommodated racism since the first arrival of slaves in 1619.  Yes, many white Christians opposed racism throughout history. But too often they were the exceptions rather than the rule. During the antebellum era many Christians, even some of the great “heroes of the faith,” owned slaves.  Others supported racial prejudice and/or abuse, a perversion of God’s order which continued into the next period of bondage, Jim Crow.   Still others chose to stay stayed silent, preferring in the words of MLK a “negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”  

I read The Bible Told Them So and learned how many southern white Christians, following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, asserted the principle of colorblindness while preaching and practicing a segregationist Christianity. They saw scripture as supporting their racialized stance and practices.  Then by asserting “colorblindness,” it allowed them to be “faithful to scripture” while navigating the perceptions of society.

I read Divided by Faith, a sociological study on faith and race in America.  There I learned despite the many actions by evangelical leaders to address the problem of racial discrimination (e.g., Promise Keepers), the data are clear. White evangelicals are more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution to closing the racial divide in America. They are unable to “see” the persistence of systemic discrimination in America because of a set of theological and cultural presuppositions. All they can “see” is individual sin, hence there is only one solution: individual repentance from sinful individuals.

But Christ’s defeat of sin and death through the cross is much more than that. It’s joining God in the renewal of all things through the launch of His Kingdom.  In Andy Crouch’s words, we are called to work “for the peace, security, justice, and prosperity of their city and their neighbors, loving them in word and in deed.” But by restricting the gospel to the plan of salvation rather than, in the words of Emerson and Smith, “integrat[ing] their faith with knowledge of race relations, inequality, and American society…[evangelicals] allow their cultural constructions to shape one-dimensional assessments and solutions to multidimensional problems.”

I read the stories of African Americans through books like Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown. I read even more books, all illuminating a different part of an America, past and present, I never knew existed.  I then pored over academic articles and found a troubling set of data supporting the findings in those books.

I learned how Alexis de Tocqueville, the legendary and astute observer of American society once said “I do not imagine that the white and black race will ever live in any country upon an equal footing.  But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere. An isolated individual may surmount the prejudices…but a whole people cannot rise.”

De Tocqueville saw the United States as composed of two foreign communities, one white and the other black.  And if slaves were freed, he predicted this divide would just grow deeper, a conflict that “perpetually haunts the imagination of Americans, like painful dream.”

A century later following the end of slavery but still in the midst of Jim Crow, Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish scholar studying race in America, found honest, hardworking white Americans to be relatively satisfied with race relations.  Yes, there were a few “bad apples” they said, but relations between races were good and improving across the majority population.  When pressed by the gross inequalities and oppression highly visible during Jim Crow, they were surprised and taken back by the question.  They weren’t aware there was a problem. Myrdal concluded what de Tocqueville a century earlier had observed.  Even though slavery had been abolished in the intervening years, American was a divided, unequal, society and one side seemed comfortable with that.

Racialization is a Variable

The data shows race has and continues to be the largest social cleavage in America.  In fact, that cleavage continues to deepen even after all the legislative progress America has experienced in the past 150 years.  Now if you asked people today if “are Africans not fully human” or “do whites have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods” and compare against historical responses, you would conclude racism is declining. 

But the racialization of America functions as a variable in history.  And we fail to understand it when we treat it as a constant, viewed through the lens from an era preceding ours. Hence, it’s important to ask the right question, a question that addresses the current state of society.  For example, the normative belief in early American history of “Africans are not fully human” diminished during the Jim Crow era. But that era brought new racial goalposts defined through segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement.

Similarly, the normative belief during Jim Crow of “whites have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods” diminished following the passage of the Civil Rights Act. But our current era, following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s has brought new goalposts of legacy impacts due to the persistence of inequalities in wealth, employment, education, housing, health, and judicial areas established during Jim Crow. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, little has changed in terms of societal division born of sustained racial inequalities according to the Kerner Report in 1968, the Eisenhower Foundation Commission in 1993, and the 2018 report entitled “Healing Our Divided Society.”

When such persistent disparities march together in lockstep, something other than chance is going on.  There must be underlying variables common in impact across life experiences and time. But what are those variables? As you would expect, many answers abound and here they create an even wider division among the races.

Three General Hypotheses

On the one side are those who see racialized differences arising through differential benefits based upon race and sustained through policies, institutions, and societal norms.  Its these structural differences which change the goalposts and they operate covertly, seemingly invisible to most whites.

