Christianity: Is It White or Right?
Excerpt from Christianity: White or Right?
Valerie Nordbye walks us through the perception that Christianity is a religion created by White people for the benefit of White people.
The movie Crash is a powerful and disturbing portrayal of race relations in the United States. It is easy to watch the movie and wonder afterwards whether even God can reconcile us to each other. Indeed the hopelessness in the movie is seemingly confirmed in the lack of diversity within the American church.
What we find in the Bible is a completely different story. In Revelation 7:9 we find this description, “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb.”
God’s future for us and today’s reality are in stark contrast to one another and countless books are written on why that is, but for purposes of this article I would like to address some errors that I believe have violated God’s desire for his church.
The first error is blindness to the reality of racism and racial inequality. In their book, Divided by Faith, (New York: Oxford Press, 2000) Michael Emerson and Christian Smith interview African-Americans and Whites and discover that they have vastly differing views of the reasons for racial inequality. Whites are far less likely to recognize the presence of racism and much more likely to see the problem in terms of individual decisions and attitudes rather than structural discrimination.
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