Earlier in March, Franklin Graham, head of relief organization Samaritan’s Purse, visited with Sudan President Omar al-Bashir just prior to the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing an arrest warrant against the president for war crimes associated with the government’s role in the Darfur conflict, where millions of lives still hang in the balance.
After Graham returned, he agreed to a lengthy interview with Christianity Today about al-Bashir and Samaritan’s Purse’s ministry in Sudan.
How would you describe your relationship with President al-Bashir based on the three meetings you’ve had?
He’s a very interesting person, and no question he’s a man who’s responsible for a lot of the bloodshed and misery in his country. Samaritan’s Purse has been the recipient of his bombing. Our hospital was bombed on seven separate occasions.
During the war, the government of Sudan targeted civilian and nonmilitary targets, hospitals, and U.N. food distribution sites. I would complain bitterly to the administration at the time. Back then it was [to] Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke — that they do something to intervene. I was finally invited by al-Bashir to come see him, and I did that, back in 2001. He stopped bombing the hospital.
When President George W. Bush came to power, he assigned Sen. John Danforth to be special envoy to Sudan. President Bush put a tremendous amount of pressure on al-Bashir, and not only did al-Bashir stop the bombing in the South, but because of U.S. arm twisting, he also signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).
What did you and al-Bashir discuss the last time you met?
Update (May 8):
It’s not just young Baptist pastors who are worried about mixing religion and politics when it comes to Ben Carson’s campaign for president.
Carson backed out of speaking at a gathering of Southern Baptist pastors recently, after some young pastors objected to his theology and to having a politician speak at their conference. [See previous story below.]
This week, the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s North American Division asked its pastors to steer clear of making comments to the media about Carson, a long-time Adventist.
"As church leaders, you may be approached by your local or national media outlets to make comments on Dr. Carson’s candidacy, in particular as it relates to his membership in the church,” read a statement posted by the Adventist Review.
Instead, the statement, which has since been revised, suggested that pastors refer reporters to the North American Division’s office.
Adventists have a long history of promoting religious freedom and advocating for the separation of church and state. Their pastors are all denominational employees, rather than being hired by local congregations, so any comments they make reflect on the entire denomination, said a Seventh-day Adventist spokesman.
The updated statement points out that the church values all its members including Carson, a famed neurosurgeon. Individual Adventists can support whatever candidates they like. But pastors and churches should steer clear of taking sides.
“The Adventist Church has a longstanding position of not supporting or opposing any candidate for elected office,” the statement reads. “This position is based both on our historical position of separation of church and state and the applicable federal law relating to the church’s tax-exempt status….Care should be taken that the pulpit and all church property remain a neutral space when it comes to elections.”
Carson’s Adventist faith would likely shape his priorities if elected. Among those beliefs: a strong emphasis on health and wellness, reports Kay Campbell, Huntsville-based religion writer for AL.com.
“Two factual beliefs of Adventists are their health message (thank you, Dr. Kellogg, for concocting dry breakfast cereal, and thank you, other Adventists, for grilling the first vege-burgers to help people become vegetarians) and their keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, sundown Friday to sundown Saturday,” Campbell wrote in a recent story on Carson’s beliefs. “They definitely do find support for both of those things in the Bible.”
Carson, like former US Senator and vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, would also likely take the Bible’s teaching about a Sabbath day of rest seriously.
Other Adventist doctrines, such as a belief that the Catholic Church and the Pope are the Anti-Christ, may be more problematic for Carson, Campbell reports.
CT recently reported on the struggle of the Adventists to maintain their distinct beliefs at a time when the church is growing and some members want it to be more evangelical.
—–
[Updated May 4]
A Southern Baptist megachurch pastor blames “theological police” for pressuring presidential candidate Ben Carson to cancel his appearance at a major conference for pastors this summer.
Carson’s Seventh-day Adventist beliefs and his politics led a group of young Baptists pastors to object. [See previous story below.]
Perry Noble, pastor of NewSpring Church in Anderson, South Carolina, said he was “shocked” that Carson dropped out.
“No one on the planet had better theology than Jesus, and yet we do not see Him drawing theological lines in the sand and excluding people who do not believe just like Him—in fact, we find Him often sitting with people who were nothing like Him at all—has the Pastor’s conference moved beyond the model Jesus demonstrated?” wrote Noble on his blog.
