INTRODUCTION

CROSSING THE COLOR LINE



The room told the story. Facing one another around the table was a diverse group of young pastors mostly from several southern states. Every Black pastor in the room spoke up, feeling safe in that space to be their authentic selves and offer their voices of deep and urgent concern about what was happening in our country and to their own communities—and congregations.

Several Hispanic and Asian American clergy broadened the conversation. The white pastors, now in a multiracial room, represented both large and smaller Protestant churches—Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Episcopal, and Lutheran. They came from quite different theological backgrounds, from mainline liberal to evangelical, and many places in between. “I am orthodox,” some said, “but I don’t just go along with the right or the left.” There were also Catholic clergy in the room, seeking new relationships with Protestants for their ministries in local communities.

We were in Georgia, and like in many other states represented around this very diverse faith table, voting rights and the real threats of voter suppression fueled the conversation. Efforts currently underway to make it harder—once again—for people of color to vote, and have their votes fairly counted, were discussed with newfound urgency. The late congressman John Lewis, who had been a member of Ebenezer Baptist Church, just down the road from where we were sitting, was remembered for calling votes precious and “almost sacred” because they allowed all of God’s children to have their voices heard in public life.

One of the new voting restrictions recently passed by the white-dominated Georgia legislature made it illegal to provide drinks or snacks to people standing in line to vote (and everyone knew that the lines to vote are always longest in communities of color). It didn’t take these pastors long to recall Jesus’ words in the twenty-fifth chapter of the gospel of Matthew about providing water to the thirsty and food to the hungry. They wondered, engaging the question seriously, would a pastor doing that at Black and brown polling places in the next election get arrested for civil disobedience?

I had spoken at the Chandler School of Theology at Emory University the previous evening at a TheoEd, theological/spiritual TED talk, and was spending the morning with these young pastors to unpack the event. My talk had directly addressed the rise of white Christian nationalism in our country, the false white gospel that was now being preached by many white megachurches, some just blocks away. In many white Evangelical circles, faith was being directly politicized, and congregational members who didn’t share a right-wing partisan agenda were being told to leave. The Black pastors around the table expressed their fears about this rise of white Christian nationalism in churches in their own cities and states—and its deliberate embrace by politicians with a racialized autocratic agenda (with some members of Congress wearing T-shirts with “Christian Nationalist” proudly emblazoned on them).

Then we heard from the white pastors in the room. They shared their own fears that now, even in their mainline denominations, truth-telling in our nation about race and American history was increasingly met with aggressive pushback from many white congregants.

They shared stories of pastors under attack for honest and even healing talk about race. Cable news channels, right-wing radio, and conspiratorial webcasts were overwhelming any gospel justice talk. A megachurch pastor had recently said to me, “Jim, I only have my people for two hours a week if I’m lucky, and Fox has them twenty-four seven. I just can’t compete.” These young clerics knew pastors who had lost their jobs and some who were even getting death threats.

“I need my salary and my parsonage to take care of my family,” said a young female pastor. “I’m being told by my senior pastor that we need to respect the demographics of our top donors,” lamented a young white male pastor, who was clearly frustrated by what he called a “consumer” approach to church—give the people what they want instead of telling the truth “that will set us free,” as Jesus taught.

The Black pastors were challenging and pleading with their white pastor colleagues to tell the truth about our nation’s racial history to help equip the country to grow into a genuine multiracial democracy. But the white pastors were all counting the cost of doing that. “I feel such a great tension between my professional demands and my prophetic callings,” one young pastor told us. Truth, risk, and cost were all issues on the table that day as these pastors took time to be together, look each other in the eyes, and talk and pray with one another.

I suggested that, perhaps, this was a “Bonhoeffer moment” for the American church. They all knew who Dietrich Bonhoeffer was. A young pastor like themselves, he led the “confessing church” movement in opposition to the rise of Nazism in Germany during the 1930s. These were a small minority of churches who dissented from the acquiescence and loyalty of most German churches to Hitler’s rise to power. In particular, the confessing church was marked by a younger generation of seminarians whom Bonhoeffer taught and some even lived in community, and whose life together became central to the Christian resistance to the Third Reich. I told them that history doesn’t repeat but it often does rhyme, in the words of Mark Twain, and the rise of another racialized authoritarian movement in America—right now—also calls us to a faithful response.

