On Sunday, June 4th, Pastor Dillon Awes stepped behind the pulpit at Steadfast Baptist Church in Watauga, Texas and declared “What does God say is the answer, is the solution for the homosexual in 2022?…That they are worthy of death.” His statement was greeted by shouts of “Amen” from within his congregation. He continued preaching, saying “…they should be sentenced to death, they should be lined up against a wall and shot in the back of the head.” Again, his words were greeted by “Amens” from within his church.

This clip soon spread across the internet, causing widespread backlash from religious and non-religious alike. But for me, an openly gay, former evangelical, Christian pastor, Pastor Awes words are not surprising at all. In fact, I’ve heard similar sentiments regularly. The only difference between Pastor Awes and most other conservative Christian pastors across the United States today is that Pastor Awes was willing to say the silent part out loud. The passage he was preaching on, as commonly interpreted by conservative Christians, does in fact say “Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things bus also approve of those who practice them.” (Romans 1:32) If you put any evangelical pastor on the spot and asked if they believed that this verse was true and was in reference to LGBTQ+ people, they would have to answer, even if reluctantly, “yes.”

In a strange way, I am glad Pastor Awes preached what he did so clearly, because he is revealing the truth that most other evangelicals don’t want to acknowledge- their theology related to the LGBTQ+ community is a theology of death. Despite attempts in recent years by evangelicals to seem more welcoming and inclusive, their core theological claim that the lives and love of LGBTQ+ people is sinful, broken, and abomination is a claim that has resulted in the suffering, oppression, and death of millions of queer people around the world, and it is high time that they own up and are honest about the beliefs they hold and their impact on LGBTQ+ people. Because again, Pastor Awes view is not a minority view, as hard as that might be to believe. He simply said what a majority of evangelical churches teach in a horrifyingly clear way. While most evangelicals would probably disagree with Pastor Awes graphic call for the execution of LGBTQ+ people, they would still affirm the truthfulness of Romans 1:32- “they are worthy of death.”

Even if evangelicals attempted  theological gymnastics to get out of this horrifying interpretation of Scripture that calls for violence towards queer people, their theology which tells LGBTQ+ people that they must suppress their sexuality or gender identity or seek to change it to be acceptable to God and welcome in the church does, in fact, cause death. A 2015 study published by the National Institutes of Health found that LGBTQ+ people who are subjected to non-affirming religious teachings have a significantly higher rate of attempted suicide. These numbers have been reaffirmed in study after study, and are certainly true in my experience as a young gay evangelical who was forced into conversion therapy by my Christian college in my early twenties. When you’re told that a fundamental aspect of your identity is evil and realize that there is nothing you can do to change it, for many, death can seem like the only viable escape from this mental and spiritual anguish.

So how are we to respond to the truth that this dangerous theology is being preached in literally every corner of our nation? How can those of us- religious or not- who are allies to the LGBTQ+ community protect our queer friends and family from violence and harm in the face of millions of people who hold to these dangerous beliefs and are feeling more empowered than ever to say them out loud and to act on them?

First, it’s important that we do our work and are informed. The truth is that while this interpretation of the Biblical texts is unfortunately common among Christians around the world, it is not an accurate understanding of the Biblical texts. The six verses in the Christian scriptures that reference any sort of same-sex behavior are all condemnations of a very particular practice that was common in the ancient world- sexual exploitation related to temple prostitution. Same-sex relationships and queer gender identities were well known throughout the ancient Near East and especially within the Roman Empire- instead of speaking about these realities, every condemnation of homosexuality in Scripture is tied to “idolatry”, which means worshipping something other than God, and in context is clearly a condemnation of temple prostitution, a practice where people who have sex with priests or priestesses in pagan temples as a way to honor various gods and goddesses. This is what is being condemned in Scripture- there is not a single condemnation of same-sex relationships or queer gender identity anywhere, and we must challenge these teachings the same way we challenged the churches teachings on slavery, the equality of women, and the panoply of other backwards beliefs that have been perpetuated in the name of Christianity.

Second, we must challenge our conservative Christian friends and family members to be honest about what they believe and the harm that it causes. The reason so many Christians shy away from saying things as clearly as Pastor Awes is because the inherently know that these beliefs are dangerous and wrong. How can one follow Jesus, whose central command was to “love your neighbor as yourself” and hold on to a belief that a group of people are abominations who are worthy of death? These are wholly inconsistent, and this inconsistency should be drawn out and turned into an invitation for our friends to change their damaging and dangerous beliefs.

Third, we must continue to uplift and celebrate LGBTQ+ people and relationships in our society. The hatred spewed by Pastor Awes is a clear reminder of why Pride is still so important- Pride Celebrations began to increase visibility of queer folks, decrease stigma around our lives and loves, and to use celebration and joy as a tool for resistance in the face of fear and bigotry. Despite the broad progress the LGBTQ+ rights movement has made in the US, our lives and rights are consistently under attack and in the post-Trump era, there has been a reinvigoration of anti-LGBTQ+ policies and rhetoric across the nation rooted in fear being perpetuated by the alt-right. Old tropes conflating queer people with pedophilia and sexual abuse have found new life, and the demonization of LGBTQ+ people as a threat to basic morality is now commonly heard on FOX and across social media. The way we combat such dangerous rhetoric is ensuring more people see and know LGBTQ+ people and for our allies to speak out whenever anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is used or policies are proposed, signaling the broad support of queer people by the American public.

 On this Pride month, it’s time for a renewed commitment to the fight for LGBTQ+ dignity and equality in the United States. It’s time for queer people to stand up and let our lights shine brighter than ever before so that LGBTQ+ youth can see our example and know that there is space for them, in all their uniqueness, in our society. It’s time for allies to be bold in their condemnation of bigotry wherever it occurs. It’s time for our nation’s leaders to reaffirm their commitment to fight for LGBTQ+ rights in every corner of this nation and around the world. If we remain complacent, fear-based views like those of Pastor Awes will spread and will result in more abuse and violence against LGBTQ+ people. Progress is not inevitable, and the fight has not yet been won. This Pride month, may we return again to the spirit of the earliest Pride marches, standing boldly in the face of fear and bigotry and declaring that love will win in the end.

It was the winter of 1995, just before Christmas. Sharletta Evans had her two sons with her as she drove to a relative’s house to pick up a grandniece after a drive-by shooting in their neighborhood the previous night. She left the kids in the car with her twenty-one-year-old cousin and seventeen-year-old niece and went inside to pick up her grandniece. While she was inside, the shooters came back. Bullets rained down on the car and the house. After the shooters left, Sharletta went back out to the car to find that the bullets missed her six-year-old son, Calvin, but one hit her three-year-old son, Casson, in the head.

Sharletta held her son and walked on the sidewalk. She talked to him. “You can make it. Hold on big guy.” Her dress was covered in blood from her collar to the hem. As the ambulance arrived, Casson took his last breath in his mom’s arms. Attempts to revive him at the hospital were unsuccessful.

What happened next Sharletta can only describe as an act of God. She heard a voice asking her if she would forgive the people who did this. By the power of the Spirit, Sharletta said she forgave them.

Seventeen years later she would be the first person to participate in a pilot program with the Colorado Department of Justice, the High Risk/Impact Victim Offender Dialogue. The victim-based restorative-justice program makes it possible for victims to meet with their offenders. There’s a long process of counseling on both sides that prepares the victim and the offender to explore every possible outcome from such a unique and weighted conversation.

Raymond Johnson was one of three teenagers in the drive-by car, and it was determined that he was the one who fired the bullet that killed Casson. At the time in Colorado, juveniles could be sentenced to life without an opportunity for parole, as Johnson was. As reporters explained about the program, “Beyond a sheer willingness to participate in restorative justice, the offender has to meet a three-part test for acceptance based on demonstrating accountability, genuine remorse and willingness to repair harm. Johnson met all the criteria, though on the last count the only reparations he could offer were honest answers to a mother’s unanswered questions.”

“There were so many questions,” Sharletta said. “When it came to every emotion, [my facilitator would] ask me where was I at. What did I want to say to him? I really had to dissect every emotion so there were no surprises.”

After each of them had prepared for their meeting, Sharletta and Raymond spent time asking each other questions and recalling that night seventeen years prior. Since their meeting, the Colorado Supreme Court struck down life sentences without parole for juveniles, and Sharletta has actively testified for Raymond to get a new sentence with an opportunity for parole. Sharletta actively advocates for victim-offender dialogue and juvenile sentencing reform. She has testified numerous times for restoration.

In 2009, three years prior to their meeting, Raymond sent Sharletta a Mother’s Day card and asked if she would be his mother. She didn’t answer until their meeting. It was hard for her to consider. Their meeting lasted eight hours. At the end, she held his hands and prayed over him. She also brought the card he sent and told him, “Yes, I will be your mother.”

In 2016 Sharletta was able to meet with the driver of the car through restorative justice.

Sharletta’s story of forgiveness and extensive work to offer the opportunity for restitution and restoration for offenders is awe-inspiring. It’s an example of what it looks like to no longer learn how to make war. It’s what we’re called to do when we choose to carry a plow instead of a gun. We have to recognize the trauma in our community and support the people like Sharletta who are working so hard, telling us to see the face of God in others.

He may not be a household name today, but a century ago Harry Emerson Fosdick frequently appeared in the pages of TIME Magazine, even making its cover. He saw what few others did — that Christian fundamentalism wasn’t a fading relic, but a resurgent factor that could alter the American future. In 1922, he rocked the religious world by asking this question in a sermon that “went viral” in its day: Shall the Fundamentalists Win? Are we finally arriving at the answer?

 Rev,. Fosdick was a leading liberal Protestant intellectual, a proponent of a Christianity that called for tolerance, open-mindedness, civil rights, and ecumenism. His forward-leaning writings and radio sermons reached millions at a time when two divergent versions of Christianity competed for the hearts and minds of the American Christian. It felt like a Kentucky Derby of faith, and the race has continued for a hundred years.

 In 1922, the fundamentalists were staging a comeback around the five fundamental doctrines they had published in 1910. But Rev. Fosdick activated the Protestant Mainline and the swelling social gospel movement gave them momentum to surge ahead. In 1925, the fundamentalists pulled out front in a show of political power by outlawing evolution in public school curricula in Tennessee. The Scopes Monkey Trial backfired and the fundamentalists again seemed to be falling behind into a period of public embarrassment and retreat.

The Mainline lead continued when the stock market crashed and most Mainline clergy had praise for FDR organizing the nation in love for neighbor. In fact, on October 6, 1930, Harry Emerson Fosdick greeted the nation from the cover of TIME Magazine. But conservative clergy were organizing against the New Deal and by the late 30s, they were laying the foundation for a new alliance between conservative Christianity and America’s corporate titans.

 With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Protestant Mainline took the lead again as the party of patriotism and support for the war. By 1948, it was American Reformed theologian and ethicist, Reinhold Niehbur, on the cover of TIME Magazine.

 By 1954, the race was shifting. Billy Graham made his debut on the cover of TIME. His upbeat crusades were putting the fun back into Fundamentalism, which was rebranding itself as Evangelicalism.

 We could trace this race through the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s to 9/11, with the iconic TIME Magazine cover often signaling shifts in who had the lead. Then came Fundamentalism’s greatest win of the last one hundred years. Spurred on by anxiety, outrage, and animus, Fundamentalism became the warhorse on which Donald Trump staged his triumphal ride into Washington. And we might just interpret January 6, 2021, as an example of how far Fundamentalism will go to hold onto its lead.

 I am a refugee from the Fundamentalism Fosdick warned us about and I eventually found refuge in the Mainline. I had great hope that Mainline Protestantism could rise to today’s challenges, and I’ve worked hard writing, speaking and organizing, to encourage Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and allies to seize the moment.

 But a few years ago, a Mainline minister pulled me aside. “McLaren,” he said, “you’re so naive. You’re right: fundamentalists were rigid in their doctrines. But we Mainliners are just as rigid in other ways. We’re liturgical and institutional fundamentalists. You have high hopes for us, and I once did too, but when I look around today, I see most of us Mainliners are keeping busy micromanaging our own decline.”

 Thinking they’ve been winning all along, Mainliners have remained comfortable and complacent, allowing Christian Fundamentalism to metastasize by combining forces with its economic, political, educational, and constitutional counterparts. With increasing influence, they speed down the straightaway denying science, undermining democracy, subverting the Constitution, seeking to reverse a century of progress in social justice, and threatening our future by refusing to face the five fundamentals we all now face. Largely unimaginable in Fosdick’s day, these new fundamentals are no longer doctrinal, they’re existential: nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction; climate change and a multifaceted environmental catastrophe; a resurgence of vicious white Christian supremacy; a form of capitalism so successful that it is not only too big to fail, it is too big to control; and the concentrated power of a small cadre of global oligarchs who buy candidates, governments, and media outlets, and use them for their own kleptocratic purposes, including invading countries and threatening World War III.

