Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism is a painful and harrowing description not only of the history of American slavery and racism, but of the church’s participation in it. Tisby does not set out to tell the whole story of the church. He is specifically telling the story of the church’s complicity. He does not consider it his burden within the book to simultaneously tell the story of when the church opposed or spoke prophetically on racism.
While the information Tisby presents can be learned elsewhere, seeing this material all in one place carries a certain weight that is particularly helpful if one is prone to be, like humans are, dismissive. He tells a story in which some white people are very bad actors, most are complicitly passive, and some are actively positive actors. All humans are emotionally invested in the idea that we are good people, so when white people find that our racial ancestors did both bad and good, we are tremendously vulnerable to the universal human temptation to imagine we would have been among the “good guys.” After all, we agree with the good guys now. This is a common anachronistic self-righteousness that almost none of us escape. No one wants to admit that if we had lived in that time, we likely would have either stood by and let an injustice happen or would even have actively supported it. When we see in history how few people of any race or majority stood up in critical moments (especially for people not of their tribe), it should begin to dawn on us that we would not have been those people. At least the odds against it are high.
What I think every Christian needs to understand as they come to terms with American racism is that they won’t really understand racism unless they also come to reckon with the foundational sin that creates it, a sin found among all humanity. It is common that a young man or woman must go out into the world for a while and see more of humanity before she really understands her family, including its problems. Similarly, world history and world travel help us see and study these sins in other times and places that clarify the nature of our own hearth and home, even our home country. This is why I believe that wise Christians should be interested in history and the world, and especially in church history and the global church. I have learned so much from studying church history and from spending time in places like India. However, for these studies to matter, we must get the most foundational Christian social ideas in our minds.
Foundations of Christian Moral Thought
The foundation of social thought starts with the human person, what scholars call theological anthropology. Every social philosophy starts with what human beings are, and if philosophies go terribly wrong, their root problem is usually a problem in how they see the human person.
Humans are made in God’s image and broken by sin. Christ and his Spirit can regenerate and transform us in holiness and unite us in the body of Christ. Together, Christians can be a city on a hill and a lamp on a stand, giving light to all. Being made in God’s image makes us capable of moral reasoning, leading to great goods. Yet depravity also makes us prone to wrong reasoning, producing great evils. Scripture and the gospel can illuminate our social thought. By knowing the foundational truths of the faith, we can reason with greater moral clarity and accuracy, growing in the mind of Christ. If not, we will be divided as people and captured by many different ideologies that will lead us into complicity in social evils or even to use Biblical truths to perpetrate or justify injustice.
Michael Matheson Miller, a fellow at the Acton Institute, has summarized the doctrine of the human person as a part of a society in the following way. A human person has at least the following properties that make up his identity in the image of God and the essence of his sacred worth:
1. Intelligence and reason:
Characterized by discursive reasoning, conceptual thought, self-reflection, interiority, intellect oriented towards truth, beauty and goodness, speculative intellect, and practical and moral reasoning.
2. Freedom:
Connected to reason, humans are moral agents who are responsible and have the capacity for self-sacrifice. God’s giving commandments and holding humans accountable to them demonstrates his belief in our capacity to choose, and in choosing, loving. Freedom is for ordering the will toward love and, formationally, toward virtue.
3. Good but fallen:
We are created in the image of God and are broken by original sin. We have the capacity to do what’s good, but we are also dominated by the flesh and tempted by indwelling sin. This is the basis not only for the need for repentance and faith, but also for limitations on rulers.
4. Social beings:
Humans can only flourish when in relationship with others. The fundamental unit of this cooperation and flourishing is the human family. The family is a natural community and a pre-political unit.
5. Embodied persons:
We are neither floating souls nor mere animals. We are composite creatures made up of embodied souls in profound interaction and codependence. Christians are neither materialists nor spiritualists.