Reflecting on Bonhoeffer and asking together what a confessing church might look like in America now turned into an amazing and insightful conversation—one that I hope to see happening across the country. Where is that Christian resistance emerging now, and where is the true gospel being recovered and reclaimed in response to the false white gospel of Christian nationalism now on the rise? I reminded them that Bonhoeffer failed in his attempt to stop Hitler and was executed in the end—hanged by the Nazis, along with many of his seminarians, in a concentration camp only days before the Allies arrived. But, I asked, how many of the German church pastors who supported Hitler do they remember now? None, of course. The witness of Bonhoeffer later inspired the South African churches as they helped bring down the apartheid regime; and now we were talking about him again.

The truth-telling about racial justice and reconciliation that we now need will, indeed, cost some pastors their jobs and pensions and parsonages; and it will lead to other pastors and leaders of predominantly white churches losing significant numbers of their congregants. A yet unknown number of white Christian leaders will find the courage to stand up while others submit to the “cheap grace” that Bonhoeffer warned against. There will be churches that stay open and faithful to the inclusive and reconciling gospel, despite the loss of some of their members, and new members—especially young people—may join them because of their authenticity and courage.

The suffering that comes with the courage to stand against the rise of authoritarian racism cost Bonhoeffer and other resistors to Hitler their very lives. Indeed, one of the pastors in the room that morning recalled a quote by Bonhoeffer, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” But what it might mean to die to self and live for the gospel truth of Christ is yet to be known in our time, and these young pastors were all wrestling with that.

While we can and must work against such violent outcomes, it is increasingly clear that voting rights, racial equality, civic justice, and democracy itself are now at serious risk in America—and that is becoming an understatement. This is a time of testing—both for the future of our democracy and for the integrity of our faith communities.

We are literally in a battle now between false religion and true faith and between racial fascism and multicultural democracy. That fight stems from fear, the motivator of hate, and the threat of violence. Helping to set us free from that fear, hate, racism, and violence is the purpose of this book.

I had said in my talk the previous evening that “crossing the color line” is the pilgrimage that has, and continues to change my life. I believe that crossing the color line to a genuine multiracial democracy will be the path that finally fulfills America’s promise. And where the congregations of all faith traditions stand in this battle for the soul of America will define the authenticity of our faith at this critical historical moment. It will also determine whether a new generation will have any interest in embracing any of our faith communities. Like growing numbers of young people around the country, many of my students at Georgetown are not currently practicing any religion and are in the “none of the above” religious affiliation category. But most of these “nones” still believe in God or something beyond themselves, and are looking for authenticity and courage in both leaders and institutions.

Democracy, faith, and the generational future of our faith communities are all at stake. If communities of faith today won’t fight for a multiracial democracy in this country, both will fail. My hope in writing this book is that it will help spark some of the deeper conversations and action that we crucially need right now and going forward. It is, finally, only the truth that can set us free, as Jesus indeed taught us. Together let us seek the truth for times like this.

PILGRIMAGE TO THE INNER CITY

My first conversion came when a revival preacher spoke at our church one Sunday night and pointed his finger right at me—it felt like—and all the other “unsaved” kids who were made to sit in the front row for the special service. With fire and brimstone, he proclaimed, “If Jesus came back tonight, your mommy and daddy would be taken to heaven, and you would be left all by yourself!”

That got my attention. I was getting up in years—six—and realized that if what the preacher said were to happen, I would have a five-year-old sister to support! My caring mother reassured me Christianity was not about the wrath of God, but that God loved me and wanted me to be his child too. That sounded much better, so I signed up.

My second conversion, and the one which has stayed with me and continues to change my life—as conversions are supposed to do—came when I was a teenager.

I was born and raised in Detroit—the Motor City, Motown. When I was about sixteen, I began to listen to my city—hear the news, read the paper, then some books, and I started to have serious conversations with adults.

Some big questions emerged and I began to feel that something “very big” was very wrong in my city and my country and my church; but I found that people in my white neighborhood, white school, and white church didn’t want to talk about it.

