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The times haven’t changed as much as we might think. Consider the assessment of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. almost a half-century ago: “Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.”
That ongoing reality is the reason Bishop T.D. Jakes, the Rev. Bill Hybels and many other well known preachers and Christian scholars from around the country came to Cincinnati earlier this month to participate in the National Summit on Racism in the Church.
Over the course of the three-day summit, sponsored by the Cincinnati Area Pastors, speakers sought to bring about unity not only in the church but throughout the nation as well.
Historians and scientists discussed the turbulent history of the Christian church and how Christianity and the Bible have often been used in the past to justify slavery and other oppression. The reason the Bible is used to justify hatred is that people interpret it in many different ways, according to the Rev. Mark Noll, considered by many the foremost authority on Christian history.
The years of slavery in the United States — from before the American Revolution until the end of the Civil War — featured the largest growth of Christianity in American history, Noll said. This resulted in many people reading the Bible cover-to-cover and interpreting it in whatever way they felt was right. Many lacked guidance from a pastor or religious scholarship.
Even so, interpretation only partly explains the Bible’s role in sustaining slavery.
Some passages don’t require any interpretation. The First Letter to Timothy, a book in the New Testament, says, “Those who are under the yoke of slavery must regard their masters as worthy of full respect, so that the name of God and our teaching may not suffer abuse.” Rather than denounce slavery, the Bible tells slaves they must respect the people who own and oppress them.
The Bible is hardly something Christians can relegate to the past. On his Web site, Hybels says, “The sole basis of our belief is the Bible, which is uniquely God-inspired, without error and the final authority on all matters on which it bears.” Jakes’ Web site says almost the exact same thing.
Was God wrong to order slaves to obey, or was the Bible wrong in saying that’s what God wanted? Jakes would likely reject both possibilities.
Modern Christianity, however, must reflect the diversity of the human race, Jakes says.
“If you’re going to embrace all people, you have to accommodate their cultures,” he says. “Integration cannot mean duplication.”
Rejecting the notion that the way to make African Americans and whites get along better is to try to get them to be the same, Jakes says we must accommodate other people’s cultures.
But even while promoting racial and cultural tolerance, Jakes and many other Christians create more divisions.
Jakes seems quite comfortable in alienating homosexual men from the church, describing them as “wearing pink boas and walking down the street talking about free love.”
While the summit raised some important questions about the role Christianity has played and continues to play in race problems in the United States, it wasn’t as effective in answering these questions. Often times the speakers seemed to take the easy way out when describing how racism should be eliminated —telling people to follow Jesus or open their hearts to God or citing other Christian clichés. ©
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2003.