Racist Church
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Oh, Lord. Here's what I want you to know. In every generation, this just happens to be our moment, there is seismic cultural shifts that happen to wake us up. I call them catalytic events in the book I wrote that's called Roadmap to Reconciliation because I've been trying to wonder, how do we get along? If it is true that Jesus has destroyed all that divides us, why are we so divided? Why?

So I've been struggling to understand that and articulate that and I'm beginning to understand that we tend to stay in our own silos unless something shakes us out of them. They're catalytic moments and whether we like the Black Lives Matter movement or not, it is hard to dispute that it was a catalytic event in our time. That it got our national and global attention.

That's Brenda Salter McNeil, an author and black U.S. evangelical pastor at Quest Church in Seattle. She's also associate professor of reconciliation studies in the School of Theology at Seattle Pacific University.

It's from a talk she gave in 2016, just after more protests across America decried police brutality and the killing of two more African-American men by police. Their names were Alton Sterling from Louisiana and Philando Castile from Minnesota. People all around the world are watching us and wondering how we'll respond to the unrest and the injustice that's around us.

I believe there's a wake-up calls, my brothers and my sisters, I really do. I believe these catalytic events are supposed to push us out of our comfort zones. So if you're feeling uncomfortable, remember, uncommon fellowship is uncommon because it's uncomfortable. So if you're feeling uncomfortable even in this talk, hallelujah, glory be unto God. Let the discomfort begin. This episode is likely going to be...

We're talking about racism.

Racism in the church, in the Bible, racism pretty much everywhere. Some would argue that Christianity itself is racist. Given the sweep of history, this is a charge that has to be confronted. So we're going to speak to a couple of people who, despite all the things the church has done wrong and continues to do wrong, and despite all the things the church should be doing but just isn't, still

still see Christ as Lord. They're still part of the church. They still reckon Christianity is beautiful, even if parts of the church aren't. But you as listeners, whether you believe or not, are going to have to be the judges. This is not an episode in which I feel competent to lecture anyone.

I don't know what it's like to be in a minority. That's why we're speaking to people today who do. It's well past time that I, dare I say, we just listened. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics Evangelical Theology by Michael Bird. Every week at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth...

The calls are getting louder. The voices more numerous. London is leaning into America's pain and demanding an end to its own.

What is clear: by the day these protests are gathering global momentum.

spreading so far around the world, the sun never sets on someone demanding justice for George Floyd, asking us to understand Black Lives Matter and calling for change. That's a clip from CNN's coverage of 2020's Black Lives Matter protests. The New Yorker calls the phrase Black Lives Matter a powerful rallying cry for a new generation of civil rights activists.

It began as a social media hashtag following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watchman who fatally shot the black teenager Trayvon Martin back in 2012. The phrase Black Lives Matter has now grown into a movement, sparking protests after the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York, and then again after the 2016 deaths I mentioned a moment ago.

This year, the next wave of Black Lives Matter protests began after the death of George Floyd, who was arrested by police outside a shop in Minneapolis. Video footage shows a white police officer kneeling on George's neck for several minutes while he's pinned to the floor. George is heard repeatedly saying, I can't breathe. He died in hospital.

Tell me about the Black Lives Matter movement. You know, lots of Christians responded, all lives matter, right? I mean, because that's true, isn't it? All lives matter? Absolutely, all lives matter. But there's this great meme, you know, this picture that shows two houses burning. And there are a couple of people standing from afar and watching those houses. And one of the people...

That's Jamar Tisby, an historian and author of the books The Colour of Compromise, The Truth About the American Church's Complicity in Racism, and his most recent one, How to Fight Racism, Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice. Jamar is the president of The Witness, a black Christian collective, where he writes about race, religion, politics and culture. It's a seriously impressive website.

And one of the people watching says, that house is burning. And the other person next to them says, well, all houses matter. And the idea is, yes, all houses matter in that instance, right? But one is on fire. And that's the one we need to pay attention to and take care of. And in the midst of that situation, this burning building to say, well, all houses matter, right?

is to miss the point and the urgency of the situation. And in a similar way, when we say Black Lives Matter, it's not to say that other lives don't matter or that other lives matter less. Black Lives Matter is saying that Black Lives Matter too. Black Lives Matter also or in addition to. And we have to say Black Lives Matter because there is so much evidence to the contrary.