 Over this last century, things have often gone, not as Rev. Fosdick hoped, but as he feared.

 Were he here today, I think he would challenge all non-fundamentalists — Christian and otherwise — with a very practical path forward. He would challenge us to wake up every day realizing that five fundamental threats are breathing down our necks. He would challenge us to out-think, out-organize, out-give, out-strive, out-love, and out-last our fundamentalist counterparts in the 21st Century. He would challenge us to start acting like we’re losing, because we are.

WASHINGTON (RNS) — On June 1, 2020, then-President Donald Trump marched across Lafayette Square outside the White House, trailed by an anxious-looking team of advisers and military aides. The group shuffled past detritus left by racial justice protesters after a frantic mass expulsion executed by police minutes prior with clubs, pepper balls and tear gas.

The dignitaries stopped in front of St. John’s Church, where presidents, including Trump, have traditionally attended services on their Inauguration Day. St. John’s, which had suffered a minor fire the day before, was closed. But Trump took up a position in front of its sign and turned toward the cameras, a Bible held aloft.

“We have the greatest country in the world,” Trump said. In the distance, sirens wailed.

Washington’s Episcopal bishop, whose diocese includes St. John’s, condemned Trump’s stunt, saying it left her “horrified.” But White House chief of staff Mark Meadows declared he was “never prouder” of the president than in that moment, calling it a rejection of “the degradation of our heritage or the burning of churches.” Trump’s evangelical Christian advisers were similarly effusive, lauding the photo op as “important” and “absolutely correct.”

In retrospect, the “symbolic” message of Trump’s Bible photo op, as he termed it, operates as a bookend to the Christian nationalism on display at the attack on the U.S. Capitol seven months later. It communicated, however histrionically, that the president was leading an existential fight against politically liberal foes calling for a racial reckoning, but at the center of which was an attack on Christian faith. From that moment on, Christian nationalism — in the broadest sense, a belief that Christianity is integral to America as a nation and should remain as such — provided a theological framework for the effort to deny Democrats the White House.

As Trump’s poll numbers dipped the same month as the photo op, his campaign redoubled efforts to stir up support among his conservative Christian supporters. Then-Vice President Mike Pence embarked on a “Faith in America” tour, while Trump conducted interviews with conservative Christian outlets and held rallies at white evangelical churches.

Referring to “American patriots,” Trump told rallygoers at Dream City Church in Phoenix: “We don’t back down from left-wing bullies. And the only authority we worship is our God.”

In August at the Republican National Convention, Trump described early American heroes as people who “knew that our country is blessed by God and has a special purpose in this world.” Pence, in his speech, adapted Christian Scripture by swapping out references to Jesus with patriotic platitudes.

Despite then-candidate Joe Biden’s public discussion of his Catholic faith, and the overt religiosity of the Democratic National Convention, Donald Trump Jr. told the GOP crowd that “People of faith are under attack” in the United States, pointing to restrictions on large gatherings due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet it was Trump’s religious supporters who did the attacking the final night of the RNC. After leaving the convention’s fireworks-filled celebration at the White House, conservative Christian commentator and Trump loyalist Eric Metaxas was filmed punching an anti-Trump protester off his bike and fleeing into the night, only admitting to the assault days later in an email to Religion Unplugged.

SIGN: RED LETTER CHRISTIAN PLEDGE

After Trump lost the election in November, a report from the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the Freedom From Religion Foundation concluded that Christian nationalism, also referred to as white Christian nationalism, was used to “bolster, justify and intensify the January 6 attack on the Capitol,” according to BJC’s Amanda Tyler.

In the days after the vote, Florida pastor Paula White, leader of the White House faith office, preached a sermon from her home church in which she called on “angels” from Africa and other nations to assist in overturning the election results. The next night, insisting she was only addressing “spiritual” matters, White vacillated between the ethereal and the electoral: She entreated the Almighty to “keep the feet of POTUS in his purpose and in his position” and decry any “fraud” or “demonic agenda” that “has been released over this election.”

“We override the will of man for the will of God right now, and we ask, by the mercy and the blood of Jesus, that you overturn it, overturn it, overturn it, overturn it, overturn it, overturn it, overturn it,” she said.

The religious rhetoric ramped up with the effort to “Stop the Steal.” Thousands of Trump’s supporters descended on Washington in mid-November for the “Million MAGA March,” where Ed Martin, a conservative politician and an executive at the Eagle Forum, flanked by signs reading “Jesus matters,” argued that the United States was “founded on Judeo-Christian values” and should not be led by “CNN … or fake news.” Martin called on God to “bless us in our work” and asked God to “strengthen us in our fight” to defend Trump because the “powers of darkness are descending.”

Around the same time, activists began planning a series of  “Jericho Marches” across the country, invoking the biblical story of Israelites besieging the city of Jericho. In Pennsylvania, demonstrators marched around the state Capitol waving Trump flags and blowing on Jewish ritual horns called shofars. Verses of the hymn “How Great Is Our God” mixed with chants about electoral fraud.

The largest “Jericho March,” on Dec. 12 in Washington, was emceed by Metaxas and included Trump-circle figures such as disgraced former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn and current Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the militant group Oath Keepers, who now faces sedition charges for his alleged role in the Capitol attack, called for the marchers to join him in a “bloody war” if the election results weren’t overturned.

Several groups took on a religious bent as Jan. 6 approached. Members of the Proud Boys, a right-wing group known for clashes with leftist protesters, prayed near the Washington Monument in December, comparing their “sacrifice” to Jesus’ crucifixion. “God will watch over us as we become proud,” one man shouted into a bullhorn. (The next evening, Proud Boys — after being prayed over by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones — tore “Black Lives Matter” signs from Washington-area churches, setting one on fire.)

Jericho Marchers were among the thousands who descended on Washington in January, some traveling on buses paid for by Mastriano. On Jan. 5, a group processed around the U.S. Capitol, holding signs emblazoned with Trump’s face while once again blowing shofars and singing “How Great Is Our God.” That night, Tennessee pastor Greg Locke —in addition to lifting up prayers for the Proud Boys — preached to a raucous crowd, describing America as “the last bastion of Christian freedom” and declaring that Trump would stay “for four more years in the White House.”

The next day on the National Mall and the Capitol steps, Christian nationalist iconography was unavoidable. Men and women waving flags that read “An Appeal to Heaven” or “Proud American Christian” surged past Capitol police as the officers tried to halt those entering the Capitol building. When people adorned in Oath Keepers attire stormed into the Capitol rotunda, they appealed to the Almighty for “letting us stand up for our country.”

In the Senate chamber, the invaders invoked Jesus’ name and bowed their heads as a self-described “shaman” associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory movement thanked Jesus for “allowing” them “to get rid of the communists, the globalists and the traitors within our government.”

As District of Columbia police officer Daniel Hodges, who was crushed in a door by insurrectionists that day, put it: “It was clear the terrorists perceived themselves to be Christians.”

That was certainly the case with Jenny Cudd, who was later tried and convicted for her actions at the Capitol. In a video posted to Facebook on Jan. 6, Cudd, draped in Trump-branded gear, said: “We were founded as a Christian country. And we see how far we have come from that. … We are a godly country, and we are founded on godly principles. And if we do not have our country, nothing else matters.

“To me, God and country are tied — to me they’re one and the same,” said Cudd.

This piece originally appeared in Religious News Service.

A couple of weeks ago, we were escorted out of the National Prayer Breakfast hosted by the National Rifle Association by about a dozen police officers. What did we do to get thrown out of the prayer breakfast? We prayed.

After the back-to-back shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, we were given tickets by a lifetime member of the NRA who is deeply concerned about gun violence. Like many of us, the person who gave us tickets wants to see our thoughts and prayers turn into policies and change.

I, along with a couple of friends, attended the prayer breakfast with one ambition – to pray. The prayer breakfast kicked off with statements from NRA executives. There was an advertisement from “Patriot Mobile,” a cell phone provider who assured members they shared the NRA’s values for faith, family, and guns. Then there was the Pledge of Allegiance, and the singing of the National Anthem. But not one mention of the victims, not one prayer for those whose lives were lost the week before in Buffalo and Uvalde.

We had visited Uvalde the day before, doing what we could to honor the lives lost, to listen to the grief and tears and outrage and calls for change. We visited Robb Elementary School, where you could still see the kid’s papers hanging in the windows of their classrooms.

So our hearts were heavy as we walked into the prayer breakfast the next day. I carried with me the Uvalde paper we had picked up. The front page had all those babies’ faces and the two teachers who died with them. We also had a list of all their names, along with the names of the 10 people killed in Buffalo. Our goal wasn’t to get kicked out of the prayer breakfast. Our goal wasn’t event to disrupt it. We had tickets and waited until there was a space without speakers in the program so we didn’t interrupt. Our goal was singular – to pray for the victims by name, and to invite everyone to join us. With the help of a coalition of clergy around the country known as National Faith Leaders For Ending Gun Violence, we had created a liturgical, call-and-response, prayer. Before reading aloud each name, we say together, “God knows their names.” And after each name, we say, “Lord, have mercy.” Simple, heartfelt prayer.

As we were told that the program would pause, and breakfast would begin, I stood, holding the Uvalde paper, and invited people to join us in prayer for the victims. After the first name, we were told that we would be arrested if we did not leave. So we invited people to join us outside, as we respectfully complied with police orders. It is noteworthy that the police came quicker to kick us out of the prayer meeting than to confront the shooter in Uvalde. And we were asked to leave a prayer meeting for praying – by an organization that boasts of its commitment to religious freedom, free speech, and the Constitution. We finished our prayer in front of the Convention Center.

There are many things I learned attending the NRA Convention and prayer breakfast. I learned that you can legally purchase a missile launcher for $6500, but the missiles cost over $3000 so you really need to want to blow something up before you invest in that. We saw all the extreme stuff you can imagine – vendor after vendor showcasing assault rifles just like the ones used in Uvalde and Buffalo and so many mass shootings. There weren’t many hunting rifles there in the exhibit hall.

After participating in the protests and vigils a day or two before, we had the rare opportunity to cross the line, with legitimate passes and interact with people inside the NRA Convention.

It allowed me to see some things I didn’t expect. For instance, a protestor we had stood with the day before, yelled insults at us as we left the building, having no idea why we were there. As the old saying goes, “Where you sit determines what you see.” And going inside surely allowed me to see some new things I didn’t see just by protesting outside of it.

As we entered the Convention Center, one of the first people I met had a warm smile and told me he had read some of my books. We had an incredible conversation… it quickly relieved some of my presumptions. And yet, what we saw inside the Convention was anything but harmless. In fact it was haunting to see vendor after vendor displaying military style assault rifles and high capacity magazines. We had one exhibitor show us a magazine that could easily be attached to a Glock pistol for less than $100, allowing it to shoot over 50 rounds without reloading.

But there is good news. The NRA is hemorrhaging in almost every way. It has been on the verge of bankruptcy, and is in the midst of a civil war within its own ranks. One thing was very apparent as we attended the Convention – it is aging out, and overwhelmingly white, old, and male. It does not reflect who America is and who we are becoming. As we crossed the line and went inside this intimidating organization, we had a “Wizard-of-Oz” moment where it felt like the veil was stripped away, only to reveal the great Wizard is just a little old man behind it all.

It is also a reminder that the real obstacle to gun reform in America is not gun owners, but gun extremists and gun profiteers, which is exactly who the NRA has become. When the NRA says that it has 5 million members, what we need to hear is that over 95% of gun owners are NOT part of the NRA. In fact, as we researched for our book Beating Guns, we found that 62% of gun owners find themselves at odds with the NRA. And when it comes to common sense gun reforms like banning assault rifles, raising the minimum age, requiring universal background checks, red flag laws, eliminating ghost guns, a majority of gun owners and nearly 90% of Americans want to see change.

Keep in mind that two-thirds of Americans live without guns. And even though we now have more guns than people in America, almost half of the guns are owned by less than 5% of our population. Those are folks who don’t just have a 12 gauge for hunting deer, but own about 20 guns average each. Some of them have over 1000 guns. That’s what we mean by gun extremists.

While the NRA only represents a small percentage of the US population, they still own a lot of our politicians. In 1998, the NRA became the biggest contributor in congressional elections. In 2016, the NRA allocated 96% of its total election spending, over 50 million dollars, to the presidential race and six Senatorial races. Donald Trump received over 30 million of that – it’s no coincidence that he was one of the speakers this year in Houston. Henry Ford once said, “Tell me who profits from violence, and I will tell you how to stop it.” Perhaps if every city and municipality started passing commonsense gun reforms – banning assault rifles, limiting handgun purchases to one per month per person, and other policy changes that would save lives, we could bankrupt the NRA and its ability to purchase politicians (as undoubtedly, the NRA will sue every municipality that regulates guns as the Second Amendment suggests).

