by Jemar Tisby
Some of the most pointed debates among Christians about black lives matter came in the wake of the triennial Urbana missions conference organized by the evangelical organization InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. On the second night of the conference, some of the staff members and hosts on stage wore t-shirts that read, “Black Lives Matter.” The shirts were only a prelude to a firestorm of controversy about to be unleashed by the evening’s next speaker, Michelle Higgins. Higgins is a black woman who leads the music during worship at her theologically conservative and multiethnic Presbyterian church in St. Louis. When the Ferguson uprisings took place, she got involved alongside other Christians from her church and throughout the city, and eventually she became director of outreach for an organization of Christians in the area called Faith for Justice.
Higgins’s talk lasted only twenty-eight minutes, but that was plenty of time to spark heated disagreement over her remarks. “Black lives matter is not a mission of hate. It is not a mission to bring about incredible anti-Christian values and reforms to the world,” she informed the audience of 16,000 college students. As if speaking about black lives matter head on was not enough, she went further still and criticized the primacy of abortion in the evangelical canon of sins. “We can wipe out the adoption crisis tomorrow,” she said. “But we’re too busy arguing to have abortion banned. We’re too busy arguing to defund Planned Parenthood.”27
This combination of an endorsement of black lives matter and a negative assessment of pro-life efforts to combat abortion resulted in a flood of condemnation. In a New York Times article, Greg Jao, a senior administrator for InterVarsity, said the organization “got blow-back from just about every side.” He spoke candidly about reactions from financial contributors to the organization. “Certainly we have donors and friends who have raised concerns and questions. They want to know how to interpret this [focus on black lives matter.]” Jao also mentioned that comments did not take on a universally negative tone. “And we’ve had friends and donors say ‘Bravo, that was brave and courageous.’ ”28
Reactions to Lecrae, Anyabwile, and Higgins merely illustrate common attitudes that many white evangelicals have regarding issues of racial justice. A survey by the Barna Research Group revealed the mixed responses to black lives matter and how the responses often split along racial lines. When it came to black lives matter, just 13 percent of evangelicals said they supported the “message” compared to 27 percent of adults overall and 45 percent of millennials. On the same question only 7 percent of those who identified as Republicans supported the movement. Perhaps predictably, 94 percent of evangelicals thought the Christian church “plays an important role in racial reconciliation” as compared to 73 percent of all adults. In a summary of the survey’s findings, researchers concluded, “If you’re a white evangelical Republican, you are less likely to think race is a problem, but more likely to think you are victim of reverse racism.” They further contended, “You are also less convinced that people of color are socially disadvantaged.” Citing the importance evangelicals attribute to the church in racial reconciliation, the researchers said, “This dilemma demonstrates that those supposedly most equipped for reconciliation do not see the need for it.”29
Many Christians may agree with the principle that black lives matter, but they still wonder whether they should get involved with an organization that espouses beliefs contrary to his or her religious convictions. There is no single answer that will fit every person’s situation. There should be efforts to critically engage rather than reflexively dismiss, and Christians should consider that the best way to start is to start local. Many national organizations are intentionally decentralized, so the character of individual groups varies. It helps to learn who is involved and what issues they prioritize. Contact the nearest Black Lives Matter chapter and speak with representatives. It may be that the people involved are people of faith. Countless ministers, Christians, and other religious adherents have been involved with the organization. Organizations sometimes host their meetings at churches or religious venues. Some people decide that they can participate in certain actions but not others. Ultimately, the organizations with which one chooses to affiliate in the cause of antiracism is a matter of conscience. The only wrong action is inaction.
The longstanding failure among many white Christians to acknowledge ongoing discrimination embedded in systems and structures means black and white Christians often talk past each other. One group focuses on isolated incidents; the other sees a pattern of injustice. To properly assess and move toward a solution to racism in America, both perspectives are needed. Every person makes choices and is accountable for the consequences. At the same time, injustice imposes limits on the opportunities and choices people have. In the church, conversations about injustice should include an examination of the circumstances of each incident, but Christians should also analyze the larger patterns—ones that can operate independent of malicious intent—to see the historic and systemic picture and advocate for more effective solutions.
THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND THE 81 PERCENT
According to Franklin Graham, son of evangelical powerhouse Billy Graham, even Vice President Mike Pence thought he and his running mate, Donald Trump, had lost on election night in 2016. “[Pence] thought they had lost the election,” said Graham. “I said, ‘Listen buddy. If you guys win tonight, you make sure Donald understands that it’s the Lord.’ ” When the results became official, Trump had, against the predictions of most pollsters and prognosticators, emerged as the forty-fifth president of the United States. In a text to Pence that night, Graham said, “Mike, look what God did tonight.’ [Pence] said, ‘Isn’t it awesome?’ ”30
Graham serves as one of the faces of what historian John Fea calls the “court evangelicals,” those who publicly and consistently support Donald Trump as president despite a string of decidedly non-evangelical character traits.31 Trump, who had never held political office until he won the presidency in 2016, has been divorced and remarried. In 2017, a former adult-film actress with the stage name “Stormy Daniels” alleged that she had an affair with Trump several years earlier, just after his current wife, Melania, gave birth to their son. A month before the election, a tape obtained by the Washington Post recorded the presidential candidate making lewd comments about women, including kissing them and groping them without consent, while boasting that “And when you’re a star they let you do it. They let you do anything.”32 Trump hardly fits the “family values” mold that conservative evangelicals had cast for their ideal candidate.
Trump traffics in harmful racial stereotypes as well. Long before he ran for president, Trump had a dubious record on race. In 1973, the US Department of Justice sued his company, Trump Management, for discrimination against potential black renters of his apartments. Under directions from their superiors, apartment managers refused to show certain apartments to black people or claimed that the rent was much higher in order to dissuade them. The company settled the case with no admission of guilt in 1975, but the Department of Justice reopened the case three years later, alleging that the discrimination, a violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, had continued.33 In 1989, police accused five black and Latino teenagers of beating and raping a white woman in Central Park. In response, Trump paid $85,000 to place full-page ads in four New York City newspapers calling for a return of the death penalty. “Muggers and murderers should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” he wrote. DNA evidence exonerated all five youth of the crime, but Trump never publicly changed his position.34 In doing so, he perpetuated the assumption of criminality that many still hold toward black and brown people.
Trump gained political notoriety before the 2016 election with his comments about Barack Obama, who became the nation’s first black president in 2008. Trump promoted a right-wing conspiracy theory that Obama, whose mother was white and from Kansas and whose father was a black Kenyan, was not actually born in the United States
and was therefore ineligible for the presidency. In a series of interviews in 2011, Trump expressed his doubts about Obama’s citizenship. “I’m starting to think that he was not born here,” he told the hosts on NBC’s Today Show.35 Observers accused Trump of racism in questioning the American-ness of the country’s first black president and of leading the charge to force Obama to reveal his long-form birth certificate to the public.
Trump’s questionable stances on race have not been confined to black people. In a speech announcing his presidential candidacy in 2015, Trump promised to build a wall along the Mexico-US border because Mexicans entering the United States were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”36 In a meeting about immigration with top officials during his presidency, Trump asked why the United States should accept more immigrants from “shithole” countries such as Haiti and countries in Africa. In response, a United Nations representative said, “There is no other word one can use but ‘racist.’ . . . It is not just a story about vulgar language, it’s . . . validating and encouraging racism and xenophobia.”37
On August 12, 2017, America experienced a flashback to its racial past when white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the possible removal of a monument to Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park. This time the protestors, who called their rally “Unite the Right,” did not wear the white robes and hoods of the Ku Klux Klan; instead, they wore khaki pants and polo shirts and held tiki torches. During a counterprotest, a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of people and killed one woman, as well as injuring many others. In his first statement about the events that the Department of Justice labeled “domestic terrorism,” Trump failed to unequivocally condemn the racist acts. Instead, he simply denounced “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.”38 Many viewed his comments as creating a false equivalency between white supremacists and those who assembled to oppose them. Add to these incidents the support the president has received from white nationalist groups, his call for a ban on Muslim immigration, and his tendency to positively and uncritically quote from white nationalist media sources, and it’s clear why Trump’s actions have elicited repeated accusations of racism.
