Race, Prejudice, And Power In The Church (2 Responses)

Response 1

Rev. Theodore Moore

“When whole groups benefit from collective harm done to others, those same groups must take responsibility as perpetrators.”

What appears to be an easy solution or “fix” is entangled with many misconceptions that have been perpetuated by racism.  In my life time, the only time I remember hearing a group publically take responsibility for the harm done by slavery was the service at St. Peter’s in Perth Amboy, spearheaded by Mother Deborah Piggins.  It was a moving and memorable example of taking responsibility as perpetrators of the injustice of burying slaves without the benefit of a name, date of birth and death.  In addition, the recognition of this institutionalized racism, sanctioned by the church in the past, underscores the need to actively search and identify additional historical as well as current examples of racially based injustices. 

What concerns me is the failure to recognize a present day system of mass incarceration that is causing collective harm to people of color.  The implementation of another form of a racial caste system is essentially taking the identities, potential and voting privileges away from people of color in a systematic way. The foundation for this system seems to be based on a racially based change in the severity of the penalties and sentences for violation of drug laws of this country.   The systematic removal of young Black and Latino males from society and the development of an underprivileged “caste system” have been achieved through the construction of penal institutions and sentencing of young Blacks and Latinos.  This has been accomplished in part by increasing the penalty for the use and possession of crack cocaine (used predominately by people of color) and decreasing the penalties for the use of cocaine (used predominately by whites).  Meanwhile our tax money has funded the expansion of private penal institutions to house the staggering increase of Blacks and Latinos arrested under these laws.  We need to recognize this injustice as well as the corruption that has accompanied this perpetuation of a modern day racial caste system.  These penal institutions exist mostly in rural and suburban areas. These suburban communities have benefitted by adding the prison population to the total census thereby increasing congressional representation.  There appears to be very little if any outcry against this injustice.  Read “The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander” for details.

“Race is a false and misleading social construct without basis in science or theology.  The idea of race was invented by sixteenth-century Europeans, imported by seventeenth-century American colonialists, constitutionalized by our eighteenth-century American forefathers, and perpetuated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a tool to measure human worth and distribute power and privilege. In the twenty-first century the results remain an unbearable weight over a divided society.”

Why are we continually forced to use this system to categorize people?  There is no justification for the continued use of this “racial classification” without a scientific or theological reason.  One section of applications for employment, loans and other legal documents continues to require information on racial background.  We all belong to the human race.  The continuation of this unscientific classification does little but provide a method of continued discrimination in hiring, loan approvals and housing.

“Even the Bible has been racialized… For centuries, the Bible was used to define and defend racism. The use of biblical foundations to justify racial classifications continues to be accepted today.  Understanding how the Bible has been wrongly racialized and used as a tool of racism is one of the most important steps in understanding and eliminating racism in the church.”

Slave owners, politicians and church leaders invented a race-based Bible that identified white people as the true people of God and all other people as something less than the people of God.  Fantasy stories were invented to authenticate the hoax, including the belief that Noah’s son Ham, who was condemned because of sexual sins, was a black African.  These fantasies have been perpetuated by both Black and White.  In the Black community one of the fantasy stories used to counteract the perpetuation of a white Jesus described the Saviors hair texture as woolly suggesting that Jesus was Black.  The Bible does not suggest or mention what His hair texture may have been.  These false concepts have been handed down from generation to generation by both Black and White designed to authenticate white supremacy and maintain a racial caste system.








Response 2

Rev. Joan Fleming             

Do white Christians truly have a deeply rooted “collective” consciousness that privileges our own kind and “disenfranchises” people of color?  We certainly hate to think so, but in many Sunday School rooms today pictures of a white Jesus still decorate the walls—and imprint a false image of our Lord in children’s subconscious.  Author Joseph Barndt would point to this as but one symptom of the deeply ingrained assumptions that have guided and controlled the Church’s thought and action since that first Anglican celebration of Holy Communion on Virginia’s shore in 1607.  Today, we still have “black” and “white” congregations, a living legacy of race, prejudice and power that brings the assumptions of the past distressingly into the present.

