Reggie Williams is a writer, teacher and activist who teaches at St. Louis University. His book Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus is an exceptional examination of how Dietrich Bonhoeffer was shaped and changed by his experience in the Black church in Harlem. What Bonhoeffer learned shaped his conceptions of resistance, and Bonhoeffer — and the Black church — rightly read, could shape our resistance as well. This interview is an abridged version of a much longer conversation. I’m so grateful to Reggie for his engagement.
Greg Garrett: I wonder if you could tell us what Bonhoeffer learned in Harlem about the Black Jesus that animated his work later on. And why you believe he’s the only 20th-century theologian really paying attention to racism?
Reggie Williams: I think what I meant is that he’s the only one who saw racism as a Christian problem, a problem Christians must address. For him, it was central to following Jesus. Some people see it as something Christians can pay attention to if they want to empathize with people of color or sympathize with people of color or something like that. But he didn’t see it in that way. He saw this as a problem Christians all must address, an obstacle to community, to life together.
Reggie Williams
(Bonhoeffer) trained in the center of imperialism, a post-World War I moment where Germans longed for their greatness again. He sensed some incongruities. All this suffering, all this depression. Does Christianity have anything to say about these things? Does it have anything to say about the people who are languishing in poverty? How about those people who have lost family members? Does the church have anything to say to them? Because as he experienced it in Germany, the church was just a part of bourgeois culture.
So, he went to Harlem and encountered the Abyssinian Baptist Church and a Black Social Gospel that was paying attention to the needs and the experiences of people who were facing white supremacy, your entire body under the duress of a politically oppressive regime. This is what the Black Social Gospel is about. And he was fascinated by it. Why? As he said, their whole body was under the gospel. It spoke to the poverty. It spoke to oppression. It was not just compartmentalized.
“This is what the Black Social Gospel is about. And he’s fascinated by it.”
GG: Where have people gotten Bonhoeffer wrong and how do we get him right?
RW: I’m a Black theologian who worked in a seminary and in the academy. The folks who get him wrong have no idea what that Black world is. They struggle to recognize the Black theological contribution as an academic one. The next mistake would be these cultural wars here in the United States. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not a U.S. conservative. But he was also not a U.S. progressive. So, what they get wrong is they fail to recognize he was German, trained and raised in a colonial worldview.
Many conservatives love him because he was willing to die for his principles and his doctrine, even in the face of government overreach. Conservative Christians had this very powerful sense under Obama, and to a lesser extent under Biden, that conservative Christians were suffering. Oppressed.
GG: They were having to listen to opinions that were not their own.
RW: And so, you know, to have this figure they can appropriate as a person willing to die for his beliefs, that’s attractive.
GG: Many people in the white church are trying to learn the lessons that Bonhoeffer learned from the Black church so that they can become a community of resistance standing up for the message of Jesus.
“Bonhoeffer would argue we need to be able to read the Bible against ourselves.”
RW: You know, I want to visit something you were just saying about having their beliefs questioned as a sort as a persecution. You know, people persecuting them because of their belief and their voice not being heard and so forth. In fact, Bonhoeffer would argue we need to be able to read the Bible against ourselves. We must be open or vulnerable in the sense of beliefs or doctrinal things. These are abstractions. He was pushing always toward the enfleshed concreteness of daily life. Are you human? And able to be human with another human, loving your neighbor in a concrete way? That’s a huge difference between him and the conservatives making those kinds of claims: How embodied are you and how do you care for your neighbor?
White Christian nationalism claims our country is founded on Christian principles and is made by God as a city set on a hill, this clear blending of nation and faith. Who are we? What is American? White Christian nationalism is a way of ordering society that makes that racial order sacred. In that regard, you can take out the “Christian” because what we’re dealing with is simply white nationalism.
GG: Since Jan. 20, we have witnessed all kinds of oppression toward people of color, LGBTQ people, women, I mean, basically everybody who doesn’t identify as a straight white Christian male. Words are being removed from the federal government that represent diversity and justice efforts. Naval vessels renamed. Accomplished people fired as DEI hires. How do we stand up to this erasure? How do we reclaim the forgotten voices?