Race-based chattel slavery turned a person into property, which is why you could separate and sell children away from their parents. Can you imagine the weeping your own child pulled away from you, likely never to be seen again? And out of your protection, you have no way to keep them safe.

And that's what race-based chattel slavery did, and that's how little Black lives matter. And then you can look at something like the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, which enshrined into law the doctrine of separate but equal slavery.

Now, this is a Jim Crow era law that separated people by race, but it was never equal. And so you can look at public education funding, which is supposed to be equal across the board. And yet schools that were predominantly white invariably got more funding, better resources, better facilities, higher trained teachers, more.

all of that than black people and people of color. Black lives didn't matter. In the present day, when we see this tragic string of cell phone videos showing unarmed black people being killed, sometimes by vigilantes, sometimes by law enforcement, but so casually, so cavalierly, that in the face of all of this black suffering, in the face of all of this black death, we scream and cry out, black lives matter.

You write in The Colour of Compromise that an honest assessment of racism should acknowledge that it never goes away. It just changes, it adapts to the changing times. So will there never be a day with no racism in the greater society or in the church?

Not until Jesus comes back. You know, you can break this down on a theological level that even as people confess faith in Christ and become more like Jesus, we're never completely perfect. And certainly that is true for other people in the world. Certainly that's true for systems that flawed people have built in imbalanced ways that promote inequity. So no, we'll never be without it, but...

I do maintain hope that it doesn't have to have such a stronghold, that it doesn't have to be as strong a force in the world as it is. And I think history attests to that. I am no longer in physical shackles or chains. That's progress. Now, we still got a long, long way to go, but it is possible.

Here's a necessarily brief history lesson on slavery in the United States.

We'll put some links in the show notes to where you can find out more. Throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa and forced into slavery in the Americas and, of course, elsewhere. It's estimated that between 1525 and 1866, over 12.5 million people were taken from the African continent and shipped across the Atlantic to be sold domestically.

into slavery. This is what's known as the transatlantic slave trade. Almost 2 million people didn't survive the journey. About 300,000 of those captives were taken to the United States. Slaves were originally brought to work on tobacco, rice and indigo plantations on the southern coast of America.

In the North, slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economy, though there certainly were slaves used in the North up until slavery was officially abolished in the northern states, which happened gradually between 1774 and 1804.

After the American Revolutionary War, when America gained its independence from the British, the American government passed a law prohibiting the importation of slaves. The law took effect from 1808. It didn't ban slavery, just the importation of slaves from outside America.

Around the 1790s, demand for cotton clothing was booming around the world, and the American South's fertile land was converted to cotton plantations, triggering a huge forced migration of slaves to the Deep South, the states of Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

In 1860, just before the Civil War, a United States census counted nearly 4 million enslaved people living in the country. Come down and feel like a motherless child. Come down and feel like a motherless child. Come down and feel like a motherless child.

Love, love, I know my love, love, love.

And then came the Civil War, where slavery did play a central role. A growing abolitionist sentiment in the North sparked fears in the South that the backbone of their economy was in danger. The North would eventually prevail after years of bloody battle, and

And the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which was ratified in the aftermath of the war, abolished slavery in the United States. Here's what it says. And I'm actually reading from my little blue copy of the Constitution, which I carry around everywhere with me in my computer bag. Why would an Australian do that? I hear you ask. I don't know. Here it is. Amendment 13, ratified December 6, 1865, section one.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. It sounds good, but as Jamar tells me, that certainly was not the case.

the end of slavery. And then, of course, you have the Civil War, which to this date remains the United States' bloodiest war, which finally abolishes slavery. But then it is replaced by something called Jim Crow, which is a cultural and legal apparatus that enforced segregation and racial suppression after race-based child slavery. And then

You have what Michael Emerson and Christian Smith in their book divided by faith call a racialized society, a racialized society, which is to say that the momentum of race-based chattel slavery, the momentum of Jim Crow segregation continues to have impacts in the present so that you can look at all kinds of indications of life and flourishing from health to wealth, to the level of education. And unfortunately,

even to this day, they still fall predictably along racial lines. The reality of one of the injustices here in Australia is a thing called closing the gap. That's Brooke Prentice, an Aboriginal Christian leader descended from the Waka Waka peoples of Queensland. She's the CEO of Common Grace, a justice movement in Australia. And

And it's actually the lack of closing the gap. And so as Indigenous peoples of Australia, we have the world's worst life expectancy compared to non-Indigenous people of any Indigenous peoples in the world. So we are still dying 11 to 17 years younger than the non-Indigenous population in Australia.

