Theology in the Raw - 720: #720 - A Conversation with Jemar Tisby

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

On episode #720 of Theology in the Raw Preston has a conversation with Jemar Tisby. Jemar is a Christian, historian, writer, and speaker. His first book, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism is forthcoming (January 2019). Jemar blogs on his website and you can follow him on Twitter. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I got a bunch of events that I'm going to be speaking at this spring. I will be at Sioux City on February 4th and February 5th. I'll be at Grand Rapids, Michigan for a one-day leaders forum February 7th, Orange County February 11th and February 12th. I'll be in San Francisco, specifically Los Altos on March 10th. And that event is called Sexuality, Scripture, and the Soul of Christianity hosted by, well, it's put on by several churches, but the primary host church is Spark Church in the South Bay of San Francisco. And that's a

conversation between myself and Justin Lee. If you don't know who Justin Lee is, you need to know who Justin Lee is. He's a provocative thinker. Well, very well-known voice in the world of sexuality and faith. And he and I are going to engage in what will hopefully be a, uh, engaging,

challenging, humble, yet forthright. And, um, hopefully thoughtful, uh, dialogue about thoughtful dialogue about same-sex marriage in the church. Justin Lee is a gay affirming Christian, and I am a historically Christian, Christian. That doesn't sound very well. I don't believe that, you know, gay marriage is something

that God blesses and he does, and we're going to talk about that. So that's again, March 10th at, in Los Altos, California, invite you to come and be a part of that event. March 12th, I'll be in Seattle, March 14th, Salem, Oregon, April 23rd, Cleveland, Ohio, April 24th through the 26th in Nashville for the Q conference. And I would love to see you guys at one of those events. You can check out my homepage, PrestonSpringhold.com. Go to the events page or the speaking link. You can see the schedule there.

Also, CenterForFaith.com will list most of these events as well. Okay, for my guest today, I have Jamar Tisby. Jamar is a provocative thinker. He is a wonderful guy. We have known each other from a distance on social media and we had the opportunity to meet each other in person in Denver last November. He was, well, both of us were speaking at the Evangelical Theological Society's annual meeting in Denver back in November, in Denver back in November. And just a wonderful guy. I could talk to this guy for hours. And so after we hung out over coffee in Denver, I said, man, I got to have you on my podcast because you're just too good of a thinker. So Jamar went to Notre Dame for his undergraduate. He went to RTS, Reformed Theological Seminary, for his master's degree.

And he is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi doing a Ph.D. in history. He is a historian. He is a cultural critic slash artist slash enthusiast, if I can say that. I don't know if he's going to like those terms, but he's just a super thoughtful guy, super engaging thinker. We spend most of our time talking about race relations in the church and also just what it's like growing up as a black man, a black Christian and white evangelicalism.

And yeah, you're going to love this episode. It's lots of great stuff here. And let's get to know Jamar Tisby. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology Narah. I have on the show Jamar Tisby. Jamar, thanks so much for being on the show, calling in all the way from the Delta in the Arkansas side of the Delta down in the South. Jamar, thanks for being on the show, man. in the Arkansas side of the Delta down in the South. Jamar, thanks for being on the show, man.

We got to clear that up for listeners because I feel like this is a public service that I have to do every once in a while. So people ask me where I live. And the first sort of misunderstanding is folks still think I live in Jackson, Mississippi. I did live there for five years while I was going for my MDiv. And so that's a natural thing. But I've since moved from there to a place that I have lived before.

And this is where it gets tricky. People ask where I live and I tell them the Delta. I usually leave out the Mississippi part because people assume that means the state. When you hear Mississippi Delta, you assume, oh, you live in Mississippi. But here's the nerd part. The Delta is an alluvial plain, a floodplain on both sides of the Mississippi River. And so in one sense, you can say the Mississippi Delta, and it's going to refer to Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, all these places where the Mississippi runs. And when it overflows, it hits all those states. And so technically, that's the geographic area known as the Delta, although the actual Delta is where the river dumps out into the Gulf, whatever. So

I say I live in the Delta, but yes, it's on the Arkansas side. So is there any cultural difference between the Arkansas side and the Mississippi side? I mean, when you say, is it more accurate to say, I mean, maybe sociologically that you're from the Delta rather than Mississippi or Arkansas, if that makes sense? Yes. The Delta, no matter what state you're talking about, is its own thing. It is definitely its own culture. And so the Delta, the reason why it is such a unique sort of socio economic ecosystem is because it has this really rich, fertile farmland, this soil, you can just drop a seed and it'll grow anything. And so this was used for mainly for cotton farming in the last century and a half or so. And so this is the place where slaves labored. And so my daily commute to and from the University of Mississippi is literally through

cotton fields. And I've got pictures posted on social media here and there of cotton fields in bloom. And it's this haunting sight, right? Because on one hand, these acres and acres of blooming cotton are a sight to behold. It's incredible. I had never seen it till I grew up and moved down here as an adult. And it's an arresting site. But at the same time, when you know the history there, it's also very haunting and sobering to know that there were human beings who were treated as property, forced to labor, picking cotton by hand for decades and decades and decades. Not too long ago i mean because after slavery comes sharecropping right and i'll tell you how recent sharecropping is

my wife's grandmother used to pick cotton as a sharecropper not as a slave but yeah you know it's right there so yeah in in each state arkansas and Mississippi, the Delta is the poorest area of the state. And it's also got the highest concentration of black people. And so the analogy I use is the way people look at Mississippi in terms of race and culture and backwardness. That's the way Mississippi looks at the Delta. Really? Interesting. delta really interesting oh yeah there are folks in mississippi other parts of mississippi who are just like i tell them i live in the delta and this is raised eyebrows like oh you live there really that's where the real you know yeah drama is so let yeah let's i want to keep unpacking that