6. Spiritual emotions:
We have the capacity for deep, powerful, and meaningful emotion. Yet emotion is to be “ordained” and ordered by reason, or it will be ordained and ordered by the flesh. Yet, the human person cannot flourish in love and joy without healthy and abundant spiritual emotion.
7. Everlasting destiny:
Every person is not a mere mortal. We have been eternally conceived and are everlasting in our lives with God. No human should look at their temporal and mortal life as a completion. It should be seen as an offering and preparation for the next.
C.S. Lewis explained this last point in a sermon called The Weight of Glory. He shows how this aspect of our anthropology is specifically relevant to our social theology:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
Recognizing these basic truths about the human person is important when pursuing the foundations necessary for understanding racial justice. We must understand how humans create and sustain evil among themselves. Christian social thought has always taught some version of the following:
- Desacralization always leads to objectification.
- Objectification leads to conceptual dehumanization like caricature and abstraction.
- Dehumanization always leads to exploitation.
- Exploitation often leads to atrocity (depending on the incentives).
Racism is one version of this descent into social evil and is a fairly common one globally and historically. It is just one result of human desacralization. Therefore, desacralization, as the foundational sin, always leads to some justification of human exploitation. Refusal to understand the universal nature of these foundational, primal, and deadly sins will make attacking racism an “us vs. them” appeal to power that will embody and aggravate the same sin cycle of desacralization, objectification, dehumanization, exploitation, and atrocity. The cure will be no different than the disease. The only possible achievement will be that it will be someone else’s turn to be the victim, and the victimization will take a different form.
Defining Terms
Desacralization:
To treat something sacred as if it were not sacred and to use it in ways disconnected with its moral standing and spiritual nature.1
Objectification:
The act of treating a being as a thing. It is to treat something that is properly in a subject-subject relationship with you as if it is in a subject-object relationship with you. Caricature, abstraction, and exploitation are mechanisms of objectification. Examples: treating a laborer as nothing more than an advanced machine, treating a woman as nothing more than a means of sexual desire, not saying thank you to someone serving you, etc.
Exploitation:
Treating an objectified person as a resource to be converted into a kind of asset. Exploitation can be disregard for someone’s wellbeing, withholding fair exchange for their work, or treating them without courtesy, kindness, and friendliness.
Caricature:
Seeing one or a few (usually disagreeable) characteristics in another personal subject/being as representing the totality of their significance. Racism almost always utilizes a type of caricature. It is a way of conceptualizing the ugliness depicted in a stereotype.
Abstraction:
In a negative social context, abstraction is analyzing sacred human beings in narrow means of assessment that doesn’t consider individuality, moral standing, human liberty, and other parts of human being. Abstraction differs from caricature in that it stereotypes people based on quantifiable data and scientific descriptions rather than by disagreeable characteristics. Thus, caricature is more evocative and emotional, and abstraction more broad-brushed and disassociating to human concern.
Radical/ism:
A social radical is someone who believes that change must come from a complete reset or recreation of society’s institutions, and that most means justify these needed ends. Because of these two characteristics, radicalism tends to be collectivist, believing the good they seek for the whole supersedes individual liberty and identity.
Mastering these universal dynamics of sin and facts of human sacredness is critical when living in a secular society. Secularist movements, especially radical ones, use sacredness and sin concepts as power categories without rigorously applying them as ballasts limiting their own agendas. Mastering the basic Christian doctrines of the human person and Christian social teaching will help you discern which activists best understand the human and social problems we are facing, and who are the most responsible and constructive voices for positive change. These leaders are often not the loudest, since modesty is a virtue. It takes discernment and discipline to find and stand with wholesome leaders.