Others see society as yielding equal opportunity without any lingering racial goalposts.  Any differences are due to conditions cultural in origin, an outcome of work habits, character, and moral control.  Under this individual-based worldview, society delivers an equal opportunity to every person and it’s up to each one of us to shape that into a successful future. 

Still others assert that these differences are old news, outdated narratives which distort the current prejudicial state of American society.  The tide has turned and now its white Americans which face the headwinds from racialized policies.  

Final Thoughts

My next several posts will explore these hypotheses from a data and theological perspective.  But until then, I’ll let the great statesman Frederick Douglass (1853) have the last word:

 “A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us.  As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood.  Our white countrymen do not know us.  They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history and progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that control and guide us as a people.  The great mass of American citizens estimates us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up our heads, if at all, against the withering influence of a nation’s scorn and contempt.”

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MLK in His Own Words

Posted on January 17, 2022 by steve.ignell

To honor Martin Luther King today, I thought I would post some of his own words, particularly those that are new to me and probably to many others as well.  They may be surprising as many of us really didn’t know him well, with our experience limited to a few quotes and a general understanding of his life’s work.  His books though are easy to read as he was a good writer. And given the current debate about “wokeness,” structural racism, and critical race theory, its important for us to hear his voice once again as MLK had much to say about systemic racism and justice.

On America’s “Congenital Deformity”

“Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality of the question of race.  She has been torn between selves – a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy.  This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him.”

“What is the source of this perennial indecision and vacillations?  It lies in the “congenital deformity” of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception.” -MLK Where Do We Go From Here

Over 100 years earlier, De Tocqueville saw the United States as composed of two foreign communities, one white and the other black.  And if slaves were freed, he predicted that this divide would just grow deeper, a conflict that “perpetually haunts the imagination of Americans, like painful dream.”

On “A Few Bad Apples”

“It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of American believe they have so little to learn. In human relations the truth is hard to come by, because most groups are deceived about themselves. Rationalization and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our individual and collective sins.”

“For the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country even today is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists.”

“To live with the pretense that racism is a doctrine of a very few is to disarm us in fighting it frontally as scientific unsound, morally repugnant and socially destructive.  The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease.  A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself.  But redemption can come only through a humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.” -MLK Where Do We Go From Here

Decades earlier Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish scholar studying race in America, found honest, hardworking Americans to be relatively satisfied with race relations.  Yes, there were a few bad apples they said, but relations between races were good and improving across the majority population.  When pressed by the gross inequalities and oppression highly visible during Jim Crow, they were surprised and taken back by the question.  They weren’t aware there was a problem.

On “A Nation’s Scorn and Contempt”

“when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” – MLK Letter from a Birmingham jail

 “All too many Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions – the Negro himself.” – The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement (1967)

Over 100 years earlier Frederick Douglass said: “A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us.  As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood.  Our white countrymen do not know us.  They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history and progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that control and guide us as a people.  The great mass of American citizens estimates us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up our heads, if at all, against the withering influence of a nation’s scorn and contempt.”

On “Systemic” Prejudice

“The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro.  They believe that American Society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth towards a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately, this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”

“Depressed living standards for Negroes are not simply the consequence of neglect.  Nor can they be explained by the myth of the Negro’s innate incapacities, or by the more sophisticated rationalization of his acquired infirmities (family disorganization, poor education, etc).  They are a structural part of the economic system in the United States.”

“years of struggle have sensitized the Negro’s eyes…[they] have become aware of the deeper causes for the crudity and cruelty that governed white society’s responses to their needs They discovered that their plight was not a consequence of superficial prejudice but was systemic.” -MLK Where Do We Go From Here

One Final Thought

Most of us are unaware of MLK’s story at least in its fullest telling. We have not been taught the extent of the sin, the depravity, against African Americans over the past 400 years. What we were taught, at least in my experience, was about a womanizing communist and an embarrassment to this nation. 

Fortunately much of this has changed in the last 50 years.  But that doesn’t mean that we are out of the woods as a nation.  The racialization of America functions as a variable in history.  And we fail to understand it when we treat it as a constant, viewed through the lens of an era preceding ours. Our ignorance, misunderstandings, and/or distorted education makes it easy for us to hide behind a self-described “colorblindness,” unwilling to accept that there is sustained systemic and structural prejudice in our society. But the data shows it’s still here.