NewSpring draws more than 30,000 worshipers on weekends, according to Outreach magazine, making it one of the largest Southern Baptist churches in the country.
Carson, who announced his run for president today, first gained national attention in the mid-1980s for his role in a successful operation that separated twins who were conjoined at the head. He credits faith with helping him rise from a poor neighborhood in Detroit to become director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Though an Adventist, Carson has always felt at home among other churches.
“I spend just as much time in non-Seventh-day Adventist churches because I’m not convinced that the denomination is the most important thing,” he told Religion News Service in 1999. “I think it’s the relationship with God that’s most important.”
The twice-baptized Carson was deemed a potential president candidate after his 2013 speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he advocated for a flat tax and condemned political correctness and the national debt.
Carson is a hero to many of Baptists, Noble wrote, adding that Carson’s appearance at the conference was a chance for Baptist pastors to learn about racial reconciliation.
His cancellation paints Baptists as intolerant of other Christians, Noble claimed, which undermines their efforts at evangelism.
“The Southern Baptist Convention claims they want to lead the charge for prayer in Baptist churches in hopes it will lead to a spiritual awakening for our nation,” he wrote. “However, I am afraid that prayer isn’t what is needed for a spiritual awakening for our nation … but rather repentance of religious people who love theology more than Jesus … which has caused them to not be able to see people as Jesus saw them.”
Leaders of Baptist21, a group of young pastors who objected to Carson’s appearance at the conference, also cited worries about evangelism.
“We are concerned because in our evangelical climate it is often easy to confuse what it means to be a follower of Christ with what it means to be a patriotic American,” they wrote.
Trevin Wax, a blogger for Religion News Service, said that the controversy over Carson is part of a generation shift among Southern Baptists. Older pastors see American as a nation founded on biblical values, and want to uphold those values by political means. But younger pastors worry about focusing too much on politics and not enough on evangelism. They see themselves as missionaries, rather than cultural warriors.
“Far from being a ‘moral majority,’” he wrote, “younger pastors are more likely to see their role as a missionary minority: speaking truth to power, witnessing to the good news of Jesus in a world that is increasingly hostile to a Christian worldview.”
In the past, politicians like Carson have been welcome at the Southern Baptist Convention’s meetings. Carson signed books at last year’s meeting, while Mike Huckabee and former presidents George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush have addressed the convention’s meetings. (George W. Bush appeared by satellite in 2002.)
Younger pastors, like those of Baptist21, have asked the convention to ban all future appearances by politicians.
The controversy over Carson is part of a bigger question of Baptist identity in America, according to Thomas Kidd, professor of history at Baylor University and co-author of Baptists in America: A History.
In the country’s early years, Baptists were outsiders. Their preachers were sometime jailed for refusing to pay state church taxes or to be licensed by the government.
As Southern Baptists became the nation’s largest Protestant group, they became tied to conservative politics. But many are still uneasy with their place in American culture, Kidd wrote in the Washington Post.
“In areas of the South, they still function like a kind of de facto established church. But are they still outsiders, even if they dominate the American religious landscape?”
—–
[First posted April 24]
Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon turned pundit, has backed out of plans to speak at a major gathering of evangelical pastors this summer.
Carson, who will likely run for president, had been scheduled to appear in June at the annual Southern Baptist Pastors Conference in Columbus, Ohio.
But a group of young ministers, known as Baptist21, raised concerns this week about his appearance.
The mostly Calvinist preachers objected to the beliefs of Carson’s booming Seventh-day Adventist Church—including the claim that worshiping on Sunday is sin and the idea that sinners who are barred from heaven will be annihilated rather than sent to hell.
They also objected to a statement made on Easter by Carson that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all God’s children.
“Certainly, we do not all worship the same God—we worship the Trinity whom Muslims and Jews would deny,” leaders of Baptist21 wrote on their blog. “And, the idea that we are all God’s children is at best the type of liberalism the Conservative Resurgence sought to address, and at worst, it is universalism.”
Politics also played a role in Carson’s withdrawal.
Jonathan Akin, a leader of Baptist21 and pastor of Fairview Church near Nashville, said he was concerned about Southern Baptists being too closely tied to the Republican Party.
“I’d suggest that we not invite any politicians to speak in the future,” he said in a phone interview.
That concerned was echoed on the Baptist21 blog.
“We are concerned because in our evangelical climate it is often easy to confuse what it means to be a follower of Christ with what it means to be a patriotic American,” the blog read.