I remember the questions I asked:

“Life in white Detroit seems very different from life in Black Detroit. Why is that? I hear about people and families who are poor and even hungry in our city, who don’t have enough jobs, or good ones, who live in bad housing and in rough and dangerous places, and many who have family members in jail. I don’t know anybody who struggles with these awful things; so how come others do and just a few short miles from where we live?

“I hear there are Black churches. How come we have never been told about them; why haven’t we ever visited them or been visited by them?”

The answers from my white church and world were: “You’re too young to ask those questions; when you get older you will understand.” Or, “We don’t know why things are that way either, but they have always been this way.”

The most honest answer I received was: “If you keep asking those kinds of questions you are going to get into a lot of trouble.” That was the only answer that later proved to be true.

I realized that I wasn’t going to get any real answers to those questions in the world where I lived, so I decided to travel outside my world, to make a personal pilgrimage into another world to find the answers. Now I tell my students to trust their questions and follow them to wherever they lead.

Then, I took my naïve white-boy questions into what we called “the inner city” to try and find out why Black Detroit seemed so different from white Detroit, and why we were so separated, even—and especially—in our churches.

I needed money for college, so I looked for jobs that would place me alongside young Black men in the city of Detroit who might have some answers. In those new jobs I began to listen to their life stories, stories that were very different from mine, stories that would ultimately change my story.

I also went to Black churches—just showed up—and was immediately welcomed in, with patient and generous answers to my many obvious questions. What they said sounded like what I thought Christianity was supposed to be. But I began to realize it was very different to be a Black Christian than a white Christian in Detroit and America.

Perhaps the greatest “epiphany” came when Butch, a new friend, who was a fellow janitor and elevator operator (yes, I am that old!), took me home for dinner one night to meet his family. We discussed the local police, whose treatment of Black people was sparking many confrontations in our city of Detroit. “I tell my children,” Butch’s mother told me, “if you are ever lost and can’t find your way home and you see a white policeman, duck under a stairwell or hide behind a building and wait till he passes before you find your way home on your own.”

I was deeply struck by that advice from a mother who wasn’t any kind of political militant, but was completely focused on raising and protecting her kids—just like my mother. And at that moment, my own mom’s words to her five children just screamed into my head. She told all of us, “If you are ever lost and can’t find your way home, look for a policeman; policemen are your friends. They will take you by the hand and bring you home safely.” Loving mothers who gave completely different advice to their children if they were white or Black. Two mothers. Two cities. Two worlds. Butch and I were born in the same city, but we lived in different countries—and so did our families.

The more I listened across color lines, the more I learned how that different standards applied to everything else too. Across the color line I found a different world, still waiting to be fully, freely, and safely included in America.

JIM CROW IS WEARING A SUIT

Later in life I realized that most of my mentors had also crossed the color line in America—white people making their own pilgrimages into Black communities and churches, and Black leaders venturing into white society and power structures to try and make things better, more just, more human, and more faithful to what our Christian faith calls all of us to be and do. I’ve learned it is proximity that changes us, that teaches us white people the work that we must do in our own communities.

Ironically, and prophetically, Dietrich Bonhoeffer also crossed the color line. During the year he spent at Union Seminary in New York City, he would visit Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem every Sunday. This young, white German pastor was likely one of the few white people in that Black congregation from week to week. Scholars, like Reggie Williams, have since shown that Bonhoeffer’s encounter with Black theology, preaching, worship, and music decisively shaped the development and formation of the confessing church in Germany, after he returned to his country, though he knew it might cost him his life.1

My own world view has been most shaped by being in places I was never supposed to be, and meeting people I was never supposed to know or listen to or become friends with. Even though I’ve said the wrong things at times and have made mistakes along the way, this was how I learned that racism was more than personal. It was structural.

Let’s compare Butch’s family to my family.

My father, James Wallis, Sr., graduated from college, was commissioned in the US Navy, and got married—all on the same day! The military was pushing new troops out to the war in Europe, and to the Pacific where he was sent. When he came home, like all other white World War II veterans, his family was eligible for an FHA loan for a first house and the GI bill to pay for any education they wanted. Every house in our Redford Township neighborhood, next to Detroit, was a three-bedroom ranch headed by a World War II GI like my dad. But no Black sailors on my dad’s ship or Black GIs serving anywhere in the military were able to get those huge benefits for housing and education that catapulted white families into the middle class.


Copyright © 2024 by Jim Wallis