This is a huge and fascinating study showing racial/ethnic discrimination be a continuing and significant problem in America.  It shows how such discrimination continues to impact many core parts of the lives of Black Americans while reinforcing and exacerbating existing inequalities.

The church has the tools to correct this.  Orthodox theology demands it.  But when Christianity is fused with a mythical understanding of history the call of the gospel becomes corrupted. I’ll be writing more about this in coming weeks and months. Until then, here’s some data showing how present-day Christian Nationalism is associated with the perpetuation of the “congenital deformity” of racism that continues to harm our nation.

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Hope or Hopelessness

Posted on December 20, 2021 by steve.ignell

“But I just don’t know what to believe anymore.”  A pastor said this on Facebook after being called out for a disgusting and shameful video posted during the midst of New York City’s worst moments with hospitals over flowing and fleets of refrigerator trucks storing the dead. The post was from citizen reporters who had uncovered the “truth” about the pandemic.  Contrary to the mainstream media, New York City hospitals were idle and they had the video to prove it.  The virus was a hoax, fake news, and the suppression of this truth a grand conspiracy against our nation.

Yet the truth was just 15 seconds away.  An easy one-click google search could have quickly revealed the creator of the post’s true colors. She was a well-known conspiracy theorist and this was just one in a long series of outrageous and false claims.  On a scale from 0-10 where 10 denotes a difficult decision, this judgment was a 0, as easy as it gets. 

During this covid season, I’ve responded to a number of people’s questions ranging from the science behind covid treatments to the veracity of outlandish truth claims.  People are stressed and looking for answers, trying to make sense of the challenging times.  There’s no shortage of answers and without the help of truth’s traditional guardrails, they get lost and truly don’t know what to believe. 

Brief Recap of Previous Posts About Truth

In the past four blogs I’ve provided four different perspectives that influence what we know to be true. I started with Galef’s metaphor how some of us (actually most of us) pursue truth through a “soldier” mindset where our goal is to defend our side.  It drives us to rationalize our beliefs and filter our vision so that “we see what we want to see.”  A second option – and the road much less traveled – is to pursue a “scout” mindset when our priority is to survey the territory without preconceived ideas so that we can draw as accurate as a map as possible. 

In my second blog, I posited what a scout mindset looks like using Wolfe’s book “Epistemology: The Justification of Belief.” He contends that all of our assertions and opinions arise from un underlying belief system or interpretive scheme.  He calls us to examine how we believe something is true because only those truth claims that survive robust and open critique can be considered “warranted,” or validated. Sheltering a scheme from such critique or constructing our “facts” from a prejudged set of sources may neutralize opposition but it also trivializes its truth claims.  Surviving open criticism means that our belief system must actually correspond to reality and can’t be selectively applied.  In Wolfe’s terms, it must be: (1) consistently applied without contradiction, (2) coherent (i.e., logically consistent) (3) comprehensive throughout experience, and (4) congruent (i.e., best fit) to the data.

In the third blog I started with the century old debate between Lippman and Dewey on the correspondence vs coherence vs theory of truth. Do we believe reality is knowable through an unprejudiced analysis of facts or are we constrained by a limited set of prior beliefs or upon people we know or trust? I then introduced several lines of research that show how Lippman got it right.  We know by how we feel and those feelings are an outcome of our prior values and sensibilities.  We’re more soldiers than scouts, prone to project values onto our perception of facts, exchanging “what is” for “what it ought to be.” In the words of Lippman, “for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define and then see.”

I then show how values are a two-edged sword. They are essential to the flourishing of society, serving as a beacon or lighthouse to help us determine right from wrong. But watch out when people violate our moral code.  Especially when amplified through a culture war fueled by media-driven outrage where malice and distain become the norm.  It creates a binary world that turns us into soldiers with the goal of defending our team’s beliefs.  And the more people moralize about politics, the more partisan bias, distance, and animosity they exhibit.  Truth becomes one-sided, coloring one’s perspective of the world.

I expand upon the truth and values theme in the fourth blog by cautioning against having incomplete values. Although we may be virtuous at heart, our goodness gets transformed through a culture war incompatible with the cross.  Through the heat of the battle, with apocalyptic outcomes at stake, our virtuous nature gives way to vice.  We become affectively polarized through a diet of outrage and fear which means that our partisan dislike surpasses most other affections.  The fruits of the Spirit yield to the works of the flesh as our inner self becomes disformed. And with the loss of those fruits comes a loss in our truth claims because we are merely soldiers for someone else’s cause.

