Ambivalent Miracles: Evangelicals and the Politics of Racial Healing

4: Religious Race Bridging as a Third Way

4 I have heard very few Southern evangelicals admit they were on the wrong side of the race issues back in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. I have never heard any of them say that they should have blocked the entrances to the jails where we were beaten and tortured, or taken a stand with us when we wanted equal access to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In fact, over the past few years there have been only a few Southern , white, evangelical Christians who have asked our forgiveness and extended a hand in reconciliation. On the contrary, for every step we take in their direction, it seems that most take another step toward the suburbs. —Spencer Perkins, Christianity Today, 1989 Only when we individually and as a corporate group renounce racism in all its forms and repent of all transgressions will God choose to use us in the future to reach all people throughout the world. —Rev. Billy Graham, at the 150th anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1995 Social change is often awkward and uncomfortable. Even under the best conditions it requires us to alter the stories we have been telling for generations about ourselves, others, and “the way things are”—stories we understand to be if not always perfectly accurate, then at least acceptable truisms that guide action. Like layers of geological sediment, collective narratives are marbled through the complex racial histories and identities in American evangelicalism. To dislodge entrenched frameworks that have provided meaning and identity for people would seem to require something akin to dynamite—a miracle, or an apocalypse. Even to reconsider old stories may involve feelings of betrayal of one’s own family, social group, or ancestors. Religious Race Bridging as a Third Way 82 A New Wave At the dawn of the 1980s, American evangelicals were at a virtual standstill on racial matters. The major competing racial narratives constructed over at least a century left blacks and whites, at least, in separate and largely segregated communities. Some, like Tom Skinner and Martin Luther King Jr., understood the church as inseparable from an ongoing mission to defend and protect downtrodden communities and fight to increase political and social equality. Others, like C. Peter Wagner, saw the church as instrumental to a swift, definitive soulsaving enterprise designed to bring glory to God and ideally reform a degenerating culture.1 Given how white evangelicals had long constructed their stories about race and religion, it was inconceivable for most to imagine being both theologically conservative and focused on racial justice or even racial integration in the church without straining what they saw as the central religious mission , salvation. In 1980, it was easier for most whites to imagine that the most glaring racial inequalities had receded; therefore, the choice to join a particular church did not necessarily imply that one identified with a racial group, even if the congregation was all white.2 For most American Christians of color, especially blacks, such de-racialized fantasies of religious belonging were untenable, as race, ethnicity, culture, and history had long been understood as organically interwoven with religious beliefs, practices, and membership. American evangelicalism seemed locked on separate tracks. Just a decade and a half later, however, things looked strikingly different, at least on the surface. By 1995, a person could almost flip open the most popular evangelical magazine to a random page and land on an article showcasing new racial changes occurring within the evangelical community. Racial reconciliation was on the rise, inaugurating new kinds of reflection, public and semipublic rituals of apology and forgiveness, and cross-racial dialogues within conservative evangelicalism. Suddenly race seemed to be a positive (if nevertheless still anxious) preoccupation. People were rethinking their old stories about race and exploring what those changing perspectives might mean for their actual social practices. Participants spoke in terms of epiphanies, collective miracles, and spiritual healing. What changed to carve a path from stagnation to visions of divinely inspired, catalytic reconciliation? Was such change driven from outside or within American evangelical communities, and how did it impact the mental and spiritual universes of people involved? What conceptual work did the discourse of racial reconciliation do for evangelicals? What were its governing assumptions and constraints? How did racial change discourse interface with what had become a quite powerful political force in the 1990s, the organized Religious Right? And what does the turn to reconciliation after decades of resistance and avoidance [3.138.174.174] Project MUSE...