Obviously, the racial struggles in the United States are huge. But it's not just the US that's struggling with this, as evidenced by the wide reach of the Black Lives Matter movement. My own country, Australia, is home to the world's oldest civilization. Aboriginal people have been here for over 60,000 years.

Yet when Australia was colonised by English settlers in the late 18th century, the land was labelled terra nullius, a Latin expression that literally means no man's land. That's how we get that English expression. It's a label that has haunted this nation for 200 years. Pre-colonisation, so pre-1788, there were estimated to be over one million Aboriginal peoples in these lands now called Australia.

By the early 1900s, our population had dropped to a mere 90,000. And today, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population is around 600,000. It's approaching 700,000 peoples. So I always do say that we were once 100% of the Australian population. Today, we're 2.8% of the Australian population.

Aboriginal people in Australia experienced dispossession of their land when white settlers arrived on their shores. And after that, they were treated brutally. Historian Lyndall Ryan at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales has found evidence of more than 150 massacres of Aboriginal people in the 80 or so years after settlement in 1788.

She reports, quote, sometimes Aboriginal waterholes were poisoned or Aboriginal people given flour, sugar or damper mixed with arsenic. Aboriginal people found themselves pushed off their land and herded into the reserves. Some of these were secular stations. Others were Christian missions.

Either way, this effectively removed them from their own community and from society at large. It institutionalized almost a whole race of people who experienced the loss of their land, the loss of their culture, and ultimately, for many, the loss of their family in the stolen generations, which I'll mention in a moment.

Just this year, the federal government of Australia released a new updated report that aims to close the gap in health and education outcomes of non-Indigenous and Indigenous people. If you are an Aboriginal person in Australia, you are more likely to die as a baby.

more likely to be unemployed, more likely to drop out of school, more likely to be incarcerated, and more likely to die early. Progress in these areas has been really slow.

Among the many events that have severely impacted my country is what's called the Stolen Generations. Between 1910 and the 1970s, one in three children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent were removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies, and the church missions fully participated.

In the historic Bringing Them Home report of 1997, a federal inquiry stated, and I quote, "...the actions of the past resonate in the present and will continue to do so in the future. The laws, policies and practices which separated Indigenous children from their families have contributed directly to the alienation of Indigenous societies today."

The report goes on, for individuals, their removal as children and the abuse they experienced at the hands of the authorities or their delegates have permanently scarred their lives. The harm continues in later generations, affecting their children and grandchildren.

In no sense has the inquiry been raking over the past for its own sake. The truth is that the past is very much with us today in the continuing devastation of the lives of Indigenous Australians. This led to one of the most dramatic speeches in modern Australian history. The Prime Minister, on behalf of the whole Parliament and people of Australia, said sorry. I move that.

Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations, this blemished chapter in our national history. The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page.

a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. The act of officially saying sorry was momentous for Australia.

But we know that words don't go far enough. Twelve years after the words were spoken, there is still a lot to do to bridge the divide. What do you see as the key factors in the terrible health, mental health incarceration rates amongst Indigenous peoples here in Australia?