Several Southern Baptist professor weighed in as well on Twitter.
“Stop inviting politicians and wanna-bees!” tweeted Kevin Smith, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville. Denny Burk, a blogger and professor at Boyce College, the undergraduate arm of SBTS, also tweeted his support.
Willy Rice, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Clearwater and president of the pastor’s conference, said Carson’s appearance had become problematic. The decision to withdraw was mutual.
“It had become a distraction,” Rice said in a phone interview. “He didn’t need that and we didn’t need that.”
Rice posted a blog on Friday, explain his rationale for inviting Carson.
“He has spoken at the National Prayer Breakfast twice (the only other person to do so was Billy Graham); he was a frequent guest of James Dobson; he has spoken at several Southern Baptist churches for major events,” he wrote. “He loves Southern Baptists and considers them friends. I believe most Southern Baptists equally respect and appreciate him.”
Rice said that Carson was not a candidate for president when he was first invited to the conference and that he still is not a candidate.
“It now appears likely that he will announce his candidacy and, though he has never held political office nor to my knowledge engaged in a political campaign, many have voiced their objections at having a declared candidate speak at our conference,” he said.
Politicians have spoken at the Southern Baptist pastors conference and the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in the past.
Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and former Southern Baptist pastor, spoke at the conference in 2009 and in 2013.
CT recently explored how Adventists, growing at a rate of 1 million members each year, have been wrestling with their identity, trying to keep their distinctive beliefs while also moving closer to other evangelicals.
A Seventh-day Adventist church in Alabama recently even started a Sunday service as an outreach event.
“There has been a continuing tension about whether [Adventists] see themselves as distinct, or as one among many evangelical denominations with a few special emphases,” said David Neff, former CT editor and a former Adventist minister, told CT. “There’s a dynamic that moves back and forth between those poles.”
Were you surprised by his apparent receptiveness?
When I’ve been with him, he’s very upfront. He says, “I want to make you Muslim.” I say, “I’d like to persuade you to be a Christian.” That’s the difference — they want to force you, we want to persuade.
Over the last eight years, President al-Bashir has shown willingness to work for peace, [but] the CPA between the North and South has not been fully implemented. It’s extremely important that that gets implemented and not renegotiated.
Gage Skidmore / Flickr
Yours is not one that’s been kicked out, correct?
No. Not yet.
How does the president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir Mayardit, view the ICC arrest warrant, and have you been able to meet with Kiir as well?
I spoke with him last Wednesday [March 11] as well, in Juba. He feels the ICC’s position could possibly derail the CPA. He is concerned. What people don’t understand is, you have a very radical Islamic government in Khartoum. Al-Bashir is probably the most moderate in that government. If he were to be replaced, the fear with everybody is that you’ll get a more radical person, and the country will erupt into civil war.
To what extent do both leaders want the U.S. to be involved in the peace process?
Both are 100 percent supportive of the United States being engaged. [Al-Bashir] asks me every time I meet with him. He asks me to ask my government to be engaged. But we are very slow, and sometimes we don’t reward them for their small steps. … We still don’t have an ambassador there. I think we ought to name an ambassador, and get the embassy up and rolling with the full court, so to speak — a diplomatic mission. We don’t have that yet. We need to assign a full-time special envoy to Sudan, someone who answers directly to President Obama and not the State Department.
Are you already seeing the impact of the relief groups having been kicked out?
A Moody Bible Institute professor has called on the school to abandon the term white privilege in discussions about diversity, calling it “inflammatory,” “repugnant,” and “unworthy of Christian discourse.”
“I suggest we should rip the term ‘white privilege’ out of our discourse at Moody,” wrote theology professor Bryan Litfin in a letter to the editor published April 15 in the student newspaper. “The underlying issues that need to be addressed should be described with more wholesome, less divisive terminology.”
Litfin proposes five reasons why he believes the term is “intended to address an important topic” yet isn’t biblical enough to be effective because it is “taken straight from a radical and divisive secular agenda.” “The problem is, the term itself is inflammatory, so the real topic goes unheard because of the offense,” he wrote, concluding, “Why employ terms that divide the body of Christ? As students of God’s Word, let us draw our terminology from the Bible, not the wisdom of man.”
The letter follows an apology he made in March for comments he had made on social media about a campus diversity event.