Here’s one constructive thing we can learn from the NRA – contacting our legislators makes a difference. One recent study found that nearly 50% of NRA members have contacted a public official to express their opinion on guns, and about 25% of them have done that in the past year. Compare that to the general population – where only 15% of Americans have contacted their legislators and only 5% in the past year. In the words of Dr. King, “Those of us who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as the war hawks.”

I believe in prayer. That’s why we went to the NRA prayer breakfast. But I also believe in action. As we were escorted out of the Convention Center, one of the NRA leaders came to talk with us. He pointed to the newspaper I held in my hands, with all of the faces of the kids in Uvalde, and told us that it broke his heart. I reminded him of this timely verse from the book of James: “Faith without works is dead.” He shook my hand as we exited the building. Every one of us is faced with a decision right now – what does it look like for us to have courage and turn our thoughts and prayers into change. The best way we can honor the lives of all those lost to guns is by taking action to end gun violence. Now is the time.

Last month an explosive report was released detailing the massive amount of abuse and cover up of abuse that has taken place within the Southern Baptist Convention over the past two decades. This was the largest investigation undertaken in the denomination’s history and the troubling report details what many abuse survivors had been speaking out about for years. Now, armed with the new report, they are continuing to amplify the call for more transparency and accountability within the denomination. 

Among those who is continuing to raise her voice is Ashley Easter, an abuse survivor, author, and advocate who uses her platform to empower other survivors of abuse. RLC editor, Rebekah Barber, recently spoke to Easter about the explosive report and what work is needed to be done to ensure that pastor predators are held accountable and survivors are able to receive a sense of justice, whatever that may look like to each individual person.

Rebekah: A lot of your work has centered around empowering survivors of abuse. Can you tell me about what led you to this calling?

Ashley: I’m a survivor myself. It was one of those things where I really felt a calling to reach out and support other survivors. I initially started with a blog, talking about different things I had survived. That developed into a conference.

 Now I have a nonprofit called Courage 365. With that, we provide a lot of educational resources. This week we’re starting our first online peer support group called Courage Clubs, which is exciting. We’ve had conferences, as well as video shows every week. We’re just  starting season three of The Courage Conversation Show. We also have free resources, PDFs, and resource guides.

We just do a lot of work to  educate and connect people with what they need for their healing journey. I got connected with the movement to end abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention around 2018. I actually came from the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church. Nobody at the time was really talking about abuse there–that’s starting to become more common in the news reports.

The Southern Baptist Convention is not not that different. There are  so many similarities in this denomination. My friend, Cheryl Summers started the For Such A Time As This Rally. We had  a protest outside of their convention in  2018. We held signs and preached many sermons and had talks from survivors and advocates. We’ve really been calling for change every year since. . The last two years, the rally has been online because of COVID and survivors often having autoimmune disorders. It’s extra important for them to be safe during these times. I’ve had conversations with some of the top leaders, confronted J.D. Greear and previous presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention, and unfortunately, have just not seen a lot of change.

Rebekah: As someone who is deeply involved in this work,  how have you been grappling with the recent  release of the report detailing abuse allegations within the Southern Baptist Convention and attempts to cover up this abuse?

Ashley: The report really had nothing new in it. Survivors and advocates have been talking about this for years. We’ve even been saying that there’s a secret list—the one that was produced.

I  think the earliest that I’m aware of there being any kind of organized survivor advocacy was in 2007  with Christa Brown. We’ve been calling for change. We’ve been saying that there’s all this abuse but  nothing has really been done. 

Advocates and survivors have been talking about basically everything in the report since 2007. I  really think that the report was only released because of public pressure, not because the SBC as a whole wants to change. It’s important to realize that the report is only talking about the Executive Committee, which is a small piece of the Southern Baptist Convention. It wasn’t a report about the Southern Baptist Convention as a whole, so it’s really very limited in its scope. The list of Pastor predators put out had many names redacted. It’s understandable if names of victims were redacted, but these were names of Pastor predators.  I think that shows that they are still protecting certain people.  I think that as people look at this report, they need to realize that survivors and advocates have been saying this for years and years. 

It’s only been because of public pressure outside the church  that this is even being released. But even with it being released, does that even signify any change? What really is going to stop Pastor predators from raping little children?–certainly not just putting out a report. We will need to have changes made, we need to have these pastors kicked out, we need to have mandatory trainings for pastors and seminary students so  they know how to properly address and respond to abuse. There needs to be a  no tolerance policy for those who cover up abuse. Simply having a report come out of information that we already knew all along, I don’t think signifies any great change. It just signifies that we know what we’re talking about and something has to happen, but it’s likely nothing will.

Rebekah: What do you think has caused this huge amount of silence and hypocrisy within the church? Why do you believe that there is so much hypocrisy in that the church preaches the concepts of Christianity but still allows these types of things to perpetuate?

Ashley: I think we can look at it from two angles. One, we can look at it from a broad structure that we could put on pretty much all church denominations, because it needs to be very clear that this is not just a Southern Baptist, or Catholic Church situation. All denominations have this problem, probably to the same extent, they just haven’t had big investigations written about them. It’s important to realize that when we see these things, this is really a microcosm of the larger church. 

People cover up abuse  for one reason: power and control. That’s the same reason people abuse: for power and control. We see a lot of patriarchy, we see a lot of racism, we see a lot of homophobia in these churches. What we don’t see is a lot of accountability for those who are given positions of power over other people.

It is much easier, much more convenient to continue supporting a pastor who has a lot of support, who maybe preaches certain messages that are advantageous to the limited few than it is to step out of the way and support a victim of abuse  who may have no power or influence in that church.  I think it always comes down to power and control,  to profit and finances. 

The SBC does not want to open themselves up to lawsuits. They try to sneak around with things so as to not lose money in lawsuits instead of addressing the problem so that lawsuits don’t have to happen. When we look at the Southern Baptist Convention, specifically, the entire reason that denomination was founded was because they wanted missionaries to be able to have slaves. When you start a denomination, or any organization,  from such a corrupt and grotesque point of view, it’s likely just going to be a downhill motion from there.

Not only is there the extreme racism in the Southern Baptist Convention, which we see over and over again to this day, but there is the patriarchy, the suppression of women… It got a little bit better in the 70s, but then they had the conservative takeover, and they stopped ordaining women and started really  leaning back into patriarchy, which they have stepped away from a little bit. We see homophobia at large scales and people truly dying because of lack of support for who they are. 

When you look at all of these things, it is no wonder that a church would not only want power and control in the area of racism, the area of sexism, the area of homophobia–but of course over victims as well–victims of all kinds.  I think when you create something out of danger, evil, disgustingness, it’s not likely to get better. It’s just going to continue to spiral into other areas.  I think when we look at the SBC, specifically, we can look and look at their roots, but  think when we look at churches as a whole, it always comes down to power, prestige, money, and influence.

Rebekah: You mentioned the need for the Pastor predators to be fired  and for there to be trainings for pastors and those in Divinity School. What other ways do you think, especially those in power, should be held accountable in these instances?

Ashley: I really believe that if you abuse or cover up abuse you need to be removed. Covering up abuse is a broad spectrum. There’s specifically being aware while abuse is happening and not telling somebody that’s on part of the spectrum, but then there’s also the part of the spectrum that is like “well, this happened 20 years ago, they’ve sought forgiveness, and it’s all fine.” Even people on that end of the spectrum,  they’re really not safe for their congregants. 

I think it’s important to have a database, one that maybe is funded by the SBC, but not created by the SBC, because they obviously can’t be trusted to really be transparent. When Pastor predators are found out there should be a database so congregants can look and see who these people are because what often happens is they’ll get fired from one place, or more likely they’ll have like some sort of quiet by night leaving, and then they’ll pop up in another church down the road. We need a way to track what’s happening.

It’s, exorbitantly expensive for somebody to be an abuse survivor, I believe it’s estimated that  for one rape or sexual assault–and oftentimes people have many–it costs about $120,000 over their lifetime  to access healing resources.  I think we should be seeing the Southern Baptist Convention, instead of pouring money into colonizing other countries,  they should be pouring money into therapy  at the choice of the survivor, of course, or to having funds for victims to pay for their legal costs. Not only does it have to stop, but there needs to be some sort of restitution for what has and what continues to happen because without that, I don’t think this is ever going to get better. 

Rebekah: Can you talk a little bit more about what a sense of justice for the survivors could look like?

Ashley: I think each survivor is going to look at justice a little bit differently. For some, they would love to have their day in court. For some survivors, that’s not possible, whether it’s a statute of limitations or whether they’re just at a point in their life where they’re just fragile and unable to withstand that abusive system which is our court system. For some people, it looks like that and for some people, it does not. 

For some survivors,  they just want what happened to be acknowledged and for those people to be removed. Justice is really a very individual thing. How can you rectify ruining someone’s life?

It’s not that you can’t experience healing. It’s not that you can’t have a  joyful life after abuse, but when someone steals these parts of you  or attempts to steal these parts of you–because we’re always whole—how can you ever make that better? How can justice  ever truly make up for a child being being raped? 

I think it looks different for the individual survivor, but I think what we sometimes have to focus on is what we’re able to do through the  legal system, through our police system–which can be extremely traumatizing , to survivors. I’d love to see any Pastor predators going to jail, but I think the statistic from RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and  Incest National Network) says that out of 1000 rapists, only one will ever see the inside of a prison cell.

Of course we’d love to see more people put away, but we’re seeing that just as recently as the Josh Duggar case (he’s Independent Fundamentalist Baptist) he’s only  getting 12 and a half years in prison. Both the judge and the people trying him said it was the worst child sexual abuse images they’d ever seen. Many times rapists  get less than that. A lot of  times if they are convicted they get a year to four years. We’d love to see more people put away for these kinds of things, but I don’t know if that is really realistic.

Rebekah: Is there anything else that you think we should know, specifically about your work to amplify the needs of survivors?

Ashley: We’ve got a couple of things coming up this year. We recently started our first peer survivor support group online. They’re called courage clubs, and are for adult survivors of abuse. We have them every first Wednesday of the month.

It’s completely free and people can just go to courage365.org/clubs.. You can sign up there to join and we have  a little curriculum that we’re going through with  different healing tips, resources and conversation. 

It’s not Christian-based as in we’re not trying to proselytize anyone, but more so just getting some healing resources into people’s hands no matter where they have landed in their faith journey. In October, we’ll  have the 30 days of courage. That’s in lieu of our in person conference because we’re not quite ready to go back in person yet. 

Throughout the month of October, we’ll have  our courage conversation show, which is a video recording that we have streamed live to our Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The back episodes are also on our website  where we interview survivors and people doing healing work like therapists and trauma coaches. People can watch that live on Thursdays at 7pm. Eastern or they can catch the replays. We have a variety of resources on our website as well and we’d love for anybody to check that out. 

I think that it’s  important to call out organizations like the Southern Baptist Convention, but I think they’ve proven to us that they’re not willing to change, so  I think while we do that we have to simultaneously, and perhaps with more vigor, be reaching out to the actual survivors because those are the ones who have the potential to experience healing and change for themselves.

James Baldwin is among those who has seen whiteness in America most clearly. In 1963, in an interview with psychologist Kenneth Clark that aired on PBS, Baldwin cut to the heart of the matter, asserting that he was “not a n*****, but a man”, and that it was up to white people to find out why they had a need for a “race” they could use to elevate themselves in the first place. “If I’m not the n***** here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to answer that question.” This is precisely the correct question for white people to ask ourselves, but we have seldom reached the spiritual and emotional maturity to approach it. Science has shown us that race is a social construct, and history demonstrates that race was systematically developed as an idea; but if we do not understand why, we cannot understand ourselves. Geneticists are helping to understand the lie of racial difference; ethnic groups in West Africa have more in common genetically with people in Western Europe than they do with people in Eastern Africa. What is it, in us, that we are unable to trust that we were made in the image of God and must denigrate the image of God in another? Baldwin wrote “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

It could be said that much of what white people have historically ascribed to black people is projection. That is, what we do not understand, do not like, or are ashamed of in ourselves become the racialized generalizations we make against black and brown people. In the earliest days of this country, when Africans were brought here and sold as property, the language from European intellectuals—especially Christians—revolved around evangelizing and civilizing the so-called African “savage.” The irony, of course, is that the Europeans who migrated to the Americas came from cultures that had engaged in tribal warfare and organized systems of violence. Christianity did (and still does) little to quell a penchant for violence; rather, followers of Jesus have worn crosses into battle. Today tourists wander the Tower of London, home to horrifying medieval torture in the place that fancied itself the world’s primary exporter of culture and intellectualism. Heretics were burned at the stake in England until the early 1600s (the first Africans arrived in America in 1619). Resmaa Menakeem writes that it is not difficult to understand why humans felt the need to flee England: “Many of the English who colonized America had been brutalized or had witnessed great brutality first-hand. Others were the children and grandchildren of people who had experienced such savagery in England. “Europeans transported African men, women and children in the cargo holds of slave ships, packing bodies together in such inhuman and unsafe conditions such that an untold number of human beings created in the image of God died and were unceremoniously buried in the Atlantic. White slaveowners raped and beat black women but portrayed the black male as the one whose sexual urges could not be controlled. White southerners—little more than 100 years ago—took picnics to and sent postcards from lynchings. Who, here, are the savages? Who is in need of the gospel, of being evangelized?

