As a Christian who has been open to race relations and has raised my kids to be race neutral, I greatly resent it when those with grudges force their negativism in my face. Somehow Mr. Trump and I are being blamed for racism.
Racism has been around for thousands of years. Racism has shown prejudice against a variety of people. Truth be told, other than the Ashkenazi Jews, we are all some type of Heinz mixture. Racism is ignorance. Ignorance of our own ancestry and tales passed down from previous generations. It takes intelligence, hard work, and time to look for and accept truth, to build bridges across rivers of bias, to find others with the same attitudes of growth and unity.
Success in this quest will yield positive results for generations for all people.
I don’t think our President is being blamed for racism. But he has attracted and not disavowed the support of avowed racist in his support base! As an autocratic leader in business and politics, he has a lot of affinity with them. Also, he has sided with the police in defining and painting:
COMPLAINTS OF POLICE BRUTALITY AND RACISM
AS
NON-SUPPORTIVE AND
ANTI-POLICE.
Do you see the communication twist in this way of painting the issue. Those people making complaints are not necessarily anti- police. They are just...
ANTI-RACISM AND BRUTALITY!
Their intention is not to destroy the police but to correct and improve policing! Furthermore, they are not saying ALL POLICE EVERYWHERE ARE THIS WAY! They are saying there is SOME in SOME places.
News persons, political leaders, men in general and certain personalities naturally distort, twist and paint what they hear and see to get us to listen, to win an argument, to make it appear black and white, all or nothing to motivate the listener to action.
Skilled listening sees the twists and turns that can also be designed to SHIFT THE FOCUS to avoid the real issue! With a laser focus they hang on to the real issue and keep bringing the discussion back to it.
If we want to be free and live in a working democracy, we all must be come incisive listeners and talkers!
I am glad to hear that you and your children aspire to be race neutral. Unfortunately, your comment exposes the very problem of communication that Mr. Sider is addressing here. He did not accuse you or your family of being personally racist. What he said is that SYSTEMIC racism is a real and serious problem in our society that he feels Christians are bound in a biblical conscience to address.
What happened in your comment was that you missed and ignored Sider's mention of systemic racism. That word has a specific meaning, and it is not the same thing as personal racism. Phil Vischer (the founder of Veggie Tales) has a good brief rundown of it here: https://youtu.be/AGUwcs9qJXY . The point of talking about systemic racism is that we can have a cultural system - what the Bible calls "the World," as in "love not the world" - in which our brothers and sisters, made in the image of God, are deprived of fair treatment on account of their race, EVEN WITHOUT any individual performing a personal racist act.
For instance, people often rely on building personal networks to advance their careers or, from the flip side, to find good people to hire. I can be perfectly race-blind and happy to hire someone regardless of race. But I rely on personal contacts to recommend promising people to hire. And it just so happens that I don't have any black personal contacts. I never consciously rejected black people as friends or colleagues; I just don't live in a place or go to schools or work in careers with many black people there. So I'm not racist; yet somehow I never give good jobs to black people. WHY I don't have those contacts is what analysis of "systemic racism" is about.
Where this comes into the communication issue that Mr. Sider talks about is that many people don't understand what people like him mean when he starts talking about systemic racism, and DON'T BOTHER TO FIND OUT. They don't LISTEN, they don't care to understand and address what he's actually saying, they jump straight to being offended and bristle at the idea that they're being accused of racism. And THAT, in its way, is the subtler, more insidious form of racism; not making people sit at the back of the bus and lynching and burning crosses on their lawn, but treating them as though their witness to what they experience at the hands of the world is NOT WORTH LISTENING TO.
