Color-Courageous Discipleship: Follow Jesus, Dismantle Racism, and Build Beloved Community by Michelle T. Sanchez

Author:Michelle T. Sanchez [Sanchez, Michelle T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Reading the Bible in living color means reading God’s Word in a color-courageous way.

Reading the Bible in living color means reading God’s Word in a color-courageous way. Rather than tainting our reading of Scripture with the racial and cultural assumptions that we bring to the text, we are free to better understand its original meaning and to enjoy more fully all the riches of God’s Word.

DISCOVER YOUR OWN CULTURAL CONTEXT

Let’s begin with our first question: What cultural assumptions am I bringing to this text that may impact how I understand it? When we open a book, we too often unwittingly treat it like a mirror; our default bias is to read our assumptions and experiences into the text. None of us is without culture. Given that we cannot remove our cultural lenses any more than we can remove our DNA, we can and should become more aware of what those lenses are.[3] When we don’t, misreading the Bible is the inevitable result.

Sociologist Michael Emerson has unearthed three cultural lenses of White evangelicalism. These three lenses go a long way in explaining why White evangelicalism has perpetuated rather than dismantled a racialized society. Here we will examine those lenses of White evangelical culture: individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism.[4]

First, individualism understands the individual rather than the collective to be paramount. When a plural you appears in the Bible, we often misread it as a singular you. It isn’t our tendency to consider what it looks like to resist racism not only as individuals but as a group. We rarely if ever think about what responsibility to dismantle racism the larger church has together as a collective. Unfortunately, in our individualistic culture, questions like these are often viewed with suspicion. Disciples in individualistic cultures tend to be flummoxed by stories like that of Achan, whose entire family was punished for one man’s sin. As Tim Keller explains, “Achan’s family (Joshua 7) did not do the stealing, but they helped him become the kind of man who would steal.”[5] Individualistic cultures like ours tend to miss the collective nature of sin. Disciples in individualistic cultures often seek to address the problem of racism in a system, for example, by identifying and uprooting individuals—the bad apples—rather than identifying and addressing collective dysfunctions.

Next, the lens of Western evangelical relationalism attaches “central importance to interpersonal relationships.”[6] This derives in part from our evangelical emphasis on having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ—which I believe is one of evangelicalism’s greatest strengths. On the flip side, relationalism morphs into a weakness when it causes disciples to view most social problems as “rooted in poor relationships.”[7] Evangelicals tend to see most societal problems as a failure to love others as we love ourselves, which is no doubt partially true. But absent from this “is the idea that poor relationships might be shaped by social structures, such as laws, the ways institutions operate, or forms of segregation.”[8]

Disciples in relational cultures prefer conversations about racial reconciliation rather than racial justice, and they like

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