Yeah. So it's the impacts of colonization as well as present injustice and it's wrapped in racism and that's, uh, systemic racism, which includes that we have systemic racism within the church, um, systemic injustice. Uh, you know, people need to understand that the very first prisons that were built in Australia, uh, were not to house the convicts that had committed crimes in England. And even though they were petty crimes coming to Australia, um,

they were to house Aboriginal peoples who had been removed from their homelands. Um,

so that the British and subsequent peoples could take the land and Aboriginal people were put in chains, marched across the country and kept in terrible conditions in the prisons. And so the very foundation of our prison systems is built upon that colonial colonisation and injustice. And still today, you know, like just this week I watched

a video of five young boys in the Northern Territory be horrendously treated by the police and said, the police officer said they were a waste of space. And this is still what's happening in Australia today. And we need to face up to that. And we've still got a long way to face up to that. I want to talk to you about the concept of corporate evil or systemic evil.

evil and injustice. How, and I'll explain this in a second, but I start off by saying Western people in general and white Americans in particular

have little or no concept of corporate evil or they are actively set against the idea. That's Timothy Keller, an evangelical pastor and public intellectual in the United States. I find him to be one of the most sensible, conservative white Christian leaders in the world. I think it's very important for me as a white man to say, look, that's wrong.

especially to say to other white Americans, many of you are, that's wrong. And if we don't get what the Bible says about corporate evil, we will not only understand the Bible itself, but we won't understand what so many of our non-white brothers and sisters and friends and neighbors are saying. We just won't get it. We'll think they're all paranoid. He acknowledges systemic racism. And that's a big deal, as Jamar explains in a second.

Can you give me examples of what racism looks like today in the church specifically? Unfortunately, we keep getting these examples. I wish it were not the case. So recently, the Southern Baptist Convention, which has a very interesting history, in 1845, the Baptist denomination split along sectional lines, north and south. And the reason the south split off is

was they contended that missionaries could indeed be slaveholders and Christians in good standing. So that's the root of the Southern Baptist Convention. It wasn't until 1995—

When Southern Baptist leaders officially repudiated that. Just chiming in here to say that the Southern Baptists in America are the largest Protestant denomination in the country, with over 14.5 million members. According to the Pew Research Forum, only 6% of Southern Baptists are black, well below the 13.5% in the general population. But there are other denominations that are even lower than that.

Then in 2020, Southern Baptist Convention seminary presidents. So these are the, I think it's about six different seminaries that train Southern Baptist ministers and theologians. The presidents of those seminaries are

recently issued a statement that did two things. Number one, it reaffirmed their denominational statement, the Baptist faith and message message. The second thing they did in that statement was to issue a full throated condemnation of something called critical race theory. Now we, as a whole separate show to talk about what, what critical race theory is, but I'll say this in practice, the way it has been used in, in,

Southern Baptist and white evangelical circles is as a label and an epithet for virtually anyone doing racial justice work within Christian circles. And,

And so, you know, for someone like me who writes a book like The Color of Compromise or How to Fight Racism, they'll look in it and they'll look especially at the sort of larger systemic policy, legal kinds of changes that we need to make. And they'll say, oh, that's critical race theory, therefore...

I don't have to listen to you. You're heterodox. You're unorthodox. Your theology is not trustworthy. Your lens is not trustworthy. Everything is anti-biblical and kind of shove you in that box and push you off to the side. And so that's what I think it looks like a lot lately is it's people making a bigger fuss over the ones trying to fight racism than making the big deal about racism itself.

You mentioned critical race theory. I was going to ask you about that later, but let's do it now. I mean, even just parenthetically for you, you know, how do you understand critical race theory? Because obviously there's a great spectrum and it can be co-opted and perverted and amplified. But for you. Yeah. John, I'll say two things about critical race theory. Number one, I don't study it.

Most black Christians I know who are fighting for racial justice don't study it. There are some scholars, there are some lawyers who know it in and out, and we can have a conversation with them. But I'll tell you how I arrive at my conclusions about race, racism, white supremacy, and what to do about it. It's by studying history. When you study history, you come to learn that it's not just individuals, but it's also institutions that can be racist.

You learn when you study history that it's not just people, but it's also policies that enact and perpetuate inequality.

Critical race theory is a very controversial topic inside and outside the church. At its heart, it says that dominant white culture has organized society to preserve power and resources at the expense of people of other races. Its roots are in the 20th century German and French philosophers.

People like Michel Foucault, who argued that most things in human experience, economics, the justice system, language and even sex are all expressions of power.

In the 1960s and 70s, this became a particular emphasis of a lot of legal scholars in the US who made the case that our legal system is fundamentally set up to preserve white advantage. And it's out of this legal analysis that critical race theory emerged as its own movement of thought in the 1980s.