Hi, I'm the daughter, so I feel qualified to reply. :) I don't know that she'll see the replies here, unless there's a notification of some kind. Anyway, I was raised to not treat anyone any differently based on the color of their skin (or other things that make us all different). That's the neutrality she means. Race wasn't a thing for us. We knew everybody and never really talked about it. However, as an adult, I am learning that I was raised with more privilege than I/we realized (and I'm still learning), and while being "neutral" was a good thing growing up (grace with words, please), it is only a piece of the reconciliation work. Anti-racism and awareness of inequality are still mine/ours to wrestle with and approach with humility and teachability. We're all works in progress, although some days it's more obvious than others. ;)
Thanks for a well-written, thoughtful blog. As a white woman who has lived for 6 years in a 96% black neighborhood in North Saint Louis, 5 minutes from where Michael Brown was shot, I think I have a unique perspective to bring to the table on the subject of racism. I have also lived for 13 years in the central corridor, a fully mixed race neighborhood, and am now living in Old North Saint Louis, a historic district that is a fully mixed race neighborhood north of Delmar, the street that forms the dividing line between black and mostly white neighborhoods in this city.
One of the means of supporting sytsemic racism is funding our schools by property taxes. Of course the wealthier districts can afford higher budgets for their public schools than the poorer districts. The Normandy School District that served our Northwoods Community had an annual budget of $12,000 per student in 2014, while Clayton, a wealthy mostly white neighborhood in the central corridor had a budget of $18,000 per student. Just before Michael Brown's death, the neighborhood of Wellston, next to Normandy, had permanently closed its high school and its students were sent to Normandy. Now Normandy and Wellston had rival gangs. Now they were all supposed to be studying together. Wellston is a notoriously rough, poor neighborhood, whilst Normandy houses The University of Missouri at Saint Louis, with all its professors and staff, so although they are both strongly black districts, there was a big socio-cultural difference between the two places. The Principal of Normandy said his students who came from stable families were doing well, as well as any students in the country, and working hard on a college track. But that was only 50% of his students! Shortly after the Wellston switch, Normandy High School lost its accreditation. He had to farm out all his students who wanted to go to an accredited school. Clayton agreed to accept 100 of his students. But they insisted that they needed to have $18,000 for each of those 100 students, to fit their budget. Of course, Clayton won that budget battle, being the stronger, whiter and wealthier neighborhood. That left Normandy with an even tighter budget for the rest of its students.
Education is the first major public step that a child takes on its way to adulthood and a productive working life. If we are to provide an equal opportunity for all children to have a good education, then we have to find a more equitable way to fund our schools. This will take a lot of legislative action, a lot of thought, a lot of hard work. But it must be done. And this argument can be extended to multiple areas of life. I am currently reading John Inazu's book, Confident Pluralism. He is a law professor at Washington University in Saint Louis, and a Christian. In it, he discusses property values in black vs. white neighborhoods. Here's an illustration from his book. Let's suppose that a black man and a white man each buy a $150,000 home in the city. The white man's house in a white neighborhood will have lower property taxes and lower insurance than the black man's home in the black neighborhood. Over time, that represents a large loss of wealth for the black man. And we know that owning your own home is one of the primary means of earning wealth in an individual's life. Another example comes with anyone choosing to live in a formerly red lined neighborhood like my current one. The banks still keep property values down there, regardless of the race of the neighborhood. My neighbor 4 doors down invested $40,000 in his 100 year old historic home a few years ago. He completely redid his rental apartment, doing a gorgeous job, and redid his kitchen. When he had the building evaluated it came back at just $2,000 more than it was worth before the investment. This kind of treatment in predominantly black neighborhoods is endemic. It kills all incentive to work hard, invest, strive forward. The miracle is that they do keep striving and working hard.
This is what the Black Lives Matter movement is all about. And they have every right to work hard through the legal system to try to bring about change and improvement. The tragic thing in Saint Louis is that we have had a very corrupt family in politics that has lined their own pockets instead of working for change. In the last election, we finally got that family out. For the first time in 50 years they no longer have a representative in the Federal House of Representatives. We've elected a young, energetic go-getter of a woman who will speak clearly and represent her people well. Her name is Corrie Bush.