The city parish I served as rector prided itself upon its Colonial heritage.  Its fine stone tower pre-dated the Revolution and was claimed as the site where the Declaration of Independence received its third public reading.  Across town, barely a mile away, there is another Episcopal church, much smaller, architecturally undistinguished, and somewhat down-at-heel.  The basement frequently floods.

This is the “black church,” begun as a “mission” of the Colonial parish, its flock still almost entirely people of color—though nowadays mainly of Caribbean origin.

I have often speculated about the cultural context out of which this mission

was born.  The story—from the white side—is that funding was generously made available to black congregants of the older parish in order that they might start their “own” church and be independent.  The story—from the black side—is that the funding was a kind of bribe to get rid of members of color.  Some deeper background to these two stories can be discerned from a couple of sources.

Old Christ Church and Bishop Croes, a parish history written in 1896, contains the following reminiscence:

“In [the] early days of our century, there were still many slaves surviving among us. … [and] to keep the young negro-lads in order while in church, and also to make sure that they came to church, a long, low-seated, high-backed bench was provided for them, which was placed at the foot of the east window, directly underneath the pulpit, and facing the congregation, so that they might be seen of all men.  You may rest assured that, under such unfavorable circumstances for pranks, there was very little sky-larking indulged in by the youthful darkeys.”

St. Alban’s mission was organized a century later, when slavery was a thing of the past, in 1921.  But why, one wonders, just then?  Interestingly, research reveals that in 1923/1924, a new pipe organ was installed in the gallery of the Christ Church sanctuary.  Planning for its installation must have begun right about 1921.  It is an altogether logical deduction that because black members had traditionally been seated in the gallery where, according to the 1896 history, “a number of pews were set aside [for] the grown negroes,” funding a mission church at just that time for the Christ Church members of color may also have had an entirely practical motive—to free up gallery space for the planned new organ. 
           

A people’s “collective consciousness” can retain the deep memory of such covert insults for generations.  For the “perpetrators,” though, amnesia often conveniently obliterates them.                                                           

 

  

Racism And Resisting Racism In The Post-Civil Rights Church (2 Responses)

Response 1

Rev. Gregory Bazilla

I was born in 1962, and I grew up in an affluent township in New Jersey.  My perceptions of the Civil Rights Movement were filtered through my parents (positive) and grandparents (mostly positive).

Though I was baptized, I grew up outside of a church (I was a Sunday School dropout).  My Christian journey began when I was a young adult.  Gradually, my involvement in the ministries of the Church grew into a commitment to the institution of the Episcopal Church.  I studied at a theological seminary, trained as a hospital chaplain, worked as a chaplain in a Trenton hospital, and ministered as a parish priest.

Today I minister to the children of the children of the Civil Rights Era. I serve as a chaplain on the New Brunswick/Piscataway campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, a student population that mirrors some of the demographic trends around ethnicity and immigration in the wider society.  My ministry is primarily with emerging adults (ages 18-30), the segment of the population that is largely absent from the pews on Sunday morning.  Emerging adults generally hold a favorable view of the Christian proclamation that the love of God is revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but they don’t see the gospel as making any difference for their daily lives.  Many will quickly point to the church’s failures, hypocrisies, and sin, including the sin of racism (though I suspect many more have not considered the issue of racism in the church in the era of Obama).  Sociologists describe emerging adults as uninterested, uninvolved and lacking commitment to any institutions, including local and denominational churches. (See Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church.)

Given the decline of the institutional church in terms of member involvement, the diminishing dollars available to dioceses and denominations for funding programs, and the other trends that prompt us as a church to think critically, creatively and theologically about our mission and ministries, I wonder whether the programmatic approach to antiracism proposed by Joseph Barndt has a future.  With the insistence that racism has to die--amen!--there is also needs to be the realization that organizational structures and social patterns of church and society are changing, yes, dying a slow, anguished death.

