Black Lives Matter and the Church that Failed Them

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. As I write this week’s episode, deliberations have just begun in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse for homicide in the deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, along with the gunshot injury to Gaige Grosskreutz. Alongside of Rittenhouse’s trial, we have been watching the prosecution make its case against Greg McMichael, his son Travis, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, who chased down Ahmaud Arbery before Travis McMichael allegedly shot him (supposedly) in self-defense. Both of these trials are tremendously polarizing and have resulted in significant pressure on all sides of the political aisle. They involve questions of gun rights, self-defense, freedom of speech, freedom to protest, among a host other questions… not the least of which are the persistent realities of racism in our country. This is all seen in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, the continued controversies surrounding that movement’s condemnation of the continued deaths of people of color in our country. All that political heat can make it hard to see, sometimes. So, I’d like to take a moment, now, before I even know what the results of Rittehouse trial are or what the results of the trial of the men whose actions led to the death of Ahmed Arbery, I’d like to take a moment and talk about the church and the question of “Black Lives Matter.” Because we need to be honest, brutally honest, that one of the reasons our society does not seem to value black lives as much as the lives of white people is because of the ways in which Christianity supported and is complicit in narratives of white supremacy. The transatlantic slave trade was founded on Christianity. A series of popes in the fifteenth century argued for the enslavement of non-Christians as “an instrument for Christian conversion.” Thomas Aquinas drew from Aristotelian understandings of slavery to insist that the slave was the rightful and natural instrument and property of the owner. Christians merged Aquinas’s understanding of the “natural slave” with the idea of Ham’s curse in the Hebrew Bible, insisting (without any true proof in the text, I might add) that Africans had inherited that curse and that slavery was their natural state. And so it was that Christians insisted slaves should obey their master, that masters were at total freedom to punish—even kill—any slave that resisted. When the Civil War concluded, Christianity was a driving force behind segregation, insisting that this was a biblical principal and that the government must not infringe upon our freedoms… And so one of the founding principles of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups after the Civil War was their belief that they were protecting their Christian nation. And it’s not just a question of Christian support of racism and slavery, it is also about the hesitance of the broader church to speak out and denounce those views when they occurred. In the book The Color of Compromise, author Jemar Tisby tells the story of what happened after four young girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, during the Civil Rights Movement. A white lawyer got up in front of an all-white business club and asked them who was responsible for throwing the bomb. He then answered his own question, saying, “We all did it.” Tisby goes on, noting, “Every time that the white community—especially Christians—failed to confront racism in its everyday, mundane forms, they created a context of compromise that allowed for an extreme act of racial terror like planting dynamite at a church. That’s the idea of complicity.” All of this Christian complicity with racism lies uncomfortably under the deaths of black people in our country right now. The church must own that history. The church must repent of that history. The church must do something to make right the history we have helped write. And in the trials currently happening in our country, Christians must demand justice. They must demand justice for a system that lets a cop go free when he shoots a twelve-year old black child who has a toy gun. A system that also seems to suggest that a seventeen-year old white boy with an assault weapon posed no threat. The reason it doesn’t feel to many people like Black Lives Matter right now is because Christians have spent centuries saying they don’t matter the same. Christians today must stand up and say, enough. Christians today must make good upon the calling of God to resist injustice, to affirm the dignity of every human being. If Christians cannot say Black Lives Matter and repent of our complicity in the sins of racism… then Christians should not be surprised if the rest of the modern world has no interest anymore in our religion. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.