95% of the Black Lives Matter protests this summer were peaceful protests. But the media focused on the troublemakers, that were both right wing as well as left wing. We must learn to educate ourselves on what is going on from multiple sources. I have three overseas apps on my smartphone so that I can read more objective news from overseas. They are BBC and Reuters from Europe and Al Jazeera English, also located in London I believe. I saw a super video on BBC, for instance, an interview with a Chinese American couple who have been married for 8 years and live in New York. He is Republican and she is Democrat. They said every Republican should find a Democrat to partner with and vice versa. They said they both have profound respect for each other and listen to each other. They said if you listened to the news on the "conservative" and the "liberal" channels, you would think you were living on 2 different planets. Just that fact alone should tell us that there is probably distortion to some extent on both sides.
Please fact check! And on behalf of the mainline media, I will say that the purpose of having editors was to ensure that fact checking happened and that lies were not printed as truth. One of the huge problems with social media is that there are no editors. Anyone can say anything he wants, regardless of whether it is true or not. It's not a wise place to get the bulk of you knowledge and information from.
Jennifer, I really appreciate your well thought out reply and I agonize over how the deck is stacked racially! The road to equal opportunity for all Americans will be long and hard. I can only hope that real change steps will begin with the Biden administration! We’ll just have to keep marching and educating till it happens!
This is so well-written and explains things really well. I appreciate your describing a smaller, unknown piece of the puzzle, and am grateful for your first-hand perspective.
There is a new book out that I've just received a copy of by Sarah Bauer Anderson called "The Space Between Us - How Jesus Teaches Us to Live Together When Politics and Religion Pull Us Apart". She used to be on staff at Andy Stanley's church and is the daughter of Gary Bauer, a one time Republican presidential candidate. It looks very well written and I hope it offers a useful guide to building a bridge of communication between those who have different political and religious views from ourselves.
I am a retired professor of Sociology, just retiring in May 2020. I taught Sociology courses at the community college level. Throughout 20+ years in the classroom, I found it very, very challenging to teach students to "think sociologically." Students were strongly grounded in thinking individually, but struggled to see the social world from a social world perspective. In other words, they had difficulty grasping the dynamics of social structures, such as racism, sexism, and ageism. Students were perplexed by "institutionalized" anything. They wondered how racism -- which they saw as a personal problem that some people had, but not them -- could be embedded in social structures. It seemed like students could see individual morality in racism, sexism, etc., but could not elevate their thinking enough to see how social ills could be part of the fabric of how society functions. Thinking secularly and by the time I retired a few month ago, I had concluded that the difficulty in thinking about the bigger picture is pervasive in western societies, and especially in American culture. It may be incumbent upon us to provide community education to help more people elevate their viewpoint of the social world. Perhaps American society needs an overarching campaign, much like was done when it was found that smoking causes cancer and death. Many people heard and were changed by the "Stop Smoking" campaign because society was continually "bathed" in the surgeon general's strong messages about smoking's correlation with cancer. Perhaps a similar educational "bathing" needs to be done with respect to institutionalized racism, discrimination embedded in the fabric of our society. Understanding needs to occur so that real social change can occur. If understanding does not occur, I fear that people will continue to believe that racism and sexism are personal problems and not social issues, and some of these people could very well be my former students.
Most of my co-workers are committed Christians; most of my neighbors probably would define themselves as non-Christian. Right now, it seems to work best for us to not discuss politics at all. However, we all share common ground in that we want to make the world a better place. As we all talk with each other (even though they, I am sure, voted differently from me) about our children, our gardens, our pets, how we are celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas, and is everyone staying well; as my husband and I do our jobs at work, and my husband stays involved in our neighborhood community garden; all this encourages me that we are keeping community in the midst of this.