a bit i mean can you can you go a bit deeper into the socio-economic or even ethnic flavor tone of the region you live in. I mean, you know, we were talking before and I was raised a West Coast guy. And when I hear my friends from the South, the Deep South, the Delta South, you know, it's like, man, that's just a different world. You know, I think on the West Coast and I'm sure we'll get here. And certainly racism exists. In fact, there's some horrific things that i've seen happen in the in southern california of all places where it's like man how have we moved beyond that

but but it's still not it's still very different than what my friends uh describe this the deep south being so have we okay so it's been 50 plus years since jim crow and and 100 well more than 100 years since slavery i guess she'll sharecropping, you know, not too long ago. What's life like now in 2018 in the region where slaves, you know, walk in the streets not too far from your home? Exactly. Well, so I think sort of a theological understanding of place is vitally important here. There's a connection between history and the physical context where historical events happened. And we know this, so in college, I was blessed to be able to spend some time in the Middle East. We studied in the Holy Land for a semester. And so we got to go up to places

like Nazareth and Jerusalem and in Galilee. And, you know, that whole area is about the size of New Jersey. It's not very large geographically. So there were, you know, memorials and tourist stops and whatnot. And everyone would always say, well, this may not be the exact spot, but it's close. And it was so small and so close that you knew Jesus had walked there. You knew he had been there. And so many of the stories that we read in the Bible had occurred there. And when you're there physically, it impacts you on a spiritual level in just a different way. a different way. And in an analogous way, living in the American South and being physically close to where so much of America's racial history has happened, it strikes you in a different way.

So I can, I was saying before, my commute is through cotton fields and seeing those cotton fields in bloom is a sight to behold it's it's beautiful in a way but it's also haunting because we know the history we know that people were treated as property and they're they're physically picking the cotton by hand for decades and decades and decades and so you ask what it's like now that legacy is still very much alive so demographically the delta has has almost always had more black people than white people because the black people were laborers. And so there were more slaves on the plantation than slave owners. There were more black people working in the fields than white

people working in any other sector. And so that still holds true. My town is three quarters African American. Um, but the economic dynamics still hold true as well. So, uh, there was slavery. And then of course the civil war, which the town I live in was a civil war battle site. So again, being very close to that history and seeing the, the, the batteries and the hills and, uh, you know, people are still finding Civil War artifacts here. And then after emancipation comes sharecropping, comes convict leasing. And what we're seeing now are generations of Black families who you can trace it very clearly from slave to sharecropper to now lower income, sometimes jobless, often single parents, raising families in a cycle of generational poverty. And on the other hand, you have these huge, beautiful old Victorian homes that speak to the wealth of white citizens, both past and

present. Some of those folks can trace their families on back before the Civil War as well. Would you say there's still a lot of racial tensions or racism, blatant racism, or have we progressed quite a bit since, let's just say, Jim Crow? I'm sure, yes, of course we have. But I mean, what are the... Yeah. If I visited there, would i just be like oh my gosh is everybody here's a racist or is it yeah yeah so i think um it's important to celebrate

the victories yeah and uh i'll never forget john lewis the representative in georgia who had his skull fracture on the march to selma and uh there there's a sense among contemporary activists that america is just as racist as it's always been and i think in a certain sense you can say that but you can't say that in the sense that there's not been any progress and so john lewis said look if you think there's not been any progress just walk a mile in my shoes. And this is a man who was nearly killed, simply for the right to vote, fighting for the right to vote. So yes, we've come a long, long way. And here, even in the Delta, which has often been referred to as the most southern place on earth. Here in the Delta, even there's been enormous change. Uh, you know, I can walk into any restaurant, uh, you know, go to any place.

Not that I always do. Um, there, there is a, there is an element of, you know, who's here, how out of place will I be? But yeah, there's cordiality. Um, for the most part it's, it's polite, but that's a Southern thing too, you know. But I would say in the important ways, live. And it's called the Elaine Massacre. Now, the Elaine Massacre is a tragic story because it all came about from black sharecroppers attempting to organize simply to get a fair price for the cotton they picked. There's a long backstory, but essentially it was a case of unjust scales, as the Bible would say, where plantation owners were not giving a fair price to their laborers.

They were trying to organize a union and a lawsuit. They were meeting at a church, no less, one night. And two white men who were plainclothes police officers, they drove by. No one knows exactly how the altercation started, but a shootout occurred. One of the white men was killed and that set off all the white people in the area. And so over the next several days,

you had white men coming in on trains from different states. You even had the military in Arkansas called out. And what happened was the whole scale slaughter of well over 100 black sharecroppers, men, women and children. So that happened in 1919. It wasn't until the early 2000s that there was any sort of public reckoning in the area. And now finally, in 2019, they're going to erect a memorial in my town, which is the county seat. And it's not that people were hostile, like that had to go through councils and stuff. It got approved.

But there are a lot of people who are like, let the past stay in the past. We don't need to talk about that anymore. And many of us who are pushing for the monument are like, we do need to talk about it because number one, we haven't been talking about it for a century. And number two, we have to have the monument to speak to where we've been, where we are and where we still need to go. So it needs to be a constant discussion point. And I know I'm talking long winded here, but the last point, it needs to be a constant discussion point because the default of American society is toward racism and discrimination. That's the default. So if that's the default, then you have to actively pull the nation, your attention, your community toward equality and justice. That's good. I love how you,

I think you have a perfect balance, in my opinion, of, you know, you can't ignore the past. You can't obviously deny the past. And you don't want to, but you don't want to just live in the past and only focus on,

you know, the difficulties of the past, the atrocities of the past. But to just say we need to not be reminded of it and revisit it and constantly put it before us and say, yes, we've come a long way, but let's not get lazy. We need to keep pushing because, as you said, if we let up, we will default back into racism, ethnic tension. I mean, just theologically, I mean, that's human nature. Let's talk about your book, man. You got a book coming out, The Color of Compromise. What's the subtitle of it? That's a pretty provocative subtitle,

I want you to say. Yeah, and it's a mouthful. The subtitle is The Truth About the American Church's Complicity in Racism. All right. So go ahead, man. Go for it. Unpack for me what's going to hit the fan here in a few weeks in that book. It's released January 22nd. It comes out 22nd, the day after MLK Day. Yes.

