White churches must act
To the Editor,
As a lifelong Christian, I read the letter from the Interfaith Council of Southern Delaware County (ICSDC) in the June 5 edition with hope and fear. I hoped that the strong letter would be followed by strong, public actions confronting the vile doctrine of white supremacy. I feared that the actions would be pusillanimous.
Our nation is in a moral crisis. Individual Christians must discern for themselves what they will do to rid our country of the scourge of white supremacy. That discernment is even more important for churches, because white supremacy in the United States is deeply rooted in white Christianity. For much of our history, Southern churches proclaimed white supremacy to be God’s will, while Christian churches in the North were, and in most cases still are, complicit by their public silence regarding systemic racism.
More than a half century ago, in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is the arch defender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”
My hope is that predominantly white Christian congregations will seize this opportunity to atone for our historic complicity in racism. That congregations will commission delegations of clergy and lay leaders to literally and figuratively carry their churches’ banners into the corridors of political power with a simple message: our God abhors white supremacy; in faithfulness to our God, our church intends to call out any politician, Republican or Democrat, whose position on white supremacy is equivocal.
My fear is that the congregations represented in the ICSDC will instead ask for prayers. Encourage their congregants to act upon what they discern. Form committees. Offer adult education sessions about the spiritual, psychological, and social determinants of racism. In short, they will remain in the comfort of their sanctuaries doing what they have done in all the decades since Dr. King wrote his letter. Doing the things that have enabled us white Christians to feel satisfied with our churches’ public silence while our justice system fails to hold white officers accountable for the murder of Black Americans and suborns the mass incarceration of Black men. If there was ever a time when doing those things was an adequate response to racism, that time is long, long past.
Grant Grissom
Media