Flyers for the event, called “White Like Me,” said it would feature “thoughts on race from the perspective of a privileged person,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
A flyer for the event, hosted by a Moody student group called Embrace, was vandalized. A photo of the damaged flyer, with the word “privilege” crossed out, was posted online.
Amid discussion of the vandalism, Litfin criticized the idea of “white privilege” and the event itself.
“Using the term ‘white’ to categorize millions of people under one catch-all term, then pegging them as elite oppressors, is offensive on its face and unworthy of Christian discourse,” he wrote on Facebook.
He later apologized, telling the Tribune that his comments were not “worthy of what a professor should do.”
Following the controversy over the defaced flyer and Litfin’s first comments, Moody President Paul Nyquist had emphasized the school’s commitment to diversity in a letter to college community.
That commitment includes talking about white privilege, he said.
“People who are white, such as myself, because we are of the majority culture, often fail to understand the privileges we enjoy due to our skin color, for it is all we have ever known,” he wrote. “Therefore, the conversation hosted on our campus last week is part of an ongoing effort to bring greater campus-wide understanding to the issue and I applaud and affirm its purpose.”
The debate at Moody is part of a larger conversation about race and ethnicity at Christian colleges, driven in large part by the country’s changing demographics.
The term white privilege was first popularized in a 1989 essay by Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women.
In it, McIntosh described an “invisible knapsack” of advantages she experienced by being white in the United States. Those advantages including being able be rent or buy housing wherever she wanted, not being stopped by police because of her race, or seeing people that looked like her on television.
Her essay and the term are often used in discussions of diversity.
But the term is problematic for Christians, says Litfin, because he believes white privilege implies that being white in America is sinful. That kind of collective sin doesn’t apply to Christians, his letter argued, as they are only responsible for their own actions.
“Collective sin was operative in the covenant community of Israel, such as with Achan (Joshua 7),” he wrote. “However, with the arrival of the New Covenant, individuals now stand or fall before God for their own actions (Jeremiah 31:29-30). …Therefore, an entire race should not be held accountable for the sins of individuals. It doesn’t work like that anymore.”
He also argues that the term “can be an unloving use of the power of naming,” “can display a critical spirit that misconstrues reality by highlighting only the negative,” and “can blind us to the cry for social justice from the white oppressed.”
In an email, Litfin said that his concerns have been misunderstood.
“My letter was never intended to deny racism or the unjust disadvantaging of some people. Of course such sin exists in a fallen world,” he said in an email to CT. “I simply wanted to serve my community with some reflections from Scripture about how we should talk about it.”
Litfin agrees the ideas behind the concept of white privilege are worth discussing. But the term is flawed, he said.
“I don’t think we can say skin color automatically gives privilege in our culture. Sometimes it does,” he said. “But what about the white 12-year-old girl who has been sex trafficked? She has no privilege.”
The professor also argued that privilege should be admired and not scorned, since it’s often earned by hard work and prudent decisions. He pointed to his grandfather, an immigrant businessman who “scrimped and saved,” and his father, Duane Litfin, who was the first in the family to go to college and later became president of Wheaton College. Their actions paid off in the future long term.
“This certainly gave me privileges—but that is something God celebrates!” Litfin wrote.
Thabiti Anyabwile, pastor of Anacostia River Church in Washington, D.C., agrees with Litfin, at least in part.
Privilege isn’t a bad thing, he said. It can be used for good. But it also has consequences.
Anyabwile, who has written forcefully about recent racial tensions in the US following the death of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, said he’s not attached to the term white privilege.
He doesn’t see it as a moral judgment against white people. And it doesn’t mean that “every white person was born with a silver spoon in their mouth,” he said.
Instead the term describes a reality in American life that should be acknowledged, no matter what term is used.
“If you are a person of white skin color, you have certain advantages,” he said. “There is a currency that comes with that. We need to be able to describe that reality.”
Diversity experts at Christian colleges agree.
The term white privilege is a useful tool, because it describes a social reality in a helpful way, said Tali Hairston, director of the John M. Perkins Center for Reconciliation, Community Development, and Leadership Training at Seattle Pacific University (SPU).
Hairston said that many of the school’s white students haven’t ever had to think about their race or haven’t experienced any discrimination.
That’s privilege in a nutshell, he said.
At Seattle Pacific, talking about diversity and privilege is an act of kindness, said Hairston. It’s meant to help students of every background understand the world around them better.