Institutions bring together different generations, help to hold us accountable, and expose us all to new ideas, experiences and perspectives.  I am grateful for the big picture, the large historical canvas painted by Joseph Barndt in his book, for its uncompromising message of antiracism, and the very practical questions he provides for us as we seek to challenge each other to be faithful to our mission as the Church.   Let’s bring these conversations together--antiracism, emerging adults, the need for the institutional church to change--and see what new insights and understandings might open for us, as we learn from each other.  May God give us eyes to see, ears to listen, and hearts to love, and the courage to risk everything for the sake of the gospel.

“Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation, in the Church and in Christ Jesus, for ever and ever.” (Ephesians 3:20,21)

Response 2

Dr. George E. Moore

Assessing racism and resistance in the post-civil rights era requires a look at events shaping our daily lives as a nation and as the church.

•       Joe Wilson - Republican South Carolina yells out “you lie” during President Obama’s speech to congress.

•       Ten (10 )Republican members of Congress co-sponsored bill requiring future presidential candidates provide a copy of their original birth certificate.  A woman waving her own birth certificate, contended Obama was born in Kenya, and shouted out, "I want my country back!". 

•       Alabama's Republican supermajority approved what many consider America's toughest immigration law. Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn upheld the law – including a portion that says schools must check immigration status of children when they enroll, as well as the status of their parents.

•       A Brennan Center for Justice study indicated new laws regarding photo identification requirements for voting, eliminating same day voter registration, requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, changing requirements for voter registration drives, reducing early voting days, etc., will make voting harder for over five million people in the 2012 election. The report projects these laws will have a significant impact on minority voters.

•       Occupy Wall Street - an ongoing demonstration protesting socio-economic inequality and corporate greed in America, has now spread to over 80 cities across the country.

Elements of our national leadership, are apparently using the economic downturn to re-institute more overt form of racism; while resistance has again taken to the streets.

The diocese I serve reaffirm its support to ending racism to the national church, yet has instituted no infrastructure to address this sin. Apparently parishioners are unwilling to engage in transformational work. Churches acknowledges it’s present, yet fail to address it’s impact on daily living.

Where we are now is troubling.

Resisting Racism In U.S. Church History (2 Responses)

Response 1

Rev. Ken Gorman

The fourth chapter of Barndt’s Becoming an Anti-Racist Church is a survey of the church’s struggle to resist racism. There Barndt argues that the church has had two “personalities” from its earliest history with distinctive personality traits that characterized each’s reaction to the issues of injustice and oppression. He uses this description to narrate historically how these two different personality type churches perceived and the degree to which they resisted racism. The two go by the names of the Ruler’s Church and the People’s Church. Reading the chapter was an evocative experience. When I was a youth, I went to a church that was in a segregated community. The community was rigidly conservative, culturally isolated and proud of it.  The ethos of the town made anyone of color uncomfortable to go there, live there or even worship there.  Growing up in our church in that community I thought we were a People’s Church because, well, our congregation represented our community and we accepted all those who came through our doors. Even the Governor was often the guest at Sunday’s church breakfast. I can remember one Sunday asking the rector if someone interrupted our service and wanted to speak about the hot racial issues (at that time it was reparations) what would he do? He said he would call the police and have them ushered out. I remember that as my first encounter of power and control wielded in the Ruler’s Church, my church. Later I would learn the hard lesson that the Episcopal Church had benefited materially from the slave trade. We were not as much a “People’s Church” as I thought we were.  Can churches and individual personalities change their “types”?  Barndt later says that it is only after a kairos moment that a church can move into the process of shaping an anti-racist identity.  Personalities can change, too, but it usually happens only after a crisis (so says Erik Erikson). It took the seismic effects of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination to finally open the doors of the mainline churches. For me there was a kairos moment, too, when I was shaken. It initiated a process that to this day requires me to acknowledge that this kind of personal transformation is a process that doesn’t end, it goes on and on.  “The structures of racism have been in place for over 500 years in New Jersey,” as one other responder has said. There is no instant way to bring racism to an end here in our State, our church, or ourselves. But each of us, from our own kairos moments, has the opportunity to chart a new way by “making a path and walking on it.”

