Because our society is so racialized, there’s no such thing as a race-neutral Sunday school curriculum. If we don’t provide a positive biblical theology of human flourishing & image-bearing to counter the worldly constructs of race/caste, kids will passively absorb the latter. https://twitter.com/henryjz/status/1356626778366820352

There's a fair amount of resistance in predominantly white churches to providing such positive biblical theology, however, because it feels novel and strange and therefore uncomfortable, or disturbing. Some quickly dismiss it as giving into CRT, cultural Marxism, or the...

...culture of "wokeness." We'll get to the CRT/wokeness debate in a moment, but 1st, let me point out that there are actually other things going on.

1) Many are unconscious to the fact that they operate w/in a specific framework in which white is normative, or the gold standard.

This unconsciousness is pretty standard among most dominant cultures, not just white Americans. Anywhere in the world, when a caste or particular group has historically been the ruling or founding class, the established norms in cuisine, banking, entertainment, decorum, fashion,

literature, economic practices, relationship to land, etc. match the values & sensibilities of that caste.

How does this play out? Let's call a hypothetical ruling class "Venusian." Over time, Venusians have developed a consensus on what constitutes good music, good literature, good food, good manners, and good ethics. But they have no need to say "Venusian standards of good music,"

"Venusian standards of good literature," "Venusian standards of decorum," or "Venusian sensibilities of time." They just say, "That's good music" or "That's the right way to do things" or "That's good literature."

Now, there's a small group of immigrants from Jupiter who, under duress, find asylum on Venus. They have a very different culture. By Venusian standards, much in the Jupiterian culture isn't considered "good." But the Venusians, who've always enjoyed dominion over their planet...

have never had to evaluate where their own standards came from, or how they arose, or how they measure up to anyone else's standards. There's a default "Venusian supremacy" at work.

This is a very crude metaphor, but I'm using metaphor because so much of the language we bring to this conversation has become so incendiary.

Now, let's talk about how Christianity fits into this discussion. When we become Christians, we don't instantaneously transform into sinless angels. We bring all of our prejudices, broken ways of relating, tribal rivalries, and historical baggage with us. INTO THE CHURCH.

And this doesn't just happen on an individual level. It happens on a macro level. Our society is racially segregated, so most of our churches are segregated. That just a fact. Becoming Christians and building Christian empires don't automatically fix that.

But the church isn't 100% segregated, is it? There's been a good bit of racial integration as well. Because people who are Christians and have read the Bible know that God values all tongues, tribes, and nations. So we try to accomplish this. Step one is to change the optics.

Because of numbers and who has historically had power, however, integration doesn't tend to be white people integrating into churches of color. It tends to be people of color being "welcomed" into white churches.

This is where it gets dicey. Integration of people of color into white churches almost always means assimilation, adopting the standards of what is good, normal, & acceptable--standards that have been established by the (unconsciously) ruling caste.

Within the church, this worldly dynamic gets christened and takes on spiritual language. (White) worship music is standard, (white) perspectives in Sunday school are most insightful, (white) theologians are the most dependable and orthodox. But "white" is never named.

In this sense, and in our time, whiteness, or white normativity, is something that is caught, rather than explicitly taught. That's why so few have a vocabulary for it and so many white people get the heebie-jeebies whenever people start naming things "white."

In Ch. 7 of Center Church, Tim Keller writes about the importance of intentional contextualization: "As soon as you express the gospel, you are unavoidably doing it in a way that is more understandable and accessible for people in some cultures and less so for others."

He continues (p.96): "The subject of contextualization is particularly hard to grasp for members of socially dominant groups. Because ethnic minorities must live in two cultures--the dominant culture and their own subculture--they frequently become aware of how deeply culture..."

"...affects the way we perceive things... In the United States, Anglo-Americans' public and private lives are lived in the same culture. As a result, they are often culturally clueless. They relate to their own culture in the same way a fish that, when asked about water,..."

"...said, 'What's water?' If you have never been out of water, you don't know you are IN it. Anglo Christians sometimes find talk of contextualization troubling. They don't see any part of how they express or live the gospel to be 'Anglo'--it is just the way things are..."

"They feel that any change in how they preach, worship, or minister is somehow a compromise of the gospel. In this they may be doing what Jesus warns against--elevating the 'traditions of men' to the same level as biblical truth (Mark 7:8)."

This thread has gotten way long. I should have just written a blog post, LOL.

2) Because the non-oppressed white ruling caste in the American church has long determined the theological vocabulary & paradigms used to prove orthodoxy, there's a huge vacuum...

when it comes to discussing matters of injustice and oppression theologically and biblically. They've never had to engage, as if their existence depended on it, the many texts in scripture that speak to the yoke of oppression and God's posture toward it.

Some white Christians, when they begin to understand the suffering of their brothers & sisters of color within our caste system, reach for vocabulary & frameworks to make sense of it. Since their churches don't provide it, they end up adopting language fm the secular academy.

This is where some lose their faith. But others, if they're helped by black Christians in particular, who HAVE had a centuries-long history of engaging w/prophetic biblical texts, they're able to see how the Christian faith, liberated from imperialist trappings, provides...

all they need to address injustice & oppression. They discover a much truer essence of the Christian faith.