What legacy have we inherited? Reflections on “12 Years A Slave.”

My wife and I watched “12 Years A Slave” this weekend. Needless to say, it was a hard movie to watch. As a pastor, what pained me the most were the parts where the slave-master would read self-serving passages out of the Bible to his slaves to put the stamp of God’s word on his authority as a master. I remember reading in Frederick Douglas’s autobiography that the crueler a master was, the more scripture he would quote. It made me wonder about the theological legacy we’ve inherited in white American Christianity from our slave-holding ancestors.

Nothing makes white people more angry than accusing them of racism or suggesting that the racism of the past still casts a shadow over how life is for black people today. We want to believe that a giant reset button got hit in 1975 or sometime around there and magically all the white people who had said the word “nigger” as part of their daily vocabulary before that were instantaneously healed of their racism. I imagine some white people are angry that they’re still making movies about slavery. Why are you still talking about that? Get over it!!!

What’s strange to me as a Christian is the way that other white Christians get hysterical over the claim that past racism has continued repercussions today when they have no problem with the concept of original sin, that humanity is utterly deformed today because of a minor mistake made a much longer time ago by some guy named Adam (he ate a piece of fruit, y’all!). Racism is the original sin of America. It has shaped us culturally and theologically, regardless of how openly it is or isn’t practiced today. So it’s very reasonable to ask how Christianity failed to stop white Christians 200 years ago from treating black people like cattle. And it’s also reasonable to wonder what aspects of our theology today have been poisoned by racism in the past even if their racist origins are no longer explicit.

I cannot trust any articulation of Christianity which is uninterested in examining how it has been corrupted by racism in the past. For instance, I’m very interested in looking at how racism has influenced the way that white Christians understand the cross. For black slaves, Jesus’ crucifixion showed that he was one of them. While the cross liberates people from sin, it also shows God’s unequivocal solidarity with the world’s crucified. White evangelical Christianity makes the cross more about the anger of the Father in the background than the suffering of the Son in the foreground. And the Father isn’t angry over the injustice against other people that angers the God of Israel in the Bible, because sin is understood strictly as an offense against God’s honor (which makes God seem suspiciously like a cosmic white slave-master who has the right to beat his slaves savagely if they show him the slightest dishonor).

Another thing I’m curious about is the role that racism played in the development of white Christian sexuality. Protecting white female virginity from black male libido was a key linchpin of segregationist culture. Just google Emmett Till or read To Kill a Mockingbird. The original segregationist basis for protecting white girls’ honor has long since been sublimated, but today’s purity balls and “True Love Waits” campaigns still provide white suburbanites with a means for defining themselves against those ghetto welfare mamas who keep opening their legs to get more taxpayer-subsidized handouts with every baby born out of wedlock (never mind that welfare as such ended in the nineties). Obviously there are very real and legitimate reasons to stand up for chaste sexuality against the libertine sexuality that American capitalism uses as its favorite marketing tool. But there is much disentangling that needs to occur.

I recognize that God can make good come out of beliefs with dubious origins and that there are many different sources for the beliefs that white American Christians have today. But some of our theology and morality is packaged together with defensiveness and denial about racism. Jesus died on the cross for our sins not in order to sanction our defensiveness and denial about the way that the past continues to haunt our present, but so that we can face our people’s past without fear and with an earnest desire for redemption and reconciliation with those who still suffer because of the sins of our ancestors.