{"id":275,"date":"2012-03-01T14:54:45","date_gmt":"2012-03-01T21:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/?p=275"},"modified":"2012-03-01T14:55:39","modified_gmt":"2012-03-01T21:55:39","slug":"black-evangelicals-white-evangelicals-and-franklin-graham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/?p=275","title":{"rendered":"Black Evangelicals, White Evangelicals, and Franklin Graham"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was deeply touched today by an article that was sent to by SOJOMail<\/strong> (3\/2\/12), a ministry of Sojourners<\/strong>. I think this is a very powerful commentary on cultural differences and perspectives of our Christian faith. Jeff<\/p>\n

GUEST COMMENTARY<\/strong> by Lisa Sharon Harper<\/p>\n

When Franklin Graham expressed doubts about President Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Christian faith during an interview on Morning Joe last week, it reminded me of an uncomfortable dinner I had in the late \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc90s.<\/p>\n

I sat down for a pleasant meal in the home of two great friends \u00e2\u20ac\u201d one of them a white evangelical faith leader deeply committed to social justice. Well into the evening\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s conversation \u00e2\u20ac\u201d when we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d dropped all our pretenses and our exchanges moved well past mealtime niceties \u00e2\u20ac\u201d one friend asked me something that caught me entirely off guard.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Do you think Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Christian?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said.<\/p>\n

I was dumbstruck. I had never heard anyone actually ask that question before.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yes,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I replied. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What would make you doubt that?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

As he explained, it became clear: My friend wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t sure whether Dr. King was a Christian because King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Christianity didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t look like my friend\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Christianity.<\/p>\n

Dr. King valued justice. My friend valued justice.<\/p>\n

King professed personal faith in Jesus. My friend professed personal faith in Jesus.<\/p>\n

And yet my friend still was hung up about King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s faith because, to his eye, King didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem interested in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153evangelism\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as my friend defined it \u00e2\u20ac\u201d i.e. the practice of calling sinners into personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ, whose death on the cross is payment for our sins.<\/p>\n

Twentieth-century white evangelical understanding of the Gospel guided (and in many ways defined) my friend\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Christian walk. Therein lies the disconnect between his Christian faith and Dr. King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.<\/p>\n

According to sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith (authors of Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America), only one thing separates white and black evangelicals, but it makes all the difference in the world: Vastly different experiences of structural and systemic oppression.<\/p>\n

Black evangelicals have a long history of interaction with oppressive systems and structures. When African Americans read the Bible, they see the more than 2,000 passages of scripture about God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hatred for poverty and oppression. They see God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s desire for systems and structures to be blessings to all of humanity \u00e2\u20ac\u201d not a curse to some and a blessing for others.<\/p>\n

And they see Jesus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 own declaration that he had come to preach good news to the poor, which, by the way, is decidedly not a reference to the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spiritually impoverished.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Jesus meant that he had come to preach good news (of liberation, freedom, and new life) to people trapped in material poverty.<\/p>\n

White evangelicals generally do not experience such systemic oppression. According to Emerson and Smith, most white evangelicals don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t prioritize or even see the thousands of references in the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament about structural and systemic injustice.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, the Gospel \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and by extension their evangelism \u00e2\u20ac\u201d is about only one thing: Personal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, who died for their sins, and a personal relationship with him.<\/p>\n

Black evangelicals also have personal faith that Jesus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 death paid for their sins, but their Gospel doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t end with personal (and individual) salvation. For Dr. King and Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rev. John Perkins and Nelson Mandela and for hundreds of thousands of Black Christians around the world and for me, the good news of the Gospel is that Jesus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 life, death, and resurrection were for the redemption of both individual souls and the redemption of whole societies.<\/p>\n

Franklin Graham\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s father, Dr. Billy Graham, didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t always understand this, either. The elder Graham\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s revivals began as segregated affairs, but the Supreme Court\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) agitated his conscience and he quickly course corrected. From that point on, Billy Graham never again held a segregated revival.
\nWhat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more, in 1957 Dr. Graham invited Dr. King, to share his pulpit for a 16-week revival in New York City.<\/p>\n

For Billy Graham, Martin King was a Christian.<\/p>\n

In the last decade or so, a new generation of white evangelicals \u00e2\u20ac\u201d such as my friends Shane Claiborne, Kelly Moltzen, Josh Harper, and others \u00e2\u20ac\u201d have intentionally displaced themselves, moving into impoverished communities of color in order to gain the experience their parents and grandparents lacked. As a result, their white evangelical eyes are open.<\/p>\n

They see those 2,000 scriptures about poverty and injustice. And this new generation of white evangelicals is committed to fight systemic and structural justice because of the Gospel.<\/p>\n

So, it grieved me to hear Franklin Graham\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s doubt-filled commentary on President Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s faith.<\/p>\n

Obama has described in his own words (and quite publicly) how he has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, how as a young community organizer in Chicago in the late \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc80s he walked down the aisle of a church during an altar call to make a public profession of that faith \u00e2\u20ac\u201d a practice developed by one of the greatest American evangelists of all time, Charles Finney.<\/p>\n

The president has clearly professed his belief that Jesus died on the cross as payment for his sins. And Obama repeatedly invokes the words of Jesus that guide his world view: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Just as you did to the least of these, you did to me.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Matthew 25:40)<\/p>\n

For a moment, Franklin Graham\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cynicism tested my own faith. I wondered if he had any idea that, when he questioned the president\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s faith, it felt as if he were questioning my faith.<\/p>\n

I wanted to know if the transformational power of Jesus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 death and resurrection, which is powerful enough to save our souls also could open Franklin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s eyes and soften his heart to the world and experience of his black brothers and sisters.
\nRepentance is sweet, not only for the sinner, but also for the world. It reminds us all of what is right; what is good; what is true. Franklin Graham apologized for his comments and repented this week.<\/p>\n

This public discussion is now a lesson for us all. I have an abiding hope that, just maybe, the power of Jesus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 resurrection is powerful enough even to save the church.<\/p>\n

<\/em>Lisa Sharon Harper is the Director of Mobilizing at Sojourners<\/strong>. She is also co-author of Left, Right and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics and author of Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican … or Democrat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was deeply touched today by an article that was sent to by SOJOMail (3\/2\/12), a ministry of Sojourners. I think this is a very powerful commentary on cultural differences and perspectives of our Christian faith. Jeff GUEST COMMENTARY by Lisa Sharon Harper When Franklin Graham expressed doubts about President Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Christian faith during an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spiritual-formation","category-understanding-context"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}