On High Alert for Desacralization
Desacralization and its results can be equally supported by systemic support of an oppressive tyranny already in place as by a radicalism that inhumanly tears down the vital fabric of preserving institutions and natural bonds. In fact, much of the divide that has grown among American progressives and conservatives since the civil rights legislation in the mid-60’s has surrounded the relationship of civil rights and Marxism during the height of the Cold War. Progressives saw how Marxism brought radical social change and hoped its promise would come to fruition in creating a society of equitable, humane prosperity. Their eyes were open to the need for social change but blind to the fact that Marxism and state socialism were doomed from the start to result in tyranny and atrocity by their desacralization of human beings. Conversely, conservatives tended to be more blind to the regime of American racial tyranny, seeing Black disenfranchisement as Black pathology and underdevelopment. Yet while many conservatives were not able or willing to see tyranny in the racial status quo here, they were wide eyed in seeing the horror of communism for the murderous scourge that it was. Progressives were motivated by the idea of how things needed to get a lot better in the country, while conservatives saw a cancer that would make everything unimaginably worse for everyone.
Again today, instead of recognizing, with the mind of Christ, these simultaneous truths in virtuous balance, we Christians have submitted to (or at least have failed to prevent) the politicization of this divide through fear and demagoguery. We Christians may not be able at this moment to close this divide nationally. However, we have no excuse for its division of the body of Christ. We, as the church, can and must choose to see through the divides of radicalism, status quo conservatism, secularism, consumerism, and so on, but only if we pursue a much deeper and more humanly universal understanding of our faith. If your goal is to stay out of things or to hold to your party’s orthodoxy, this can never happen. It can only happen if we have the mind of Christ in the whole body of Christ, are actively putting sin to death, and are constantly vigilant against worldliness.
Learning From History
I believe that the literature written by believers under communism in the 20th century is woefully underread, especially among younger Christians. The books Tortured for Christ by Richard Wormbrand, Tortured for his Faith by Harlan Popov, and God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew are all important biographical stories from this period. The story of Gladys Alward also covers the period from Mandarin rule in China, to the desecration of China by the Japanese, to its own communist revolution and the onslaught of murder, and her final expulsion to Taiwan. But the most magisterial work, what scholars say broke the back of progressive fawning over Marxism, was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. It is available in an abridged paperback version that I believe every college-educated believer should read as part of a basic humanities education.
The Soviet Gulag system was perhaps the greatest human atrocity in the history of the world accomplished in less than 100 years under a single government. Solzhenitsyn not only describes its inhumanity, but also its human dynamics—how human beings come to operate and tolerate such a regime. How people become liars and how they allow injustice to begin, grow, and be sustained. It catalogs the desacralization and objectification of humans, the use of systematic caricature envisioning whole races and classes as disposable abstractions, and how these dynamics lead inevitably to oppression and atrocity. It is a study in the nature of human evil in the context of institutions, and it is an unmitigated horror. Not only every leader, but every voter and activist need this education.
It is within this context that Solzhenitsyn writes his most famous quote about the human person in society:
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates through the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
Had Solzhenitsyn been in America, he would’ve added race to the list in that quote.
The Nature of Moral Reasoning
One of the things I have found deplorable in both conservative and progressive thinking is how devoid of classical wisdom and Christian truth their foundations have become. Conservatism tends to fail when it is simply doing the work of conserving. When we seek to conserve what we think is good, we are limited to what is in front of us, and our default is to conserve what already exists from whatever group of “barbarians” seeks to tear it down. G.K. Chesterton once said that the heart of progressivism was to continually change everything to make as many mistakes as possible, and the heart of conservatism was to make sure none of those mistakes was ever corrected.
The reason Chesterton was so apt to dismiss the ideological captivities of his time is that he believed that the opposite of ideology is philosophy. Philosophy, or the love of wisdom, is the attempt to conform the mind to what is. In this sense, ideology is its opposite. Ideology can be the attempt to conform what is to what is in the human mind. That is, I have an idea of the way things should be, and I will make the world in that image.