Critical race theorists are essentially committed to exposing and redressing the tendency toward white dominance in politics, education, economics, and so on. We can also think of critical race theory as an intellectual tool or perspective that guides how we assess things in the disciplines like history, gender studies, sociology, and much more.

I have a lot of skeptical listeners, you know, people who don't share the faith that you and I have. And I'm sure they'll be listening to this and maybe putting it together with other things they've heard. And they'll just be thinking there's something inherently racist about religion and about Christianity. Forget the sociology, forget the history.

That religion itself, Christianity itself does divide. So, you know, how do you answer that? And I guess a subsidiary question is why aren't black people just giving up on the church because of this?

That's great. That's a great question. And I am so glad for skeptics and seekers and questioners. We have some really interesting conversations. I would say this. I'm not a Christian apologist in the sense of being trained to talk to these questions. I will say this. Oftentimes, what we view as Christianity is European or white Christianity, which unfortunately has been deeply, deeply infiltrated by this ideology of white supremacy.

That's even a global enterprise. This is true not just in the United States, but in places that have been colonized by imperial powers. So there's a sort of global phenomenon to this. But I would also say this, is when you look at Christianity as it's been practiced by people who are not in power, by people who are on the margins, by people who are poor, by people of color, you see a very different Christianity. You see a Christianity

That looks a lot more like the brown skin Palestinian Jewish man who we call our savior, Jesus Christ. And that's what I would say.

Before anyone gives up wholesale on Christianity or simply puts it to the side, be sure that what you think of as Christianity is not just the sort of narrow popular conception that is dominated by what

white people. I'm not talking about motives here or anything, but I'm talking about a certain way of practicing the faith that is not universal. And so look to, for instance, the black church in the United States has an incredible legacy of liberation and

Christianity, even as it is the religion of the oppressor, has been the religious force behind much of the activism and much of the black freedom struggle in U.S. history. So we have to account for both is simply what I would say.

But therefore, are you saying, you know, Christianity is neutral on racism and sometimes it's, you know, used by the people who are racists and they, you know, it's perfectly in aligned with Christianity. And sometimes it's used by, you know, those who are oppressed as a liberation thing. And Christianity doesn't necessarily bias in its ideas toward one or the other.

That's a wonderful question. And I'll say that the Bible and God is very much biased toward racial and ethnic equality, diversity, and all of that. What we have seen has been such a depressing perversion of what God speaks about. I mentioned before the doctrine of the image of God. That's all the way back in Genesis chapter 1, the very chapter of the very first book of the Bible.

And then you can talk about all sorts of other passages. Biblical theology is a very interesting branch of theology because it takes the Bible as one unified narrative and then talks about the unfolding of particular teachings throughout that narrative. So you can start with prophecy.

the germinal or seed form with this doctrine of the image of God. And you look at Genesis three 15, where God promises that, uh, the seed of the woman will crush the head of the seed of the serpent, the first gospel as people say, and then you can go to Genesis chapter 12 and the promise that Yahweh gives to Abram that, uh, in you, all the families of the earth will be blessed. And then it expands to nations. And then you see in the new Testament that, uh, uh,

When Jesus comes, he comes to proclaim good news to the nations. And then when Jesus ascends into heaven, he says to the disciples, go and be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And then you see in Revelation 5, 9 and 7, 9, the fact that it says people from every tribe and tongue and nation will be gathered around the throne, worshiping Jesus. And the idea is this ever unfolding, ever expanding.

And that is the thrust of Christianity. That is the momentum of history. That is where we're headed. And as we pray in the prayer that Jesus taught us, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

it is in heaven, we as followers of Christ should be modeling what that looks like to have diversity in the midst of unity, which is different from uniformity. It is not Jesus making everyone the same. It is Jesus holding us together within our differences, differences that are beautiful and to be celebrated. And that is a biblical view of racial and ethnic diversity and justice.

It is pretty difficult to argue there's even a hint of racism in the Bible. From beginning to end, the Bible explicitly teaches a kind of universalism that God intends to bless every tribe, tongue and nation.

I mean, literally, the first book of the Bible, Genesis, records God's first promise and fundamental promise to Abraham, the first Jew. It goes like this in Genesis 12. Go from your country, your people, and your father's household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you. And all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

Then in the final book of the Bible, we see the fulfillment of all that in this great vision of Revelation 7.

