Last week I posted the following thread on Twitter, in response to Justin Peter’s indignant request of Beth Moore:
Constantly Attacking Anti-Racists Gives Defense to White Supremacists in the Church : Slander? Receipts
James White
Galatians 3:28 and Colossians 3:11 do NOT Preclude Justice Advocacy
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal. 3:28)
Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. (Col. 3:11)
I’ve become more and more baffled how passages like Galatians 3:28 and Colossians 3:11 have been used to oppose advocates of racial justice and reconciliation in the Church. The idea seems to be that since all believers are one in Christ and our identity and unity is to be found in Him alone, then even bringing up race in the Church is itself a source of division, such distinctions having been wiped away by the death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord. For example, we read the following popular expression of the claim:
A Quibble: White Evangelicals Are Not Anti-Structuralist
The racially important cultural tools in the white evangelical tool kit are “accountable freewill individualism,” “relationalism” (attaching central importance to interpersonal relationships), and anti-structuralism (inability to perceive or unwillingness to accept social structural influences). (Divided by Faith, p. 76)
When I first read Smith and Emerson’s book, Divided by Faith (a must read), this section stood out above all else. I had wondered why the concept of structural, systemic, or institutional racism was so forcefully dismissed by white evangelicals in general, and opponents of racial reconciliation in particular. The concept of a “tool kit,” stocked with limited methods of interpretation (even conceptualization), populated by fundamental beliefs and assumptions found within evangelical ideology itself, seemed a welcome explanation for the obvious hostility toward structural explanations. The logic seemed simple. Evangelicalism rightly sees salvation as an individual affair (though often with illegitimate emphasis); God saves sinners from sin; sin is the ultimate problem; only individuals can sin or be saved from sin; racism is wrong because it is sin; therefore, racism is also only an individual affair. As such, evangelicals can only process racism as an individual attitude or as individual actions. Evangelicals simply have no interpretive category for institutionalized, systemic, or structural racism. It makes perfect sense.
Bradly Mason 