Choose the Slave! The Moral Imagination of White American Christianity

ABSTRACT

The racial justice protests of the last several years reveals the extent to which white American Christianity finds itself caught between two moral imaginations – one rooted in the system of white supremacy and the other animated by theologies of solidarity and resistance. This moral confusion has left many white Christian leaders at a disadvantage on the issue of racial justice, one of the most pressing moral issues of the day. More importantly, the institutional apparatus of white Christian life also finds itself suspended between these two moral imaginations, which can be experienced most viscerally in liturgy and worship. As environmental, social, and political pressures mount, white Christianity must wake up to this moral conundrum and find a way to act rightly and assertively.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial justice
• white supremacy
• moral imagination
• Christianity
• clergy
• community life
• antiracism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Baldwin, “On Being White,” 179.

2 Jones, White Too Long, 234, 235.

3 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 43.

4 Arora, “How the Coronavirus Pandemic Helped the Floyd Protests Become the Biggest in U.S. History.”

5 Harmeet, “The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Hitting Black and Brown Americans Especially Hard on All Fronts.”

6 I am deliberately leaving aside the work in this moment of the Black Church, of African, Eastern, Latin American, Orthodox, and Asian Christianity more generally; of Judaism, Islam, and the many other forms of organized religion that exist in this country, as these traditions do not have at their modern foundations the racialized oppression of Black and indigenous peoples, as white American Christianity—broadly speaking—does.