We must confront our sin

I will continue to post about our deep-seated racism as the story unfolds from Buffalo, NY. For us as whites, I am still stunned when a motive is made clear, I still have friends who say, “Well, it will be interesting to get the whole story.”

So… I will still keep at this.

We have to confront our deepest sins. We have to confess our deepest problems. They may not be individual sins in us, but they are sins that bind our culture. Somehow it is easy for white conservative Christians to call out abortion as a “system” and still can’t get past their lame mantra of, “I’m not a racist. My family didn’t own slaves.” (And how is it that conservative white men don’t feel a need to say, “I didn’t have an abortion”?)

There is no quick fix. As Willie Jennings makes clear, we will fail “to come to grips with the racial and violent reality of America” until we “comprehend fully how deeply and thickly race and Christian faith are entangled in the Western world.” Until we do, “we repeat the mistake continuously in this country of trying to address our racial animus and the violence it fosters as though it were a virus that occasionally attacks our social body, rather than seeing the truth: that racial animus is a constituting reality of our social body. Our racial struggles are intractable because we refuse to see how deeply their roots are embedded in the ways we think, live, and imagine the world socially. Race in America is a form of religious faith, and we will never be able to understand or address it with the necessary knowledge, energy, or commitment until we comprehend its true architecture.”

More HERE.

We need an unflinching look at ourselves. We are too hard-hearted.