Black people recognized the pattern of prejudice from Trump, and they showed their distaste at the polls. Eighty-eight percent of black voters, including 94 percent of black women, supported the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. By contrast, 58 percent of white people voted for Trump. Breaking the 2016 voting numbers down even further reveals overwhelming support for Donald Trump among white evangelicals. According to a Pew Research report, 81 percent of voters who self-identified as white evangelicals pulled the lever for Trump. While white evangelical support for the Republican presidential candidate has regularly hovered around 75 percent or above, their support remained high in spite of his deplorable comments, especially concerning race.39 Further reports demonstrate that during his presidency, Trump has maintained strong support from white evangelicals, especially more frequent church-goers. “Eight-in-ten white evangelical Protestants who attend church at least once a month approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president.”40
Why did so many white evangelicals support Trump despite his obvious racist tendencies? First, it should be acknowledged that plenty of evangelicals did not support him. Many took a #NeverTrump stand and objected to his rhetoric and policies. They voted third party or refrained from voting altogether. Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, vocally opposed Trump during the primaries and the early part of the election campaign. He called evangelical support of Trump “illogical.” He went on to suggest that evangelicals might risk losing credibility among black people by supporting Trump: “When evangelicals should be leading the way on racial reconciliation, as the Bible tells us to, are we really ready to trade unity with our black and brown brothers and sisters for this angry politician?”41 Apparently plenty of white evangelicals did not mind trading unity with people of color, because they threatened Moore’s job. In an episode reminiscent of Southern Baptist opposition to Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit decades prior, more than 100 Southern Baptist churches promised to withdraw their funding from the collective cooperative fund unless Moore changed his tone or was dismissed.42
Evangelical support for Donald Trump can be attributed to a combination of policy issues they thought he would champion as well as an intense dislike of Hillary Clinton. White evangelicals looked to Trump to support their pro-life stance. They wanted him to oppose gay marriage and, of vital importance, to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices who would protect and promote their policy interests. In addition, many evangelicals did not necessarily cast a vote for Donald Trump so much as vote against Hillary Clinton. Aside from being a Democrat, Clinton’s public championing of abortion and alignment with Planned Parenthood, her relatively rare public expressions of her faith, her lack of outreach to conservative evangelicals, and her “emails” all combined into a mix that many white evangelicals found repugnant. But other Republican candidates in the primaries had more credible conservative bona fides than Trump and could have stood up for evangelical political priorities. Evangelical support of Trump and dislike of Clinton went beyond policy concerns.
Trump tapped into the latent sense among some evangelicals that they were losing their influence in American culture and politics. Increasingly, evangelicals believe they are the ones experiencing persecution. That gay marriage is now the law of the land, the lasting effects of Roe v. Wade, the controversy over whether Christians can refuse certain services to gay and lesbian customers, and the general trend toward liberalism make some evangelicals feel like people without a home in the American political landscape. A Public Religion Research Institute survey found that the only religious group that thought Christians in America faced more discrimination than Muslims were white evangelicals: 57 percent of evangelicals thought Christians faced a lot of discrimination compared to 33 percent of Americans overall.43 Trump’s campaign slogan promised to “Make America Great Again.” In the conservative Christian political mind, Trump, despite his, promised to “Make Evangelicals Great Again.”
The impact of the 2016 election cannot be underestimated. In an interview for a New York Times article, Michael Emerson, coauthor of Divided by Faith, gave his assessment: “The election itself was the single most harmful event to the whole movement of reconciliation in at least the past 30 years,” he said. “It’s about to completely break apart.”44 The Trump campaign and presidency revealed just how tenuous the interracial coalition of Christians that had emerged in the past two and a half decades really was. The forty-fifth president did not produce the racial and political divide between black and white Christians, but he exposed and extended longstanding differences while revealing the inadequacy of recent reconciliation efforts.
THE COLOR OF COMPROMISE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
The never-ending struggle for black freedom has resulted in tangible gains for all Americans. Black people who once largely inhabited this country as slaves have become Fortune 500 CEOs, media moguls, award-winning academics, and even president. It has become more difficult, though not unheard of, for the American church to openly make racist statements and argue for the inferiority of black people. But racism has by no means disappeared from the headlines.
Examples abound. In a culturally obtuse move, a group of white professors at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary thought it would be funny to send off a retiring colleague by posting a posed picture of themselves in baggy pants, hoodies, and crooked caps. One professor even held a real gun.45 The Presbyterian Church in America, a denomination founded in the 1970s but with connections to Southern Presbyterians, decided to deliberate for a year before passing a resolution about their complicity in racism during the civil rights movement.46 The Southern Baptist Convention faced a public relations debacle when a committee ref
used to consider a proposal by a black minister to condemn the racism of the alt-right.47 And while multiracial congregations have become more commonplace, many churches remain some of the most segregated places in America.
Plenty of white evangelicals have promoted reconciliation and have attempted to address the racism that has defined large portions of the American church in the past. Yet, spurred by evangelical support for Trump, many black Christians have distanced themselves from white evangelicals. In a widely circulated op-ed for the New York Times, black Baptist minister Lawrence Ware renounced his membership in the Southern Baptist Convention. “My reasoning is simple,” he explained. “As a black scholar of race and a minister who is committed to social justice, I can no longer be part of an organization that is complicit in the disturbing rise of the so-called alt-right, whose members support the abhorrent policies of Donald Trump and whose troubling racial history and current actions reveal a deep commitment to white supremacy.”48 Ware articulated a keen sense that white evangelicals have continued to compromise with racism even in an age when the obvious racist actions of the past have been denounced. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, now a professor of theology in Atlanta, left her position on staff at a majority white church after the 2016 election. “We were willing to give up our preferred worship style for the chance to really try to live this vision of beloved community with a diverse group of people,” she said. “That didn’t work.”49