JOIN: POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN MORAL MARCH ON WASHINGTON 

White supremacy is a verdict in search of evidence. Why is that evidence so important? Historian Nell Irvin Painter brings forward a helpful conclusion from sociologist Max Weber. Wealthy, privileged people want to believe that what they have comes from “underived, ultimate, and qualitatively, distinctive being. . . the fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced that he ‘deserves’ it, and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others . . . Good fortune thus wants to be ‘legitimate fortune.” White people want to look around at the advantages that are overwhelmingly theirs, in all areas–poor whites to poor blacks, white women to indigenous women, non-binary white people to non-binary Asian-Americans—and believe that these advantages can somehow be justified. Otherwise, it is clear we have not earned what we have, and in a capitalist society that prizes hard work and acquisition, that is a statement on our value as human beings. We need these myths in order to live in denial about how much of what we have should not, in a just, peaceable world, be ours in the first place.

White Christians will pray on Sunday morning about the God of grace; they will speak openly about the unmerited love of Jesus that is born out on the cross, and acknowledge that our lives do not often honor such a sacrifice. However, at the mere suggestion that perhaps the color of their skin has helped them in their career, there is immediate reticence. Perhaps our language about our inadequacy in light of God’s unconditional love is just that, talk; or perhaps we have internalized it, believe we are unworthy, and are out to prove that worth in other ways. The truth of the gospel is that God first loves us, first offers us grace without any assurance that we will have somehow be found “worthy.” We are worthy only because God has made it so. The irony is, nothing puts just how unlove-able we can be in starker relief than when we soothe our own insecurities by doing physical, economic, emotional and spiritual violence to our siblings of color.

When the Rev. Deanna Hollas heard about the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, she was shocked, but she wasn’t surprised.

Three years into her role as the first ordained minister of gun violence prevention in the largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States — likely in any denomination — Hollas is never surprised by gun violence.

That’s what happens in a world where there are more guns than there are people, she said.

Just over a week before Uvalde, there was the shooting at a Taiwanese church in Southern California. A day before that, it was the shooting at a supermarket in a predominantly Black community in Buffalo, New York.

Every single day, Hollas said — pointing to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — incidents involving guns take more than 120 lives.

“The mass shootings capture our attention because it could be us. The randomness feels so much worse as opposed to the one child that gets ahold of a gun or the one that gets shot by a drive-by shooting. Those, oftentimes, we’ve become numb to, and we’ve just expected them to be normal, but it’s not. It’s not normal,” she said.

“It’s only because we have so many guns.”

Hollas, a Texas native, became interested in gun violence prevention in 2016 when the state passed a law allowing guns on college campuses. Worried about her daughter, then a student at Texas Tech University, she joined the group Moms Demand Action as “really just a cry for help: ‘What do I do? How can I make a difference?’

She was ordained specifically to the call of gun violence prevention in 2019 by Grace Presbytery, which includes Presbyterian Church (USA) congregations in North, Northeast and Central Texas. During the service, she was presented with an orange stole — not a traditional liturgical color, but a color used nationally to symbolize gun violence prevention. The congregation debuted a new hymn: “If We Just Talk of Thoughts and Prayers” by the Rev. Carolyn Winfrey-Gillette.

The Rev. Steve Shive, interim general presbyter of Grace Presbytery, said the presbytery has always been 100% supportive of Hollas’ call because “we have all seen the effects of gun violence in our culture and our society.”

For decades, the Presbyterian Church (USA) has urged its members to study, dialogue and act to prevent gun violence, Shive noted. That goes back to the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, according to the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship.

Other mainline denominations have also joined, like the Episcopal Church’s Bishops United Against Gun Violence.

“We feel, in the midst of this, that we are called to be peacekeepers — that we are called to pursue the well-being of our communities, and by working with gun violence prevention, we are helping to better our community and our world by being more in alignment with the values and the vision of Jesus,” Shive said.

Since her ordination, Hollas has served as the coordinator of gun violence prevention ministries for Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, a nationwide network of mainline Presbyterians focused on ending violence and war.

Gun violence has only grown worse in that time.

The day before the school shooting in Uvalde, the FBI released a report noting an alarming increase in active shooter incidents — a number that has doubled since 2017, climbing from 30 incidents in 2019 to 40 incidents in 2020 and 61 in 2021.

A month prior, the CDC released data showing guns were the No. 1 killer of children and adolescents, claiming the lives of 4,368 Americans under the age of 19 in 2020.

That’s a Uvalde every other day in the U.S., Hollas said.

The minister sees efforts to end gun violence as fulfilling the promises Presbyterians make when they are baptized: “to turn away from violence and toward love, toward life, toward Christ,” she said.

In the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Hollas asked Presbyterian Peace Fellowship members to ring their church bells 19 times in memory of the children who were killed.

She shared resources, including Scripture passages and hymns that speak to the issue of gun violence; prayers written by students after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; information about related proposals headed to the denomination’s general assembly in June; ways to speak out on social media and to contact elected officials.

She also urged Presbyterian Church (USA) congregations to host Guns to Gardens events at their churches, inviting — and sometimes incentivizing — gun owners to turn over their weapons to be turned into garden tools. The events are meant to evoke the prophet Isaiah’s biblical vision of peace: “They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

Community United Church of Christ in Boulder, Colorado, held the first Guns to Gardens event with a nonprofit network of blacksmiths called RAWtools after a gunman killed 10 people last year at a grocery store in the city, according to according to the church’s pastor, the Rev. Nicole M. Lamarche.

The church prayed and organized listening circles to determine how to act. It then invited people to bring unwanted guns to an event at the church, where those present watched as the weapons were sawed into pieces. Later, the church hosted a healing event for the community, where blacksmiths transformed those pieces into garden tools and jewelry.

“Having it be hosted by a faith community was something that had never happened before, and then the best thing happened, which is that it inspired a whole other thing beyond what we could have even imagined in terms of just congregations outside of our tradition doing this,” Lamarche said.

On June 11, Presbyterian Peace Fellowship is partnering with churches and organizations across the country to organize more than a dozen Guns to Gardens events. Additional events and trainings for interested churches are planned later this summer and fall, according to Hollas.

“We cannot turn away when there is such tragedy,” she said.

“We are the ones who comfort the families, who bury the dead, and we can’t just do that without asking, ‘What can we do to stop this?’ Because we know that this doesn’t happen in other countries, other peer nations. This is a unique problem to the United States, and it has to do with our gun laws.”

This article originally appeared in Religious News Service.

I awoke in the night to pangs so strong that they nearly bowled me over on the way to the bathroom, and caught me again rounding the corner at the foot of the bed. We rushed to the hospital. After 8 hours and 13 minutes of pain and hard pushing, I held my baby girl in my arms for the first time.

One month later, I was back in the bathroom overwhelmed by gushes of blood. Another frantic car ride to the hospital. Another sleepless night tethered to an IV. A trail of nurses and doctors came and went with furrowed brows and concerned queries. The heavy bleeding had stopped, but they still ran a slew of diagnostic tests. My milk came in and I worried about my little one. She needed to eat and I needed to release the growing pressure. I felt the tug of a phantom umbilical cord still inside me, tying me to her every breath. The nurses noticed my agitation. “Can we get you anything?” they asked.

“Please,” I responded, “a pump.”

The diagnosis was postpartum hemorrhaging due to retained products of conception. They recommended a minor surgical procedure to remove the mass in my uterus that the tests revealed. Another option was to return home, begin a course of antibiotics to stave off any potential infection, and see if my body would resolve the issue on its own. I elected the latter.

It was a sweet, albeit groggy reunion with my baby girl. For four hours I nursed her and held her close. But the gushes resumed suddenly, much stronger than before. I was unable to stand up. A third hurried drive to the hospital.

As soon as we arrived, the staff wheeled me straight to the OR prep area. I was in surgery less than an hour later. Throughout the entire experience I felt an odd sense of calm— never fear. But as the staff talked me through the final health questions and waivers prior to administering the anesthesia, I was overcome by a strange malaise. My body felt heavy and uncomfortable. I struggled to keep from slurring my words. My brain was foggy and slow.

The procedure took only 20 minutes. I emerged drowsily from the anesthesia, the doctor discharged me, and we returned home for a relatively easy recovery.

What I realized at the time, and continue to process until now, is that I could have died. Hemorrhaging is one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in the United States. And yet, it was unlikely that I would have succumbed to my condition. Why? Not because the bleeding wasn’t serious. But because I am an upper middle-class white woman in America.

When I went into the ER, the hospital staff believed me. They accepted my account of my symptoms as valid, even when those symptoms had momentarily abated. They were eager to alleviate any pain or discomfort. It was this close, caring attention on my first visit to the ER that allowed for the quick, crucial intervention on my second visit. Moreover, I did not hesitate to seek medical attention and financial cost was not even a consideration. This was my racial and socioeconomic privilege at work. What saved my life was my posture and my place.

I am on the other side of the widely circulated statistics about Black maternal mortality.

Today, in the United States, mothers are dying in shocking numbers. According to Every Mother Counts, a global nonprofit addressing maternal health issues, “the U.S. is the only industrialized nation with a consistently rising maternal mortality rate, despite spending more per capita on health care than any other country.” And Black mothers are dying at three times the rate of their white counterparts.

Society normalizes into invisibility its prioritization of me and its assault on Black motherhood. Both are the result of systemic racism embedded in our medical and economic systems. Health disparities manifest in preexisting conditions like heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity which are exacerbated by poverty and chronic stress. Medical professionals downplay and dismiss Black women’s reports of pain, following a well-established historical pattern. Moreover, the lack of universal health care disproportionately impacts Black and brown families.

And it does not stop there.

What of the mothers who survive to see their children grow, only to mourn them as victims of police brutality?

When protests erupted two summers ago over the lynching of George Floyd at the hands of US law enforcement, I didn’t watch the video. I didn’t need to witness the senseless killing to be incensed. But when I saw the chilling footage during the trial of Floyd’s murderer, what haunted me the most— indeed, haunts me to this day— is that Floyd cried out for his mother. I thought of Mary’s agony as Jesus hung on the cross. I wanted to scream, “When will we stop killing people’s babies?”

But it is the nice, Christian mothers like me who are often the quickest to question the means and motives of good faith activism in defense of the Black right to breathe. Despite our professed passion for protecting the sanctity of life, killing is exactly what we do. We kill when we choose our own “safety” over the safety of others. We leave communities to wither and die when we give in to our basest biases and flee to the suburbs or pull our kids out of public schools. We do it when we support “law and order” policies, oppose public housing projects near our homes, and fight to barricade our borders so we can feel secure.

Becoming a mother does not imbue anyone with an innate sense of higher morality. It does not free you from the grip of ingroup bias or outgroup animosity. When I became a mother, my world both expanded and contracted. My love for my family ran deeper, but my circle of empathy shrank smaller. As a white mother, even if I profess to care for those outside my circle, I can easily choose apathy over action. I can choose self-preservation over sacrifice. Black mothers do not have that choice. They fight every day for their own lives, and the lives of their children. In doing so, they fight for us all.

In his seminal book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, theologian James Cone painfully recounts how,

In their justification of lynching, southern whites often used the pretext of an alleged “outrage” against white women. Lynching, they claimed, was necessary to protect the virtue of white women from the “unspeakable crime” of the “black male beast,” who no longer had slavery in place to keep his bestial behavior in check. Rape “placed him beyond the pale of human sympathy,” and “the world accepted the story that the Negro is a monster which the southern white man painted him.” (127)

It was the work of activists like Black journalist, Ida B. Wells, that helped to expose the lie behind this narrative. They brought to light the hideous truth that we now take for granted: lynching was never really about sexual violence. It was always about maintaining white supremacy.

White women, and white mothers in particular, have a vital role to play in shaping American society. We can allow ourselves to be pawns in the politics of fear. Or we can divest from the lie that we are under threat, that our children are under threat, that our neighborhoods are under threat. We must disown the violence. Not violence against us, but the violence that we wield against our Black brothers and sisters when we silently wash our hands of their suffering, or worse yet, cry, “Crucify them!”

