Ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven—No Thanks to "The Church"

On April 5, 2019, the new film Best of Enemies will be released. It is based on the true story of the unlikely friendship/partnership of KKK "Exalted Cyclops" C.P. Ellis and African American community activist Ann Atwater and their role in integrating the public schools in Durham, North Carolina.

I was discussing this movie on Facebook with an old friend who spent his career in the ministry in a largely white, fundamentalist Christian church in Texas (in the denomination in which I grew up). He's white himself, but he got involved in advocating for black farmers who faced discrimination by the federal government and intimidation by local whites. In that process, he became an ardent advocate for racial justice.

As an aside: He and his partner Shoun Hill, an African American photographer and filmmaker, are putting together a documentary on these farmers and the challenges they faced (and still face). Those are stories that desperately need to be told, and if you care to donate to that project, please join me in doing so and click the link!

But the conversation we were having had to do with the Best of Enemies film and a book by  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion (forward by MacArthur "genius grant" award winner the Rev. William Barber!). My friend said it was his first "...hard, penetrating read about our assumptions about our faith and the church." He wanted people to know that Wilson-Hartgrove has developed study materials [PDF, 241KB] that weave the film and the questions raised in his book into four study sessions with various activities, a portion of the gospel story, a portion of the movie, and thought-provoking questions.

I mentioned that I knew the story of Atwater and Ellis because my spouse preached a sermon about them years ago, and I was captivated by the hope their relationship offered me. And then my friend said he would be interested to hear my perspective on the story.

You know that old saw about "Be careful what you ask for"? 😂 I started writing and couldn't stop. So rather than clog up his Facebook feed with my sermonizing, I decided to turn it into a blog post.

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CP Ellis did the thing that rich white people fear the most. The local KKK "Exalted Cyclops" realized he had more in common with a poor black single mother than he did with the white people who wanted to make him hate her and others like her. They were both poor and looked down upon. Neither of them had a good education. In 1971, they ended up making common cause to try to improve education in Durham, North Carolina for ALL kids.

Ellis was certainly not the first to realize that racism is the tool those in power use to keep "the peasants" from uniting to overthrow them—but he turned out to be pretty astute for someone who left school after the 8th grade. At the end of the project that first brought Ellis and Atwater together, he tore up his KKK membership card in front of a huge local crowd and renounced the beliefs he had held for a lifetime. As a result, his life was threatened and he lost all of his old friends—but he never returned to the KKK. He became a local labor organizer, and he and Atwater remained friends until he died in 2005. She gave the eulogy at his funeral.

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C.P. Ellis figured out what a lot of people with a whole lot more education and money than he had refuse to acknowledge: Racism exists because it benefits white people in power—and no one else. As President Lyndon Johnson said when talking about racism:

"I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you."

If white people could ever stop looking at people of color as competitors for the artificially scarce resources those in power deign to allow us to have—and start seeing them as allies/co-conspirators instead—we might be able to create the kind of just and peaceful world most of us dream of.

I used to believe that was possible. But that was before I saw the ugliness that Barack Obama's election unleashed. My own family was split apart by the virulent racism that erupted when the first black man was elected (fairly, I might add) to the presidency. I was stunned by the bitterness, rage, and seething contempt that people I had loved all my life turned on President Obama—and any white person who dared to support him. If racism can make you cast out your own flesh and blood, I'm not sure it's redeemable short of the Eschaton.

And if redeeming racism is left up to the (white) church, I'll state here and now that it WON'T happen until then. Churches—including my own—have done a piss-poor job of naming racism for the sin that it is. Churches have not done the job of educating their white congregations that racism is NOT your feelings about people of color. Racism is about INSTITUTIONS. It is about the hatred and discrimination baked into the foundation of our nation. It is the slaves' blood that watered the development of our Constitution and every branch of our government. It saturates our economic institutions and our social structures. It is the water in which we swim and the air that we breathe.

I didn't learn any of that in church, by the way. I learned that in graduate school. I learned it from working with a diverse group of people/mentors who taught me a truer version of our nation's history. I learned it from friends who loved (and love) me enough to correct me when I screw up, which I still do, sadly. But I've also learned not to take those corrections as a comment on my worth as a human being. I grew up as a relatively well-to-do white woman in a thoroughly racist culture; I will be "unlearning" racism for the rest of my life, and part of that involves learning to listen to people of color, admitting when you make a mistake and asking forgiveness with some humility, and trying to do better.

It's a difficult task because humility is hard for most of us—but it's infinitely less difficult than having to be on the receiving end of racism every day of your life.

I know a lot of Christians who have taken up that task because they saw that racism is the antithesis of the Gospel—the anti-Christ, if you will. But I can probably count on one hand the white ministers I've heard issuing a call-to-action against racism from the pulpit. Any white minister who claims to be preaching/spreading the Gospel but who fails to put the issue of racism at the forefront when proclaiming the "good news" is lying to hirself and hir flock.

And, of course, anyone who DOES this is likely to find hirself unemployed pretty quickly.

And that, my friends, is why Christianity is dying in the west and why I predict it will eventually die everywhere. Christianity calls for courage to go against the status quo—but most of us are selfish cowards who don't care if others suffer as long as WE are doing okay. It calls us to a kind of self-sacrifice—of status, money, and safety—that human beings (especially those in a capitalistic society) very rarely indicate they are willing to make . And it calls us to love others (even "THOSE people"!) as much as we love ourselves.

Maybe the real issue is that we don't even love ourselves, so how can we love others—especially those who aren't part of our "tribe"? I can't say for certain.

But I CAN say that "The Church" (writ large) has failed to tackle the issues of racism and poverty in any meaningful way. It has turned the radical Jesus into a plaster saint. It has become a club where the people in it congratulate themselves on living godly lives, while pulling the lever for a man like Donald Trump, who makes Herod look like a piker in his cruelty, and for members of the GOP, who never met a program that helped poor people (especially black/brown people) that they didn't want to kill. (Programs to make rich people richer are A-Ok, of course.)

"The Church" hasn't called people to repentance for this. In fact, "the Church" has been a key institution in promoting and upholding every human evil. More and more people—especially young people—are seeing it for what it is and walking away. And who can blame them? Young people have always been acutely attuned to hypocrisy—at least until they get co-opted into it. (I'm looking at US, Boomers. And I don't exempt myself from any of this critique, in case you were wondering...)

To bring this back to Ellis and Atwater: both were Christians who lived out their faith in a costly way. But 40 years after they reached across the divide, we can't even TALK about racism in church except to say that using the "N word" is sinful. Talking about racism is seen as worse than being racist—and God help anyone who tells a white person that zie has said/done something racist. 

I hope white people see the movie and are inspired to do better. I hope churches adopt Wilson-Hartgrove's curriculum and push for honest conversations about racism as institutions, not feelings. I was taught that, with God, all things are possible. I would like to be able to believe that again.