Robert Jones has been a Christian all his life. He was raised in the Southern Baptist Church – this was something that played an important part in forming his identity. But at some point, he began to have questions he could not ignore. There were things about his upbringing and the church community that he grew uncomfortable with.
He began noticing the implicit racism all around him. He increasingly became aware of the assumptions that were made about people that no one ever seemed to question. Beliefs and preferences were accepted as facts. But, to Robert, they no longer seemed to be reliably factual.
As an adult he pursued a career studying religion in America, particularly the way our religion forms our social and political identity. He founded an organization called the Public Religion Research Institute, which conducts opinion polls to measure how political issues in our society relate to religious values. More and more, he saw that religious values and affiliation are related to people’s views on race.
In 2016 he wrote a book called The End of White Christian America. The title seemed to alarm a lot of people who thought he must be suggesting the end of Christianity in America was imminent. That was not what he was saying. He was simply noting the fact that the Church in America is becoming less white. It is becoming more diverse, just as America is becoming more diverse.
Should the racial or ethnic composition of the church really matter? Probably not. But it does matter because, for hundreds of years, the church has been right in the thick of racial segregation. Martin Luther King once said that 11:00 on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week in Christian America. And it really hasn’t changed much in the sixty years since he made that observation.
It is no wonder that White Christians in America became anxious by the title of Robert Jones’s book. The end of White Christian America might sound to some like an existential threat.
He followed that book up two years later with another one called White Too Long. He delves more deeply into the matter of racial segregation in the American Church, focusing most acutely on White Supremacy, the belief that White people are, somehow, superior to people of other races. Jones has come to the conclusion that White Supremacy is so woven into the fabric of the American church, it cannot be easily removed.
His findings are based on statistics. The numbers come from polling, so take it with a grain of salt if you wish, self-report is only self-report. But here is what he found: the more racist attitudes a person holds, the more likely that person is to identify as a White Christian. And it isn’t just one particular type of church – this is true among Evangelical Christians, Mainline Protestant Christians, and Catholics. These numbers tell us that Christians are as likely as anybody else – actually, more likely than anybody else –to categorize people into those who are acceptable and those who are unacceptable.
Those who belong and those who don’t belong.
Those who are trustworthy and those who are untrustworthy.
We might want to push back on that notion; we might want to get angry. We might resist the very idea with all our being. But it’s important to say, isn’t it? Because don’t we want to understand where our faults may lie?
The Psalmist says Lord, you have searched me and known me…You discern my path from far away…you are acquainted with all my ways. You, Lord, know me better than I know myself.
It is very hard for people to see the things about themselves that they don’t like. Everyone has parts of themselves that they are blind to, yet others can see them clearly. The question we all face at some point is whether we even want to know these things about ourselves.
When I was a seminary intern in a congregation I was excited about everything I was doing, and I asked the pastor who was supervising me to give me feedback. “Tell me how I’m doing, all of it.” He said, “Are you sure about that?” I said, “Absolutely, yes!” By the time he was finished, I was sorry I had asked. I was defensive. I was full of excuses. I was not ready to hear about my faults.
But if I was going to grow I needed to know. If we can never talk about our faults, we cannot repent. And repentance is at the center of our Christian faith. Confronting our sinfulness and turning in a new direction is just what Jesus, our Good Shepherd, invites us to do with him.
The story in John about the young man who was born blind is the same thing – it’s about being able to see what is true about yourself, and how far we will go to avoid seeing it. This is such a rich and full story, we could easily spend a couple of hours talking about it. But for now I simply want to lift out one thing:
The Pharisees, the men who decide who belongs and who doesn’t, have judged Jesus to be one who doesn’t belong. They don’t like him. He doesn’t go with the flow, he doesn’t follow the conventions, he doesn’t parrot the traditional beliefs. He’s different. So they don’t like him, and they have labeled him an outsider.
He is one who cannot be trusted. He is someone who does not belong in their class.
And once they have decided that he is in the category of “Other,” or outsider, they can’t see anything that might contradict that belief.
It is the one who was born blind who can see what the ones with sight are blind to.
The one who has never seen anything in his life can see the one thing that the others cannot see, and that thing is truth.
I was talking to someone recently who is active in Alcoholics Anonymous, a 12-Step Recovery Program. If you are not very familiar with the 12 Steps, it is essentially a process of turning your life over to a Higher Power – God, we would say – to help you heal and grow. The person was getting ready to help someone through the 5th Step of their program. The 5th Step comes only after a great deal of self-reflection, and it is this: We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
She said the scheduling of this thing was a big deal. She told me, “It’s pretty much an all-day thing.” That sounds intimidating to me – whether I was on the admitting side or the listening side, it could be a scary thing.
That is why no one does it alone. No one is expected, no one possibly could, go through the process alone.
Christ calls us to see the things about ourselves that make us uncomfortable, things that cause us to harm others and ourselves. Christ calls us to be honest with ourselves about our weaknesses, our faults, our sin. None of us wants to do that. But the good news is this: when we are willing to do that, when we take a step into that deep, dark valley of self-reflection, of searching ourselves just as God searches us, we will not be alone; our shepherd will be with us.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley…you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Jesus, our Good Shepherd, will walk all the way through it with us. He will never let us go.
Thanks be to God.