For some majors at SPU, such as pre-med, discussions about privilege are mandatory. Students who are going to be doctors need to develop their cultural competency, because they’ll worth with people from all backgrounds, said Hairston. Understanding privilege will help them do that.
He said that students from white evangelical backgrounds in particular often need remedial cultural literacy so they can understand the world from other people’s point of view. That’s a wise and a Christian thing to do, he said.
“They are trying to overcome a deficit of cultural literacy,” he said. “If you were raised in white evangelical culture, you have not had to understand this.”
There’s also a spiritual aspect to discussions of privilege, argues Christena Cleveland, associate professor of reconciliation studies at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She believes that unacknowledged privilege hampers spiritual growth in students.
“Privilege is poison,” said Cleveland, “because it keeps us from connecting with God and others.”
Cleveland uses the term white privilege as a starting point for discussion. This week she planned to have her students write a response to Litfin’s letter to the editor.
Cleveland argues that it’s an important phrase to use. If students only talk about racism or the disadvantages of some ethnic groups, she said, they’ll miss the big picture.
When some groups are disadvantaged in a culture, other groups gain an advantage, she said.
That’s not an easy thing to grapple with, especially for students from privileged background. They’ve often benefited from unearned advantages, said Cleveland. Coming to grips with that can leave them angry and confused.
She recounted a story told by one of her colleagues, in a discussion about diversity. A white student asked, “Are we inherently sinful because we are white?”
“He said, ‘No, you are not sinful because you are white—but you have inherited a sin because you are white. The question is, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” said Cleveland.
Regardless of what term they use, Christians will continue to grapple with questions about diversity, in large part because of the American church’s demographics shifts.
About 7 out of 10 Americans over age 65 identify as white Christians, according to data from the Public Religion Research Institute. Those white Christians outnumber Christians of color of their generation by about 5 to 1. Among American ages 18 to 30, about a third (32%) identify as Christians of color, while only one in four (25%) are white Christians.
As a more diverse groups of Christians come into their own, the culture and power structure of the church will change.
Anyabwile believes that for some Christians, growing diversity is seen as a threat to what had been a “white-defined” way of life in the US.
“That’s what makes the debate so pitched right,” he said.
Getting past that fear, he said, will help the church better fulfill its mission.
One places where this new demographic reality has come to life is at Nyack College, which has campuses in New York City and Rockland, New York. It’s one of the most diverse Christian colleges in the country. Only one in five students—and about half of the faculty—are white, said David Turk, the school’s provost.
For most of its history, most of the students at Nyack were white. That changed in the late 1980s, when the school started recruiting students from New York City. By 1992, about 40 percent of the students were minorities.
The demographic change caused tension, said Turk. Some of the Hispanic students on campus thought professors giving special privileges to white students. Many of those concerns went away over time, especially as the faculty became more diverse.
Turk says that most Christian colleges today will have to learn to discuss hard questions, like the topic of white privilege, because of demographics.
“The demographic change that hit Nyack 20 years ago will soon be hitting the rest of the country,” he said.
Even when they become diverse, Christian colleges will still have to have hard conversations about race and privilege.
“This is a long-term process,” Turk said.
Back at Moody, the controversy over Litfin’s remarks continues over social media, under the hashtag #mbiprivilege.
Embrace, the student group, planned to host a lecture on April 30 entitled “White Privilege: A Sacred Legacy of America’s Civil Religion” by Moody theology professor Michael McDuffee.
Moody’s president said the school is working on becoming “more inclusive and welcoming to students and staff of color.”
“For the past two years, I have personally led a task force which has been charged with developing recommendations and strategies to reach this goal,” Nyquist wrote. “Some of the changes set forth by this group have already been implemented, such as hiring more ethnically diverse faculty and appointing more ethnically diverse trustees.”
More work has yet to be done, he added.
Lebo Pooe, a senior from South Africa, is hopeful about the school’s future, despite the recent conflict.
“The notion that white privilege is not worthy of Christian discourse is extremely hurtful,” she told CT in a phone interview. Discussion of race and privilege are difficult at first, she said, “but only for a season.”
“The more we rub up against each other, the more a beautiful unity emerges.”
On Her.meneutics:
“White Privileged Like Me”: Jamie Janosz looks at Mary McLeod Bethune, Moody Bible Institute, and the legacy of majority culture.
Image: "Just Sayin'," by Ti-Rock Moore, photo by Bart Everson.
You have some powerful video footage on your website, particularly showing your church rebuilding program. How is this project coming along?
