Karen J. Johnson, a professor of history (and department chair) at Wheaton College, has just published a book about Christians’ struggle for racial justice that is designed (at least in part) for Christians outside of academia.
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Her earlier book, One in Christ: Chicago Catholics and the Quest for Interracial Justice, is an academic monograph published with a university press. Her new book, Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice: A History of Christians in Action, is a little different. Published with IVP Academic and designed for a Christian audience, it’s a collection of stories of “ordinary” Christians from the 1930s through the late 20th century who took risks in order to pursue racial reconciliation or racial justice. It’s also deeply personal. And it’s arriving at a moment when much of the white American evangelical church seems to be turning away from its brief moment of interest in racial justice.
In my interview with Karen Johnson, I spoke with her about how her book can help us at this particular moment – and what she hopes her book will accomplish.
DKW: Your first book, One in Christ, is a historical monograph published with an academic press. Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice is a different type of book. It’s written in a somewhat different style than your first book, it’s published with a Christian press, and you may have written it with a different audience in mind. Can you tell readers what Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice is and why you wrote it?
KJJ: We are shaped by our contexts. I have the gift of working with Tracy McKenzie who challenged the Conference on Faith and History in his 2012 presidential address to labor in the field of history not only to contribute to the scholarly conversations about our subject, but to speak to the church. He said the questions we raise may not be ones dealing with causation, but rather ones dealing with meaning. I was not at that CFH meeting, but Tracy’s convictions have shaped Wheaton College’s history department, my own teaching, and my scholarship, and I am grateful for his examples in The First Thanksgiving, A Little Book for New Historians, and We the Fallen People.
In short, I wanted to write for the church in Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice and to do what I get to do with students over the course of a semester. The book, like my classes, has three layers. First, it’s about what happened; in this case, I wanted to show how Christianity influenced the systemic developments shaping race in America, especially in housing and economics. To narrow the subject and allow for sufficient depth, I centered this narrative on the Great Migration and the long civil rights movement. But given my hopeful disposition, I also wanted to give examples of people who were resisting the dynamics leading to segregation and hierarchy, and so use four case studies to move the narrative forward.
Second, I show how historians think because I am convinced that thinking historically can help people become better disciples of Jesus. To do this, I narrate pieces of my own research process. I have become convinced that some of the most important work historians can do is to teach our students to think historically–to ask good questions, to account for sources’ contexts, to specify the things we don’t know and where we are making educated guesses, to justify why we use sources as we do, and to do all this with a frame of loving the dead. In these, Lendol Calder, Sam Wineburg, and Beth Barton Schweiger have been foundational to my thinking Most monographs and popular histories, however, show only the conclusions the author has drawn, and textbooks are even worse in their playing the ‘God-trick,’ speaking as though all the mysteries of the past have been solved. They rarely reveal the process of reaching the conclusions or raise wondering questions that acknowledge the limits to our knowledge. Instead, they model a mastery of material, a frame that characterizes theological education and western education more generally. But as Willie Jennings has argued so brilliantly, this assumption that we ought to strive to master a subject is an embodiment of a mangled Christian imagination that leads to isolation and oppression rather than connection with God and with others. After all, if I know everything, do I really need God or anyone else?
Third, I lead readers to moral reflection, or letting the past be a mirror that might show us who we really are and help us see the ways in which we have fallen short. Parker Palmer’s argument that students and teachers need to allow the things we study to ask for a response has shaped me here. In this, I was walking a line: I think people do history well when they are not using it to make a moral point or, even worse, weaponizing it for their current agenda. To try to separate what happened and how I figured that out with what it means, I included pointed questions with some commentary at the end of each chapter. These questions are intended to help individual readers and groups reflect on what they can learn from, not just about, the past.
DKW: Why do American Christians (and especially American White Christians) need to learn about the history of race in the United States? What do you hope they’ll learn from this book?
KJJ: We need to learn about race because it is something that has divided the Body of Christ, led to suffering, and hindered the witness of Christians because we do not love one another.
In this I speak as a white American Christian who, like everyone else, has my own blind spots. But, as Michael Emerson and Christian Smith argue in their classic Divided by Faith, white evangelical Christians have a theological toolkit that includes an emphasis on relationships (i.e. I have a personal relationship with Jesus), is anti-structural (i.e. in reading Scripture, I believe that God can speak to me personally through it, without the mediating interpretation of a church hierarchy), and is focused on the individual (i.e. I have a relationship with Jesus). While those tools are gifts that white evangelicalism brings to the broader church, like any strength, they can become a weakness when their limits are not accounted for. Emerson and Smith found that when white evangelicals were living in a majority-minority community, they were able to see the systemic effects of race. But when they were in majority white settings, they could use these frames to perpetuate a racialized society.
My hope is that readers will see the fullness of the Gospel, lived out imperfectly in the four case studies, and also be able to understand the systemic developments that have shaped race and Christianity in the United States.
DKW: Your book is structured around the stories of four individual Christians (or small groups of Christians) who confronted issues of racial injustice using their faith. How did you choose these four particular stories to tell – and what do you hope your readers will learn from each of them?
