Black America flipped the script on a racialized democratic state to make it more perfect. It is Black people’s fight that makes the United States exceptional. —Randal Jelks (2022) Many of us are profoundly worried about the health of…
Ron DeSantis: The anti-woke prophet of evangelicals
It’s no secret that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida plans to ride an anti-wokeness wave to the White House. To get there, he has turned his sights increasingly on higher education — specifically “woke” professors. Whatever “wokeness” means, for DeSantis…
New survey: Republicans and white evangelicals are outliers in fear of immigrants invading U.S.
The gap between Americans on immigration is steadily widening as conservatives increasingly embrace anti-immigrant attitudes that include a belief that migrants are invading the United States to displace white citizens, according to new research by Public Religion Research Institute. The…
Where God is: Preaching the hard truths about change
Last fall on the second Sunday of Advent, I preached a sermon at the American Cathedral in Paris on change, our fear of change, the difficulties of change. And on race. It was a pretty typical sermon for Advent, that…
Dig deeper when looking for your church’s racist or anti-racist history, Gardner advises
A church may have a racist past even if its archives reveal no evidence of support of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, segregation or other racist structures, author and historian Andrew Gardner said during a recent webinar hosted by the Alliance…
Alliance of Baptists steps into anti-racism work
The coming year will be filled with the challenge of intense anti-slavery work for the Alliance of Baptists if its 2022 fall gathering was any indication. The session was held Nov. 10-12 in Montgomery, Ala., where about 150 participants attended…
When hate speech meets the First Amendment, what should Christians do?
Hate speech, like an erratic stock market, rises and falls. The primary instigators of the last two jumps in hate speech have been Donald Trump (beginning in 2015) and Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter. In Trump’s case, there…
How Santa figures into the not-so-merry Supreme Court case about LGBTQ discrimination
One of the key sticking points in the hotly contested debate over LGBTQ discrimination is whether that issue is in any way equivalent to racial discrimination. Now, Santa has gotten involved. White Santa, that is. During oral arguments before the…
This is what happens when race is ‘nothing’
There’s a refrain that dominates conservative rhetoric: “It’s not about race.” From white parents who insist they send their children to private, mostly segregated academies because “I’m only interested in a good education,” to politicians who insist there is only…