However, when we seek to make the world “the way it should be,” it matters greatly what we mean. The world is made up of two very different things. First, the world is made up of things that are the way they are by an unchangeable nature (image of God) or immutable condition (depravity). They cannot be other than what they are. Second, other things are the way they are by “accident,” or “contingently,” or plainly. In other words, they could have been otherwise. An ideology in the negative sense is not ideas of reform that make contingent things better, but an attempt to change what is part of reality by nature. It is an attempt to make 2+2=5. Oppressive ideologies fail by telling us that what is contingent is a fact of unchangeable nature and must remain the same. Radical ideologies fail in thinking that things that are unchangeable by nature are changeable and to leave them in place is injustice.
Good philosophy will seek to change that which is unjust by accident, human will, or social custom, but not that which is unjust by nature (trying to make people equally athletic, tall, or outdoorsy). Good philosophy will not try to make penguins fly, but it may protect their fisheries. Understanding this distinction between ideology and philosophy, it becomes clear that the first step in moral reasoning is to investigate the nature of the world, humanity, God, and society. What are their natures or imperfectible conditions? Then, given our philosophy about nature, we can proceed to the abstract questions of how things ought to be. Only then can we put together what we think is just with a procedure that seeks to improve the world without trying to change what we can, without trying to change what we cannot or must not.
However, the negative form of ideology reasons with abstraction first, not nature. Radical ideology imagines how the world “ought to be” without first understanding what it is, and what humans are. By imagining a “better” human and society without first understanding the nature of humanity, the results are always inhuman, and usually monstrous. Social and political life must be fitted to the human condition as it is. James Madison got at this difference in social reasoning this way in Federalist 51:2
The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
Madison clearly claims that the moral creation of a government must proceed from a reflection on the unchangeable traits of human beings and their social interactions. Men are not angels and need to be governed, but we have only men to do the governing. So, what can be done? To put this in present racial justice terms, the behavior of people demonstrates that we need police, but we have only people from which to get our police. Without police we will have anarchy. With police we will have the danger of tyranny. So, what do we do? The answer of the founding father and that of BLM organizations are somewhat the same: division of power.
However, radical ideologies, like Marxism, have no patience for the division of power, because it stops “the will of the people” or keeps us from “getting things done.” This is precisely the opposite intention of the framers like Madison. This is because Marx began not with a classical and Christian investigation into human nature, but an economic and ideological analysis of human systems. Seeing injustice, he imagined a society without injustice and with real equality, like the radicals of the French revolution before him: “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” Considered ideologically, this is the perfect society—one of simultaneous individual liberty, true social equality and economic equity, and a pervasive solidarity. So how did we get housewives devouring the still warm hearts of their neighbors in the French streets, 30 million torturously killed in the USSR, and perhaps 50 million in China? How did smiley face national socialism become Nazism and Fascism?
It is the result of a simple, but profound difference in how one does moral reasoning. Yet, that simple difference amounts to the difference between two totally different ways of seeing people and societies. It also amounts to two totally different ways of following God in the world.
Therefore, if we do not develop our philosophy informed by revelation or the Natural Law, then we will try to shape the world in a way that is incompatible with its nature while we are seeking to make it “the way it should be.” We will be forever frustrated. In our failure, we will be tempted to become increasingly “radical” and more absolutist in our attempts to remake the world in the image of our ideology, which has become our idolatry. We will think we have only failed because we have not gone far enough. In the end we will find ourselves not only idolaters trying to make ourselves gods, but devils affirming inhuman evils that inevitably bring about ever more destructive ends. Meanwhile, we will convince ourselves that we are the only good ones, the only ones free enough to “do what needs to be done.” We will kill the righteous and think we are doing God a favor.
The purpose of philosophy, therefore, is to start the process of moral reasoning by understanding the difference between that which is a natural feature of the world and that which is in the world that but doesn’t need to be that way—that which is “accidental.” Fundamental to this pursuit is having a truthful philosophy of the nature of the human person. If we derive the dignity of the human person from the fact that we are created “in the image of God,” then a complete and truthful understanding of the human person is dependent on truth about God. If this is the case, then our moral reasoning must proceed from a profound understanding of human nature, the human condition and truths about God and ourselves revealed in Christ and in the Scriptures.