Hope or Hopelessness

Marietta and Barker in their book One Nation Two Realities paint a hopeless picture for America.  So do an increasing number of pundits across both sides of the aisle.  Day after day, malice, distain, and outrage are amplified through the infinite feedback loops of our echo chambers. And of the many causalities from this war, there are none more profound than truth. 

Yet I think of Keith or Eva, both whom I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs: or our friends Dave and Karen, or Steve my former pastor.  And other friends along with thousands and perhaps millions of others like them that refuse to subject their heart to a divisive message.  This remnant of people, like Shadrach, Meshack and Abednego of old, have chosen not to bend, bow or burn the pure gospel for a counterfeit message that the culture war demands.

It’s because of this remnant that I chose hope rather than hopelessness for our nation.  They serve as examples, as signposts in a hostile culture (a part of which is evangelical-based) of a different way to be human.  Three aspects of their lives stand out as a possible roadmap for others to escape from tribalist rabbit holes to be part of a movement that brings hope to our nation.

Step 1 to Hope – Establish Road Markers, Make Yourself Guideposts

The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah said: “Set up road markers for yourself; make yourself guideposts; consider well the highway, the road by which you went” (Jer. 31:21 ESV).

It’s a theme found elsewhere in scripture such as Proverbs 4:25-27 “your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you. Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways. Do not turn to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.” And it serves as our first step towards hope.

  1. Don’t blindly trust your intuitions.  Be on guard against the unconscious power of our cognitive biases that drive us to look for causality at all costs, picking and choosing data (or even making up data) to confirm existing beliefs.  And then recognize that no matter how much we guard against those biases, we need external accountability as those biases are built into our neurology and we can’t escape them.
  2. Don’t blindly trust your tribes and especially their media outlets.  Be on guard against the power of tribalism to hijack our identity, imputing certainty on our truth judgments that they now control. To wit: unless we break free our media echo chambers and purposively and seriously question the narratives in those chambers, our understandings of truth will remain fettered.
  3. Don’t blindly embrace “new” ideas.  Be on guard for our human susceptibility to the “medium lie” which opens the door to another lie and then another until we will accept anything. In a like manner, be vigilant against the lure of a soft Gnosticism, with its itchy ears for “secret knowledge” that too often leads people down YouTube rabbit holes. In my past Pentecostal tradition, we were always on the lookout for fresh revelation, new insight that no one else had ever seen.  It too often led us down wrong paths.
  4. Don’t blindly hold tight to your opinions.  Be on guard for our human need for certainty.  The antidote is humility that welcomes uncertainty as it exchanges a “soldier” mindset of defending tribal beliefs to a “scout” mindset where accuracy is the goal.

Step 2 to Hope – Seek Wisdom Like a “Scout”

The quest for wisdom is characterized as a passionate call for insight and understanding.  Scripture likens it to looking for silver and searching for hidden treasure.  It’s a journey of discovery that depends upon virtue through a humility and openness to counsel. 

  1. Honor the Bible as the story of God rather than a collection of proof texts that we can pick and choose to fit existing narratives.  As NT Wright has said, each word in scripture must be understood within its own verse, each verse within its on chapter, each chapter within its own book, and each book within its own historical, cultural, and indeed canonical setting.
  2. Honor the Book of God’s Works – his created universe – by honoring peer review science as the hands and feet that uncovers those Works, consistently applying such science through an objective weighing of valid evidence and expert judgement across the spectrum of issues, whether they are partisan or not.
  3. Honor the wisdom of a diverse crowd as there is “safety in the multitude of counselors.”  Being embedded in diverse communities with a practice of listening, goes a long way to keep us on the straight and narrow.
  4. Honor the wisdom of diverse counsel from those with proven expertise both inside and outside of your guild.

Step 3 to Hope – Choose Virtue

Philippians 4:8 says “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things;”

Mom would often quote those words as this was the second of many Bible verses I memorized as a young boy.  I never forgot it because the older I got, the more she reminded me of this verse.  We still need this wisdom and here’s how that would look like using a passage in Galatians that I’m sure mom would approve of.  Especially as a contrast between the nine Fruits of the Spirit with those Works of the Flesh which arise through the heat of America’s culture-war battle.