Oh, all right. So, yeah, give us give us the bird's eye view of the book. Well, it's related to what we were just talking about in terms of remembering the past. Yes. To celebrate the progress we've made. And there's undeniable progress. But to also recognize how far we still have to go. So I often say The Color of Compromise is a book about the past, but it's really a book about the present and the future of the church. And it's about recovering the past so that we might change the present. What I often notice is a couple of things. sort of racially recalcitrant people will acknowledge that the church in America has

at times played a role in constructing or perpetuating racism. But our understanding is very impressionistic. We know vaguely, you know, the church was involved. But I think it's more powerful if we actually know specifics. If we know names, dates, places, people, and times, and context, and circumstances, if we know the stories, and history is just story, it's narrative. And I think we need more specificity about the narrative. You know, exactly why did the Southern Baptists become Southern Baptists? And not only them, why did Southern Methodists become Southern Methodists and Presbyterians become the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America for a time? When did that occur? Because it was actually before the Civil War for most of those denominations.

And what the church was doing in terms of dividing along the issue of slavery is what the nation would do more than a decade later. So in some ways it hinted at that. So when we know the specifics, I think it's more powerful. Also, when we know the specifics, we know how deep and far back race and racism go in this country and in the church. So one of the things that floored me was my family and I were on vacation a couple years ago in Williamsburg, Virginia. And they had a museum there because it's not far from the place where in 1619, 20 and odd Negroes were transported to the coast of Virginia. And that is widely recognized as sort of the start of race-based chattel slavery in British colonial America. And so at this museum, it showed a resolution by the Virginia Assembly,

which was a group of white men who were all Anglicans. And it made a resolution basically saying that baptism would not free an African, a mixed race person, or a Native American. And that shocked me for two reasons. Number one, they know implicitly that if you baptize someone and they're a Christian, they're a follower of Christ, there's a sense of equality there. And so they got to deal with that. So how can I enslave someone who is now my brother or sister in Christ. And then two, it also floored me that this was 1667, more than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, more than a hundred

years before the adoption of the Constitution. So before there was even a United States of America, you're already delineating people along racial lines and religious lines. And so if it goes that far back, at least to the last point, I said it's a book about the present. And the phrase I use often in the book comes from a phrase in Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. And he says, the fierce urgency of now. And he's talking about in 1963, how long black people have had to wait for justice and how at that moment in 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement that the nation had to respond to the fierce urgency of now and make immediate changes. later, you could still use that same phrase that the American church needs to respond to the fierce urgency of now in terms of making progress in race and justice issues today. Wow. So that's a little bit about sort of the theory and philosophy behind the book. So how's the church doing? How would you describe the American evangelical, let's just say Evangelical Church in 2018. Obviously,

that's a massive community of diverse people. But do you feel like we are doing pretty good right now in terms of race relations, ethnic reconciliation, and so on? I always want to acknowledge credit and give credit where credit's due. So there have been really important efforts. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, headed by Al Mohler, just released a report on their institutional history in regards to slavery, segregation, and racism. And it was a 71-page report conducted by a committee of internal constituents at Southern Seminary. And they were very forthright. You know, the four founders of SBTS were all white men and were all slave owners. And they acknowledged that. One of the things that stuck out to me was in the 1890s, the seminary was about to go under financially.

It was about to close down. It was saved by a $50,000 donation from a supporter who was a trustee member, former governor of Georgia. He also made his fortune through convict leasing. And convict leasing is when you sweep up a whole bunch of black people, mostly black men in the South, for minor offenses like vagrancy. You slap them with a fine. They're already poor, so they can't pay the fine. Then they go to jail. Then what happens is an employer, like this guy who bailed Southern Baptist Theological Seminary out, he contracted out with the prisons for the labor of these black inmates and sent

them to work in coal mines. And it's a boon for the employer because guess what? He pays the prison, but he doesn't pay the laborers. So it's basically, someone who wrote about this calls this a fate worse than slavery. Wow. Because in slavery, your slave owner had some incentive to keep you alive. You were a financial investment. Slaves were very expensive. And there was some incentive for a slave owner to keep people alive so that they could make a profit. But with inmates, nobody cares about you. They can literally work you to death. And they often did. As a matter of fact, in Texas, they just found a mass grave of convict leased prisoners, unidentified. They're going, trying to figure out who these folks are, trying to memorialize them. And this is probably almost a century later.

But this evangelical institution, this seminary was bailed out with blood money. And so that report was hard for the seminary to produce. But I give credit for them to go back and excavate that history. At the same time, there's a heck of a long way to go. The church is generally behind other institutions in society. For instance, you could look at the Oscars so white hashtag, and there was a huge push that actually disrupted the academy, the group of people who picks out Academy Award winners each year. And there was a massive push to include a racially and ethnically diverse composition there. You can look at sports. You can look at politics, which this Congress that's just getting going in 2019 is the most racially and ethnically diverse Congress in the history of the United States, more women than ever before. So the church is generally downstream from the culture when it comes to race and ethnicity. But that's frustrating because we have the gospel. We have scripture. We have every reason to honor and respect the dignity

of people made in the image of God, no matter what they look like. And therefore, the church should actually be the leader or like they say in the church, the headlight, not the taillight. Yeah, yeah. But we generally aren't that. And you're talking specifically of ethnic diversity within the church? Because obviously there's a high percentage of people of color who are Christians who are in the church but you're saying that it's the segregation

of different ethnicities in the church that we saw a long way to go that's an interesting issue certainly there's segregation in the churches and we all know that phrase 11 o'clock is the most segregated hour of the week. And certainly, we should be seeing more integration in our churches.