In February, I returned to work after my five-month maternity leave. In that relatively brief period of time, a jury acquitted a white boy who openly carried a loaded gun across state lines and killed two white men marching for Black lives. Over one hundred Black clergy and interfaith leaders gathered and prayed in Brunswick, Georgia over the verdict of the trial of three white men who lynched a Black man on a run after one of their lawyers objected on the record to all the “Black pastors” present to support the victim’s family. A white Senator voted against her party to prevent the end of the filibuster, long a favored tool in blocking civil rights and anti-lynching legislation. The change would have protected voters’ rights at a time of rampant suppression of minority votes.

All this took place while I recovered from my minor surgical procedure, nursed my newborn in the comfort of my easy chair, and sang lullabies over my two-year-old.

Larcenia “Cissy” Floyd was not alive to hear the cries of her son’s dying breath. But I think of Floyd’s six-year-old daughter, Gianna, and how her words— “Daddy changed the world”— echo those of Mamie Till— “When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before.”

George Floyd was somebody’s baby. Emmett Till was somebody’s baby.

What will it take for us— the white mothers— to stand up? When will we cease to be silent in the face of the lynching mob that marches out on our behalf? When will we stop killing other people’s babies?

As Fannie Lou Hamer so famously cried, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” and as Audre Lorde added, “even when her shackles are very different from my own.” Or as the Apostle Paul put it, “If one part suffers, every part suffers with it.” (1 Cor. 12:26, NIV)

I fight because no mother should have to feel the pain of losing a child to state-sanctioned racial violence, and no child should be left motherless because of the color of their skin. When one Black mother hurts, we should all feel pain. When one Black mother weeps, we should all weep beside her. And when she rises to change the system that killed her baby and devalues her life, we too must rise.

A version of this article originally appeared in KTF Press. 

A year ago while checking my emails for work, I came across an email from Goodwill Rights Management Corp. whose subject read, “Reminder: join us for the webinar “Is Social Justice the same as Biblical Justice?” This was intriguing for someone like me, to say the least. Upon opening the email, my spirit was deeply disturbed when I discovered that the title of the webinar came from a book entitled Why Social Justice is Not Biblical Justice: An Urgent Appeal to Fellow Christians in a Time of Social Crisis by Scott David Allen.

Huh?

I was so confused and went to delete the email, but my curiosity and righteous indignation took over. My initial thought was, “The audacity!” But, I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe this was some deep analysis that detailed how what we call social justice failed to live up to the life-giving justice described in the Biblical scriptures. Wrong! What I came across was anything but that.

I have not nor will I ever read the book, however, in doing research on this particular author, I stumbled upon an article on the book and an interview with the author. From the interview, he is quoted as saying social justice is an “ideology” that has come into the “Bible-believing or evangelical church.” This means that he identifies with what is commonly referred to as an “evangelical.” I say what is commonly referred to as “evangelical” because what we commonly refer to as “evangelical” is a particular group of people all over the United States, but particularly in the Bible Belt states (combination of southeastern, southwestern, and some midwest states), that have a particular theology of the Bible and share a very conservative (and republican) political ideology. This is a perversion of what it means to be “evangelical,” which is not about a certain theological and political viewpoint upheld by the interests of an overwhelmingly white and conservative republican movement.

There was one line, however, that really prompted me to write a response to this uninspired, morally reprehensible, gaslighting of a book. It was when Allen says, “What I wanted to do in the book is not just critique social justice. I wanted people to understand it clearly as I could convey. This is not an academic book, it’s for lay Christians who are trying to get their heads around this. It’s so prominent in the culture. I tried to lay out what this worldview of social justice is but wanted to do it by comparing to biblical understandings of justice. I believe what you are dealing with here is a counterfeit justice.”

Y’all, I can’t make this stuff up!
Let’s dive into it…’

One of the things that is so backwards about the author’s logic begins with his definition of “justice” itself. The author, who is honestly representing the sentiments of the “white evangelical” world (generally speaking), expresses an ignorance about the Bible and justice. He takes the term social justice and uses it to create a false divide. First things first, all justice is social.

There is no such thing as justice outside of community. There would be no need for it. It wouldn’t exist. The sin that is injustice can’t be done in isolation. We don’t sin in abstract ways. We sin by going against the will of God but the effects are experienced by others as well as ourselves.

In the interview the author says, “Social justice comes out of a school of thought that is largely theistic, it comes out of idealism. It’s a school of thought that arose in the 1700s. People are probably familiar with Hegel and Nietzsche and some of these folks. So, it has starting points from that. But biblical justice I define this way, its “conformity to God’s moral standard as revealed in the 10 commandments, in the royal law in the New Testament which says love your neighbor as yourself.” Social justice has to do with deconstructing traditional systems and structures that are deemed to be oppressive and redistributing power and resources from oppressors to their victims in the pursuit of an equality of outcome. You can see from those two simple definitions how different these two concepts are even though they use the same word: justice.” He is basically arguing that what we know as social justice comes from a decidedly non-God or even anti-God perspective. This author and “evangelical” perspectives like his never address what the prophets of the Old Testament were called by God to preach to the people. Some examples of this are below:

Micah 6:8, “He has told you human one, what is good and what the Lord requires from you: to do justice, embrace faithful love, and walk humbly with your God.” (CEB)

Isaiah 1:17, “… learn to do good. Seek justice: help the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow.” (CEB)

Amos 5:24, “But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (CEB)

Jeremiah 22:3, “The Lord proclaims: Do what is just and right; rescue the oppressed from the power of the oppressor. Don’t exploit or mistreat the refugee, the orphan, and the widow. Don’t spill the blood of the innocent in this place.” (CEB)

I’m not trying to cherrypick scripture either. The truth is that these are just a few examples, but the scripture passages in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and many of the other prophets are too much to just write in one blog post. And, I encourage you, as is a practice of mine, to read what comes before and what comes after to fully understand what is being said in these singular verses. Nevertheless, each of these verses comes after the prophets share God’s disgust with the centers of power and the people’s performance of religion and faithfulness to “Him.” The festivals and offerings do not please God when the oppression of the most vulnerable people in society (i.e. widows, orphans, refugees, etc.) or the outright disregard for them as human beings is the norm.

This is an excerpt from a blog post that originally appeared in “In My Ancestors’ Dreams”. 

“I’m not going to talk about basketball.”

Steve Kerr, head coach of the Golden State Warriors, had a different topic on his mind than the NBA playoffs when he sat down for his pregame press conference on Tuesday (May 24).

“When are we going to do something?” he asked angrily before turning his ire to Sen. Mitch McConnell and other U.S. Senators opposed to legislation to reduce gun violence. “Are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children, and our elderly, and our churchgoers? Because that’s what it looks like.”

In Dallas for a game with the Mavericks, the mass killing of 19 children and two teachers at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school earlier that day prompted Kerr’s outrage. The murderous rampage by an 18-year-old using legally-purchased guns was the worst school shooting since the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

As Kerr noted, the Texas massacre did not occur in isolation. It came just days after a racist shooting spree in a Buffalo, New York, grocery store by another 18-year-old that left 10 people dead. The White shooter targeted a Black community and cited as justification the “great replacement theory” (a White Supremacist idea once on the fringe but now espoused by right-wing media figures and conservative political leaders).

Kerr’s diatribe also followed a shooting at the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, California, where a man motivated by political hatred opened fire into a large crowd, killing one and wounding others before attendees subdued him.

While each event contains unique horrors, the frequency of such occurrences risks a collective acceptance of these episodes as an inevitable, even normal, part of life. As Kerr cautioned, “We can’t get numb to this.”

Many on social media rightfully denounce the blithe offerings of “thoughts and prayers” by elected officials as excusing inaction. Yet, even after years of criticism about that phrase — and years of politicians doing nothing to lessen gun violence — many politicians use the phrase and then do nothing. The book of James reminds us that “faith without works is dead,” but there’s actually something worse than prayers without action. Some offer prayers of support for the very groups contributing to the deadly inaction.

In this edition of A Public Witness, we look at the principalities and powers preventing us from doing something about gun violence, along with the Christian leaders aiding and abetting their cause. Then we denounce the idolatry that demands we sacrifice our children.

Switching Off the Safety

More restrictive gun laws that would make our communities safer are wildly popular with Americans. A 2021 poll by Pew and Gallup found 85% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats believed that those with mental illness shouldn’t be allowed to purchase firearms. In that same survey, 70% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats supported requiring background checks as part of a gun sale. With so much obvious common ground to be found, what’s stopping policymakers from acting?

Any answer to that question must begin with the National Rifle Association, which actively lobbies against background checks and undermines efforts to keep firearms away from those with mental illness. Over the last 25 years, the organization has spent hundreds of millions of dollars influencing elections, legislation, and regulations to advance its pro-gun agenda. (And it also finds itself under legal investigation for financial misconduct and corruption.)

The NRA wasn’t always this way. Originally formed after the Civil War to improve marksmanship among northerners (who, apparently, had worse aim than their southern counterparts — but still won) and promote firearms safety, the organization spent much of the early 20th century lobbying for gun control. Testifying before Congress in 1939, the organization’s president told lawmakers, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

Even as recently as the late 1980s, the NRA accepted a ban on fully-automatic weapons as a compromise in advancing its other priorities through Congress. That moment hints at two forces today pressuring the NRA towards a less conciliatory approach. The first is pressure from the NRA’s most extreme members. Indeed, more extreme gun rights groups use any perceived display of weakness by the NRA in response to mass shootings to steal members. This threat creates an incentive for the NRA to oppose any restriction on gun ownership.

The second force is the financial support provided by the gun industry itself. The Violence Policy Center extensively documented how gun manufacturers, sellers, and other “corporate partners” help underwrite the NRA’s operational and legislative activities. These entities have a vested interest in loosening and preventing restrictions on gun sales.

“Today’s National Rifle Association is essentially a de facto trade association masquerading as a shooting sports foundation,” VPC Executive Director Josh Sugarmann told NPR in 2018. “So, it’s very important to understand the political battle in terms of the interests of the industry and in terms of marketing.”

Sugarmann added that instead of acknowledging their cynical motivations, the NRA portrays its efforts “in terms of freedom and history and, you know, sort of the sacred nature of firearms.”

Blessing the NRA

In a macabre coincidence, the NRA will hold its annual convention this weekend in Houston, just hours from Uvalde. While some politicians may decide not to participate and more protesters than normal might gather outside, the show will go on. The festivities include a prayer breakfast, an annual part of meetings for more than two decades.

For $45, one can attend the prayer breakfast sponsored by Trijicon (an arms manufacturer that sparked controversy in 2010 for putting Bible verse references on gun sights sold to the U.S. military), Kel-Tec (a gun manufacturer whose products include semi-automatic guns), and Universal Coin & Bullion (that sells silver coins honoring the NRA and Donald Trump). The featured speakers will be Baptist evangelist Tim Lee and North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.

Lee, who serves as chair of the board of trustees at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, describes himself on Twitter as “Christian, Husband, Father, Papaw, Evangelist, Marine, NRA, ProLife, Patriot, VietVet, #PurpleHeart.” After Tuesday’s deadly shooting, he tweeted that the “heartbreaking” shooting occurred because our society allows abortion: “When kids hear adults say that it’s ok to kill babies (abortion) then all respect for human lives is gone. #Ulvade #PrayersForUvalde”

Robinson, who is already running for governor in 2024, garnered national attention last year for anti-LGBTQ comments he made at a Baptist church. His political career launched with a 2018 speech made before a city council meeting against canceling a gun show after the deadly shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 14 students and three staff were killed. Now his campaign website lists his top two issues as “2nd Amendment” and “Pro-Life.”

This article was originally published in A Public Witness. 

June 17, 2015 “Granddaddy done had a good life. We knew this was gonna happen.” It was a regular Wednesday night at the Dallas hospital where I worked as a chaplain. I was helping a family whose patriarch had died. They were unusually stoic, so I offered to pray with them. As I prepared to complete the customary paperwork with the family, I realized I didn’t have it with me. I excused myself and went to my office. I still think my forgetting those papers was an intervention by the spirit of God. I had left my phone charging on my desk and decided to take a moment to check my messages. I’d missed several calls from my daughter, Aja. The reception was bad in my office, so I took my phone into a conference room and wiggled my way into the corner where I knew I could get a strong signal. “Aja?” “Mama, Jonquil called me. Something’s going on at the church in Charleston. Granny’s church.” My mother’s church was Emanuel African American Methodist Episcopal Church. We all called it Mother Emanuel. Aja told me all the information she’d been able to gather. My sister’s son, Jonquil, told her something bad had happened at the church, but he had been unable to get more details. He and his mother, Esther, were going down to the church to see what they could find out. I had a really bad feeling, but I brushed it aside because I had to do my job. A family was processing the death of their grandfather.