After this, I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count from every nation, tribe, people and language standing before the throne and before the lamb. This is a picture of people worshipping Christ, the lamb, because he gave himself, he sacrificed himself for every race.

I would challenge my skeptical listeners to find a text from any culture in the ancient world that is as universalistic in its outlook as the Bible. The Bible can't be racist.

But people are racist, just as they're selfish and greedy. And this individual racism leads to group racism, which leads to the racism in our societal structures or what people call systemic racism. In some ways, this isn't too different from the individual greed that manifests itself in systemic greed.

Unless we're vigilant, systemic racism, just like systemic greed, will affect us. But can we redress racism? Or is this episode just a punch in the nose to white guys like me?

I admit that I did have a bit of a bloody nose after talking with Brooke and Jamar. There's just so much I don't know, so much I haven't recognized. And it was a little bit painful. It was a bit like that biblical proverb, wounds from a friend can be trusted. Yet there are some practical things we can do beyond the hashtags to mend our

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today. He's

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

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You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Anglican.

and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash undeceptions. What's broken? And that's where we head after the break. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. Actually, this week I asked a former guest of the show, Rebecca McLaughlin, to read something from her forthcoming book,

Her first book, you may remember, was Confronting Christianity, which I think I said on the show with her, was, in my opinion, the finest, broad-ranging defence of Christianity in perhaps a decade. I can't wait for you to read her next book, which, among many other things, deals with racism. Here's Rebecca now. My daughters attend a public school that celebrates diversity.

But sometimes when they come home with a new song, I point out that what they have learned was originally a Jesus song. "Amazing Grace" sung in Navajo without explanation of the words, "I've got peace like a river" and "We Shall Overcome" taught without reference to their gospel origins. Now my girls will ask me, "Mummy, is this a Jesus song?" Some white Christians worry that saying the specific words "Black Lives Matter" signals a wholesale embrace of progressive views.

This is an understandable concern. The Black Lives Matter organization presents racial justice as a package deal with celebrating LGBT romance and identity. We must carefully disentangle these differences. Still, many theological conservatives, including many black Christians, are glad to march under the Black Lives Matter sign because these words are a statement of truth. Given the history of white evangelical failure to recognize black people as their equals before God,

I gladly affirm that Black Lives Matter, despite the fact an organization with that name expresses other beliefs I cannot embrace. If there were a secular organization called Unborn Babies Matter, I would say those words too, even if that organization also waved a rainbow flag, because unborn babies matter. If I were concerned people might think I affirmed everything else that organization stood for, I'd simply add two words, Unborn Babies Matter, to Jesus.

Some respond that all lives matter, but this qualifier misses the point. For centuries, black people have been treated like their lives didn't matter. That's the problem being addressed, the truth that needs to be upheld, just as we'd recognize that unborn babies matter needs to be said. But we must also recognize that from a consistently atheistic perspective, no lives ultimately matter. Human beings have no natural rights, just as spiders, chimpanzees, and hyenas have no natural rights.

Ultimately, Black Lives Matter not because progressive people have told us so, but because the equal value of every human being, regardless of race, walks off the pages of scripture with the sound of a trumpet. Black Lives Matter enough for the Son of God to shed his blood so that black men and women might have eternal life with him. Black Lives Matter because Jesus says so.

Christians must work for justice for historically crushed and marginalized people because Jesus came to bring good news to the poor and to set at liberty those who are oppressed. Christians should be the first to fight for racial justice and to pursue love across racial difference, not because of any cultural pressure from outside, but because of scriptural pressure from inside. Black Lives Matter is at heart a Jesus song and we must sing our Savior's songs no matter who else plays the tune.

As we hear the tear-stained words of Anthony Ray Hinton's sister, "Thank you Jesus, thank you Lord," we must ask, why would a black woman in a state with one of the worst records on racial justice and one of the highest levels of Christian identification thank Jesus for her innocent brother's release? Because she knows that Jesus is on the side of the poor, oppressed and falsely accused. Because she knows that black people have been followers of Jesus from the first.

because she knows that black lives like her brother's matter, not because a progressive organization bearing that name has capitalized on a cultural moment, but because black lives matter to Jesus. You can press play now. We in the church have a blindness to our own racism in the church.