We estimated that about 1,000 churches were destroyed in the war by al-Bashir’s government when they were trying to destroy Christians in the South. They killed one million people, and that’s a conservative estimate. Some think it’s closer to two million. Pastors were rounded up and their wives and daughters were raped in front of them. Then the pastors’ throats were cut and their wives and daughters were taken back to be sex slaves. That’s all been documented.
But through our rebuilding program we’ve rebuilt 256 churches, with 16 under construction. It costs about $80,000 per church to rebuild. We’ve had to build our own construction company. We fabricate the buildings offsite and then erect them. They are well-built. … These buildings will be there for several hundred years. By the end of this year, we plan to have over 350 churches rebuilt in the South and also in the Nuba Mountains [where over 100 churches have been rebuilt].
What is your organization’s overarching strategy in Sudan?
A Moody Bible Institute professor has called on the school to abandon the term white privilege in discussions about diversity, calling it “inflammatory,” “repugnant,” and “unworthy of Christian discourse.”
“I suggest we should rip the term ‘white privilege’ out of our discourse at Moody,” wrote theology professor Bryan Litfin in a letter to the editor published April 15 in the student newspaper. “The underlying issues that need to be addressed should be described with more wholesome, less divisive terminology.”
Litfin proposes five reasons why he believes the term is “intended to address an important topic” yet isn’t biblical enough to be effective because it is “taken straight from a radical and divisive secular agenda.” “The problem is, the term itself is inflammatory, so the real topic goes unheard because of the offense,” he wrote, concluding, “Why employ terms that divide the body of Christ? As students of God’s Word, let us draw our terminology from the Bible, not the wisdom of man.”
The letter follows an apology he made in March for comments he had made on social media about a campus diversity event.
Flyers for the event, called “White Like Me,” said it would feature “thoughts on race from the perspective of a privileged person,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
A flyer for the event, hosted by a Moody student group called Embrace, was vandalized. A photo of the damaged flyer, with the word “privilege” crossed out, was posted online.
Amid discussion of the vandalism, Litfin criticized the idea of “white privilege” and the event itself.
“Using the term ‘white’ to categorize millions of people under one catch-all term, then pegging them as elite oppressors, is offensive on its face and unworthy of Christian discourse,” he wrote on Facebook.
He later apologized, telling the Tribune that his comments were not “worthy of what a professor should do.”
Following the controversy over the defaced flyer and Litfin’s first comments, Moody President Paul Nyquist had emphasized the school’s commitment to diversity in a letter to college community.
That commitment includes talking about white privilege, he said.
“People who are white, such as myself, because we are of the majority culture, often fail to understand the privileges we enjoy due to our skin color, for it is all we have ever known,” he wrote. “Therefore, the conversation hosted on our campus last week is part of an ongoing effort to bring greater campus-wide understanding to the issue and I applaud and affirm its purpose.”
The debate at Moody is part of a larger conversation about race and ethnicity at Christian colleges, driven in large part by the country’s changing demographics.
The term white privilege was first popularized in a 1989 essay by Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women.
In it, McIntosh described an “invisible knapsack” of advantages she experienced by being white in the United States. Those advantages including being able be rent or buy housing wherever she wanted, not being stopped by police because of her race, or seeing people that looked like her on television.
Her essay and the term are often used in discussions of diversity.
But the term is problematic for Christians, says Litfin, because he believes white privilege implies that being white in America is sinful. That kind of collective sin doesn’t apply to Christians, his letter argued, as they are only responsible for their own actions.
“Collective sin was operative in the covenant community of Israel, such as with Achan (Joshua 7),” he wrote. “However, with the arrival of the New Covenant, individuals now stand or fall before God for their own actions (Jeremiah 31:29-30). …Therefore, an entire race should not be held accountable for the sins of individuals. It doesn’t work like that anymore.”
He also argues that the term “can be an unloving use of the power of naming,” “can display a critical spirit that misconstrues reality by highlighting only the negative,” and “can blind us to the cry for social justice from the white oppressed.”
In an email, Litfin said that his concerns have been misunderstood.
“My letter was never intended to deny racism or the unjust disadvantaging of some people. Of course such sin exists in a fallen world,” he said in an email to CT. “I simply wanted to serve my community with some reflections from Scripture about how we should talk about it.”
Litfin agrees the ideas behind the concept of white privilege are worth discussing. But the term is flawed, he said.
