Divided by Faith

“Christianity is not just reconciliation to God but reconciliation with people. You start out at the personal level and you see people as people. We also address systemic injustice, looking for ways to help either advocate for people who don’t have a voice or help make the playing ground a little more equal.”

“Because of our cultural backgrounds,” said Nancy, a white Presbyterian woman, blacks and whites “might not enjoy the same kinds of worship.

But, as the church grew, something happened to its mixed-race nature—it disappeared, and the congregation became nearly all-African American. Perhaps because the pastor was black and thus practiced a nonwhite style of preaching and leadership, perhaps because white Americans are accustomed to being the majority, a pattern developed in who visited a

The early white abolitionists opposed slavery but not racialization. They were uncomfortable with these strange Africans, and, to put it bluntly, wished them to go away.

The sin of “indifference” is noted by many of these early advocates of racial reconciliation. To sit on the sidelines while unequal and oppressive forces harm part of the Christian community is a grievous wrong.

As Stokely Carmichael and others have noted, when problems are at least in part structural, they must be addressed at least in part by structural solutions. If a building is on the verge of collapse due to an inadequate design, improving the quality of the bricks without improving the design is not a solution. Evangelicals, for all their recent ene