This is my sixth and final post in this series. I am addressing how the Bible and the gospel offer a cure to the pathologies of racism and tribalism. My first five posts in this series were:
- #1: All Gentiles are born “strangers and aliens”
- #2: The atonement kills hostility between peoples
- #3: “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord”
- #4: Jesus prioritizes the “doing-God’s-will family” over the “bloodline family”
- #5: God is love
For most of us, I believe that the subject of racism is difficult, painful, complicated. It is just plain hard to talk about it. To reduce racism in our own lives and communities, we need fewer ready-made answers, less defensiveness, a lot more humility, way more listening. But we have a problem.
An anti-listening culture
Is it getting harder to simply listen? I think so. Here’s one reason why: Social media. As much as we may benefit from platforms like Facebook and YouTube/Google, it must be recognized that they have business models that reward outrage. The more outrage, the more conflict and division, the more clicks and engagement, the greater the profit. The result? We can unwittingly adopt a default form of communication that is dehumanizing, based on conflict and winning—rather than mutuality, understanding, nuance, compromise. Respectful listening falls by the wayside.
Business school professor Scott Galloway (interviewed here) is asked, “The Internet promised the democratization of business and culture. The reverse seems to have been the case. What’s gone wrong?” Here’s how Prof. Galloway responded:
“[I]f you were to try and reverse-engineer the one thing that’s done a ton of damage is that their underlying business models tap into a very tribal instinct and that we’re very drawn to conflict and rage and the underlying business model of Google and Facebook is to sell as much advertising as possible, so as a result the algorithm has a vested interest in creating conflict and rage. They talk about engagement as a key metric, and what they really refer to is an enragement.”
–Scott Galloway
So within this world of “enragement,” how should followers of Jesus respond? We go against the flow: We slow down. We lean in. We cross a boundary. We are open to the awkward. We live the gospel. We listen.
Racism and listening—three ways you can listen better
1: Develop your listening skills.
God’s will is that we listen better concerning the difficult, painful, complicated social sin of racism.
“He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Mat 11:15). “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19).
Listening deeply is a spiritual practice. What if, in Galatians 5:22–23, we equated love with listening? Like this: But the fruit of the Spirit is listening well—through joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. Listening is vital when discussing the sin of racism.
In my own life, I have identified five levels of listening.1
- I only appear to be listening. I’m thinking about something else. My mind and heart are elsewhere; and usually, the person I’m talking to knows it.
- I listen in order to be heard. I’m thinking about what I will say next. I want to make a good impression by what I say. I may gain something valuable as a result.
- I listen for information. I need the knowledge to be effective in my work, family, relationships, ministry.
- I listen to understand. I repeat using many of the same words I have heard—so that the person knows I understand him or her. I want to reflect what the person is thinking.
- I listen empathically. I interpret what I have heard using my own words, and I try to use the appropriate emotion. I want to reflect what the person both thinks and feels.
Listening at levels 4 and 5 is powerful for building trust, working through thorny problems, handling trauma, understanding deeply. To observe the difference between level 2 listening and level 5 listening in a marriage relationship, check out this helpful video (14 minutes).
Plan to listen well. I have found that a powerful trigger for level 5 listening is this: plan to respond in your conversation with the words, “What I hear you saying is …” (Then, in your own words, you complete the statement with what you just heard.) I recommend that, when discussing any hard issue, including the sin of racism, we intentionally use listening skills at level 4 or 5.
2: Listen individually to a brother or sister of color.
Be intentional and reach out. Hear about racism from someone who has been victimized by it. There is nothing like sitting down and listening to another person’s story. Then, don’t try to fix it. Rather, make it your goal to understand as deeply as you can. Be okay with awkwardness. Vulnerability is often healthy as it draws out our humility.
I have had the opportunity through my home church to become friends with an African American brother who teaches on racial unity and the church. He is a wise man. My wife and I took his class. I have learned much from him. It is always good to grab a meal together or just have a conversation. He has helped me better understand the dynamics of racism in my world and in my “tribe”—the mostly white evangelical church.
3: Listen by reading widely.
Over the past couple of years, I have been reading books on the intersection of Christianity and racism. Below are five examples. All of these books I found nourishing and helpful.
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight. Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History, this biography is a masterful work of storytelling and scholarship by David Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University. As I was reading this book, I came to have great affection for Frederick Douglass. Reading of his rise from being born into slavery—to America’s most widely-heard and eloquent abolitionist in the 1800s—makes for a profound learning journey. That Douglass becomes a Christian and is self-schooled in the language of the King James Version of the Bible is a major part of his identity.
The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, by Jemar Tisby. From the Amazon page: This book is “both enlightening and compelling, telling a history we either ignore or just don’t know. Equal parts painful and inspirational, it details how the American church has helped create and maintain racist ideas and practices. … The Color of Compromise is not a call to shame or a platform to blame white evangelical Christians. It is a call from a place of love and desire to fight for a more racially unified church that no longer compromises what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality.”
Jesus and the Disinherited, by Howard Thurman. This is a short book—102 pages—first published in 1949. It helped to inspire the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. The book remains a classic. From the Amazon page: “In this classic theological treatise, the acclaimed theologian and religious leader Howard Thurman (1900–1981) demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised. Jesus is a partner in the pain of the oppressed and the example of His life offers a solution to ending the descent into moral nihilism. Hatred does not empower—it decays. Only through self-love and love of one another can God’s justice prevail.”
The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, by Willie James Jennings. This book tells the story of the conquest by European nations of Africa and the Americas, and how racial categories and hierarchies were couched in Christian theology to support that conquest. I was thrilled to discover that Jennings ends with hope as he expounds on Ephesians 2:13–16. “This new biracial humanity, Jew and Gentile (metaphorically speaking), would be the basis for peace. Jesus marked an alternative path away from violence and toward peace through his own body, in which he constituted a new space of reconciliation. In a powerful inversion of the power of death, Paul claims that Jesus, through his death, put to death hostility.”2 (See my post, “The atonement kills hostility between peoples.”)
The Third Option: Hope for a Racially Divided Nation, by Miles McPherson. Written by the senior pastor of a racially diverse church in San Diego, The Third Option is a book for leaders who want to move toward unity and a more racially diverse congregation. From the Amazon page: “Christians, who are called to love and honor their neighbors, have fallen into culture’s trap by siding with one group against another: us vs. them. Cops vs. protestors. Blacks vs. whites. Racists vs. the ‘woke.’ The lure of choosing one option over another threatens God’s plan for unity among His people. Instead of going along with the culture, Pastor Miles directs us to choose the Third Option: honoring the priceless value of God’s image in every person we meet.”
NOTES
- See my article, “Giving Honor: A Key to Fruitful Cross-Cultural Partnerships” in Evangelical Missions Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 4.
- Jennings, Willie James: The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. Yale University Press. Kindle Edition, location 6006.