You don’t know what’s happening yet in Charleston. Go and help these people who lost their granddaddy, then get back to your office so you can start calling people. As soon as I returned to my office, I started making calls. I got through to my baby sister, Nadine, who lives in Charleston. She hadn’t heard anything, but she was going to go check it out: “I’m putting on some clothes and going down there to the church.” I called JonQuil. He told me, “Auntie, we down at the church but nobody’s letting us get close to the building.” His tone conveyed his concern. “They just keep saying something happened in the church. Maybe some shooting. We don’t know.” He said authorities were gathering family members at a nearby hotel. So while everybody was there, holding onto each other, I was in Dallas alone. I kept calling my nephew and my sisters, but the calls went to voicemail. Whatever was going on, I knew Momma would have been at church that evening. Every Wednesday there was a Bible study, and she made it her business to be there and make sure the church was ready. She opened the doors and was always one of the last people to leave that church—every night. My mother loved that church. As long as she was able to get out of her bed, Ethel Lance was gonna be at that church—you could count on it. One time she said to me, “For all the things that I might not have done right in my life, the more time I spend in this church, the more I get to talk to God and ask for forgiveness.” “Ma, I don’t think you did so many things wrong.” 

*******

Even after days of watching, I could not tear myself away from the television. If I was awake, the TV was on. The day after the murders, the police arrested Dylan Roof—I hate to even acknowledge his name. The news outlets had been showing a video of him leaving the church. The next day a woman recognized him driving his car and called the police. He was taken to jail in North Charleston. Evil. The first time I saw him, saw his face, he personified evil to me. I was stunned by his youth, though. How did such a young boy get so much hate inside him? His eyes looked dead. That picture they showed of him with that little smirk on his face—I hate to see that picture because it represents pure evil to me. It’s gotten better for me as time has passed, but that look in his eyes is just haunting. I was captivated by the proceedings on television. Praise God! You are not gonna get away with this. They got you now. They got you now.

*****

My parents lived paycheck to paycheck, but I never really knew that as a kid. I never felt hungry or cold or poor. I just remember that we never seemed to have enough space. We had one bedroom for all the kids back then. The girls had to double up in bunk beds and our brother had a bed to himself. I shared my bed with Esther, and for a while Terrie had her own bed. Then, when Nadine was born, she slept in the bed with Terrie. That’s just how things were in those days, and I didn’t really mind, except that Esther was always peeing the damned bed! Later, we found out that she had a kidney problem, but all I knew back then was that I would wake up every morning with a peed-up damned bed.

We had a praying Momma who had a big heart and was always willing to help somebody else. Momma would always say, “Every man for himself, and God for us all.” She loved wearing fine perfumes and dancing to James Brown’s music. Momma was a no-nonsense kind of woman who had a very strict work ethic. She kept her home clean and spotless. On special occasions, when we got dressed up in our Sunday clothes, Momma would spray us with one of her perfumes. Then she would hide the bottle, because she knew, given the chance, we’d be spraying it all over the place. Oh, she loved her perfumes! One time when I was a little bit older, I bought her a fragrance at Edward’s Five and Dime store. It was “eau de something.” I was really proud of buying that bottle of perfume with my own money, which I had earned from running errands for the neighborhood ladies.

****

Life has given me challenges and failures, good times and bad times. Along my journey I have known feelings of hopelessness, shame, guilt, and unworthiness. Sometimes I have replayed old tapes of toxicity in my mind and plunged into darkness, wallowing in all things negative. Yet, inside I knew, Sharon, you’re better than this, and that eventually I would find my way back to the present. But life has given me some lessons that I want to share with anyone willing to take heed. My stuff may not compare to someone else’s, but we all have stuff. No matter who you are, what you have, the house you live in, the job or title you hold, life is going to toss you around sometimes. Nevertheless, God has given us all what we need to be the best person we can be. The things to ask yourself are, “Am I comfortable with who I am? Can I be content being the authentic me? Is there room for change in my life? Am I willing to do some deep self-reflection and take inventory of myself? Is there purpose in my life beyond just getting through?” Sometimes I sought answers to those questions, and at other times life forced me to reckon with the solutions. Consequently, I have learned a few things along this journey called my life.

****

LESSONS I Learned!

You cant heal in isolation, Trust your gut instinct and cling to your faith, Be prepared to get rejected.

You’ve got to persevere. Don’t give up on humanity. Everybody has a purpose, You have to put in the work to achieve your dreams.

A lot has happened in the two years since the horrific police murder of George Floyd. Riots. Global protests. Public statements. The New York Times Best Sellers list briefly packed with racial justice books. Derek Chauvin behind bars. Confederate monuments torn down. A white backlash against anything deemed “critical race theory.” And all the while, police still killing Black people at three times the rate of white people.

But for all that has and has not transpired over the past two years, what grips me today are these simple, poignant words penned by my friend, Black journalist and advocate Chanté Griffin, one year ago:

I wish I didn’t know who George Floyd was. I wish I had never heard his name, never cried or protested over his death.

I wish he had lived a life in obscurity to everyone except those who knew him intimately.

I wish a lot of things,

mostly that he were alive today,

one year to the date his life was snuffed away.

Chanté’s words remind us that our response to our nation’s centuries-long, ongoing idolatry of white supremacy can never be solely activism—learning more history, attending protests, elevating voices of color, advocating for systemic change—though the love of God and neighbor will compel us to do these things. More fundamentally, we must continue to grow in a spiritual practice that many of us are abysmal at: we must lament.

In his book Prophetic Lament, Soong-Chan Rah writes that, while 40% of the biblical psalms are psalms of lament, only 5% of our popular worship songs even scratch the surface of lament. The white American church, he writes, has left many of us without the “permission, language or tools to adequately sit with the despair and sadness of recent racial injustices.” Our triumphalist American faith does not know what to do with scriptures like Psalm 88, which concludes not with praise or hope, but with words of disorientation and pain that are all too relevant today:

“You have taken from me friend and neighbor—

darkness is my closest friend.”

Yet there can be no lasting racial reconciliation in the United States—or the American church— that does not begin with lament. As Emmanuel Katongole wrote in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, “The resurrection of the church begins with lament.”

So today, I offer up an elegy—a poetic lament for George Floyd, inspired by Chanté’s words. The poem’s title, Image, speaks to the living, breathing image of God in George Floyd, whom we in our idolatry have reduced to a lifeless image, a hashtag, a memory. In the midst of all the work to be done, we must not forget—even two years later—to stop and lament the tragedy of his death. Let us mourn with the psalmist, aware that no amount of progress in racial justice will ever be able to restore George’s unique and irreplaceable life.

Take a few deep breaths. Invite God to draw near to you. Then read these words, letting them lead you to a place of lament—a place to sit with Jesus, “a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief” (Isaiah 53:3).

Image

I wish I didn’t know who George Floyd was,

had never heard his name or seen his face

displayed on screens or blazoned on brick walls,

unbreathing monuments to life erased.

I wish that George was playing with his daughter,

unknown to all the world, lost in her eyes.

I think of all the things he would have taught her,

their lives unshattered and unscrutinized.

Instead, the whole world watched a white man kneel

upon her father’s neck until he died.

My God! What do we do? How do we heal

this hell of hashtags hewn from priceless lives?

Today, Lord, help us mourn for George and feel

the richness of the years he was denied.

What does the Bible have to say about current events? Many parents (and Christians in general for that matter) often wonder if God’s word is relevant for the evils facing our world today. Where should we turn when a Black or Brown man or woman is shot in the streets or in their own home? What does the Bible have to say about immigration, police brutality, systemic racism, missing indigenous women and girls, educational inequity, protests, rioting and looting? Well, actually, a great deal. But we want to summarize it in a simple phrase: Listen, then respond. Hear the cries of those hurting, understand the root of their pain, and the ways in which they are asking for care and justice in that moment. Our response should be motivated by real stories and real needs.

There are so many stories in Scripture where someone is abused, assaulted or oppressed, and God models to us how to center and elevate that person’s story. God has always cared about our stories; in the book of Judges, for example, we read story after story of injustice, including in chapter 19 the assault, rape and murder of an unnamed woman in the streets of Gibeah. It is a horrific murder. When the people of Israel heard about it, they assembled and then in Judges 20:3 the Israelite leaders said “tell us how this awful thing happened.” In other words, they sought out answers first, before they acted. The heinous, unjust killing of a human being demands a weighty response. But first we must listen.

The story in Judges 19 challenges us, as families seeking to raise our children with the heart of God, to ask the victimized community for their point of view. For example, instead of jumping to talk about grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation with our kids, we need to first do the hard work of encouraging our children and ourselves to hear a person’s (or community’s) pain and even rage. This is what happened after the conviction and sentencing of Amber Guyger, a former Dallas police officer who entered 26-year-old Botham Jean’s apartment and fatally shot him. Botham’s brother, Brandt, responded by saying “I forgive you” and the video of Brandt hugging Guyger went viral. However, many missed footage from the rest of the family, including these words from Botham’s mother, Allison Jean: “Forgiveness for us as Christians is a healing for us, but as my husband said, there are consequences. It does not mean that everything else we have suffered has to go unnoticed.” As author and speaker Dorena Williamson argues, “Listening to the entire Jean family offers us a fuller picture of Christianity. In their words and posture towards Guyger and the criminal justice system, we hear calls for both forgiveness and justice. But if we elevate the words of one family member at the expense of another, we run the risk of distorting the gospel.”

READ: THE SHOOTING IN BUFFALO HAPPENED within a Context of Complicity with White Supremacy 

Much of the news today on everything from Black Lives Matter to immigrants, border crossings, anti-Asian racism and more in this country is steered by the dominant voice. But Scripture challenges us to listen to all the voices. We need to gear our attention in the direction of the marginalized voices and make the conscious choice to listen to the experiences of those who have suffered the most pain. In other words, we can control our own attention and focus to hear from those who are most overlooked.

Telling your own story is a God-given right. Every person of every cultural background and heritage has the right to talk about their experiences, struggles, and joys. Whether the person is an immigrant, a Black man, a Native American, a Latina, a second generation Asian American woman, a white person, or someone who is incarcerated, everyone has the right to be understood in the context of what they’ve been through and in the context of their relationships with others—and even more so for their experiences to be heard and believed.

JOIN: FAITH FORUM WITH THE POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN 

So the next time a racial tragedy headlines on the news, our posture as a race-wise family should be to listen. The next time a Black or Brown person is killed, the next time immigration is described as a “crisis at the border”, or the next time an Asian is the recipient of racist rhetoric, we must challenge our family to first go to people who represent that community and say, “We must do something! So, speak up!”

We must raise children who value people’s stories. Whether they are named or unnamed on the nightly news or in a viral video, whoever the man or woman is, they are made in the image of God. He or she has a story and their life has meaning. As you watch the news on TV or when you know your kids are scrolling through news feeds, challenge yourself and your kids to lean into what the victim’s family and community is saying. Ask them how the voices of people of color might differ from the news organization reporting the story. Ask them to think about how a community of color’s perspective is different from the dominant white community’s response and consider why that is.

It’s only after fully listening and understanding that we can respond. If we have listened to the voices of hurting people of color, I mean really listened, we will challenge ourselves to see the world through their point of view. Current events, including racial tragedies are always complex, and while there is often room for differences in opinions, it’s important to show love to our neighbor by holding space and even being led by their opinion on an issue. True listening and understanding leads to holistic responses that align with real community needs and desires.

When we hold the Bible in one hand and the news in the other, our posture as a race-wise family will be to listen often and well, and to be slow to speak. We will challenge ourselves to hear all the voices in a news story and then respond in ways that are honoring and loving toward those who have been victimized or who are struggling.

Excerpted from The Race-Wise Family. Copyright © 2022 by Helen Lee & Michelle Ami Reyes. Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

I started preaching in Christian college chapels after returning from Iraq in 2003. George Bush was President, and white evangelicals still overwhelmingly supported his “war on terror,” which had led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I had been there with the Christian Peacemaker Teams to try to interrupt the violence Iraqis were suffering. After the US bombed a hospital in Rutba, Iraq, a doctor there saved three of our American friends when Iraqis pulled them from a wrecked car and brought them to him. He wouldn’t accept payment for his help. “Just tell people what’s really happening here,” he said to me.

We’d lived the Good Samaritan story in Iraq, and as a recent Christian college graduate, I thought it was important to preach that parable’s good news to Christian colleges. Chaplains invited me into their pulpits, and we often shared conversation over lunch with students and faculty about what it means to live the gospel of Jesus in a violent world.

The culture on white Christian college campuses skews conservative, and there were always people who were uncomfortable with my messages—even those who publicly protested them. But as the occupation of Iraq drug on and the truth came out about the lies that had been told to justify the initial invasion, the common sense about that war changed. I had the chance to preach Jesus’ Way of nonviolent love, beloved community, racial equity and economic justice on Christian college campuses. I taught students to sing the freedom songs of the civil rights movement and introduced them to the vibrant faith of Fannie Lou Hamer and Dorothy Day, Clarence Jordan and Rosa Parks. Over the course of two decades, I’ve had dozens of conversations with chaplains and administrators about the challenge of young people who grew up in the Christian faith rejecting it as young adults because they do not see the church living out Jesus’ commitment to love, justice, and mercy. I’ve loved preaching in Christian college chapels because it’s given me the chance to watch faith get reborn in some of those young people.