Towards a joy arising through an undivided heart with affections affixed upon Christ: an outcome of a 2 Cor 3:18 life passion for Christ shining through us, independent of situation and culture.

Away from factions and the division that breeds an affective polarization which distorts and divides our heart.  Where our enmity towards the opposing side exceeds even our affection for those around us.    

Towards a peace born of His Spirit, marked by forgiveness, and sustained through Philippians 2:13 type of trust that God is working in us and giving us the means to do His will. 

Away from dissentions and conflict borne of a culture war that is destroying our church and country.  Where a passion for political power exceeds a passion for the cross as it changes the gospel witness in this world.   

Towards patience, putting others before us as we forbear with the inconveniences of the world.  Although not blind to injustice, patience refuses to punish others for the difficult, unfair, and painful nature of life. 

Away from discord from fighting in a world that blames the other as it unleashes the dogs of war.  Fed by fear, it relies upon a highly divisive populism marked by “we the good” and “they the enemy.”  

Towards kindness irrespective of the individual: whether poor or rich, liberal or conservative, gay or straight, city dweller or rural, immigrant or citizen, or whether in or out of my group.  I am Christ’s reflection in this world and that is what He would do.

Away from group rivalry and its binary world that’s a zero sum game where somebody has to loose. Such tribalism changes our identity and alters our perspective us as it binds and blinds us against the other side.

Towards goodness through a life marked by virtue, humility, empathy, and putting others first rather than seeking our own advantage.  Where we are kind, full of mercy and passionate about justice.

Away from a selfishness that sees people different than us and foreign to us as violators of “our way of life.” Whipping us up into a fear-based state of alarm despite the Biblical call to welcome the stranger.

Towards a faithfulness in character that arises from a pure and undivided heart. Marked by a consistency between beliefs and actions, and where faith is confirmed through deeds and not just words.

Away from great zeal of a partisanship that competes with a gospel-centric faith and leaves us doubleminded.  From an upside-down world where mulligans are given out because the end justifies the means.

Towards a gentleness in spirit witnessed through a meekness of character, being kind to one another as we forgive one another. Strength under control with a softness in speech and a tenderness in action. 

Away from fits of rage arising from a steady diet of malice and outrage. Where fears are stoked and outrage enhanced and then again and again through an echo chamber-led feedback cycle. 

Towards self-control marked by a self-awareness and empathy towards others. Quick to listen and slow to speak, giving ourselves time to think before we act. 

Away from the impurities formed by innate cognitive biases which causes us to instantly respond without considerate thought. It leads to predictable errors in judgement which are very difficult to overcome. It taints our truthfulness, relationships, and our consistency with gospel verities.

Two Hypotheses:

My primary audience in the last four blogs have been both the Christian and evangelical communities, an estimated 70% and 25% of the American population, respectively. In the last two blogs I focused on the fruits of the spirit, the gospel-centric metrics for our external actions and internal attitudes.  They tell the true story about the faith we affirm and help shape the story of our truth proclamations.

H1: The division in America could swiftly change if the Christian church heeded the calling of 1 Peter 2:21 “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.” NT Wright put it this way: “Jesus came to earth to bring something new, through the launch of a kingdom that was not of this world. As citizens of that kingdom, we are to be instruments of God’s new creation, planting signposts in hostile soil that show a different way to be human.”  The early church changed their world through being faithfully present to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.  We could too.

H2: The truth crises in America would swiftly change if the Christian church, the ekklesia, would:

  1. Heed the scriptural admonition to “establish road markers…make yourself guideposts” by refusing to: blindly trust our fallible intuitions, blindly trust our tribes and media outlets, blindly embrace “new” unwarranted ideas, and blindly holding tight to our opinions.
  2. Seek knowledge and wisdom like a “scout,” like a hunt for hidden treasure encapsulated by virtue, humility and an openness to diverse counsel.
  3. Taking to heart the calling of Philippians 4:8 “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

There’s never been a time where the scriptural injunction to “Be on your guard and stay awake” is more needed for the discernment of truth and the avoidance of deception.  In fact, none of this truly works without first establishing boundaries as it’s nearly impossible to follow the rest when entwined in a partisan or populist worldview born of our culture wars.  So, let’s be on guard, honor wisdom’s diverse foundations, and then commit to the core of the gospel: dying to self, putting others before us, being attune to the Spirit, and with a singular focus on Jesus.

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