I’ve just recently subscribed to your blog. I appreciate the winsome manner that you approach topics that impact the body of Christ. Having read this post as well as the one about the pledge of evangelicals regarding racism I have thoughts I’d like to share. In both posts you speak a lot about structural racism or systemic racism. I’m concerned that in these 2 posts that you haven’t addressed individual sin. No structure or system in itself sins. People sin. You call for Evangelicals to confess about their ancestors, and in the context you use I presume that you’re referring to spiritual ancestors. Both my spiritual and biological ancestors were sinners. So are you and I. I don’t think a pledge and confession of our ancestors sins are nearly as impactful as acknowledgement and repentance of our own and seeking Gods help replacing our sins of prejudice with love. I also think it’s very important for someone of you influence to emphasize the goodness and power of our great God. He promises that ‘all things work together for good to those that love the Lord and are called according to His purpose.’ This He, Almighty God promises and this He does. Christians all suffer, in different ways, in different degrees, but Almighty God is faithful to each and every one of His regenerate children by keeping everyone of His promises. Each of His children are victims of His ordained suffering unto sanctification and glory. None of us have the moral high ground apart from Christ’s righteousness and His life, death and resurrection which give us life and imparts a renewed conscience that conditioned by scriptural truth condemns our hearts unto repentance. We can talk about the past ancestors sins. Christ did. All the Apostles did. They did to emphasize theGood News that there is salvation in no other name so repent and believe. Our best life is later. the fix isn’t confessing someone else’s sin, it’s confessing ours. All of us.
There is a need for liberal and evangelical people of faith to listen to each other. Not just that but people of all faiths and no faith. There is theological truth that some things are beyond human compression that all faiths including Christianity reshaped by their time and place. A generation ago there was Christian churches together which brought Catholic
Orthodox ethnic evangelical and mainline protestant churches together.It had difficulties a consensus statement on marriage feel ap art the issues
Of same sex marriage. We need communities of faith together bringing Christian s non Christian and Denbighshire together
Unfortunately the culture wars will not end with re-election of how biden.Paula white praying for big to smite trump 's opponents is per
Proof of this.
Someone conceded much of passes for prayer is actually black magic. Certainly prayers for people to be hurt is such.
A century ago the fundamentalist modernist controversy ended with
The adoption of a policy of broadconfessionalism we need a new broadconfessionalism of shared
Values. While agreeing to disagree on theological issues including the case existence of God
We can agree on civil discourse.While agreeing to disagree on suggests such as premarital s ex homosexuality and other things we can agree. To oppose junk sexuality we can
I think what you are saying is “GRASS ROOTS” thinking. It is addressing the ROOT PROBLEM! That also means that the work is slow and tedious to get rolling but when the “SNOWBALL EFFECT” takes over it can be life transforming!
I know a place where the challenge of talking across “GREAT DIVIDES” is occurring. You just might find some great resources to address this issue!
The Leadership Connection is a program that has been running ROUND TABLE meetings that has successfully bridged the gap between Christianity and Professors/Administrators in the college community! Dave Thom is the founder and leader of this ministry that started in Massachusetts but is, now, beginning to spread across the nation!
We all do big and little things that undermine our chances to really communicate. The President and many news commentators are setting the tone purposely this way for their own ends! Democracy requires effective communication! It’s destruction by leaders who have an autocratic vision of leadership is common as a means to their end! So we who called ourselves Christian, who already have a sense of detachment from earthly activities like politics and government, just might be able to model a more healthy form of communication fit for democracy! As a people, we earn the right to have good leaders by having good communication skills, good education, and good moral lives at all levels!
In order to be sensitive to things like covid, the election, and esp the difficult subject of racism, we need to have the Spirit of Truth. I capitalize these words only to signify that the Bible speaks directly of it, but the main point is that to recognize what is true from what is fiction, you need not only human-supplied information but the divine gift and consequent human predisposition to see what is true and distinguish it from what is not or less so. You cannot be motivated by anything other than God's truth and must see things from God's perspective. Without such a perspective, no manner of effort at discernment--one of scripture's spiritual gifts--will bear good fruit.
Meaningful change starts in the hearts of individuals. We have to allow God to open our hearts of stone. Don't just ask yourself "What would Jesus do?" search the scriptures, look at the life of Jesus, and then answer the question.
As a Christian who has been open to race relations and has raised my kids to be race neutral, I greatly resent it when those with grudges force their negativism in my face. Somehow Mr. Trump and I are being blamed for racism.
