The past decade has created a new dialogue on issues of racial reconciliation and the role religion plays in it. From Robert P. Jones’ White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity to Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, there is much conversation within and without Black and white circles as to how to understand Christian identity in light of events like the death of George Floyd.
The newest of these is a new PBS documentary that recently premiered at the National Press Club March 7. Religion, Racism & Reconciliation is making the rounds as a “ground-breaking” exploration of America’s complicated relationship between religious identity and racism, which it describes as America’s “original sin.” It is currently available for free online.
There is no denying much has changed in recent years as the public struggled to come to terms with Floyd’s horrific death in 2020, which completely changed the tone of how the public approached the issue of race. It spurred years of introspection and dialogue, skyrocketed anti-racist activists into national attention, and became a priority for the Biden administration. That wave has momentarily crested in the past year, as the Trump administration has targeted diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as a matter of policy through executive orders.
“The film makes an important statement, that religion can be used to divide but also to unite.”
The portrait Religion, Racism & Reconciliation paints of the United States is a complicated and painful one and asks the challenging question of what it truly means for a deeply disunited and divided culture to come together over the issue of race. The film makes an important statement, that religion can be used to divide but also to unite.
As the film suggests, American Christianity has effectively divided in half, into White Christianity and Black Christianity. The former has become ensnared with racial and political ideals that blind it to the truth of the gospel and force it into ideas the documentary’s interviewees point out are both historically inaccurate and theologically heretical. Just as slave owners who looked to the Bible as a means of defending slavery were acting against the meaning of the text.
Conversely, the film suggests Black Christianity is far more in tune with the spirit of the gospel due to its history of oppression, asserting that Christianity is a religion for the oppressed against oppressors.
The film’s vision of Black Christianity is far more all-encompassing than just being about the evils of slavery and segregation. It argues that the language of Scripture provides a language through which Black Christians have the power to appeal to God amid ongoing societal issues like voter disenfranchisement, mass incarceration, police brutality, limited health care access, and lack of affordable housing.
The anecdotes it pulls from to paint such a complex portrait are vast, from white Lutherans in Minneapolis helping activists during the Floyd protests, to indigenous pastors struggling to divorce Christ from the faith of those who disenfranchised their ancestors, to portraits of how faith helped save and reform young men in prison, to interfaith bus tours working together to promote justice initiatives. The experts interviewed come from a wide set of faiths and denominations, although the majority are clergy of Mainline Protestant sects.
More than anything, Religion, Racism & Reconciliation is a call to action for its viewers, particularly challenging white audience members to consider what it means to get past their “whiteness” and “privilege” to participate in rebuilding society to become more just. It repeatedly casts the white church’s racial identity, expressed through ideologies like Christian nationalism, as a form of idolatry.
And as America becomes more religiously and ethnically diverse, it argues that whiteness is being enacted through reactionary crackdowns against minorities that leave minority populations heavily incarcerated and poor — a backlash from a population that feels threatened by change.
With our culture being as heavily divided as it is, American religion is certainly fractured along the same lines as everything else. Every denomination has conservative and progressive factions with wildly different priorities. The documentary acknowledges it is hard to imagine a world where anything can bridge these divides, particularly when such a massive reckoning is being called for.
The film is correct, though, in its estimation that Scripture calls us to unity (John 17:22-23) and that the barriers of race are a fiction that divides us (Galatians 3:28). That we fail to be united in Christ is a scandal against the gospel, but the places in our culture where Christ is at work often are those in which those barriers break down, as the movie makes clear.
Tyler Hummel is a Wisconsin-based freelance critic and journalist, a member of the Music City Film Critics Association, a regular film and literature contributor at Geeks Under Grace, and was the 2021 College Fix Fellow at Main Street Nashville.