African Americans: Evangelical Racism?

With the rise of Afrocentric thought in American culture, evidenced most recently by the release of Spike Lee’s movie Malcolm X, Christianity Today interviewed black evangelical leaders and found similar discontent and debate raging there.

Anthony Evans swims in the evangelical mainstream. He holds a doctorate from Dallas Theological Seminary. His Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas boasts 3,000 members. Evans has even launched a radio ministry that has gained listeners throughout the nation.

But not in Dallas. “KCBI in Dallas won’t let me on the air,” Evans says. “Many radio stations have turned me down, saying a black speaker would offend their white listeners.”

This is not the only rebuff Evans has received. He has issued a new book on blacks and Christianity through his own publishing company, partly because some white-owned evangelical houses declined to publish it. Evans adds that many Christian bookstores will not stock it.

Evans may be disappointed, but he is not surprised. “Unfortunately, the concerns of black Americans are not of dominant concern, by and large, to white evangelicals,” he says.

Evans’s opinion may sound extreme to many white Christians, but among black evangelicals, he is in the mainstream. Evans’s criticisms of racism among white evangelicals were echoed and amplified in conversations Christianity Today had with a number of prominent black Christians. As they see it, many conservative white Christians view their black brethren with attitudes ranging from apathy to hostility, with room for a little condescension.

The result: a sense of frustration among many black Christian leaders—frustration that has helped to spawn an increased willingness to question Eurocentric views of Christianity. More and more black evangelicals are striving to understand the teachings of the Bible in the context of African and African-American history and culture, an “Afrocentric” approach that mirrors similar efforts in the broader culture to reinterpret history from an African basis as opposed to a European basis.

Strained Relations

This Afrocentric movement has been going on for years among American blacks who feel that white society has no place for them. Books about black history, art, and culture are popular as never before. And blacks are seeking to relate to God in ways untainted by European racism.

One result of this is renewed interest in Islam, the faith of radical black activist Malcolm X, who is the subject of Spike Lee’s movie Malcolm X, released earlier this month.

But only recently has the Afrocentric movement begun to take root among black pastors and scholars trained at white evangelical institutions. One major reason is the growing impatience with the perceived racism of white Christians. William H. Bentley, president of the National Black Evangelical Association (NBEA), is especially critical of the attitudes of the whites who dominate the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE): “It holds itself as white first and Christian second.… White supremacy—they would shrink from being called that. But they practice it. They practice it like all white people.”

Bentley concedes that the NAE’s Social Action Commission has met with members of the NBEA to seek out common ground. A series of meetings culminated in a 1990 joint statement insisting that white evangelicals must repent of the sin of racism and work to purge it from the church.

But Bentley says the joint statement has not brought about any change. He says real power at the NAE rests with an executive committee, which ignores the work of the Social Action Commission. “We don’t get any direct action from their top executives,” he said. As a result, Bentley said the NBEA had no plans to continue meeting with NAE officials. “We are going to retreat from it,” he said.

In an initial conversation with NAE president Billy Melvin, Melvin admitted that racism remains a problem among white evangelicals, but added, “It’s much better than it was.… Much progress has been made.”

Melvin rejected Bentley’s claim of strained relations between the NAE and the NBEA. “We have had an open-door policy for as long as I can remember,” he said. Melvin said it was improper “to suggest that there’s even a story that there’s any tension with NBEA,” calling the matter “a nonstory.”

Melvin suggested that former NBEA president Reuben Conner would provide a different perspective. But Conner’s view of the NBEA-NAE relationship seems identical to Bentley’s. “I think there’s tension there,” said Conner, president of the Urban Theological Mission in Dallas. “It’s a lot of ‘I love you’ rhetoric and very little tangible results.”

In a subsequent interview with Melvin, he replied, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t agree with [Conner’s assertion], NAE is wide open. I have personally appealed for years for more involvement, not only from the black community, but from every ethnic community in this country.”

Melvin also said he worked to get more blacks into leadership positions in evangelical organizations. “Reuben Conner is on the board of World Relief because I recommended his name.”

Conner was particularly troubled by the alleged failure of wealthy white evangelical organizations to share their resources with impoverished black ministries. His work as a board member of World Relief, the international evangelical relief agency of the NAE, has only increased his frustration. “They spend millions of dollars in the Third World,” Conner said. “There is a tremendous need for the same thing in America, but they will not spend a dime.”

World Relief Executive Director Arthur Gay said he and Conner “sit over the table and pray over this and agonize over this.” Gay added, “He is a very compassionate guy, and if he feels the way he said to [CT], that means he’s got some experience of that, and that’s very sad. We don’t have clean hands in this. Racism is everywhere in the evangelical church as well as it is in the whole society.”

Black Presence In The Bible

The continuing perception that white Christians care little about the interests of their black brethren is one factor leading many African-American evangelicals to forge their own theology, one that makes the problems and interests of blacks a central concern.

Says H. Malcolm Newton of the Center for Urban Theological Studies in Philadelphia, “We must begin to reread the Bible and ask the question, ‘Hath God said what white evangelicals have been telling us he said all these years?’ ”

Newton said that black evangelical theology is virtually identical in its core doctrine to the faith of white evangelicals. But black Christians have always applied Scripture in ways that reflect the challenges of their lives in America.

For example, said Newton, many whites interpret the Book of Exodus mainly as a foreshadowing of the redemptive work of Christ. But among the descendants of slaves, Exodus is a story of how God reaches directly into history to free a nation from political and social oppression. “When blacks read the Book of Exodus,” Newton said, “we see a liberator.”

Some Afrocentric scholars go further, challenging the perceived tacit assumption of many white Christians that the characters of the Bible were white people, even though the Bible’s setting was Africa and the Middle East.

Black evangelical thinkers such as Walter McCray assert that many major characters in the Bible, including Jesus, must have had black African ancestors. “The Bible has a pervasive and predominant black presence, particularly in the Old Testament,” says McCray, author of the two-volume The Black Presence in the Bible.

Anthony Evans quotes McCray’s work approvingly in his new book, Are Blacks Spiritually Inferior to Whites? Evans sees evangelical Afrocentrism as an antidote to the growing appeal of Islam. “There’s a strong black presence in the Bible,” says Evans. “That ought to be a basis of our pride, not the cultural standards of our day.”

William Pannell, professor of evangelism and preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, says Afrocentrism “provides another important antidote for us … which defrays the debilitating effect of white cultural racism.”

Distorting The Message?

But some black evangelicals fear that Afrocentrism could distort the Christian message, just as white racism has done. Pastor and activist John Perkins is sympathetic to the Afrocentric movement, but says he hates to see it.

“It is disgraceful of whites that they so oppressed blacks that they had to go to that extreme to affirm their dignity,” Perkins said. “I think a true theology would affirm the dignity of all people.” But Perkins expects the popularity of Afrocentric Christianity to grow, as white Christians continue to ignore the plight of their black brethren.

To Pannell, Afrocentrism is a benign result of a fearful problem—the growing distrust and anger between blacks and whites in every part of American society. Pannell says the Los Angeles riots only hinted at the bitterness. “We are going to have to take some rather courageous and extraordinary steps to avoid a race war,” he said.

In the church, Pannell said, most of those steps must be taken by white Christians. “It’s the white culture’s problem, not ours,” he said. The first step, Pannell says, is sincere repentance of racism by white evangelicals.

“Until something like that happens,” he says, “I don’t envision black evangelicals taking their white counterparts seriously.”

By Hiawatha Bray.

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