KJJ: History is a discipline that is shaped by particularity. Unlike social scientists (and I may be unfair here), we do not assume that the narratives we tell can explain everything in part because of contingency. History deals in the unexpected.
I landed on the four case studies through a process of trial and error as I taught about race, justice, and reconciliation in my classes at Wheaton. I did try to find a balance of Northerners and Southerners, and expanding into the South after studying race in the urban and suburban north during graduate school was new territory.
The book, in a sense, is autobiographical in that I chose people who had influenced me in my own journey towards racial justice as a white evangelical Christian. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s without realizing that race mattered in American history and with an implicit theology that assumed that the Gospel was primarily about my personal relationship with Jesus that would make me a happier person and give me a ticket to heaven. It was only in seminary that I learned about the impact of race on American Christianity and that the Good News extended to people’s souls and bodies. In short, I stopped spiritualizing the portions of Scripture that spoke about poverty, suffering, and justice.
Catherine de Hueck opens the book because her story (1) shows the nationwide impacts of race, as she is in the North and (2) because she was a Catholic whose tradition has a thick theology of engagement in social issues that has nurtured me. I wrote about Catherine in One in Christ, too. Her story could have been fiction. To give just a glimpse, she was a refugee from the Russian Revolution who nearly died at the hands of Communists and watched them kill her family members. But when she moved into neighborhoods where Communists were recruiting working class folks first in Toronto and then in Harlem, she refused to label people Communist and dismiss them. She sought to learn from them, to let their actions help her analyze the causes of poverty, and to confess her own role in making a world where people suffered.
John Perkins, the black evangelical leader, shows us how sometimes we have to relocate to see the full implications of the Gospel. I primarily write about his work in the 1960s, when he was moving back to Mississippi from California with the intention of focusing on evangelism and discipleship. In Mississippi, John and Vera Mae, his wife, had to ask the question: is the Gospel big enough to handle racism and poverty? They answered yes, and developed a working theology of the church that called Christians to social action, community development, and working for justice in addition to evangelism and discipleship. This was the wholistic gospel, rather than a gospel that just saved a person out of this world.
Clarence Jordan was a white Southerner, a New Testament scholar and founder of the interracial Koinonia Farm. Like Perkins, he moved back to the rural South from a city to try to make things better for people there. During his graduate work, he became convinced that Christians were called to share their possessions with one another so that no one was in need, and that they should not make distinctions on the basis of color. At Koinonia Farm, they did just that and faced serious repercussions in the form of violence and boycotts. Clarence has taught me that we ought to live our lives faithfully, scorning the consequences. He lived as though God’s economy was more real than the earthly economy.
Raleigh and Paulette Washington and Glen and Lonni Kehrein take us back to the North with their stories. The Washingtons founded Rock of Our Salvation church, where I was a member in the mostly Black Chicago neighborhood where I moved, following John Perkins’s call. The Kehreins had moved to that neighborhood with a desire to serve those experiencing the negative effects of white flight. The story of the relationship between the two couples and the interracial relationship building they led at Rock Church teaches us the importance of seeking first to understand, along with the persistence needed for interracial relationships. Rock Church was a leader in the racial reconciliation movement of the 1990s, but resisted the colorblindness characterizing white evangelical orthodoxy in that period and had a radical edge because of its location.
DKW: Your book focuses almost entirely on stories of racial justice that took place between the 1930s and the 1980s, and the timeline you include at the end of your book ends in 2013. But the years when you were writing the book overlapped with new episodes in the history of racial justice and injustice in America: the Black Lives Matter movement, the political polarization in America’s churches following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and national debates about “critical race theory,” among other things. In what way can the lessons you draw from the mid-20th century help us meet the challenges of the 21st century? What continuities (or discontinuities) do you see between the struggles faced by the people whose stories you tell and the struggles that Christians engaged in the quest for racial justice face today?
KJJ: You are either pointing out a weakness or a strength in the book. The historical narrative ends in the late 1990s, though I do, as you say, end the story in 2013 when my husband and I moved from the city to the suburbs. I hesitate to do recent history in part because I think we don’t yet have enough distance to be able to assess significance.
That said, I wrote the book thinking that the church in America is in the midst of a Kairos moment, a time in which we have an opportunity to respond to a movement of God. If we steep ourselves in Scripture and read the times accurately, we can join God in God’s work. Lessons I would draw that account for continuity and change include:
- While this moment is unique, it is not unprecedented. People in the past lived through great polarization in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, with conflicts over Vietnam, civil rights, and women’s roles. We can take courage, then, in our own polarized moment because others have done the same.
- People have agency. People in the past also lived through the dismantling of the civil rights gains of the Reconstruction era during the rise of Jim Crow. They also worked to dchange laws and to empower people, eventually leading to the civil rights gains of the 1960s. I chose people in this book that are less famous because I want people to know that they can work for what is right, true, and beautiful in their own contexts. They don’t have to be national leaders to do that.