Racism has been around for thousands of years. Racism has shown prejudice against a variety of people. Truth be told, other than the Ashkenazi Jews, we are all some type of Heinz mixture. Racism is ignorance. Ignorance of our own ancestry and tales passed down from previous generations. It takes intelligence, hard work, and time to look for and accept truth, to build bridges across rivers of bias, to find others with the same attitudes of growth and unity.
Success in this quest will yield positive results for generations for all people.
I don’t think our President is being blamed for racism. But he has attracted and not disavowed the support of avowed racist in his support base! As an autocratic leader in business and politics, he has a lot of affinity with them. Also, he has sided with the police in defining and painting:
COMPLAINTS OF POLICE BRUTALITY AND RACISM
AS
NON-SUPPORTIVE AND
ANTI-POLICE.
Do you see the communication twist in this way of painting the issue. Those people making complaints are not necessarily anti- police. They are just...
ANTI-RACISM AND BRUTALITY!
Their intention is not to destroy the police but to correct and improve policing! Furthermore, they are not saying ALL POLICE EVERYWHERE ARE THIS WAY! They are saying there is SOME in SOME places.
News persons, political leaders, men in general and certain personalities naturally distort, twist and paint what they hear and see to get us to listen, to win an argument, to make it appear black and white, all or nothing to motivate the listener to action.
Skilled listening sees the twists and turns that can also be designed to SHIFT THE FOCUS to avoid the real issue! With a laser focus they hang on to the real issue and keep bringing the discussion back to it.
If we want to be free and live in a working democracy, we all must be come incisive listeners and talkers!
Excellent explanation. Thank you.
I am glad to hear that you and your children aspire to be race neutral. Unfortunately, your comment exposes the very problem of communication that Mr. Sider is addressing here. He did not accuse you or your family of being personally racist. What he said is that SYSTEMIC racism is a real and serious problem in our society that he feels Christians are bound in a biblical conscience to address.
What happened in your comment was that you missed and ignored Sider's mention of systemic racism. That word has a specific meaning, and it is not the same thing as personal racism. Phil Vischer (the founder of Veggie Tales) has a good brief rundown of it here: https://youtu.be/AGUwcs9qJXY . The point of talking about systemic racism is that we can have a cultural system - what the Bible calls "the World," as in "love not the world" - in which our brothers and sisters, made in the image of God, are deprived of fair treatment on account of their race, EVEN WITHOUT any individual performing a personal racist act.
For instance, people often rely on building personal networks to advance their careers or, from the flip side, to find good people to hire. I can be perfectly race-blind and happy to hire someone regardless of race. But I rely on personal contacts to recommend promising people to hire. And it just so happens that I don't have any black personal contacts. I never consciously rejected black people as friends or colleagues; I just don't live in a place or go to schools or work in careers with many black people there. So I'm not racist; yet somehow I never give good jobs to black people. WHY I don't have those contacts is what analysis of "systemic racism" is about.
Where this comes into the communication issue that Mr. Sider talks about is that many people don't understand what people like him mean when he starts talking about systemic racism, and DON'T BOTHER TO FIND OUT. They don't LISTEN, they don't care to understand and address what he's actually saying, they jump straight to being offended and bristle at the idea that they're being accused of racism. And THAT, in its way, is the subtler, more insidious form of racism; not making people sit at the back of the bus and lynching and burning crosses on their lawn, but treating them as though their witness to what they experience at the hands of the world is NOT WORTH LISTENING TO.
Please explain what do you mean by race neutral?
Hi, I'm the daughter, so I feel qualified to reply. :) I don't know that she'll see the replies here, unless there's a notification of some kind. Anyway, I was raised to not treat anyone any differently based on the color of their skin (or other things that make us all different). That's the neutrality she means. Race wasn't a thing for us. We knew everybody and never really talked about it. However, as an adult, I am learning that I was raised with more privilege than I/we realized (and I'm still learning), and while being "neutral" was a good thing growing up (grace with words, please), it is only a piece of the reconciliation work. Anti-racism and awareness of inequality are still mine/ours to wrestle with and approach with humility and teachability. We're all works in progress, although some days it's more obvious than others. ;)
Thank you for your clarification. Now I understand it better.
