{"id":285,"date":"2014-12-04T17:48:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-04T17:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/12\/more-than-ferguson.html"},"modified":"2014-12-04T17:48:00","modified_gmt":"2014-12-04T17:48:00","slug":"more-than-ferguson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/12\/more-than-ferguson.html","title":{"rendered":"More than Ferguson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

by Miles S Mullin, II<\/a>
R3 Contributor<\/span><\/p>\n


<\/span><\/span>After the St. Louis County (MO) Grand Jury in Ferguson declined to indict Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, chaos ensued. Certainly, chaos ensued in the streets of Ferguson as protests turned into riots throughout the city. At the same time, chaos of a different sort emerged among evangelicals. In the aggregate, evangelicals (and here I really mean white evangelicals) were uncertain how to respond to the developments in Ferguson. On the one hand, many felt a natural inclination to support former Officer Wilson\u2019s version events. On the other hand, many others\u2013having come through the racial reconciliation emphases of the 1990s\u2013felt discomfited by such a \u201cconservative approach\u201d due to the circumstances of the case.<\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

After Michael Brown was killed, Ed Stetzer began posting a series of articles on his Christianity Today blog entitled \u201cA Time to Listen<\/a>.\u201d Listening is good, and many of the posts are helpful, instructive, and insightful. But why does it take tragic events to catalyze white evangelical listening? Unless they have been silenced by why-do-you-make-everything-about-race shaming, black evangelicals are willing to share something they know that we (white) evangelicals do not: white and black evangelicals experience life differently in the United States because of race. <\/span><\/p>\n


As white evangelicals, we may wish that this were not the case. We may wish that being white did not grant us the privilege of \u201cno assumptions\u201d in so many arenas of society. We may wish that we lived in the society of the catch phrases: a color-blind society; a post-racial society. But we do not. Instead, we live in a racialized society, \u201ca society wherein race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities, and social relationships (Emerson and Smith, 7).\u201d White evangelicals have a difficult time coming to terms with this for several reasons.<\/span><\/div>\n


First, the historic evangelical emphasis on the necessity of individual conversion through repentance and personal faith in Christ colors the way evangelicals view evil in the world. The (correct, in my estimation) emphasis leads them to see sin solely in personal terms, a position so eloquently expressed in the Facebook post<\/a> by New Orleans Saint Benjamin Watson. And, while I certainly endorse that perspective, a myopic focus on it in relation to social ills fails to account for the fact that there is systemic evil and institutionalized wrongdoing that transcend the aggregation of individual sin in society. That is what we see in many of the idolatrous societies portrayed in the Old Testament as well as what we see, in part, in Paul\u2019s reference to \u201cpowers and principalities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Second, regardless of the subversive heritage<\/a> that American evangelicalism may (or may not) have possessed in the past, by the late twentieth century, its dominant form was reflexively conservative, characterized more by Billy Graham\u2019s \u201cpolitics of decency<\/a>\u201d than Ron Sider\u2019s<\/a> sort of \u201csocial action.\u201d For the most part, contemporary white evangelicals respect authority and comfortably speak of \u201cthe rule of law.\u201d As corollaries, two things occur. <\/p>\n

First, this means that\u2013despite their own doctrine of depravity\u2013they have a propensity to believe the accounts of those in authority vis-\u00e0-vis other witnesses, reflexively defending their actions. We see this in Ferguson, but also in the Rodney King debacle, when many white evangelicals ridiculously defended the actions of the police officers who beat King. Second, in describing their position they end up employing language with a history of racial oppression, using such phrases as \u201claw and order.\u201d Such terms have a weighty history that African Americans remember well, a history of being, at best, the position of white Southern moderates, at worst code words for segregation.<\/p>\n

Third, white evangelicals have a hard time coming to terms with the difficult truth that the United States is a racialized society because they want it to be otherwise. They want America to be the sort of meritocracy of opportunity about which David Brooks<\/a> dreams. That is a great desire and a worthy dream. But it will only be more closely approximated when both individual sin is confronted and the systemic ills that perpetuate injustices are addressed. It is not an either\/or proposition, and it is about so much more than Ferguson.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Miles S Mullin, IIR3 Contributor After the St. Louis County (MO) Grand Jury in Ferguson declined to indict Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, chaos ensued. Certainly, chaos ensued in the streets of Ferguson as protests turned into riots throughout the city. At the same time, chaos of a different sort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMore than Ferguson<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"by Miles S Mullin, IIR3 ContributorAfter the St. Louis County (MO) Grand Jury in Ferguson declined to indict Darren Wilson in the shooting death of\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/12\/more-than-ferguson.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"More 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