I want to caveat that, though, because I think, excuse me, I think as long as there is racism in the church and beyond, there will be a need for the black church. church and beyond, there will be a need for the black church. If you think historically, that, you know, black people, whether they were enslaved, or whether they were underemployed because of discrimination, had to face all kinds of obstacles, six days a week, interacting with a society that gave benefits to white people and disadvantages to people of color. Then you get to church on Sunday, and it's all black. And it's the only place where they call you sir, or ma'am, or miss, and not boy, or girl. It's the only place where you get to exercise a leadership role. You're the head of a committee, you're a deacon, you're a pastor. It's the only place where they really take your education seriously. And so for the history of the U.S., ever since there have been black Christians in the U.S.,

the black church has been a source of strength, of rejuvenation, of protection. And so, yeah, that integration thing is interesting. But generally, when we think of integration and Christianity, we're only thinking of Sunday morning. What about the rest of the week? That's where I think Christians really need to step up. Well, also, I think when I hear people talk about integration or even diversity or even, I don't know, even racial reconciliation, you know, the term gets thrown around, I think, without a lot of thought to it. These are all, I guess, good on the surface. But what ends up happening, and please correct me if I'm wrong, what ends up happening in a lot of these attempts is not true integration, but assimilation. You have a white flavor of the church.

And it's kind of like a, and I'll just say we, we don't really notice it, right? Because we are, you know, the dominant, whatever. And we're like, oh, we love it when black people show up. You know, whatever.

But like, it's still, it's a very white flavor that we're expecting, not explicitly, but very implicitly, I think, but expecting everybody else to assimilate into. So don't you touch our – we sing Amazing Grace a certain way and don't you – and yeah, we'll have a black worship leader in skinny jeans or whatever. But a black lead pastor that is preaching like a black man, that would make a lot of people nervous.

Would you agree with that i think we need to push through not not just wanting people to assimilate into a white dominant evangelical culture but to truly integrate to where the church doesn't have a white flavor to it that's right yeah yeah again you know the default is going to be towards uh whatever's comfortable to the majority in in this case, white people. And so I think it's Corey L. Edwards, K-O-R-Y, has a great book that I think it's called People of the Dream, Corey L. Edwards. And she talks about the struggle that multi-ethnic churches have to remain truly multi-ethnic, or better yet, multicultural, as they have multiple races and ethnicities. And one of the things she talks about is that even in a racially and ethnically diverse church,

the pull is toward what is comfortable and normal for white people. And that can be true even in a church that's majority minority. How can that be true? Because of your affiliations. And so if you're part of a church planting network or a denomination that's predominantly white and your church specifically is still majority minority, there's still a pull toward what the majority, even beyond your church walls, are doing. And so, yeah, that's in the music. I think that's especially in the preaching, and so yeah that's in the music i think that's especially in the preaching right it's not just aesthetics it's content and so what illustrations does the preacher use you know that it's going to strike differently uh to let's say black people if you use a seinfeld reference versus a martin reference or living single reference you know what i'm I'm saying? I grew up in the nineties. So those are my,

so we like when you peel back the layers, right. And like you're saying, not just do we sing amazing grace, but how do we see? And then the black, you know, what can be considered traditional black preaching? Is that a novelty that you get, you know, when you trade pulpits once or twice a year, or is that something that your white parishioners can really sit under and learn from? That's one thing that really strikes me is that a lot of people, especially a lot of Christians, have never sat under the authority of a person of color, particularly a black person, whether that's in the pulpit as a preacher or a teacher or a professor in

schools, or even a boss at work. And so just imagine how hard it's going to be for people who have never had a person of color in a position of authority for them to now listen to people who look different and learn from them and take a posture of listening. So yeah, this thing is deep, man. It's deep. You know, there's a couple organizations just off the top of my head that I've been really impressed with, really impressed with, and that's the Evangelical Covenant Church.

Are you familiar with the ECC? I think they do. They seem to be far ahead of most denominations that I've – I work with a lot of denominations through my ministry. And, man, they seem to really get it in ways that go beyond kind of the assimilation or just kind of the surfacy level. And also, InterVarsity. So, I spoke – check this out. I spoke at an InterVarsity event. It was a gathering of leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area. And it was white, let's just say, maybe 150 InterVarsity campus leaders. I was by far the minority. It was probably about 25% white. Both of the leaders were people of color.

uh both of the leaders were people of color uh everybody most people on stage worship and everything were of color the the music was very different we sang several songs that weren't in english um the beat was i couldn't keep up with the beat was very different when i got to speak there was about a five minute apology that they had a white straight male speaking i felt like i'm like i'm so sorry for being here i got invited but it was and they were joking and they were wonderful in fact they they invited me back and everything so i mean but it was so in a way it was so refreshing and eye opening and in a very positive way, uncomfortable. Yeah, yeah. But then that's the uncomfortableness that a lot of, I would assume, people of color experience almost every day when they're in a white dominant church environment or whatever. But I was just like, man, these guys are – this is a really special gathering that I think was a foretaste of heaven.

really special gathering that I think was a foretaste of heaven. Have you seen, give me some positive examples maybe that you've seen of churches or movements or even people or leaders that are like, man, these people are setting the pace of where the church needs to be. Do you have any examples? Yeah, I think the two you mentioned stick out to me as well. The ECC, I was just, it was a wonderful way to celebrate the first Sunday of January 2019. I went to worship at an ECC church that was literally one of the most racially and ethnically diverse churches I've seen. There were probably 100 to 150 people there. And it was one of those wonderful conundrums where there are so many people of different backgrounds that you couldn't actually name a clear majority. Right. Yeah. I couldn't tell you if it was mainly black, white, Asian, Hispanic.

