America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America by Jim Wallis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How To Be Saved

I recently gave a talk on this book to some church-going friends. I summarise that talk here without yet knowing what effect it had on them.

Racism is a spiritual malady; its legal, psychological, and behavioural symptoms are derivative. Racism exists, like language, as something embedded in individuals but simultaneously floating beyond them as an independent fact.

Some racists are indeed criminals or psychotics but all are sinners who have inherited their sin - but not through their parents’ genetic legacy. Rather they have become racists through their religion - which exists in the same personal/spirit form as language and racism.

The specific vector of the spiritual disease of racism is a variant of the Christian Faith which is used to establish and justify a privileged status in the world. This is Wallis’s central message, although presented with more nuanced finesse than my summary. But I question whether nuance is what’s needed. The fact of racism is a profound and pressing challenge to Christian theology that should be faced without dissemblance.

Christianity has always tended toward a sort of self-conscious tribalism. The ‘Other’ - Jew, pagan, Muslim, heretic, reformer, apostate - has always been an acute threat from its inception. Uniquely among the world’s religions, Christianity has demanded unwavering acceptance of a set of doctrinal principles. Although variable from sect to sect, these principles define who is a member, who is ‘in’, who is saved, and, most crucially, who is to be considered lost, unworthy and inferior. Its purported universalism is advertised right up to the moment that a prospective convert says ‘No thank you,’ at which point he or she is eternally doomed.

Christian superiority is the central message carried by every organised Christian Church. The Church with its hierarchical structure is necessary because doctrinal faith requires an arbiter, an interpreter, of the principles to which members give obedience. The Church exists functionally to prevent dangerous contact with others who threaten the faith of members with doctrinal miscegenation. The result is a de facto religious apartheid, the effects of which can be observed from Ireland to Burma, to Ferguson, Missouri for those who have eyes to see.

In many places around the world, this spiritual apartheid has transformed easily into a racial apartheid. South Africa and the United States are the two clearest examples of the phenomenon but it is the norm everywhere. Not only are Christian sects divided rather sharply by race; those of the white Christians also have - by commission and omission - enforced the basic tenets of racism as a matter of faith and moral probity, equating the two as rationale for the other in the social attitudes. The rapid segregation of the Pentecostal movement from its mixed-race roots in California is typical. Black churches have been complicit in this through their acceptance of this fundamental distortion of spiritual life.

Racism is a perennial Christian teaching. Like liturgical customs and holiday celebrations, racism persists long after the source-doctrines are forgotten. Just as the Christian Church has taught anti-Semitism through its official teachings and its ‘off the record’ acceptance of violence and discrimination, so it has also taught the doctrines of white supremacy. Slavery was justified for almost 2000 years by the teaching of the Apostle Paul. Christian missions in Asia, South America, and Africa were part of the white man’s burden to bring true civilisation to inferior cultures. Christ, many of his adherents have contended, was not even a Jew much less a Semitic man of colour.

The Christian Religion was, and still is, considered inseparable from a smugly content bourgeois style of life which is predominantly European, white, and protective of its privileges. And, most important, Christianity, it believes, has nothing to apologise for. Any historical ‘excesses’ or mistakes were the fault not of the Church and its teachings but of individuals acting in aberrant ways. This is indeed institutional Original Sin.

It was Augustine who, in the 5th century, formulated the theological theory of Original Sin which Wallis alludes to. Augustine recognised that the character of this sin is such that it cannot be overcome by the efforts of the sinner. It is self-sealing and inescapable. A metanoia, a complete and fundamental transformation of one’s nature, is the only remedy for this condition. Such a transformation can only be experienced as a gift from elsewhere. According to Augustine, the source of this gift is God, who either grants it or he doesn’t.

On the face of it therefore, Wallis has a serious problem. There is nothing he or anyone else can do directly to promote the necessary metanoia among the Church community. It appears that a hopeful resignation is all that he can suggest. Theologically this presents an apparent ecclesiastical dead end. What rationale could there be for the church to take action other than looking to legal protection and continuing its tradition of spiritual defensiveness?

The answer depends on one’s view on a more fundamental, in fact the most fundamental, theological question: Who, what, where is this being that is casually caused ‘God’? If it is some remote transcendent Presence who governs the universe through arbitrary fiat, then there is no recourse from the Augustinian (and strict Calvinist, Jansenist Catholic and Evangelical Republican) doctrine. Racism is then merely an unintelligible fact of an inherently corrupt world. Action in that case would be an impertinence against the Divine Will.

If, however, God is imminent, that is, as the Gospel of John says, “He dwells among us,” then there is one certain location in which to find God: Other people. It is in and through other people, that is to say politics, by which Original Sin can be overcome. But this politics is not the current coercive Evangelical politics of changing laws. Such politics has nothing to do with metanoia.

The politics of spiritual transformation is demonstrative not coercive. It requires acting one’s way into another way of thinking rather than thinking one’s way into a new way of acting. Such action is not an argument or a directive, it is a demonstration of a relationship. Such a demonstration requires no explanation, no exposition; it is self-explanatory and complete in itself.

This kind of action has a single motivating principle: the superiority of the interests of the Other over one’s own interests - personal interests, congregational interests, ecclesiastical interests and even national interests. There is no way that this principle can be transformed into law since it involves a legal paradox - the superiority of the claims of others.

So take it or leave it. Continue to defend your indefensible history, and doctrines, and self-righteous claim to superiority; or allow yourselves to be transformed by those you have harmed and continue to harm. Only they can help you. James Baldwin knew this. I’m just reminding you of his wisdom and theological understanding.

View all my reviews