“I don’t think we can say skin color automatically gives privilege in our culture. Sometimes it does,” he said. “But what about the white 12-year-old girl who has been sex trafficked? She has no privilege.”
The professor also argued that privilege should be admired and not scorned, since it’s often earned by hard work and prudent decisions. He pointed to his grandfather, an immigrant businessman who “scrimped and saved,” and his father, Duane Litfin, who was the first in the family to go to college and later became president of Wheaton College. Their actions paid off in the future long term.
“This certainly gave me privileges—but that is something God celebrates!” Litfin wrote.
Thabiti Anyabwile, pastor of Anacostia River Church in Washington, D.C., agrees with Litfin, at least in part.
Privilege isn’t a bad thing, he said. It can be used for good. But it also has consequences.
Anyabwile, who has written forcefully about recent racial tensions in the US following the death of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, said he’s not attached to the term white privilege.
He doesn’t see it as a moral judgment against white people. And it doesn’t mean that “every white person was born with a silver spoon in their mouth,” he said.
Instead the term describes a reality in American life that should be acknowledged, no matter what term is used.
“If you are a person of white skin color, you have certain advantages,” he said. “There is a currency that comes with that. We need to be able to describe that reality.”
Diversity experts at Christian colleges agree.
The term white privilege is a useful tool, because it describes a social reality in a helpful way, said Tali Hairston, director of the John M. Perkins Center for Reconciliation, Community Development, and Leadership Training at Seattle Pacific University (SPU).
Hairston said that many of the school’s white students haven’t ever had to think about their race or haven’t experienced any discrimination.
That’s privilege in a nutshell, he said.
At Seattle Pacific, talking about diversity and privilege is an act of kindness, said Hairston. It’s meant to help students of every background understand the world around them better.
For some majors at SPU, such as pre-med, discussions about privilege are mandatory. Students who are going to be doctors need to develop their cultural competency, because they’ll worth with people from all backgrounds, said Hairston. Understanding privilege will help them do that.
He said that students from white evangelical backgrounds in particular often need remedial cultural literacy so they can understand the world from other people’s point of view. That’s a wise and a Christian thing to do, he said.
“They are trying to overcome a deficit of cultural literacy,” he said. “If you were raised in white evangelical culture, you have not had to understand this.”
There’s also a spiritual aspect to discussions of privilege, argues Christena Cleveland, associate professor of reconciliation studies at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She believes that unacknowledged privilege hampers spiritual growth in students.
“Privilege is poison,” said Cleveland, “because it keeps us from connecting with God and others.”
Cleveland uses the term white privilege as a starting point for discussion. This week she planned to have her students write a response to Litfin’s letter to the editor.
Cleveland argues that it’s an important phrase to use. If students only talk about racism or the disadvantages of some ethnic groups, she said, they’ll miss the big picture.
When some groups are disadvantaged in a culture, other groups gain an advantage, she said.
That’s not an easy thing to grapple with, especially for students from privileged background. They’ve often benefited from unearned advantages, said Cleveland. Coming to grips with that can leave them angry and confused.
She recounted a story told by one of her colleagues, in a discussion about diversity. A white student asked, “Are we inherently sinful because we are white?”
“He said, ‘No, you are not sinful because you are white—but you have inherited a sin because you are white. The question is, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” said Cleveland.
Regardless of what term they use, Christians will continue to grapple with questions about diversity, in large part because of the American church’s demographics shifts.
About 7 out of 10 Americans over age 65 identify as white Christians, according to data from the Public Religion Research Institute. Those white Christians outnumber Christians of color of their generation by about 5 to 1. Among American ages 18 to 30, about a third (32%) identify as Christians of color, while only one in four (25%) are white Christians.
As a more diverse groups of Christians come into their own, the culture and power structure of the church will change.
Anyabwile believes that for some Christians, growing diversity is seen as a threat to what had been a “white-defined” way of life in the US.
“That’s what makes the debate so pitched right,” he said.
Getting past that fear, he said, will help the church better fulfill its mission.
One places where this new demographic reality has come to life is at Nyack College, which has campuses in New York City and Rockland, New York. It’s one of the most diverse Christian colleges in the country. Only one in five students—and about half of the faculty—are white, said David Turk, the school’s provost.
For most of its history, most of the students at Nyack were white. That changed in the late 1980s, when the school started recruiting students from New York City. By 1992, about 40 percent of the students were minorities.