It was it was that integrated. And so and that was interesting because it happened even under a white senior minister. But they're in the inner city of Chicago. And and I know a lot of folks who are really passionate about, um, diversity in the church who gravitate toward the ECC. I've also spoken, you know, there's always, uh, issues. So I've spoken to, to folks who are in the denomination and work for it. And when you're in it, you can see, you know, the, the, the underbelly or the, the, the work that still needs to be done a lot more clearly, from the outside looking in um they certainly seem to be further ahead than a lot of other denominations so go ahead no you'll get you go ahead you finish up yeah intervarsity is also very interesting um because i've heard that that their urbana conference which just happened um it's a student

missions conference that happens every three years i've heard it was a majority minority for the first time really more people of color than white people uh and i think part of that has to do with yes it's evangelical but it's also very british um all right so john stott had a huge part in that and from what i understand the founder of the USA chapter of InterVarsity was also British. And so they come with their own baggage, of course, but sort of a different kind that may have enabled them to make progress a little bit faster than something like Campus Crusade for Christ, founded by Bill Bright, who is very much an American evangelical. So how do we get there? What are the ingredients? So let's just take ECC, InterVarsity. What got them there? Because I know there's a lot of people, especially in my podcast,

a lot of people listening that are very much going to resonate with everything we're saying, but wanting to say, okay, so how do I do this? How do I take the next step and move beyond just assimilation and try to foster integration? So how did places like InterVarsity ECC get to where they are? I don't know their institutional histories. I would love to learn more about it. But I can say more generally, to get to the place where a lot of us want to go in terms of racial and ethnic diversity is going to be bloody. At least metaphor racial and ethnic diversity is going to be bloody, at least metaphorically speaking, it's going to be bloody because progress in these areas never

comes without a struggle. And so to me, the conversation we need to be having in terms of discipleship of Christians in America is less about practical steps of achieving racial and ethnic diversity, which, by the way, is only one step. There's got to be diversity, equity, and inclusion, which a lot of organizations have adopted as a framework, because just getting people of different colors in the same room does not ensure that there's going to be equal power or voices are going to be heard. Can you unpack those three real quick? I mean, we don't, I mean, we get diversity, but equity and inclusion.

Yeah. So equity means sharing power. So it means that, you know, so a lot of times our schools, our public schools are as desegregated or more so than before. And the way that many schools got around that, especially in the early days of integration, was letting in one or two black people. And they're like, okay, we'll do this. That way we can check the box that says we're obeying the law. And we can say we have diversity and we're not discriminating based on race because look, we have black people. But they could do that because it didn't substantively change anything they were doing. The parents didn't have power on the PTA.

They weren't school board members. The students didn't have a say in the curriculum or anything like that. So there was no equity there in terms of the people you're bringing in, the diversity that you have actually gets a say in the way your institution conducts itself. And then inclusion would be, are you welcome here? So do you think those one or two black students in those early days of integration felt welcome? Of course not. They were tolerated at best. And maybe, you know, maybe they befriended a couple of people. But, you know, by and large, it was seen as a great sacrifice to be a minority who's integrating these institutions because there was no sense

of inclusion. We want you here. We welcome you here. We honor your presence. We won't try to change you. We want to learn from you. So I think that's one thing Christians need to understand, because there are more and more churches are having people in the pews who look different from one another. And that's great.

That's progress. But let's not stop there. So you, I mean, you have a mean, you have a personal narrative here. I mean, you grew up, Christianly speaking, in, can I assume, I mean, a largely white evangelical environment. I mean, you went to RTS. You've been part of kind of the Reformed-ish branch of evangelicalism for most of your Christian walk, whatever.

So what has it been like being a black Christian in a largely white subculture of evangelicalism? So I've almost always been a minority in Christian spaces. I was introduced to a personal relationship with Christ, however you want to put it, in an evangelical white youth group. And I started going to the church that was attached to that youth group, which was an evangelical white church, sort of loosely modeled off the Willow Creek seeker sensitive model, and all the culture that went with that. In the youth group, there was one other

black person who frequently came. He was biracial. And so, yeah, I've always been very conscious of race because I was typically the only one or one of a few. That persisted into college and adulthood as I got more and more into reformed circles, churches and seminary and the like. And here's the thing. churches and seminary and the like. And here's the thing, in the 21st century, you can be black in those spaces, as long as you talk about race a certain way. So as long as you're talking about racial reconciliation, and you know, the more we get together, the happier we'll be kind of stuff. You're fine. People celebrate that they welcome that I was a golden boy for a while, when I first started writing and speaking. And I was just talking about sort of, you know, from a theological, biblical standpoint, the equality of all people and how we need to get together and all that stuff.

Folks love that. They applauded that. White people, black people, there's no problem there. The problem comes in when you start talking about systems and power. When you go beyond diversity and you're talking about equity and inclusion, that's what really rankles people because now you have to change. With diversity, there's a sense in which you can welcome all comers as long as they do what you do, talk like you talk, dress like you dress. do what you do, talk like you, you, you talk, dress like you dress. So there's a difference between unity and uniformity. Yeah. And with unity, you can have diversity with uniformity.

