My response to a
brother who blames whites for the divisions within the Church:
“I appreciate your response, although I disagree with your
diagnosis of the present Church:
·
It’s impossible, as WASPs, to fully appreciate
the cultural segregation fostered upon the black community in our country as
the segregated church continues to bear witness.“ As for me, I am coming to
understand more deeply the inherent racism…
While we both grieve over the racial tensions among
believers, I think that you are mistaken to blame today’s white church for the “segregated
church” and what you have termed as its “inherent racism.” Instead, I have
found that the black racism has become more acceptable, flagrant, and even fashionable.
(This is not to say that blacks are any more racist than whites. Rather, none
of us should get a free moral pass.)
If you are talking about “inherent racism” within the human
heart, I would certainly give you an “amen.” But I think that you are unfairly
ascribing this to the WASP church. Nevertheless, during Jim Crow, this church
had been a dismal failure.
However, I would hesitate to claim that this is inherent to
the WASP church. Our Leftist dominated universities and media are very prone to
demean the white church to further exacerbate the divisions and de-legitimize
the Church. Therefore, they have been happy to focus on the segregation era.
However, there are other equally revealing narratives that they have
conveniently overlooked. Retired Professor of History and Black Church Studies
and author of “Black Preaching,”
Henry H. Mitchell, had been charged with “teaching Black Church history like
it’s your own family album.” Mitchell admitted to the charge, adding that he
had also written to raise the esteem of his Black people.
Nevertheless, Mitchell also had some good things to say
about the White Church and their role in Reconstruction:
·
After the South was opened up to the
missionaries, under protection of military occupation, the Protestant churches
of the North launched a veritable crusade to bring literacy to the huge host of
the newly freed. (Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings, 142)
Well, how great was this crusade? Mitchell investigated the
annual reports of the American Baptist Home Mission Society:
·
I was stunned to see whole pages of names of
people who had been sent south to do mission work. There were hundreds of these
names, in tiny print, on page after page. (142)
·
Regardless of paternalism and hazards to African
American self-esteem, it was this huge crew of volunteer and minimally paid
instructors, of not just Baptist but all denominations, who laid the foundation
for all the secondary and college work reported in the pages that follow. There
may have been only a log cabin church to teach in at first; it may have been by
firelight, but these volunteers taught their very hearts out. There simply
isn’t room to begin to cover the host of primary reading classes that were
begun in churches and elsewhere soon after the Union troops took over. (142-43)
Mitchell later listed a vast multitude of schools started by
these white missionaries to train Black teachers.
The unbalanced treatment of the black/white experience tends
to be quite divisive and inflammatory. It keeps our brethren of color at an
unproductive boiling point. Should we blind ourselves to the racism within the
Church? Certainly not! However, the broad unsubstantiated blanket indictments
against the white church have illegitimately turned seekers away from the Church
and even from Christ. Sadly, even many of our youth have turned away because of
all of the negative publicity.”
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