On "Sin" and Other Hollow Rhetoric

When you have no Good News to offer, you just say stuff. And a lot of it bolsters white supremacy.

I’m not quite sure if you heard or not, but Donald Trump won an election a couple of weeks ago. After being exiled in 2021, he’ll be returning to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in January of 2025.

In the meantime, he’s been assembling his cabinet. For most presidential administrations, cabinet positions are filled by people with some combination of a demonstrated record of public service and a level of expertise in the field they’ve been asked to oversee.

But this is not most presidential administrations.

And so the cabinet is very transparently being stocked with sycophants and yes-men (and women! hooray for progress!).

Many of the cabinet nominations in this administration appear to be lazy attempts at trolling “the libs.” An anti-vaxxer has been tabbed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Someone who is widely believed (even by his own colleagues) to have engaged in some shenanigans that are somewhere between unethical and illegal has been picked to lead the Department of Justice.

And a Fox News host with some really interesting tattoos and the requisite number of baby mamas & extramarital affairs for the Trump orbit (3, at last count) has been called on to lead the Department of War (formally known as the “Department of Defense”).

Some Christians pointed out how odd a lot of this seemed.

And I couldn’t help but think how normal many of those tattoos would look on the body of someone I wasn’t trying to come across on the yard. But observations like these are often frowned upon, because they “assume the worst” of people.

That’s a concern that is often unevenly applied in a way that is… well… racist.

And I said as much in response to this same situation:

Folks won’t feel comfortable calling someone who speaks, behaves, and dresses like a white supremacist a “white supremacist” until they commit an actual hate crime.

And that plausible deniability is a *feature* of white supremacy, not a bug.

“Sure, he has a lot of the same tattoos you’d find in a neo-Nazi gang…. But how can we be sure???” is exactly how whites supremacy works.

Because that same benefit of the doubt is not extended to people who are not perceived as white or white-aspiring.

White supremacy requires believing the best about anyone we believe to be white, while assuming the worst about anyone who isn’t thought of as white.

So a white dude who occupies racist spaces with all the eerie tats? Who can tell.

But a Black woman from an HBCU? A Marxist.

The most uncomfortable part about this is not the racists we grant the benefit of the doubt to.

It’s the people granting the benefit of the doubt.

Because we’re all complicit in that.

There’s a tiny White Citizens Councilor inside all of us.

We gotta starve it.

-@pastortrey05 on the website formerly known at Twitter

White supremacy works by attributing the best motives and narratives possible to white people by default while attributing the worst motives and narratives possible to everyone else. And then denying that very thing is happening.

White supremacy works by denying that it exists, despite the fact that we all have eyes, ears, and brains.

Which puts Christians in the United States in a very precarious position.

---

Here’s what cannot be denied:

The United States has a history of racism. It took a Civil War and several constitutional amendments to address some of the most glaring injustices present in this country.

There was a struggle for civil rights that targeted commercial enterprises and local & national legislation.

Reparations have been made to various Indigenous tribes for the stealing of life and land. Reparations have been paid to Japanese Americans for rounding them up in internment camps.

America has a long history of making it dangerous to be anything other than whatever was conceived of as “white” at any given point in time.

You could argue that this is a stain that is relegated to the past. You would be wrong, but you could argue it.

What cannot be denied is that these things happened.

America has been largely and loudly shaped by white supremacy, which means that its tendrils are still clinging to the nation we’ve inherited.

And the fact that so many professing Christians appear resistant to admitting this poses a problem for a central claim that many of them make:

We are all sinners saved by grace.

I haven’t met very many Christians who would deny this reality.

All of us have participated in sinful acts or sinful systems that are beneath the whole and holy standard that God invites us to live into.

We have all been shaped and impacted by habits and mores that separate us from the best version of ourselves. Many would argue that we’ve indeed been separated from God by our “sin.”

And a bit of unimpeachable evidence that someone doesn’t actually believe any of that stuff is the utter commitment that so many people have shown to minimizing the insidiousness of white supremacy in our midst. They do not minimize it because it does not exist. They minimize it because it makes some (white) people feel bad. I’m not making that up. It’s what many people have gone on record saying.

Little thought is ever given to how the current narratives (which, again, were bequeathed to us by a society that was shaped by and assumed white supremacy) impacted children who were not white. If America is this great, meritocratic land of opportunity, then many students have been left to conclude that their ancestors simply did not have what it took to succeed in society. Teaching them that their ancestors were systematically robbed of their humanity, fair wages, land, and liberty would risk making other (white) students feel bad.

But if the practice of naming the sins that shaped us and the sins we’ve participated in and benefited from (whether intentionally or not) makes us feel bad, and those bad feelings are enough to prevent us from facing them head on… can we really claim to have encountered the gospel?

When I’m made aware of the many sins that have brought me to this point of my life, my eyes are opened to the depravity we accept as normal and to the transformative power of God.

---

I speak about white supremacy because it is one of the many sins that separates us from wholeness.

White supremacy tried to make me believe that I had to distance myself from my ancestors to be closer to God.

It tried to convince me that the theology and churches that brought us gospel music and a home base for the Civil Rights struggle were somehow inferior.

And white supremacy does the same thing to so many people who think themselves (or aspire to be) white.

Once upon a time, there were no white people.

Sure, there were Anglos and Saxons and Germans and Franks and all sorts of ethnicities. There were Italians and Swedes and Scots. They had their own cultures and heritages and languages. And they still do. But a lot of that was systemically stripped from Black people.

Thanks to the comprehensive nature of family separation inherent in the transatlantic slave trade and the system of chattel slavery in the Americas, the only way that many of us will ever be able to name an ethnic identity that ties back to the continent of Africa is by paying for a DNA test that is, in a cruel twist of irony, more than likely supplied by a white company.

And so Black has become a default ethnic identity in America directly because of the vestiges of slavery.

But whiteness? That only exists to remind people that they are not Black.

And that’s a shame. Because, while people were so worried about not being Black, they’ve been slowly separated from their own humanity.

White supremacy robs us all blind.

Everyone but the greediest among us.

We are all victims of white supremacy.

I speak against it because it is one of the many things that Jesus saves us from.

White supremacy is part and parcel of the matrix of sin that nailed the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth to a Roman cross.

White supremacy is indeed an aspect of the enemy that Jesus defeated in his resurrection.

I talk about white supremacy because, as dastardly and scary as it may seem… that mess don’t scare me.

But we cannot defeat what we will not face.

When we deny the prevalence of white supremacy, we are not only participating in white supremacy… we are rendering the grace of God ineffective in our midst.

When we claim that we are “sinners saved by grace,” do we believe it?

Or are we just sayin’ stuff?

Because the fact is that facing our sin will probably make us feel bad.

But God’s love is amazing.

It lifts the weary head.

It helps us get through what feels bad so that we can be good.

It sanctifies us.

There is salvation on the other side of shame.

---

I like playing with words. So that’s what I do. Whether it be with tweets, videos, essays, sermonic presentations, Bible studies, podcasts, or speaking engagements of other sorts, I’m always trying to figure out how to provoke an image in a seeker with some combination of words.

If you’ve enjoyed any of the words I have to offer, check out my book Theologizin’ Bigger: Homilies on Living Freely and Loving Wholly wherever books are sold!