The demographic change caused tension, said Turk. Some of the Hispanic students on campus thought professors giving special privileges to white students. Many of those concerns went away over time, especially as the faculty became more diverse.
Turk says that most Christian colleges today will have to learn to discuss hard questions, like the topic of white privilege, because of demographics.
“The demographic change that hit Nyack 20 years ago will soon be hitting the rest of the country,” he said.
Even when they become diverse, Christian colleges will still have to have hard conversations about race and privilege.
“This is a long-term process,” Turk said.
Back at Moody, the controversy over Litfin’s remarks continues over social media, under the hashtag #mbiprivilege.
Embrace, the student group, planned to host a lecture on April 30 entitled “White Privilege: A Sacred Legacy of America’s Civil Religion” by Moody theology professor Michael McDuffee.
Moody’s president said the school is working on becoming “more inclusive and welcoming to students and staff of color.”
“For the past two years, I have personally led a task force which has been charged with developing recommendations and strategies to reach this goal,” Nyquist wrote. “Some of the changes set forth by this group have already been implemented, such as hiring more ethnically diverse faculty and appointing more ethnically diverse trustees.”
More work has yet to be done, he added.
Lebo Pooe, a senior from South Africa, is hopeful about the school’s future, despite the recent conflict.
“The notion that white privilege is not worthy of Christian discourse is extremely hurtful,” she told CT in a phone interview. Discussion of race and privilege are difficult at first, she said, “but only for a season.”
“The more we rub up against each other, the more a beautiful unity emerges.”
On Her.meneutics:
“White Privileged Like Me”: Jamie Janosz looks at Mary McLeod Bethune, Moody Bible Institute, and the legacy of majority culture.
Image: "Just Sayin'," by Ti-Rock Moore, photo by Bart Everson.
How does al-Bashir respond to this?
He listens. He shows respect for what I say. Of course he doesn’t believe it, but he will never be able to stand before God and say, “I didn’t know.”
You say, “We need al-Bashir at the table.” Why should those hoping for peace believe that having him at the table is desirable?
Because there is peace right now in the South, and a government. And as part of the CPA agreement, there will be a referendum in the South for them to vote to secede. People are rebuilding, and the bloodletting has stopped. We are taking a huge risk. But people say this [ICC warrant] is justice. I say, give me a break. What you’re going to do is ignite another war because you’re trying to make a point.
How do you respond to suggestions by the previous administration’s special enjoy to Sudan, Richard Williamson, that al-Bashir is manipulating you and others in the international community and using the suffering Sudanese people as pawns?
I’m sure al-Bashir has his agenda. He may be trying to manipulate the system all he can. That’s why we have to hold his feet to the fire in terms of the peace agreement. President Obama has to pay attention to this. The peace agreement should not be renegotiated. It should be implemented.
If you oppose the ICC’s arrest warrant, what international action, if any, do you believe should be taken to address al-Bashir’s actions?
“Just Sayin’,” Ti-Rock Moore
What do you desire the ICC and the international community to do now that the warrant has been issued?
The damage is done. We have to move past this and get the United States engaged. I encouraged al-Bashir. I said, “Don’t let this ruling discourage you and prevent you from working for peace. You can’t change what’s been done. Now let’s work together for peace.”
It appears that since the 13 international relief agencies have been kicked out, several Arab and Muslim relief organizations have applied to replace them. Could you comment on this?
This is part of the [Sudan] government’s strategy. They say, “If these agencies are going to spy, we’ll put them out and aid groups from Iran and Saudi Arabia can come in and pick up the slack.” I can’t speak to what these groups will do … [but] we are Christian, and we feel we’re supposed to share God’s love with everyone and tell them what Jesus Christ did for us on Calvary’s cross. I want everyone to know that they can have new life and a new beginning in Jesus Christ. So far, God’s given us favor with this government, and I don’t know why. But I hope in the next 10 years to have 10 churches built in Khartoum, and I’ll keep reminding him. I’ll [tell al-Bashir], “That’s what you told me.”
What gives you hope?
Right now there is peace in the South. When I was in Nuba, I visited a Bible school, an evangelical seminary staffed with teachers from Lebanon and Jordan. There are 36 students there about to graduate after a three-year Bible course and become pastors. They are about to graduate and will become new church leaders. That’s what gets me excited.
Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere:
Christianity Today has more articles on Sudan.