Response 2

Leroy Lyons

 “White slave masters taught slaves a twisted and distorted version of the Bible as part of their strategy of dehumanization and pacification.” P.54 Unfortunately, this tragedy, perpetuated by the triumphalistic Ruler’s Church, has been allowed to go unchallenged. The subtlety of this false bible messaging has remained inviolate for the most part; probably for several reasons. In the first place, there is a reticence, on the part of a Christian community, to challenge the ‘word of God’. The bible says and it does say unequivocally, that slaves should be obedient to their masters. What is prescribed as expediency becomes principle. This verse translates into a biblical injunction and the idea is interpreted as a good thing to do. In the second place, and for the most part, until recently, the People’s Church lacked the theological sophistication to think exegetically, and many scriptures went unchallenged. Finally, there was and is this ready acceptance, a brainwashing for the most part, to accept without questioning, what the Ruler’s Church dictates as the reality of the gospel.

Passages of scripture, such as:’ Slaves be obedient to your masters’, fit readily into the convenience of the Ruler’s church, and are accepted with a great deal of scriptural authority as just what the doctor ordered. It is easily swallowed. 

Another illustration should prove my point. The letters of the New Testament travelled through posterity and ultimately became part of the canon of Scripture because of their importance and use, not only to the church’s to whom they were directly addressed, but because of the importance of their teaching to the whole Christian community. It is therefore inconceivable to think that the letter to Philemon survived just because it gives instruction to the church on how to deal with thieving runaway slaves. How convenient though was this book to the slave Masters!  This thinking played right into their hands; how well does this idea reaffirm the rights claimed by the Fugitive Slave Law!

The book of Philemon is universally understood as the tale of a thieving runaway slave. He was encouraged by Paul to return to his master to be disciplined and restored. Here is the rub: this crass assessment is made on the strength of a minor and abstruse reference in 18. ‘If he has done you any wrong, or is in your debt.’ This is the evidence to prove the point. BUT, let us juxtapose this verse with 15. ‘That you may have him back for good, no longer as a slave, but as more than a slave – as a dear brother, very dear indeed to me, and how much dearer to you, both as a man and a Christian.’ This verse should leave no doubt as to which direction we should look for the meaning of the epistle. This letter is a clear challenge to a grave matter, an institutional crisis – the abolition of slavery in the church.

Abolishing slavery was not merely letting the slave go free, with his 40 acres and a mule, if anything. It was a difficult process that involved both master and slave in an intimate struggle.  It was a reconciliation process that led to restoration and wholeness for both the master and the slave. Humanity, as well as spirituality is to be repaired and rebuilt. Onesimus is returning to a very big change, a revolution in that household, for he is returning both as a man and as a Christian. It is not: you go your way and I go mine.  Can you imagine the transformation that is to take place between both slave and master!

Our present book is entitled Becoming an Anti Racist Church and our present chapter is Resisting Racism in United States Church History. The question is often asked how much is the racial situation today improving? Are we not looking at the same problem that has undergone a metamorphosis into a subtle and more pernicious creature?  Our anti racist struggle is a long way from completion. Is it because we cannot find Philemon? When we do find him, are we deathly afraid of the struggle or to risk the hard work that is needed to accomplish the challenge?  Certainly in this struggle, the concepts in the words: reparation, restoration and forgiveness, truth and reconciliation a la S. Africa will have to play their part. The biblical approach to anti racism has to be our thrust. What happened in Philemon’s house grew to affect the whole church and reformed the institution from within and in its quiet and enduring way kept this example for us as it is recorded in the canon of scriptures. In our quiet and enduring way, we must remain the anti-racist church ..…  RESISTING.