Thanks for a well-written, thoughtful blog. As a white woman who has lived for 6 years in a 96% black neighborhood in North Saint Louis, 5 minutes from where Michael Brown was shot, I think I have a unique perspective to bring to the table on the subject of racism. I have also lived for 13 years in the central corridor, a fully mixed race neighborhood, and am now living in Old North Saint Louis, a historic district that is a fully mixed race neighborhood north of Delmar, the street that forms the dividing line between black and mostly white neighborhoods in this city.
One of the means of supporting sytsemic racism is funding our schools by property taxes. Of course the wealthier districts can afford higher budgets for their public schools than the poorer districts. The Normandy School District that served our Northwoods Community had an annual budget of $12,000 per student in 2014, while Clayton, a wealthy mostly white neighborhood in the central corridor had a budget of $18,000 per student. Just before Michael Brown's death, the neighborhood of Wellston, next to Normandy, had permanently closed its high school and its students were sent to Normandy. Now Normandy and Wellston had rival gangs. Now they were all supposed to be studying together. Wellston is a notoriously rough, poor neighborhood, whilst Normandy houses The University of Missouri at Saint Louis, with all its professors and staff, so although they are both strongly black districts, there was a big socio-cultural difference between the two places. The Principal of Normandy said his students who came from stable families were doing well, as well as any students in the country, and working hard on a college track. But that was only 50% of his students! Shortly after the Wellston switch, Normandy High School lost its accreditation. He had to farm out all his students who wanted to go to an accredited school. Clayton agreed to accept 100 of his students. But they insisted that they needed to have $18,000 for each of those 100 students, to fit their budget. Of course, Clayton won that budget battle, being the stronger, whiter and wealthier neighborhood. That left Normandy with an even tighter budget for the rest of its students.
Education is the first major public step that a child takes on its way to adulthood and a productive working life. If we are to provide an equal opportunity for all children to have a good education, then we have to find a more equitable way to fund our schools. This will take a lot of legislative action, a lot of thought, a lot of hard work. But it must be done. And this argument can be extended to multiple areas of life. I am currently reading John Inazu's book, Confident Pluralism. He is a law professor at Washington University in Saint Louis, and a Christian. In it, he discusses property values in black vs. white neighborhoods. Here's an illustration from his book. Let's suppose that a black man and a white man each buy a $150,000 home in the city. The white man's house in a white neighborhood will have lower property taxes and lower insurance than the black man's home in the black neighborhood. Over time, that represents a large loss of wealth for the black man. And we know that owning your own home is one of the primary means of earning wealth in an individual's life. Another example comes with anyone choosing to live in a formerly red lined neighborhood like my current one. The banks still keep property values down there, regardless of the race of the neighborhood. My neighbor 4 doors down invested $40,000 in his 100 year old historic home a few years ago. He completely redid his rental apartment, doing a gorgeous job, and redid his kitchen. When he had the building evaluated it came back at just $2,000 more than it was worth before the investment. This kind of treatment in predominantly black neighborhoods is endemic. It kills all incentive to work hard, invest, strive forward. The miracle is that they do keep striving and working hard.
This is what the Black Lives Matter movement is all about. And they have every right to work hard through the legal system to try to bring about change and improvement. The tragic thing in Saint Louis is that we have had a very corrupt family in politics that has lined their own pockets instead of working for change. In the last election, we finally got that family out. For the first time in 50 years they no longer have a representative in the Federal House of Representatives. We've elected a young, energetic go-getter of a woman who will speak clearly and represent her people well. Her name is Corrie Bush.