That's Bishop Chris McLeod, National Aboriginal Bishop within the Anglican Church of Australia. Chris is of Gurindji descent and Aboriginal people in Northern Australia. We're listening to a bit of an interview he did this year addressing the Black Lives Matter rallies that occurred across Australia and explaining what he believes should be the response of the Australian church. If the church is really going to speak with integrity about Black Lives Matter,

and speak with integrity about any issues around social justice, then we actually had to look at ourselves as well. We actually had to confront our own racism. I think often the church has been well-meaning and has made decisions for and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. But I think the real issues are listening to what we have to say.

And I think that's the issues around Black Lives Matter as well, is listening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people of colour around the world saying, here are the issues we face on a daily basis. Listen to us. To listen to us.

That has to be the key, right? Jesus' brother James urged his readers in James 1.19, And then he adds slow to speak. If you're a talker or a fixer, it doesn't come easily or quickly to be a listener, so I'm told.

Both Jumar and Brooke talk to me about the other side of listening. That's truth-telling.

The idea that people in the US, the UK, Australia and many other places need to face up to the truth of what actually happened to people of colour in their country. There is a tendency to explain away the actions of those who came before us, to make it somehow smaller, less important, less horrific or just nothing to do with me.

As if the benefits that came to my family growing up by the beach in the suburb of Mossman didn't come at the expense of the many Indigenous families who were expelled from this pretty part of Sydney. Well, I'm here down at Balmoral Beach, not far from where I grew up.

And the street I grew up in had an Aboriginal name, Cabramatta Road. But you know, I never thought about Indigenous people growing up. There were none left in Mossman by the time I was born.

But there used to be thousands here. It was a really populated area full of fishing and hunting opportunities. In fact, one early settler report criticizes the local Indigenous people around here for only working three to four hours a day. The land was so generous to them they didn't have to work. And it was a classic Protestant work ethic critiquing the local Indigenous people.

Anyway, there is one monument here at Balmoral to the indigenous past and I'll get to it in a second. It's here. It's a cave.

100 metres or so from the water's edge, open to the public, but hardly anyone visits it. But they did a dig here back in the early 90s and they found mountains of evidence right where I'm standing, going back 3,000 years. They found animal and fish bones, seashells,

tools, lots of remains of families living and sleeping together, cooking and eating right here. They chose the perfect spot actually. And there's a giant water hole about 250 meters to my right that is now just Balmoral Soccer Oval where I did Wednesday night training for much of my teenage years.

But all the real evidence of Indigenous people living here is gone. It's just gone. And the weird thing is, I knew nothing about this growing up here. Learning about the true history of how our countries have treated black people is surely a first step.

I have three things I talk about, which is to listen, to learn and to love. In Australia, we have to mature as a nation. And that means we have to face up to our true history. We have to face up to what's happening today. So what can we do?

do we fight racism? You speak of the ARC of justice. So can you talk me through that? That is an acronym that stands for Awareness Relationships Commitment. Have you ever had to sit on a two-legged stool? I hope not, because you'd fall over.

You need at least three legs to have a stable foundation, and it's similar to racial justice. What I find is that many of our racial justice approaches, we're lacking in one or more of these elements. And I think all three, awareness, relationships, commitment, are necessary to really pursue this well. And so what are they? Awareness is the knowledge, the data, the information that we have to

have to understand race, racism, and white supremacy. I'm particularly keen on building our awareness of history. History has the receipts, as they say. It has the evidence, and it tells us how we got to where we are. History diagnoses the problem and helps us understand what we're dealing with.

But you can't just have a big old head and know about this stuff. You got to have a big heart, too. And that's where relationships come in. All reconciliation is relational. No matter what the racial or ethnic divide, at some point, you got to interact with real people. And for people in the racial majority in the United States, that's white people. They got to work harder.

to have meaningful relationships across racial and ethnic lines because folks who are in the majority, because society tends to cater to your needs and wants and proclivities, you don't ever have to have...

deep relationships with black people and other people of color. So you kind of have to go out of your way to make sure that happens. And it also humanizes people. It builds empathy, it builds solidarity, and it makes sure that we don't get so caught up in the information or the action that we forget real people are involved. But a lot of times, especially when it comes to white evangelicals, they want to stop at that relationship part.