You can only have aesthetic diversity and on the deeper things, the most important things they, they, they sort of prescribe a lockstep. You know, this is the way things are done. This is the way we understand the bible and that's it wow so i mean going back to the assimilation integration people are fine with assimilation diversity under the umbrella of assimilation but once you start to generally integrate integrate in terms of and i'm just thinking like at a leadership level, I think that that's – would you agree that that might be the first step people need to take? It's one thing to open up your doors and welcome people and have kind of a combat racism on a surface level. But once you start having a leadership turnover, is that where people start getting uncomfortable?

Have you seen that happen where people get nervous about that or? It depends on the kind of leader. So you can certainly have a person of color who's who's totally celebrated because they don't approach issues of race in a controversial way. controversial way. They're still talking about just reconciliation, which in Christianese, I understand racial reconciliation simply to be diversity, simply to be the call for people to be friends across the color line. And so I want to clarify that because I think there's a healthy type of reconciliation that would include justice, that would include equity, that would include inclusion. And so it depends on the kind of leader. I think churches, especially churches that are predominantly are all white, they ought

to be doing the hard work of dismantling racist ideas long before they ever think about inviting people of color into their congregation and certainly into their leadership. In other words, I don't want churches that are predominantly white to think they have to wait until they have diversity to start talking about race, ethnicity, culture, justice. That should be happening right now so that when it does happen, and if it does happen, it's actually a safe place to land for people of color. And I use that term inclusively, people of color, but I do want to delineate because of the history of race-based chattel slavery, African-American people or Black people have a very distinct dynamic in all of these conversations, too.

I wonder, too, I mean, would a church's awareness of social issues, even politics, and, you know, I know the term can be interpreted in different ways, but social justice, issues surrounding social justice, and is that, I mean, I'm going to say, obviously, you know, churches that are predominantly made up of people of color, especially black people, are going to be much more aware of issues surrounding social justice and things going on in the wider society. So we're a church that maybe will talk about racial reconciliation and may actually be eager to have more integration, diversity, so on and so forth,

if they don't also proclaim from the pulpit in their small groups, in the very DNA of the church, if they are not publicly aware and taking action toward social justice, then it's not going to be really a place that's going to resonate with people of color the way it should. Would that be an accurate assumption? Yeah, I think that's a really, really important point you bring up. First, I always talk to Black people and say, just because you're Black doesn't mean you know about race and racism. This stuff actually takes study. It takes time and reflection. And of course, not all black people are the same. So we've been raised in very different contexts of socio economically and culturally. And so the black immigrant experience is very different. of another race or ethnicity doesn't mean they're actually very astute on these issues or very

learned about them. So that's a caution that we all need to have that, you know, the amount of melanin in one's skin neither qualifies nor disqualifies you to talk about race. The other thing is, it's really crucial in this day and age to recognize that most Christians are not foaming at the mouth racist, very far from it. In fact, many, many pastors, even of predominantly white churches, are going to support racial integration. They're going to preach about equality from the pulpit. But the point you raise about justice, I think that's critical. Really? When you start, so I just think it's not very costly in 2019 for a church leader to say, I believe all people are created equal. I don't discriminate based on race.

You know, that's, thank God we're to that point because that wasn't always the case, right? So credit where credit's due. But at the same time, is that it? Is that what we're talking about? Have we checked the box then on race and racism in the church? No, I don't think so. So I think the next push in the 21st century for Christians is on issues of justice, which no matter what issue you're talking about, falls along racial lines. Yes, it falls along economic lines as well, but those economic lines are also delineated racially. I'll give you an example. I don't have the exact numbers, but even if you look at the wealthiest 10%, wealthiest 1%, if you look at millionaires, both black and white, the white millionaires have multiple times the

millions that black millionaires do. So even when you're dealing with the very richest people, the white people are richer than the richest black people and of course when you're dealing with the very poorest people the same can be true or the proportion of poor people so we got to deal with that we got to deal with how the criminal justice system has been structured to almost systematically uh entrap black people in what Michelle Alexander calls a new form of Jim Crow. We got to deal with what's happening right now in terms of voter suppression. There was a case not long ago in North Carolina where a judge ruled against gerrymandering because he said the ways that the majority white Republican legislators drew the boundaries was designed to disenfranchise or exclude black people with,

quote, almost surgical precision. Wow. They were targeting black people to make it harder for them to vote. And this is the 21st century now, not 1963. We got to deal with what I call the Fox news Christian or the Fox news evangelical whose racialized politics seem to dictate their attitudes and stances more than scripture does. So when preachers start talking about that, that's when they're really honing in on what needs to happen in terms of race and justice today.

Wow. Good stuff, man. I remember at ETS, you were on an Evangelical Theological Society's annual meeting, which is very white-dominant. It's very white evangelical, which it is what it is, I guess. But you were on a really interesting panel.

I wish I was there for the whole thing. I caught the tail end of it. But you, and it was on, was it on something with Trump, right? I mean, yeah, it was on John Fia's book, Believe Me, and the Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. You gave a stunning, there was a five minute section where you were talking

about trying to help a 90% white audience understand why so many black Christians might be theologically conservative, but politically quite progressive, largely Democrat and trying to help us, I'll say say us understand the logic of that can you for my audience give you uh unpack that again i i wish i had the recording but uh yeah i wish i'd had why would a somebody who's a person that's just a person of color black um be theologically conservative and yet still vote for say say, Hillary or Obama or Bill Clinton or be, you know, staunchly Democrat. Yes. I don't remember exactly what I said, but when you look at it, African-Americans are the most consistently partisan voting bloc in the country. And when you ask why that is, it basically boils down to race. And by that, I mean, black people vote for the least racist candidate or party.