95% of the Black Lives Matter protests this summer were peaceful protests. But the media focused on the troublemakers, that were both right wing as well as left wing. We must learn to educate ourselves on what is going on from multiple sources. I have three overseas apps on my smartphone so that I can read more objective news from overseas. They are BBC and Reuters from Europe and Al Jazeera English, also located in London I believe. I saw a super video on BBC, for instance, an interview with a Chinese American couple who have been married for 8 years and live in New York. He is Republican and she is Democrat. They said every Republican should find a Democrat to partner with and vice versa. They said they both have profound respect for each other and listen to each other. They said if you listened to the news on the "conservative" and the "liberal" channels, you would think you were living on 2 different planets. Just that fact alone should tell us that there is probably distortion to some extent on both sides.
Please fact check! And on behalf of the mainline media, I will say that the purpose of having editors was to ensure that fact checking happened and that lies were not printed as truth. One of the huge problems with social media is that there are no editors. Anyone can say anything he wants, regardless of whether it is true or not. It's not a wise place to get the bulk of you knowledge and information from.
Jennifer, I really appreciate your well thought out reply and I agonize over how the deck is stacked racially! The road to equal opportunity for all Americans will be long and hard. I can only hope that real change steps will begin with the Biden administration! We’ll just have to keep marching and educating till it happens!
This is so well-written and explains things really well. I appreciate your describing a smaller, unknown piece of the puzzle, and am grateful for your first-hand perspective.
There is a new book out that I've just received a copy of by Sarah Bauer Anderson called "The Space Between Us - How Jesus Teaches Us to Live Together When Politics and Religion Pull Us Apart". She used to be on staff at Andy Stanley's church and is the daughter of Gary Bauer, a one time Republican presidential candidate. It looks very well written and I hope it offers a useful guide to building a bridge of communication between those who have different political and religious views from ourselves.
I am a retired professor of Sociology, just retiring in May 2020. I taught Sociology courses at the community college level. Throughout 20+ years in the classroom, I found it very, very challenging to teach students to "think sociologically." Students were strongly grounded in thinking individually, but struggled to see the social world from a social world perspective. In other words, they had difficulty grasping the dynamics of social structures, such as racism, sexism, and ageism. Students were perplexed by "institutionalized" anything. They wondered how racism -- which they saw as a personal problem that some people had, but not them -- could be embedded in social structures. It seemed like students could see individual morality in racism, sexism, etc., but could not elevate their thinking enough to see how social ills could be part of the fabric of how society functions. Thinking secularly and by the time I retired a few month ago, I had concluded that the difficulty in thinking about the bigger picture is pervasive in western societies, and especially in American culture. It may be incumbent upon us to provide community education to help more people elevate their viewpoint of the social world. Perhaps American society needs an overarching campaign, much like was done when it was found that smoking causes cancer and death. Many people heard and were changed by the "Stop Smoking" campaign because society was continually "bathed" in the surgeon general's strong messages about smoking's correlation with cancer. Perhaps a similar educational "bathing" needs to be done with respect to institutionalized racism, discrimination embedded in the fabric of our society. Understanding needs to occur so that real social change can occur. If understanding does not occur, I fear that people will continue to believe that racism and sexism are personal problems and not social issues, and some of these people could very well be my former students.
Most of my co-workers are committed Christians; most of my neighbors probably would define themselves as non-Christian. Right now, it seems to work best for us to not discuss politics at all. However, we all share common ground in that we want to make the world a better place. As we all talk with each other (even though they, I am sure, voted differently from me) about our children, our gardens, our pets, how we are celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas, and is everyone staying well; as my husband and I do our jobs at work, and my husband stays involved in our neighborhood community garden; all this encourages me that we are keeping community in the midst of this.
