Why Don’t Black Lives Matter to White Christians?

Now of course I’m not suggesting that Sterling died for some grand cause.  He died because the police officers involved were bullheaded, violent, poorly-trained morons who knew they would almost certainly get away with killing him.

However…

It was still an execution, not an accident.  These officers of the State saw that Sterling was not going to simply bow his head to their supposedly God-given authority, lace up his shufflin’ shoes, and call them massa, so they reacted by killing him.

Photo credit: Johnny Silvercloud via Foter.com / CC BY-SA

Where is the spirit of radical resistance to oppression in today’s white Christian community?  Just look at the statistics:  black men ages 15-34 make up 2% of America’s population, but 15% of police deaths.  Ultimately, in 2015, they were nine times more likely to be killed by the police than their white counterparts.

Now, conservatives don’t like these statistics, and they will make up all the excuses in the world (“but they commit more crimes!”) to discount them.  Unfortunately for them, facts are facts, regardless of your explanations and justifications, and they prove beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt that there is a racial component to police violence.  It’s settled.  Move past it.

Since Jesus’s Kingdom of God was brought specifically to the oppressed, the brutalized, the downtrodden, and the lowly, shouldn’t justice for the African-American community be a top priority of all Christians?  Why are so many of them so vehemently against it that they will engage in mental gymnastics to avoid calling a spade a spade?

It is because their brand of Christianity has almost nothing to do with the historical Jesus.  This is a prime example of what happens when you extricate the historical Jesus of Nazareth from the religion ostensibly founded on his character.

The historical Jesus of Nazareth was executed by the State, which right away means that Christians should not support capital punishment under any circumstances.  But they do!

The historical Jesus of Nazareth dedicated his life to resisting injustice wherever it reared its ugly head.  But when confronted with blatant, factual, undeniable injustice, white conservative Christians close their eyes.

The historical Jesus of Nazareth commanded his followers to welcome strangers into their lands, and said however we treat these strangers is how we are ultimately treating God.  And yet, our white conservative Christians froth at the mouth when discussing immigration and the need to “take their country back.”

The historical Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew who created a Jewish movement primarily for Jews in the Jewish homeland, and then was written about by Jews who used their Jewish scriptures to tell a Jewish story about him.  And yet the foundational beliefs of conservative evangelical Christianity are based not on anything Jewish, but on the Gentile heresy of biblical inerrancy and much-later theological constructs like the Trinity and, most relevantly, the theory of substitutionary atonement and original sin.

See, Christianity takes Jesus the Jew and turns him into an ethereal, celestial, divine, and white being unconcerned with the goings-on of Planet Earth.  If his primary purpose was to be God and allow God to sacrifice himself as the Son in order to make up for Eve eating an apple and the sins we supposedly all commit (but…wasn’t Job blameless and without sin?  He wasn’t God…), then all the inconvenient stuff about justice and the Kingdom of God becomes not only sanitized and sterilized, but secondary.

When the purpose of faith in Christ is “getting into Heaven,” then injustice on the Earth simply matters less.  When Christ was crucified not as a consequence of his radical sociopolitical beliefs but because of some divine plan, the sociopolitical beliefs that landed him on the cross become unimportant.  When the “love” that Jesus and Paul spoke of is reduced to a banal feeling of “not wishing harm on anyone,” it becomes not love but benign apathy.  To separate distributive justice and restorative righteousness from love is to destroy both concepts completely.

So if you are a Christian and you strive earnestly for the Kingdom of God, I need you to say to yourself, “Black Lives Matter.”  Right now.  I want you to actually say it out loud.

Because our black brothers and sisters are under attack.  Not by individuals, but by a system.  And it will take all of us to dismantle that system, not as great white saviors, but as active participants in and supporters of the efforts of the black community.

Whatever Alton Sterling’s criminal past, he did not deserve to die.  Jesus took that judgment away from us when he commanded us to love our enemies and our neighbors all the same.  His death was an injustice, plain and simple, and Christians are called to fight injustice with love.

As the great “revolutionary Christian” Cornel West once wrote, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

Jesus couldn’t have said it better himself.