Epigraph:
“The extinction of race consciousness is one of the most outstanding moral achievements of Islam.” Arnold Toynbee
Source: On Faith
By Elizabeth Evans
Successful movements for women’s ordination and gay ministers have swept through Protestant churches, but the movement toward racial reconciliation is mixed, at best.
This past July, Episcopalians from all over the country gathered in Philadelphia to commemorate a groundbreaking event: the 1974 ordination of 11 women who defied church tradition and canon law to become priests. Forty years later, it’s hard to imagine the denomination without women priests. There were celebratory speeches, of course, but what I took away from the day were thewords of the African-American panelist, elder stateswoman, and prominent local Episcopalian Nokomis Wood: “The Episcopal Church was just beginning to talk about racial equity and racial justice. The conversation about women’s ordination just allowed [the church] to put it back further.”
I caught up with Wood at lunch, and asked her to amplify what she meant. She told me that the issue of women’s ordination had “derailed” the denomination’s nascent conversation about race. While there continued to be “parallel” dialogues, the challenge of racial injustice took a back seat to other social issues. And so it remains. What happened to the passion of the 1960s? What happened to the multiracial coalitions that fueled, often in the face of tremendous violence, the quest for racial justice for the descendants of slaves? Where are the prophetic faith community leaders advocating for biblically-based justice and structural social change? Who today is standing against persistent racism among many in Caucasian enclaves? Why is Sunday morning still, almost 50 years after the Voting Rights Act became law, the “most segregated hour in Christian America”?
“It’s time for whites to give up power”
A few weeks after my lunch with Wood, unarmed teen Michael Brown was shot by white policeman Darren Wilson in the mostly African-American St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. The killing, and the unrest and protests that have followed, has spurred some church leaders to prayer and others to prayer and action. Archbishop Robert Carlson of the Roman Catholic Diocese of St. Louis visited Brown’s memorial and held a mass for peace and justice at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. National leaders, including Lutheran Church Missouri Synod President Matthew Harrison, called for prayer and rallied local leaders for a faith community-based response. There were round-table conversations, marches, and other gatherings sponsored by individual churches and local faith-based organizations. But among church leaders and religion scholars, it’s not at all clear that the statements and marches will result in anything resembling the racial coalition that fomented action 50 years ago. “The 1960s were an extraordinary time, and there was a reason for people to get together,” says Anthea Butler, associate professor of Religion and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Now, with so many issues clamoring for attention, a distracted nation isn’t paying that much attention to matters of race, she says. “I don’t think white Christians think it’s a problem for them, because it’s not happening in their community and they don’t see enough black people to care.” “If you have this (black) skin, and you have to deal with it, you know what kind of America we are living in. A lot of white people don’t get it — white church people especially, I think.”
Categories: Americas, Universal Brotherhood