Because of this experience, I was troubled when I heard from my friend Jemar Tisby that the Board of Trustees at Grove City College had commissioned an investigation that singled out a sermon he gave in their chapel two years ago. The language the report uses is common in right wing political circles right now. It demonizes “critical race theory” as a threat to faith, then finds signs of this imagined enemy in any efforts to address racial justice. Without naming any theological or hermeneutical error in his message to the students, the report names Dr. Tisby as a representative of its boogeyman, then recommends restricting access to the pulpit to prevent others from committing the same perceived error. If you’re interested in the details of all of this, Dr. Tisby has written a gracious response that includes links to the report.

What concerns me about this official action to single out Dr. Tisby and purge a Christian college campus of conversations about racial justice is the answer it implies to the question of what mission Christian colleges serve. Like I said, there have always been people on these campuses who would disagree with me or Dr. Tisby. This is what a college campus is for: critical reflection and honest debate about how we make sense of the world. At a Christian college, that debate is shaped by the shared conviction that the Bible and Christian tradition shape conversations about how we understand the world.

At least, that’s what I’ve always assumed. But in their zeal to appease extremists who’ve made “CRT” their boogeyman, the Board of Trustees at Grove City College seems to have made a public confession that the shared commitment which shapes conversation on their campus is not the gospel of Jesus Christ, but the conversative political ideology that racial equity challenges. Given the reach of the religious right into white Christian institutions, I suspect this board is not the only one that will have to decide which side of this ultimatum it is on.

My guess is that most of the members of the Board at Grove City aren’t happy they were forced to make this choice. The board chair, who also serves as CEO of DuPont, has made public statements on behalf of his company in support of racial justice, and he claims to be implementing a company-wide initiative to achieve racial equity in their workforce. It’s awkward to be put in a position where you publicly contradict yourself, but some powers and principalities persuaded the Board to accept and approve this report.

But having spent time on Christian college campuses, my heart aches for the young people who thought they were learning to follow Jesus and the faculty and staff who show up every day assuming that their mission is to pursue God’s kingdom, not the success of the Republican Party. The Board of Trustees hasn’t only singled out Dr. Tisby in an unfair and un-Christian way. They have also let down a community whose primary obstacle to faith in recent years is the hypocrisy of its leaders.

Since our friend Tony Campolo first called us together 15 years ago, Red Letter Christians have been preaching Jesus and justice on college campuses and in churches and communities around this country. In this moment, we have a chance to say #IStandWithJemar, and to challenge other Christian colleges and institutions to make clear whether their primary commitment is to the gospel of Jesus or to a political ideology. I hope we can do it not only for Dr. Tisby’s sake, but also for the millions of young people in this country and around the world who are genuinely asking whether an authentic Christian faith is possible.

At approximately 2:30 p.m. ET on Saturday, a white supremacist terrorist—motivated by a fear that whites were being “replaced” by immigrants and the growth of nonwhite Americans—massacred 10 people and injured three others in predominately Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. As this 18-year-old young man unleashed a deadly barrage of more than 70 rounds from an assault rifle with the N-word emblazoned on the barrel, I was sitting on a hill in Mendota Heights, Minnesota.

I was learning more about how central demographic and cultural replacement has been to white supremacy in this country—plainly evident in the systematic genocide and removal of Native Americans from their historic lands by white European settlers, backed by our nation’s military and government. You can see the violent logic of white replacement in the soil itself and in the competing names that have been assigned to that hill, a 350-foot-high bluff overlooking the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers.

In documented history back to the early 1800s and in oral Native American traditions reaching much farther, this land was known as Oheyawahi (“the place much visited”). It served as a sacred burial and ceremonial space for the Dakota people. Early French fur traders acknowledged it as La Butte des Morts (“hill of the dead”). As white settlers increased in Minnesota in the mid-1800s, the place became known in English as Pilot Knob, because its geographic distinctiveness allowed riverboat captains, with their cargoes of goods and guns, to safely mark their position on their missions supporting white proliferation along the great rivers.

In 1925, most of the hill was purchased by the Masons and christened “Acacia Cemetery,” after a sprig used in Masonic funeral ceremonies. Early advertisements declared that the land was to be “dedicated to the exclusive and perpetual use of Masons and their families.” An extensive landscaping and monument construction plan removed more than 20 vertical feet from the top of the hill, a process that conveniently cleansed the land of most Native American remains. Some bones, most of which likely belonged to Dakota people, were collected haphazardly in a vault at the periphery of the property when they marred the landscaping plan or trespassed on a purchased white burial plot.

After the tour concluded, I left Mendota Heights for a different kind of sacred space, George Floyd Square in Minneapolis.

I had learned, serendipitously (Providentially?), that my visit would coincide with an outdoor performance of “Beyoncé Mass,” a womanist worship service—curated by Rev. Yolanda Norton, the H. Eugene Farlough Chair of Black Church Studies at San Francisco Theological Seminary—that uses the music and life of Beyoncé to foster an empowering conversation about Black women.

After getting over my self-consciousness as a white man in this space lifting up and honoring Black women, I fell into the worship experience. I hadn’t heard the horrific news about Buffalo yet. But Rev. Dr. Norton’s sermon, and the experience of passing the peace and taking communion among that gathering of 80 or so people from all walks of life, sustained me when I finally heard that yet another act of racial violence had been committed by a person who looks like me.

I’m sure Rev. Dr. Norton had not heard the news either, but her words were prophetic. Or perhaps that’s not even the right word. In our current context, this is simply a description of lived reality.

There is always a Pharaoh who will arise over Egypt. Everywhere I look I see Pharaohs arising. People committed to death dealing and who are not life giving. There are people who have decided that if you are not part of their tribe there is nothing valuable about you. Everywhere I look I see Pharaohs arising. People committed to the death of Black people.… Everywhere I look I see Pharaoh.

But over the opening notes of Beyoncé’s “Halo,” which preceded communion, Rev. Dr. Norton also offered these words of hope:

Repentance is not a one-time thing, but a developmental process, a journey that requires a confrontational truth-telling. The liberation and healing of the oppressed. Repentance and conversion of the oppressor. The building of the beloved community.

After the immediate shock of the shootings abated, those words came back to me: repentance and conversion, the healing of both the oppressed and the oppressor. The building of the beloved community.

We white Christians have learned these words. I mean, we know them. And we love to quote them in Januaries. But we must, once and for all, get clear about the stakes before we again utter mere lip service to Rev. Dr. King’s vision.

The beloved community is the repudiation of the violent theology of replacement germinating in white supremacy. We white Christians must figure out how to drag ourselves and our peers to kneel at the altar of repentance. We must confess our complicity in the heretical and only half-unconscious belief that God has ordained whites to replace—that is to say, to kill and displace—others, and that, once accomplished, white dominance is to be perpetually preserved as the divinely approved state of affairs.

Here’s a simple test to assess our communities. If our pastors and Sunday School leaders did not talk this Sunday about the 10 human beings killed by white supremacy and justified by a depraved vision of European Christendom, we are responsible. If even our confrontations with our congregations about our complicit silence are met with a collective shrug, white supremacy is being blessed by our apathy.

The last words I heard while sitting on Oheyawahi with a group of white evangelicals came from Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and the director of racial justice for the Minnesota Council of Churches:

I don’t need white Christians to be smarter. I need them to be better.

Through local activism, 125 acres of that sacred hill—including the land on which I sat Saturday—have been protected from additional desecration and development by being placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Under the watch of a local nonprofit, the land is being restored to an oak savannah, slowly healing from the wounds of the past.

The belief that America is a kind of promised land for European white Christians (a view held, by the way, by 52% of white evangelical Protestants and by more than one third of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics) cannot coexist with the beloved community. We have to make a choice between these incompatible visions of America: one that replaces, one that shares; one that kills, one that heals.

On Saturday, May 14, 2022 a young man entered a grocery store in predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York and opened fire.

By the time he surrendered a short time later, he had shot a total of 13 people, most of them Black, and left 10 of them dead. They were senior citizens, retired law enforcement, churchgoers, grandparents, brothers, and sisters.

Prior to the crime, the shooter wrote a 180-page manifesto and posted it online. He left no doubt that he intended to target Black people and that his murderous act was a hate crime. He even painted the word n***er on the assault rifle he used.

Commentators rightly identified this perpetrator as a white supremacist. He wrote in his manifesto about the “great replacement” theory—”the false idea that a cabal is attempting to replace white Americans with nonwhite people through immigration, interracial marriage and, eventually, violence.”

But heed this word of caution as the phrase “white supremacist” becomes the topic of national conversation once again.

To identify someone who targets, plans, and homicidally attacks Black people and other religious and ethnic groups as a white supremacist, while accurate, can obscure the ways many others are complicit with white supremacy.

In my first book, The Color of Compromise, I spoke of the “complicity” of white Christians in the racism that has plagued the United States for centuries.

It is convenient to point to slave traders, plantation owners, and Klan members as the “real racists.” We tend to think that only the most severe examples of prejudice constitute racism. But even if only a small number of people actually commit acts of violence in the name of racism, the ideas that lead to such acts are often co-signed by the masses.

As I wrote in the book,

“The most egregious acts of racism…occur within a context of compromise. The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow.”

What was true in the past is true in the present—the most horrific violence done in the name of white supremacy happens within a context of compromise and complicity.

Major news media outlets such as Fox News have favorably cited the great replacement theory on their programs. Right-wing activists are waging a crusade against what they label “Critical Race Theory” in an effort to prevent education about racism and white supremacy. Many churches and Christian institutions are actively suppressing efforts to promote racial progress in the name of opposing CRT and promoting “the gospel.”

If we look at shooters like the one in Buffalo as the only type of people to whom the phrase “white supremacist” applies, then we miss all the daily and common ways that countless others endorse the same ideas that undergirded his murderous actions.

SIGN: RED LETTER CHRISTIAN PLEDGE 

Passivity in the face of white supremacist diatribes—whether on social media, in person, or even in the pulpit—permits the spread of these evil ideas.

Tuning in to podcasters, YouTubers, pastors, pundits and others who play on racist fears to get clicks and build a platform allows white supremacy to remain an influential narrative in this land.

We can look in horror at the actions of a white supremacist terrorist in Buffalo. But he is simply the extreme version and the logical end of what many other people believe and support in other ways.

You don’t have to pull the trigger on an assault rifle to support white supremacy. All you have to do is nothing at all.

As I put it in The Color of Compromise…

“The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.”

This article originally appeared in Footnotes by Jemar Tisby. 

You have people in your church who are gay. 

Depending on how affirming your church is, some of these individuals have integrated this into their identity, no longer hiding. Some choose to conceal it for a time (from others and perhaps from themselves). Others simply keep it quiet and keep a part of themselves separate, but embrace their gay identities away from church. Still others are trying to pray the gay away, silently suffering, carrying a weight they were not meant to carry. In the past few years, the evangelical church has developed a strategy to deal with what they consider the “same-sex attraction issue.”

In the face of an undeniable reality, some in the evangelical church are finally acknowledging that gay and lesbian people are born what they call “same-sex attracted,” and that we shouldn’t try to change them. At first blush, this seems like a move in the right direction. Perhaps the church is becoming accepting and has pulled their head out of the sand. Perhaps they’re acknowledging not all people are born cisgender and straight. Certainly individuals like Preston Sprinkle are ready to admit the inhumanity of the church toward LGBTQ+ people, but they stop short.

In the past, the church thought lesbian and gay people chose an aberrant “lifestyle.” Both the desire and the act was condemned as sin. After that, they believed people with “those desires” experienced childhood trauma or abuse and so became homosexual. Cue the ex-gay movement and conversion therapy of the 80s and 90s like Exodus International. These organizations have largely imploded on themselves, their founders and proponents issuing apologies and confessions that not only did these “ministries” fail to convert anyone from being gay, but they did damage by helping people deny who they are.

Now, instead of pushing the LGBTQ+ out, the church wants to create a familial community to fill the gap that a marital relationship would provide. They are delineating between desires and actions. They’re also crossing their fingers – I mean praying – that the gayness will evaporate. “It’s OK to be gay (I guess), but you must remain celibate, or enter into a heterosexual marriage.” This is the church’s latest attempt at what they call compassion.

They do not see that this position is even more destructive.

Here’s the cruelty of it: in an already isolating reality of experiencing being different and a hated minority, the gay community is being told to further isolate themselves by committing to a life of celibacy. They’re being told that the only way to be faithful to Jesus is to accept this fate and rely upon a church to supplement their need for relationship, love, and connection — a church that has hated and scorned them.