And you'll hear people say, well, some of my best friends are black or I'm nice to all people or I don't see color. Those kinds of things are all very individualistic relational statements. And the fact is, it doesn't matter how many cups of coffee you have. It doesn't matter how many panel discussions you attend. That's not going to do a thing about voter suppression. It's not going to do a thing about mass incarceration. We have to work on a policy, a systemic and an institutional level.

to eradicate racism as much as we possibly can. And so keeping those three together, it's not that it's linear, that you move from awareness to relationships, commitment. All these are happening at once. And it's not like you're ever done. We're always learning. We're always adding knowledge. We're always getting better at these things. But when you keep them all together in this dynamic dance, that's when I think we can really make headway on this journey toward racial justice.

What would reconciliation or racial justice look like? How would we know we've succeeded? I would look for certain elements. So I think it would be an ongoing process. I don't think you're ever sort of done with this, and not least of which because there are always new wrongs being done. But I think some elements would be truth-telling.

And so, you know, what would what would sort of a truth and reconciliation commission look like in the United States context? But but particularly telling the truth about history. And there's so much of the ugly racial past which continues to have present day implications that we just haven't talked about. We haven't reckoned with. We haven't done anything about after the Civil War. Many of the plantation owners got their land back.

And instead of enslaved labor, they went to sharecropping, which is debt peonage and another form of economic exploitation. And the few black people who were able to gain something like farmland has been decimated through changing laws, through these huge conglomerates coming in and sucking up the land from poorer farmers. And so we've never had

real truth telling about that, nor have we had real repentance around that. And so I go to school in the state of Mississippi. We were the last of all 50 states in the U.S. to have the Confederate battle emblem on the state flag. Mind you,

Mississippi has the highest proportion of black people of any state in the United States. And so this was a symbol of white supremacist terror that was supposed to represent all the people in the state until 2020.

Did that flag finally come down after flying for more than a century? And the point being is there's never really been repentance. People are still fighting the Civil War in a lot of ways over Confederate monuments, over flags, over different things. And then there has to be repair.

And a lot of people get real antsy when they hear that word reparations. But we can go into all the details about the fact that the economic exploitation that black people face, not only in race-based chattel slavery, but for the following century and onward through other forms of discrimination has never been compensated, has never been repaired, has never been dealt with. And even...

Apart from the financial repair, there's the relational repair that has to take place. There are a lot of white people and white Christians right now finally becoming more aware of racial issues that, you know, their theological and historical heroes were slave owners or segregationists and they want to repudiate that. What they don't do, they always look forward. What they don't do is look back and say, who have I hurt?

Who have I hurt because of my previous beliefs and actions? And how can I make it right? So I would look at those elements, truth, some sort of repair, some sort of confession and repentance. All of those things would make for, I think, more robust reconciliation.

In the show notes for this episode, we've put a whole bunch of links to articles and resources that Jamar and Brooke have suggested as good places to start to bring yourself up to speed on issues of race in America and Australia in the future.

and anywhere, really. There are also links to alternative perspectives on all of this stuff. Go take a look. And if you've got questions, I'd love to hear them. We might even be able to get our guests from this season to answer them for you in our next Q&A episode next season.

You can tweet us at Undeceptions, send us an email at questions at Undeceptions.com or record your question and we'll play it on the show. Just go to Undeceptions.com, scroll down and hit the record button. This is our last episode for the season.

But I'll be pushing out a few singles in the coming weeks before we return with season four. I can't wait for you to hear some of the stuff we've got ready on mental health, religious freedom, Old Testament history, pornography and much more.

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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley, who's back from holiday. We gave you two weeks holiday. Hey! That was one week. Oh, okay. It's surprising that we actually got an episode done without you. Did you listen to that episode or did you sort of protest and put it away? As I remember it, you got me to do two interviews on my holiday. Yeah, okay. That's problematic in some way. Oh, God.

Editing by Nathaniel Schumach. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this undeception possible. Brought to you by the Eternity Podcast Network.