   

Racism In U.S. Church History (2 Responses)

Response 1

By Rev. Carolyn H. Eklund

Probably the best, most recent example of racism from our country’s history and our diocesan history was the awareness of the unrecorded deaths of slaves who were buried in the graveyard of St. Peter’s parish in Perth Amboy.  One evening in August, the bishop and members of various parishes packed the St. Peter’s nave in recognition of this fact.  We were mindful of the Diocesan warrant to repent of the sin of racism and ask God to reconcile us to each other.  It was a moving service that concluded with a reading of the few names of slaves that had been recorded in the church registry.  We all walked outside to the churchyard where the bishop dedicated a stone that acknowledged the unnamed souls.

As I read Joseph Barndt’s chapter on the history of racism in the United States and in the church I learned how slavery came to be in the United States centuries ago and how many millions of slaves died over those 400 plus years:  As white Europeans came to the Caribbean Islands, Mexico, South America, Central America and North America, the biblical “mandates,” “be fruitful and multiply” and “have dominion over the earth” were used to justify taking land from native people, imposing European Christianity on them and subjugating people into slavery in order to realize a prosperous destiny that included only white people.

I grew up in a racially integrated town, Kansas City, Kansas.  I went to racially integrated public schools.  And yet, I am aware that I am a part of that historical and existing “prosperous destiny” still primarily reserved for white people of this country.

Ten years ago I was called to a racially mixed parish which is my life’s love.  For years now, I have been alert to my “white privilege” and have loved engaging honestly and deeply with my friends from African descent.  Serving on Grace, Plainfield’s annual Black History Month committee has been foundational to my personal journey as I help to bring our church to racial unity and wholeness.

Response 2

Barbara Okamoto Bach

I visited St John’s Church (Montclair) to hear an invited sermon by an attorney who represents slave descendents’ reparations cases.  The forum topic after the liturgy was financial reparations for lasting effects of slavery, but the discussion turned on racism.  Chapter 3 of Barndt’s book makes the same connection -- from slavery and Indian genocide to racism.  He asks us to examine our church’s history.

2006 GC resolution A123 acknowledged that slavery is a sin and the Episcopal Church participated in this sin.  The resolution apologized for the Church’s complicity in supporting slavery, segregation and discrimination and urged each diocese to research its slavery history.  The Dioceses of Newark and New Jersey (one diocese before 1874) research found:

·        U.S. 1790 census counted 11,423 slaves in New Jersey; 1850 census counted 18 slaves (16 older than 60 years), a significant reduction possibly due to 1786 (Constitutional) and 1808 (NJ) bans on further importation of slaves.

·        Archeological evidence at landed estates show enslavement similar to southern plantations.  A Shrewsbury plantation recorded “60 to 70 negroes” in 1684. 

·        13 % of the 161 active NJ congregations in 1765 were Anglican.  Most churches in the Dioceses of Newark and New Jersey were founded after 1865 (13^th amendment).  Quakers organized and spoke out against slavery; Anglicans largely followed societal pressures, proslavery or silent.

·        Episcopal Bishop Henry Codman Potter (NY) in 1894 described the Christian church as a place where religion “taught all men were brothers, and practiced the opposite.”

·        From 1919 to 1939 at St Peter’s Church (Perth Amboy) Father Nelson provided separate services in the afternoon because black Episcopalians were not allowed to worship in the morning.  Toward repentance and redemption, the Diocese of NJ consecrated slave graves in St Peter’s churchyard (August 10, 2011).

I recently led a seminar for a Social Justice group, addressing the damaging legacy of enslaving black Americans.  A board member who hadn’t known that Thomas Jefferson kept 275 slaves asked,  “Why don’t we learn this in school?”  Twelve U.S. presidents (7 Episcopalians) owned slaves.  Slave owners Jefferson and Washington didn’t mean all men are created equal.  Read the collects for Independence Day (BCP pp. 242 and 258)!

God created all men equal.   It’s time to get it right.  My brown-skinned Latina daughter pledges allegiance with a plaintive question mark:  “. . . one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all?”