If someone who loves Jesus and is LGBTQ+ decides to attend and serve at a church, then decides one day to become involved with and perhaps marry someone of the same sex, that person must be confronted, dealt with, and marginalized. They would be treated as a non-believer. It doesn’t matter what they think or believe about Jesus or God, they would be “in sin.” 

In other words, “You’re welcome to come to our church, just don’t bring your spouse. In fact, keep your sexuality hidden from view.”

To them, it would be the same as if one day I, a heterosexual man, decided to cheat on my wife and have an affair. To them, it’s all sexual sin.

There are many that call themselves same-sex attracted or even LGBTQ+, but have the conviction or desire to remain celibate. I think of individuals like Bridget Eileen Rivera or a close friend of mine. Both believe that God has called them to remain unmarried, but they also hold that every individual must follow their own conviction. 

Yet there are many that choose to be in an intimate committed relationship. There are many that don’t feel the conviction or calling of celibacy or of remaining single. There are many that want to enter into a committed, agape-loving relationship with another human being.

Do they love God any less? Is the fruit of the spirit not in their lives? Are they somehow less of a Christian?

This new tack by the church is not compassion. This is an attempt to control behavior while playing the part of being compassionate. This allows the church to check a box, pat itself on the back, and call itself “accepting,” “open,” “tolerant,” and even “loving.”

While there are many who have the conviction of celibacy for themselves, to mandate a prohibition against same-sex sexual relationships is not compassion. It’s deceitful, constricting, and manipulative.

The root of this problem is a misunderstanding of what it takes to please God. The thinking goes something like this: In order to please God, one must follow a set of prescribed rules. Some of the rules we like; some of the rules we don’t like. Either way, God knows best, so follow these rules whether we understand or agree with them. If we think about or question the rules, we are deceiving ourselves. And because our hearts are deceitful above all things, we cannot trust our reasoning.

Actually, according to the Bible, the rules are there to help us carry out the commandment of love. At the heart of God’s prohibitions of sexual immorality is the goal to treat others with respect and love. Paul cautions against sexual immorality by reminding the Thessalonians that sexual immorality takes advantage of a brother or sister:

 “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the pagans, who do not know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong or take advantage of a brother or sister.” (1 Thessalonians 4:3-6a). 

Sexual immorality is about satisfying one’s own selfish desires. It’s immoral because it becomes all about self, and not about loving others. It is “out of control.” And like any selfish sin, leads to emptiness and lack of purpose. This can happen in hetero as well as gay sexual relationships.

When Christians talk of rules, lines, and statutes, they’re focused on arbitrary commands instead of the law of love, which Jesus brought forth. 

While there are many who have the conviction of celibacy for themselves, to mandate a prohibition against same-sex sexual relationships is not compassion. It’s deceitful, constricting, and manipulative.

Beware of the church’s new strategy masquerading as compassion. Although they acknowledge who you are and how you’re created, the moment that you act upon this identity; the moment you stop believing these desires are sinful; the moment that you want to enter into a loving committed connection with another human being is the moment that you are not welcome.

Recent weeks brought temporary reprieve for Melissa Lucio when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed her execution–just 48 hours before the state was to put the 53-year-old Catholic grandmother and mother of 14 to death by lethal injection. Lucio’s numerous supporters heaved a collective sigh of relief and she rejoiced at having more days ahead to share her faith with her family. But the anguish will surely grind on as long as she remains on death row.

The intensity of Lucio’s brush with death in the face of breathtaking evidence of her innocence is startling. Experts like Professor Sandra Babcock and The Innocence Project insist Lucio was convicted for a crime that never occurred, pressured into a false confession and scapegoated by a corrupt prosecutor. Yet despite the flimsy case against her, it took a documentary film seen by millions, a massive local public education effort featuring Lucio’s family, tens of thousands of signatures, half the legislators in Texas, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian to stop this execution. Stays like this one are not the norm in Texas, which leads the nation in executions, and rarely lead to a reduced sentence.

Moreover, near misses like Lucio’s are an ominous recurrence in a nation where the federal government, military tribunals, and 27 states still use capital punishment, against the admonition of global human rights authorities and in contrast with nearly all liberal democratic societies. Ranking in the ignoble Who’s Who of nations that most frequently put their citizens to death, the U.S. stands in the bad company of authoritarian and pariah states like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea—a fellow outlier on a core human rights issue that’s drawn burgeoning consensus over the last seven decades.

U.S. insistence on modern day death chambers poses a host of moral problems beyond the risk of a flawed human system catching innocents like Melissa Lucio in its fatal grip. In addition to condemning 187 defendants who were later fully exonerated, our state and federal governments have executed at least 42 intellectually disabled and 22 who committed their crimes as minors—killings our Supreme Court has since summoned the scruples to deem unconstitutional.

The Court has not, however, seen its way clear to safeguard against the indisputable racial disparities in capital punishment, by which Black defendants are far more likely to be executed, especially when Whites are the ones victimized. Poverty is a risk factor, too, and idiosyncrasies of state and local politics and officials’ views play an alarming role in meting out the ultimate, irreversible form of retribution.

The U.S. has refused to respect global human rights norms that limit capital punishment to the most extreme cases. Texas proceeded with executing Carl Buntion last month at the age of 78, despite his physical infirmities and evidence that people his age are rarely violent. One treaty repudiates the death penalty for those aged 70 or older, but that was no matter.

It’s not only the execution of innocents that should haunt us. It’s the specter of Richard Moore choosing a firing squad over electrocution, and the excruciating lethal injection of prisoners caught between a drug industry that objects to its medicines being used to lethal ends and officials fixed on finding a path to execution, even through shadowy or unregulated means. Oklahoma injected one poor soul with a chemical used to de-ice airplanes. His last words were, “It feels like my body is on fire.”

We need a broader moral reckoning on capital punishment—in the Bible belt, in particular. In a recent forum, we zeroed in on the challenge of problematic theology, which in Shane’s words has turned the Bible Belt into a “Death Belt,” giving moral cover to a lethal human rights violation. Southern states where Christianity predominates are the ones holding fast to the death penalty and using it most often. Last month four executions were scheduled—two in Texas and one each in Tennessee in South Carolina—during a season where Christians everywhere celebrated resurrection.

A 2021 Pew Research study found that White Protestants are the most ardent supporters of capital punishment (nearly three quarters approve), and that Atheists and Agnostics are the only groups to disfavor it. Catholic support at 58% is nearly on par with the national average—despite Pope Francis renouncing capital punishment altogether, thanks to the tireless advocacy of Sister Helen Prejean and her fellow advocates.

As lifelong Christians who hail from the Deep South, we know how values of personal responsibility plus law and order can be warped into religious fervor for lethal retribution. Yet even the most rigid interpretations of a Christian message are impossible to square with the death penalty. Though not all Jesus followers embrace penal substitutionary atonement (the belief that Jesus’ death was necessary to save humanity from sin), a great many do. The good news is that, taken seriously, it could be the undoing of American bloodlust.

If the primary significance of the crucifixion is redemption from our sinful human nature and an invitation to reconciliation with a loving God, we mock the Author of this plan by declaring that Carl Buntion was no longer worth Christ’s effort. If we dismiss a fellow human being as beyond redemption, we may as well look Jesus in the eye and tell him, “Sorry, your tortuous sacrifice is not good enough for my taste.” To insist on death as retribution is to reject the Christian Gospel of salvation.

And ultimately, that’s the problem, isn’t it? We try to reject it, time and again. The deep difficulty many Christians have with the Gospel is not believing it but truly “accepting that we are accepted,” to paraphrase Fr. Richard Rohr, through no merit of our own. Such grace, he explains, is the death knell of our striving egos, the ultimate expurgation of our false, temporal selves. If our eternal, spiritual side could receive the hope of salvation, enjoy its truth in our innermost being, we would shudder at the thought of putting a fellow sojourner to death.

If we believed Jesus’ words, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick,” we would cherish the lives of those whose past misdeeds lay bare the universal need for saving grace. The New Testament gives us a parent rejoicing over the return of a wayward child with a relish that leaves others in disbelief. Divine hope in the redemption of the most culpable criminal—or of you and of me—never gives out.

If we were to look carefully at scriptures invoked to justify lethal retributive punishment, as scholar David Gushee has, we would learn that early communities of interpretation came to understand them as “putting a sacred protective boundary around the life of the human being,” rather than demanding further violence.

What’s more, the sum of the biblical narrative bespeaks a value and worth to each and every human life, in God’s eyes, which has influenced the course of history. It has helped to birth the revolutionary conviction that certain principles for how we treat one another are sacrosanct. For the human right to life to mean anything, it must mean the powerful hand of the state is restrained from striking down one of its own—an image bearer of a merciful God—in the name of justice.

It was all anyone could talk about on social media. A leaked document indicated that the Supreme Court would soon vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 court case that protected a woman’s right to an abortion.

According to a draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” and “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled.”

The majority opinion argued that only states had the right to decide whether abortion should be legal.

“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” Alito wrote.

The decades-long campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade has deep ties with the Religious Right, political and religious conservatives who often view abortion as murder and a sin.

Opposition to Abortion Did Not Unite the Religious Right, Racism Did

When most people think about the Religious Right, the matter of abortion comes to mind. Like no other issue, the rejection of legalized abortion has come to define the Religious Right.

Repealing Roe v. Wade stands as a perennial high-priority issue for conservative Christian voters, so much so that today it is hard to imagine a time when that was not the case.

But in the early 1970s, abortion was not the primary issue that catalyzed the Religious Right, as it would in later years. Initially, the Christian response to Roe v. Wade was mixed. Instead, conservative voters coalesced around the issue of racial integration in schools.

Abortion has not always been the defining issue for evangelicals. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, passed a resolution on abortion that called upon Southern Baptists

“to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

W. A. Criswell, pastor of the largest SBC congregation, stated after the Roe v. Wade decision that “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had life separate from its mother . . . that it became an individual person.”

He further explained, “It has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

A poll in 1970 discovered that 70 percent of Southern Baptist pastors “supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the mother, 64 percent supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity and 71 percent in cases of rape.”

Like the Southern Baptists, many other conservative Christians were not uniformly against abortion in the early 1970s.

The Religious Right, Racial Integration, and Bob Jones University

Instead, the impetus that galvanized the Religious Right came from an unexpected source, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Historian Randall Balmer explains that conservative power brokers originally came together as a political force to combat what they perceived as an attack by the IRS and the federal government on Protestant Christian schools.

It only took one school, Bob Jones University, to bring the threat of government-enforced integration to the attention of Christian conservatives and to politically mobilize them.

Bob Jones, Sr. started his school, located in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1927. Politically and in his preaching and teaching, Jones supported segregation as a biblical mandate and stood firm in his convictions all throughout the civil rights movement. Jones died, but his son, Bob Jones, Jr. took over and continued his father’s tradition of racial discrimination.

The university did finally admit its first black students in 1971, but they were only allowed if they were married. The ages-old bugaboo of interracial marriage and miscegenation made the idea of having single black men on campus as potential suitors for young white ladies an unconscionable prospect for the leaders at Bob Jones University.

In 1975, the school changed its policy and allowed unmarried black students to enroll, but as clearly outlined in the student handbook, the school prohibited interracial dating.

Bob Jones III, who served as president from 1971 to 2005, stated in an interview: “There are three basic races—Oriental, Caucasian and Negroid. At BJU, everybody dates within those basic three races.” Anyone involved in an interracial relationship or those who promoted such pairings would face expulsion.

The Civil Rights Act and the IRS’s newly adopted policies meant that Bob Jones University’s stance on interracial dating placed it in violation of racial discrimination laws.

The IRS revoked the school’s tax-exempt status in 1976, but these financial penalties did not deter university officials.

Bob Jones University officials sued the IRS and presented their case as an issue of religious freedom. “Even if this were discrimination, which it is not, though the government disagrees,” Jones III said, “it is a sincere religious belief founded on what we think the Bible teaches, no matter whether anyone else believes it or not.”

Similar to what some proponents of slavery had argued in the Civil War era, segregationists in the twentieth century considered it a “right” to separate people based on race. It was a religious belief with which the government had no right to interfere.

The IRS’s guidelines about racial integration in 1978 sparked national outrage among many Christian conservatives. Department officials as well as members of Congress received tens of thousands of messages in protest. In an interview, conservative operative, Paul Weyrich explained,

“What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the [Equal Rights Amendment]. . . . What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”

Resistance to racial integration and IRS sanctions provided an initial catalyst that mobilized the Religious Right as a political force. Opposition to abortion and the campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade was not as central to its origin story as many now believe.

This article originally appeared on Footnotes by Jemar Tisby.