Dr. Sider,
I’ve just recently subscribed to your blog. I appreciate the winsome manner that you approach topics that impact the body of Christ. Having read this post as well as the one about the pledge of evangelicals regarding racism I have thoughts I’d like to share. In both posts you speak a lot about structural racism or systemic racism. I’m concerned that in these 2 posts that you haven’t addressed individual sin. No structure or system in itself sins. People sin. You call for Evangelicals to confess about their ancestors, and in the context you use I presume that you’re referring to spiritual ancestors. Both my spiritual and biological ancestors were sinners. So are you and I. I don’t think a pledge and confession of our ancestors sins are nearly as impactful as acknowledgement and repentance of our own and seeking Gods help replacing our sins of prejudice with love. I also think it’s very important for someone of you influence to emphasize the goodness and power of our great God. He promises that ‘all things work together for good to those that love the Lord and are called according to His purpose.’ This He, Almighty God promises and this He does. Christians all suffer, in different ways, in different degrees, but Almighty God is faithful to each and every one of His regenerate children by keeping everyone of His promises. Each of His children are victims of His ordained suffering unto sanctification and glory. None of us have the moral high ground apart from Christ’s righteousness and His life, death and resurrection which give us life and imparts a renewed conscience that conditioned by scriptural truth condemns our hearts unto repentance. We can talk about the past ancestors sins. Christ did. All the Apostles did. They did to emphasize theGood News that there is salvation in no other name so repent and believe. Our best life is later. the fix isn’t confessing someone else’s sin, it’s confessing ours. All of us.
There is a need for liberal and evangelical people of faith to listen to each other. Not just that but people of all faiths and no faith. There is theological truth that some things are beyond human compression that all faiths including Christianity reshaped by their time and place. A generation ago there was Christian churches together which brought Catholic
Orthodox ethnic evangelical and mainline protestant churches together.It had difficulties a consensus statement on marriage feel ap art the issues
Of same sex marriage. We need communities of faith together bringing Christian s non Christian and Denbighshire together
Unfortunately the culture wars will not end with re-election of how biden.Paula white praying for big to smite trump 's opponents is per
Proof of this.
Someone conceded much of passes for prayer is actually black magic. Certainly prayers for people to be hurt is such.
A century ago the fundamentalist modernist controversy ended with
The adoption of a policy of broadconfessionalism we need a new broadconfessionalism of shared
Values. While agreeing to disagree on theological issues including the case existence of God
We can agree on civil discourse.While agreeing to disagree on suggests such as premarital s ex homosexuality and other things we can agree. To oppose junk sexuality we can
I think what you are saying is “GRASS ROOTS” thinking. It is addressing the ROOT PROBLEM! That also means that the work is slow and tedious to get rolling but when the “SNOWBALL EFFECT” takes over it can be life transforming!
I know a place where the challenge of talking across “GREAT DIVIDES” is occurring. You just might find some great resources to address this issue!
The Leadership Connection is a program that has been running ROUND TABLE meetings that has successfully bridged the gap between Christianity and Professors/Administrators in the college community! Dave Thom is the founder and leader of this ministry that started in Massachusetts but is, now, beginning to spread across the nation!
Email: davethom@mit.edu or cambridgeroundtable.org
We all do big and little things that undermine our chances to really communicate. The President and many news commentators are setting the tone purposely this way for their own ends! Democracy requires effective communication! It’s destruction by leaders who have an autocratic vision of leadership is common as a means to their end! So we who called ourselves Christian, who already have a sense of detachment from earthly activities like politics and government, just might be able to model a more healthy form of communication fit for democracy! As a people, we earn the right to have good leaders by having good communication skills, good education, and good moral lives at all levels!
In order to be sensitive to things like covid, the election, and esp the difficult subject of racism, we need to have the Spirit of Truth. I capitalize these words only to signify that the Bible speaks directly of it, but the main point is that to recognize what is true from what is fiction, you need not only human-supplied information but the divine gift and consequent human predisposition to see what is true and distinguish it from what is not or less so. You cannot be motivated by anything other than God's truth and must see things from God's perspective. Without such a perspective, no manner of effort at discernment--one of scripture's spiritual gifts--will bear good fruit.
Meaningful change starts in the hearts of individuals. We have to allow God to open our hearts of stone. Don't just ask yourself "What would Jesus do?" search the scriptures, look at the life of Jesus, and then answer the question.