- We need one another. It’s easy to demonize the other. But the work of the Gospel draws people together, reconciling us not only to God but to one another. Each of the ordinary heroes I wrote about crossed lines for Christian fellowship and justice.
- Be humble. Studying history shows us that we don’t know it all, but if we learn from others who are different from us, we can account for some of our blind spots.
DKW: Your book draws a connection between historical study and activism, a connection that not all historians (or all Christians) have accepted. In what way do you think the study of the past can make a person a better activist for justice and a better servant in God’s kingdom? How would you respond to Christians who have denounced “critical race theory” or approaches to the study of the past that inspire social justice, because they believe that these approaches reflect a left-wing bias that is incompatible with historical objectivity and with the principles of biblical Christianity?
KJJ: Studying the past can help people live faithfully, pursuing justice and working for Christ and the fullness of his kingdom in the present, in at least two ways. First, you can learn from others by studying their strategies and how they framed their work. Catherine de Hueck, for instance, knew that she needed to be strengthened by Jesus to do the hard work of serving poor people (in whom she saw Christ), speaking prophetically to white American Catholics, and trying to lead a community of lay leaders in the work of interracial justice. She protected her interior life through prayer and daily Mass, which were some of the resources of her Christian tradition. To use a more well-known example, Dr. King knew that the press followed him and he used the presence and power of the press to shine a light on the injustice inherent in northern and southern racial logics.
Second, historical study gives us the gift of historical consciousness, of realizing that the things we assume are normal and even normative are often historical developments. C.S. Lewis’s frame of chronological snobbery is helpful here, which he defined as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.” Each age, Lewis noted, has its own illusions. We are unable to go to the future to see ourselves more clearly, but we can read old books and study those who went before us, which will allow the “fresh sea breeze of the centuries” to clear our minds and help us see more clearly. For instance, most white Southerners before the civil rights movement assumed that God supported segregation and to try to dismantle segregation was an attack on the Bible. That reading of Scripture has a history, and recognizing the history can help us see why they read the Bible that way. Studying history can help us see the developments that led to some of our own “facts” today, including that Biblical Christianity does not demand that Christians seek justice.
The rise of the assumption that seeking justice is somehow not Christian has a history that is complicated, of course, and that others have taken up. But I’ll just note that nineteenth century white evangelical Christians were among the many who were working to make society more just. The leaders of my own institution, Wheaton College, were immediate abolitionists in the 1860s who saw their work to end slavery as an outworking of their commitment to the Gospel. Yet through the 1940s, the school’s commitment to African Americans’ well-being gradually declined. There were many reasons for this shift, but I’ll just note the rise of the fundamentalist/modernist debates in the early 20th century that led many evangelicals, again for complicated reasons, turned inward and adopted a premillennial eschatology that discounted the need for working to bring justice on the earth. This, coupled with the suburbanization of white American evangelicalism after World War II, has led to a faith that emphasizes individual comfort over sacrifice.
Scripture is clear that Christians are called to seek justice if we are to faithfully follow our master, Jesus. In the Old Testament, righteousness and justice nearly always are together. We cannot have personal righteousness without seeking justice. And to give just one example from the New Testament, Jesus announced his ministry by saying that he had come to proclaim good news to the poor, proclaim liberty to the captives, and provide sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4.18-19). We need to repent of the fact that justice is something that people do not associate with Christianity and engage, even as we recognize why we have not done so. We also can be grateful that Jesus came to give us sight and freedom, too.
I will also note that I disagree with the idea that history can be objective. That notion has a history that I won’t go into here, but no one can be objective. That’s part of being human; we cannot see anything completely clearly and we are situated in our own times and places, which give us limited perspectives. Rather than fight against that, trying to be God, we can embrace our limitations. A more helpful approach is to seek to determine our biases and account for them by reading and engaging widely, including with those who hold different perspectives from our own. We also must remember that history is different from the past. The past is all that has happened, which no one but God can know. History is the remembered past, or to put it differently, the true stories we tell about the past, which is the definition I explore in Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice. The second part of the definition, stories, acknowledges that we cannot tell everything that happened. We choose a beginning, middle, and end, and are always weighing questions of significance that are shaped by our own frames. But these stories must be true; they must be grounded in evidence and they cannot dismiss evidence that provokes questions about an interpretation or avoid counterarguments.
DKW: How would you like to see Christians engage with Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice? If someone were considering using this book in a church class or book reading group, for instance, what would you say to encourage them to pick this book up and share it with others – and what questions would you encourage them to ask of themselves and others as they begin reading it?
I would encourage them to be open to historical study and moral reflection, not just learning about the past. The three layers of the book–content, historical thinking, and moral reflection–are valuable because they not only shape what we know, but have the potential to affect how we think and act.
KJJ: I do believe that the stories of the people in this book point to the fullness of the Gospel, the good news, which can bring eternal life (which starts now), joy, justice, and healing. I would ask them to wonder about the imperfect witnesses of the lives of these historical actors, and let those lives be a mirror in which they can see themselves more clearly so they can walk more faithfully in the present.
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