The False White Gospel by Jim Wallis EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Authors: Jim Wallis
- Language: English
- Genre: Self Help
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THE FALSE WHITE GOSPEL
Looking back on my teenage years in Detroit, I remember when a
concerned elder in my evangelical church took me aside one night to set me
straight. I will never forget what he said: “You need to understand, son, that
Christianity has nothing to do with racism—that’s political and our faith is
personal.”
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It hit me hard. If the thing that was tearing me up, turning me upside
down, and changing me had nothing to do with my faith, then I wanted
nothing to do with that kind of religion either. That was the night I left my
childhood church and faith—in my head and my heart. Skeptical of the
church, I joined the movements of my generation against racism, war, and
poverty—but not as a person of faith. I was secular now. If Christianity had
nothing to offer the downtrodden and discriminated among us, I wanted
nothing to do with it.
I didn’t have the words to respond to that elder on that night, but I found
them later when I came back to faith in Jesus after years of organizing in
social movements: God is personal, but never private.
For that elder in the Detroit church of my youth, and for many white
Christians today, faith is a private affair—it’s only about them and God,
only about their own personal sins, only a vertical faith and not a horizontal
one that reaches out to the world. They fail to understand the verse I was
forced to memorize as a kid, John 3:16:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that
whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
We always skipped the first part about God loving the world. We never
prayed that God would change us so that we could change the world. Jesus
ushered in what he called “the kingdom of God,” a whole new order, so that
we might learn to love the world, rather than to just be saved from the
world.
Without any awareness of the public discipleship which Jesus taught,
Christians become vulnerable and susceptible to false political religion.
And that is what white Christian nationalism is—a false white gospel.
White Christians can become tempting or even unconscious targets of
ethnocentric religion that is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Easily
politicized by power brokers, this bad religion can infect the body politic by
manipulating the body of Christ.
Many won’t recognize themselves in the term “white Christian
nationalist,” but they have become subject to the fears and anger that it
promotes. And having only a private faith, they miss the heart of the Lord’s
prayer that many pray week to week, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be
done, on earth as it is in heaven.” My hope and prayer is that even some of
those who have unwittingly and tacitly adopted white Christian nationalism
can be set free from it. Then they can become part of the movement for
change and the restoration of both faith and democracy in America.
CALLING OUT FAITH
I am not treating this simply as a political problem and certainly not just as
an academic debate about religion, but rather as a faith problem that needs
to be solved for both believers and for the sake of the country.
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