Beyond virtue signaling and thinking right
the limits of white Christians feeling guilty in public
The liberal white man is a strange creature; he verbalizes the right things. He intellectualizes on the racial problem beautifully. He roundly denounces racists, conservatives, and the moderately liberal. Sometimes, in rare moments and behind closed doors, he will even defend Rap Brown or Stokely Carmichael. Or he may go so far as to make this statement: “I will let my daughter marry one,” and this is supposed to be the absolute evidence that he is raceless.
So wrote James Cone in his 1969 seminal text Black Theology & Black Power. Honestly I wonder what he would say about my twitter feed these days.
If you follow many of the liberal/left white Christian twitter accounts you may be familiar with what I’m talking about. For six months to a year we were boldly chastising conservatives for their fixation on and blatant dishonesty around Critical Race Theory. The daily battles (of which I certainly don’t absolve myself) ranged from the snarky to the wonky and everywhere in between.
Then there is the constant undercurrent of white supremacy. While a close cousin of the great CRT wars, the game plan here ranges from assembling Tucker Carlson clips to lumping neatly together conservatives, fascists, neo-Nazis and actual white supremacists.
In recent days the conversation has shifted to the buzzword du jour “Deconstruction.” I’m frankly too lazy to go back and parse out what set off the current need to defend the concept and practice but from what I can see there’s plenty to be upset about.
Now. Every one of these concepts is worthy of our time. The CRT debate underscores the need for school curriculum to at least attempt to represent the reality of US history. And of course there are white supremacists, Christian nationalists and (to use an old school term) racists among us. The plurality of which exist - in keeping with historical precedent - on the conservative end of the political and religious spectrum.
As far as deconstruction, it at least deserves some attention, if for no other reason than religious and political dogma are taught as just that. And dogmas we inherit should be suspect. Particularly if they have been handed down to us from slaveholders and segregationists.
The details and relative importance of each and all of these concepts can and should be debated in good faith (assuming that was a realistic possibility).
What troubles me about each of these debates, specifically as they relate to the left/liberal white Christian spaces I occupy, is the very real possibility that we are simply working on “intellectualizing on the racial problem beautifully.” And it troubles me that much of the discourse seems unaware of this possibility.
I have a theological hunch as to why that may be the case, if you’ll indulge me.
WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) like me trace our theological heritage back to the Puritans of 17th Century England. A good number of the Puritans, of course, fled to America to become “Pilgrims,” or “Colonizers,” depending on your exposure to Howard Zinn.
The Puritans of New England, from Cotton Mather to John Winthrop and later to Jonathan Edwards, if you hadn’t heard, were absolutely fixated on piety and their personal virtue. Understanding this as the driving religious and political motivation explains expelling (and worse) native populations, buying slaves and executing witches. Transgressing bounds of personal piety, whether through worshiping “false gods” to promiscuity (if you happened to be a woman) essentially makes you less of a person.
The great fiction regarding the time is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The great sermon is Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” And perhaps the most enduring theological work is John Owen’s The Mortification of Sin.
A theme runs through these works and the time of the Puritans that might seem familiar to us. There is a tunnel vision that is undeniable - you can call it a feature, not a bug - in the theology handed down to white American Christians that has the effect of overemphasizing personal righteousness to the exclusion of actual biblical values like feeding the poor, crafting a community that is just, welcoming the stranger and taking care of widows and orphans.
The theological understanding of “sanctification” as an undying quest to rid oneself of personal filth and to present a new self to the world as spotless and clean has endured up to our present day.
And here’s the trouble. For those of us raised within an overwhelmingly white evangelicalism, we may have “deconstructed” quite a bit. We have owned our racist past, or at least the racist past of our families and forefathers. We have owned mysogeny and maybe we’ve even worked to ‘center’ marginalized voices. These are good things.
But. There is a strong tendency within us (me?) to count public displays of repentance, garment rending and verbally tearing down our problematic past as an end to themselves. In doing so our consciences can remain clear. We are now on the right side of history. Our sanctification is trending again in the right direction.
If we stop here, however, what progress have we made that we can realistically point to? Now instead of being deceived into problematic thoughts about ourselves we have achieved the goal of letting the world know that we are part of the problem.
Great.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Biko Mandela Gray, who teaches religion and race at Syracuse on my podcast not too long ago. At around the 40 minute mark he made it plain.
What I recognize is what’s “good” in the United States when it comes to quote unquote ‘racial justice’ is the performative politics of virtue signaling: “I know that I am wrong and that’s all that you can say.”
After quoting that great Cornel West line, “justice is what love looks like in public,” Dr. Gray went on to say:
No one gives a shit about your intentions if the public effects of those intentions do nothing to change the material conditions of those on the ground.
So how do we move from the self-focused, individualized pursuit of moral rectitude that looks like for white Christians to move from a place of endlessly fighting the current twitter wars with defensive (and sometimes loony) conservative accounts? How do we move virtue signaling to working towards justice? Here’s the part that might be unsatisfying to read.
I. Don’t. Know.
If you haven’t noticed, nobody has solved racism. Nobody has solved white supremacy in the US. Nobody has solved the need for spiritual deconstruction. Depending on the day it may be easier to argue that we’re further away today than when we started on each of these fronts.
Meanwhile, student debt is killing us and black folks are over-represented. Prisons are overflowing and black folks are over-represented as inmates. Millions of us are uninsured and many more of us are under-insured. Again, black folks are over-represented in those numbers.
The list can go on and on of course. We could get into housing, capital punishment, police killings, food insecurity, COVID mortalities, a stagnant minimum wage, an almost nonexistent social safety net and more.
The question is always what to do with our spiritual development and transformation. The good news is that there are organizations working on each of these structural issues. While as white Christians our first instinct is to take the lead, maybe it’s time to follow a bit. We have much to learn.
But we can join with folks and get our hands dirty doing more than showing up at marches, showing up at the polls and waging war 280 characters at a time.
Paraphrasing Dr. West, we can be involved in bringing justice to our neighbors by simply loving in public.
But we’re going to have to get out of our heads (and perhaps off twitter for a while) and get our hands dirty.