I say least racist on purpose, because it's not like neither party has problems. Both parties have problems with race and racism. But, you know, when African-Americans finally got the opportunity to vote after an amendment to the Constitution had to be passed, who are you going to vote for? Who are you going to vote for? Someone in the party of Lincoln who signed the Emancipation Proclamation or someone in the party of at that time it was the Democrats. Right. The Democrats were were the party of white supremacy. That's not a hard choice. When you look at especially the 1960s and onward, when you've got Barry Goldwater, who did not support the Civil Rights Act. And that's interesting. Barry Goldwater is very interesting because he's from Arizona, not the Deep South. And he did not support the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds. He thought it was government overreach. But he won all the states in the Deep South because people in the Deep South didn't want Black people voting, didn't want Black people to have more civil rights. And so that's a really

easy choice for Black voters. Are you going to vote for the candidate who opposes the Civil Rights Act? Or are you going to vote for the candidate who supports it? And later on, you know, Nixon with his law and order politics, which I think is still a big issue. Law and order is a dog whistle term, a racially coded term, because it was used most frequently in references to urban uprisings. And so it was it was about getting Black people under control. So are you going to support the quote unquote law and order candidate? Are you going to support another candidate who's not going to use sort of those racially loaded terms? So the short story is, you know, all voters in a sense vote their own self-interest, but black

people are voting for self-survival. And they're going to vote for, we are going to vote for candidates who at least make gestures toward pushing for racial justice. Yeah, that's good, man. Okay. So obviously people are going to ask about the abortion question. So how to, how to, and again, I don't expect you to answer on behalf of an entire community, but what would be the typical kind of black Christian response to the pushback that, you know, what about abortion or what about, you know, what about just liberal values that may be more present among Democrats that may clash with Christians would be, you know, the argument that people might make. Yeah, I love talking about this stuff. It's very complicated. One, we have to acknowledge the extent to which abortion as an issue has been politicized. So I think there are a lot of

Republicans, Christians, who are anti-abortion and really believe that it's purely a biblical theological issue. But honestly, abortion has been weaponized in the political sphere. And it's been used as a dividing line where there are probably Christians, black and white, who, especially as we move forward in time, who probably have a lot in common politically, but abortion has been elevated to a single issue kind of topic. And traditionally black voters have had a lot more holistic view when they vote. A lot of voters have a lot more holistic view and don't vote on a single issue. And I say that in the same breath as black people are consistently the most religious and the most Christian demographic in America. So you're not dealing with atheists.

You're not dealing with atheists. You're not dealing with secular people. You're dealing with other believers who have a different political calculus than white evangelicals. In the book, The Color of Compromise, I cite historian Randall Balmer, who has a really provocative thesis in his research. And what he's arguing is that in the 1970s, what brought together the Christian political right, or the moral majority, essentially, was not the issue of abortion originally. It was actually the issue of racial integration and tax-exempt status. And listeners who are older will remember Bob Jones University had a policy of excluding Black people. And then when they did let Black people in,

they had it in their handbook, you could not date interracially. And they held on to that sucker. You know? And so from the IRS of all places came the supposed threat to religious freedom, because the IRS is saying you're breaking the law by discriminating against black people, you will no longer be allowed tax exempt status. And it was that case that in the early 1970s started to mobilize Christians politically in opposition to the federal government and that case. And then what Ballmer is arguing is that based on that infrastructure, they sort of stumbled their way into this issue of abortion. And this is coming along as Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, they have, you know, whatever happened to the human being or something like that. And they made a documentary. They went on tour about it.

This is happening in conjunction with a whole lot of other cultural movements. And then you get it. But abortion wasn't the original issue. Even when Roe v. Wade originally passed, the Southern Baptist Convention had sort of a like, okay, fine response. It wasn't this huge whole scale rejection. I think it was Jerry Falwell didn't preach his first sermon against abortion to like 1978, several years after Roe v. Wade. So my point is, it has been, it is an issue of human atrocity. Every fetus is a human being. They have a right to live.

And so that is very, very true. But we also have to acknowledge the way that it has been used by politicians to separate, divide, garner votes, those kinds of things. And I think if you look at people of color, they're looking more holistically. So they're looking at pro-life from womb to tomb, not just pro-birth, but pro-life. So what does that look like?

That means providing adequate healthcare. That means providing adequate education. That means making sure that people who are incarcerated are treated humanely and have their human rights protected. So they're looking not just, you know, at children in the womb, they're looking at when those children get born, do they have the opportunity for human flourishing? for human flourishing. Interesting. Oh, wow. I know you got to go, but just one more thought as you're talking. Does it matter? And I don't know the stats on this, and I don't even know if it's true or not, but I've heard, I remember reading several places, that the number of actual abortions does not ebb and flow with whether the president is say pro or anti-abortion is that an accurate thing like i heard i think that abortions maybe the number of abortions you know i think even went

down was it during bill clinton's office and maybe up during the bushes or something like that again i don't know if that's true but i heard something like that and part of it is because part of it plays into the to the economic and socio and socioeconomic policies of of you know the person that's in in power at the time is that yes uh let me ask you this question um is this going to go as video or audio or both uh it will go as audio and maybe down the road we'll release it as a video but yeah you go if you got something good pop it up yeah let me let me i want to smooth out my answer to the abortion question okay if so sorry producer oh yeah yeah no worries so just uh ask that first question again i really like your follow-up question in terms of when abortion goes

up or down so maybe we can stick a pin in that yeah um but i want to go all the way back okay and re-explain it a little bit more smoothly we don't need to edit it this is uh yeah just go ahead and just uh yeah for the audience just go ahead and smooth it over and and they'll okay yeah the issue of abortion always comes up when you're talking about voting patterns especially among christ, and then even more specifically among black and white Christians. And so even with abortion as an issue, you're going to find that black people still generally vote Democrat, white people still generally vote Republican in terms of Christians, evangelicals. And so it's a complicated issue. And I think, I think we should have the babies. I love children. I was a, I was an educator and I believe a fetus is a person

and that we have to deeply consider what that looks like in terms of valuing and cherishing life. in terms of valuing and cherishing life. I also think there are very complicated circumstances that lead people to make really, really difficult choices in terms of whether to carry their child to term or not. So it's a complicated issue. We need to hear and follow the lead a lot more of women in this whose bodies are most directly affected by this issue. So with all sensitivity to the issue of abortion.