When we do not understand human nature and human wretchedness as part of the present state of the human person, we will tend toward either highly cynical views of how little life could improve or highly utopian views of what it must look like. In this darkened state, we might either believe that animalistic humans will never arise to states of virtue necessary for liberty, or we will believe that malleable humans have within them a perfectibility that, properly formed, can be united into a utopia. Both views dismiss the humanity of human beings. Allowing ourselves to see people as objects destroys the subject-subject relationship that exists in dignity between two sacred persons in all relationships. The moment one subject looks at the other subject as an object—as an abstraction that can be used in any way but as a sacred person—then any number of inhumanities must result, which are no respecters of political ideologies. It may produce systemic racism, or anarchy, or communism, or economic exploitation, or any evil concocted by the creativity of man.
It is only when we see all human beings as sacred, divinely created creatures made in the image of God with the capacity for will and freedom, brimming with spiritual emotion, with a purpose of stewardship in the world and in eternity before them, that we can truly see them as another sacred subject in our relationship with them. Since our sinfulness is always persuading us of justifications to objectify others, staying connected to the divine image of the human person must be fundamental not only to friendships, parenting, and romance, but to every way we understand our relationships in social connections.
Only by understanding what produces all human evils and goods can we really understand the true dynamics of any particular evil, including racism or systemic injustice. Either studying the phenomenon of many human social evils or knowing solidly God’s revelation about the human person is a prerequisite to being prepared to unravel and remedy any particular social evil. Further, only by understanding how human beings are cared for and ordered to the good, can we realize how human societies can be as good as they are, become better and not become worse. It will reveal what fences should not be torn down, or what structures should not be destroyed, as we seek to work towards a future that is better—not just in our ideology, but in actual achievement.
The 20th century is a long and horrific story about the triumph of inhuman ideologies that came upon the scene heralded as humane and profoundly enlightened. What they all had in common was a rejection of a profoundly Christian and classical understanding of the human person, and the institutions of human society which best form us for nobility—namely the family and voluntary associations of civil society.
By understanding how humans are formed in character and virtue, not only will we seek to understand the deeper dynamics of love and wisdom, but we will begin to understand the dynamics of human solidarity and society. We will begin to understand that real functions best in proximity and voluntarily—leading us to see the central importance of the nuclear family, the voluntary civil society, and the voluntary exchange of economy as more fundamental and basic to human flourishing than the state.
However we come to believe we should combat the injustices that remain in our society, we should base it in a thoroughly Christian understanding of God, the human person, and how human persons come together in a society. We should also recognize what basic human arrangements not only supply the physical needs of human beings but best order the development of human beings to virtue and nobility. These are the structures of voluntary civil society, including the sacred structures of the church and the natural bonds of family and clan. If we understand these human and theological basics, and if we protect them in our search for progress, we will understand what to conserve and what to rearrange and reimagine. We can live neither for a label of “conservative” or “progressive” nor within the stereotypical constructs of White or Black, or any other. It will give us our best chance of true interparty solidarity, a chance at real progress, while lessening our chance of destroying what we should conserve, thereby making things worse rather than better.
Holding to this basic foundation before we give ourselves and our loyalty to any political or popular superstructure will take both deep wisdom and profound personal discipline. But we serve a God who did precisely that all the way to the cross. In the year of the curse, there is no easy path to flourishing. Thorns, thistles, and pain will meet us all the way in the childbirth of progress. This is why the Christian way is always the way of the cross and of sacrifice. Sacrifice doesn’t just require the bleeding heart of grace, but the steady hand of sacrifice. In Christ, this is both our heritage and identity. But more than that, it is our privilege.
Footnotes
- Technically the term for this is the verb “to profane,” but today we use this primarily as an adjective in relation to bad language.
- The Federalist Papers were a series of essays explaining and defending the American constitution in preparation for its ratification by the 13 colonies. They are a foundational source in American civics and jurisprudence.