“There’s no way these communities can be erased.”
RW: It’s important to recognize there’s no way these communities can be erased. When you talk about your church community, that community is an alternate world within a broader world, and those alternate worlds are still there. We’re not alone. We still stand in some form of protest over and against what the Democratic Republic is doing. There’s still this prophetic stance that we must have, and that can’t be erased.
GG: Many people who look like me are experiencing oppression for the first time in our lives. I understand what I may be understanding for the first time is not at all new to Reggie Williams, which is why it really is so necessary for us in the white church to reach out and to have conversation about what it means not just to be allies to those who have long been oppressed, but to be active ourselves in pushing back against this wave of injustice.
RW: It’s an important recognition that this is not a problem for people of color. We didn’t create the racism. Until white folks recognize this is not a problem of empathizing or sympathizing with individual people of color, but it is at heart a white problem. A problem of whiteness more particularly, which is the structure of knowing the world, not a quality of any particular demographic. As I’m describing it — and I get this from my dear friend Jake Carter — white is a way of knowing and being, a way of knowing and seeing in the world, which is why you get people of color who are so devoted to it as well. You can have your Clarence Thomases who are prophets of whiteness in addition to being Black.
But white people have a different relationship to whiteness. It affords privileges to insiders. You know, they’re group members who are acknowledged as white. It’s really more of an argument for ownership of everything, including bodies. Whiteness is the apologetic for the slave trade and for seizing land.
This thing that we need to be able to confront? It is a religion, a way of knowing the world. And because it affords privileges, it is also the structure, the background assumptions, what I would describe as myth, background assumptions that organize what we believe about the world as sacred and right. It is an organizing ideology.
“This thing that we need to be able to confront? It is a religion, a way of knowing the world.”
And so, we have this myth of American greatness that is being enforced by any means necessary. It is a scaffold of information, the scaffold on which reality hangs in an ideological way, in an ideological sense. And what we’re about doing, you and me, is exposing that scaffold and undoing it. Tear it down!
The world that was made by whiteness is an awful one. It is a death-dealing one. It is demonic. It is one that makes for a Christianity that is cruel. Apathetic. Complicit. Offering a Christ that is not Christ, but anti-Christ. Yeah.
That is the work before us, to make that known, to unmask those presumptions. What do we presume when we say, God bless America? You know, what are the presumptions that are underlying that? What are the presumptions underlying the claims that DEI is reverse racism? What are presumptions that are present within that that would have us turn hard against people of color?
GG: One of the things I hear from a lot of people is, I’m exhausted. Where are you finding joy and courage and strength right now? What is giving you joy and making it possible for you to keep on keeping on?
RW: Friends. That’s a hugely important thing. Being part of these communities that are different, those alternate communities that always remind me and us that what we see on TV is not an accurate representation of the world.
When I was a kid, I had a neighbor with an aboveground swimming pool. It was always fun to walk in a circle and create a tide pool. Get that thing going really strong, and then turn and face it. You feel the rush of water that you created, right? Ideology is like that. For centuries in this country, it’s been going in one direction in regard to rights, ideas of the sacred, beauty, intelligence, morality, all of it has been going in one direction, and that’s an argument for hierarchy. So how do you face that tide that’s gotten foul, has gotten millions of people over hundreds of years pushing the ideology in that direction? You can’t turn and face it alone or with two people or three people.
How do you fix a tide pool? If enough of us over time recognize that just going along with it isn’t going to help. Many people, they ride the tide pool and think that they’re moving on their own strength. They own their own intellect, their own wisdom. They ride the tide pool because it is for them. Life is so easy. But many of us who are caught in that thing find getting your footing is challenging. We need allies to help us turn and stop this stuff. We are going to drown, and many of us have drowned in the rush of that tide pool of demonic information.
Greg Garrett
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.
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