But when you're talking politically, I think we also have to recognize that this is not simply a theological issue. It's not solely a theological issue. It is, right? Like we understand from a biblical perspective how God has formed people in the womb, how we're made in his image, but it's also a political issue and it has been politicized. And so one of the things I talk about in The Color of Compromise

is historian Randall Balmer, who has some very provocative research. And he argues that what originally brought together white evangelicals as a political movement was not the issue of abortion, as is often assumed, but it was the issue of racial integration and tax-exempt status. And that goes back to the case with Bob Jones University, which had a very prominent and public policy of first completely excluding black people. But then even when they allowed black students to enroll, they had an explicit policy in their handbook against interracial dating. And so that the IRS looked at that and said, this is a violation of the Civil Rights Act. You're discriminating on the basis of race, and you will not get tax-exempt status.

Bob Jones University filed suit. It's in courts for years and years and years. And it's that case that begins to bring together, begins to mobilize white evangelicals politically against certain laws in the federal government. And it's not until later in the 70s, so Roe v. Wade is early 70s, it's not until later in the 70s that abortion really becomes the paramount issue of the moral majority or of the religious right. And so I think that's a critical history to understand is that, you know, politicians are trying to get votes and they found this issue that that really fires people up in terms of white evangelicals and mobilizes them. So we have to at least be cognizant that that the issue of abortion is operating both on a moral level and a political level. cooperating both on a moral level and a political level. In terms of Black voters, Black voters are the most consistently partisan voters of any demographic, consistently vote Democrat in the last half century or so. Now, why is that? A lot of people will say, well, Black people have been

duped. They've been hoodwinked. They've been tricked by, you know, Democratic liberals, and they don't understand that these policies are actually hurting them. And if they would just be conservative and Republican, then they would finally get free. Well, I think that's very demeaning. I think it's very insulting to Black people as if we can't make the same sort of political calculations that other people can make. And the reality is that Black people are voting for their own survival. Historically, Black people vote for the candidate or the party that comes off as less racist. I say less racist because both parties have issues with racism.

But it's a very easy choice in 1964 when Barry Goldwater opposes the Civil Rights Act and LBJ supports it and pushes it through. It's a very easy choice when Nixon is talking about law and order, which has widely been recognized as a dog whistle for controlling black people. It's very much geared toward urban uprisings and putting black people in their place and making sure that they're not, you know, supposedly riding in the streets for no reason at all. So those are very easy political calculations. And especially in this day and age, man, you can look at some of the recent Senate races. You can look at some of the ads that Republican candidates have put out. In Mississippi, Cindy Hyde-Smith, who is now the senator, she won the election. She said, she joked about, you know, her friend, if he invited her to a public hanging, she would sit in the front row. And this is in Mississippi with the highest recorded number of lynchings. And everybody there laughed at it. So it wasn't

just Cindy Hyde-Smith saying it, it was the audience there laughing at it. So it wasn't just Cindy Hyde Smith saying it. It was the audience there laughing at it. And it later came out that she was in a white flight school, a segregation academy, as they call it, a school that was explicitly started in the days of early integration this would be late 60s early 70s explicitly begun uh to maintain segregation and it started as a private school uh so the white folks fled the public school so they wouldn't have to integrate right so she went and she grew up in that context so i say that because for black people the political calculation is pretty straightforward. Like, do you honor my humanity as a person of color? And that doesn't just mean we vote for people of color. That means that we vote for our survival. The last thing I'll say on this sort of related to the abortion issue is that because of racial discrimination, black people tend to think more holistically in terms of pro-life, right? Like it deserves mentioning that African-Americans are consistently

the most religious and the most Christian demographic in the country. So we're not dealing with unbelievers. We're not dealing with a whole bunch of secular folks. We're dealing with Christians. And when it comes to being pro-life, African-Americans and a lot of other folks tend to think not just pro-birth, but pro-life from beginning to end, pro-life from womb to tomb. And so that would include issues like education, healthcare, incarceration, nutrition, all of these things. So it's not just what are we doing with a baby in the womb, but what do we do once that human being enters the world? And do they have the opportunity for human flourishing? Jamar, thanks so much for your time, dude. That is so, so much to chew on. I could keep, man, I wish I had another hour to keep digging into all these.

I got so many other questions. So, which means I'll have to have you back on. So thanks for letting me rant. No problem, man. That's why you're here. That's why you're here. That sounds so good. What I have guests on though, I mean, my goal is, man, I want to, yeah, I want them to do just what you did, man.

Inform us, educate us, challenge our thinking. So you've definitely done that on this episode. The book is Color of Compromise, releases January 22nd. Who's the publisher? Is it Zondervan? That's correct. Zondervan. And yeah, where else can people find you?

There's this thing called Google. And if they Googled your name, I'm sure it would take you. But for those who don't want to go through a two step process, what's your Web site and where can they find us? Yeah. So we have tons more content about these issues at our Web site, which is the witness BCC dot com. BCC stands for Black Christian Collective. So the witness BCC dot com. BCC stands for Black Christian Collective. So the witness BCC dot com. We're on all major social media. You can find me at Jamar Tisby at the witness BCC and at underscore past the mic is our podcast at underscore past the mic. Subscribe, rate and review. Awesome. Thanks so much, Jamar. And yeah, good luck on your next book. Appreciate it, brother. Thank you.