Ambivalent Miracles

Evangelicals and the Politics of Racial Healing

Nancy D. Wadsworth

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813935324
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

Over the past three decades, American evangelical Christians have undergone unexpected, progressive shifts in the area of race relations, culminating in a national movement that advocates racial integration and equality in evangelical communities. The movement, which seeks to build cross-racial relationships among evangelicals, has meant challenging well-established paradigms of church growth that built many megachurch empires. While evangelical racial change (ERC) efforts have never been easy and their reception has been mixed, they have produced meaningful transformation in religious communities. Although the movement as a whole encompasses a broad range of political views, many participants are interested in addressing race-related political issues that impact their members, such as immigration, law enforcement, and public education policy.

Ambivalent Miracles traces the rise and ongoing evolution of evangelical racial change efforts within the historical, political, and cultural contexts that have shaped them. Nancy D. Wadsworth argues that the stunning breakthroughs this movement has achieved, its curious political ambivalence, and its internal tensions are products of a complex cultural politics constructed at the intersection of U.S. racial and religious history and the meaning-making practices of conservative evangelicalism. Employing methods from the emerging field of political ethnography, Wadsworth draws from a decade's worth of interviews and participant observation in ERC settings, textual analysis, and survey research, as well as a three-year case study, to provide the first exhaustive treatment of ERC efforts in political science.

A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

PART ONE

What Stories We Tell

Historicizing Evangelicalism and Race

1 The New Paradigm of Racial Change

Red, yellow, black, or white, all are precious in His sight.

—Traditional Christian song

There was a time when most American evangelical Christians did not have to think about race in church—or at least not about race or racism as problems within the church. For people of color, of course, the impact of a historically racialized society is impossible to avoid. But race wasn’t supposed to matter among Christians: once a believer “accepted Christ” and was thereby “born again,” she was “saved” and part of the Christian community whatever her background or skin color.¹ Even so, for a variety of reasons most Americans have historically joined churches filled with members who looked, racially, a lot like themselves. A long legacy of racial fracture in evangelicalism, and, later, a popular paradigm for church growth called the Homogeneous Unit Principle, created an effectively segregated church culture in the United States. Nine out of ten Christians still attend racially homogenous churches (Chaves et al. 1999; DeYoung et al. 2003; Emerson 2000, 74).

The appearance of individual taste, not systemic exclusion, as the basis for church demography gives whites the luxury of imagining the church as a race-neutral place. But the growing social movement for racial change within evangelical Protestantism has made it harder for the racially separate status quo to escape critique.² Within the evangelical racial change (ERC) movement, participants spotlight issues of racial and ethnic diversity (or the dearth thereof), and promote reconciliation and substantive integration inside churches and Christian organizations.³ ERC leaders work, first and foremost, to foster a “body of believers” who know how to identify and dismantle racist attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, and are able, wherever feasible, to thrive in racially and ethnically heterogeneous, culturally syncretic congregations in which no single worship or leadership style dominates. Such a tapestried Christian community, advocates believe, is a preview of what heaven will look like and part of a biblical command to embrace diversity.⁴

The movement can be traced to a number of historical strands and precursors. As early as there have been Christians in North America, there have been a (very) few who actively pursued the belief that their religion could foster harmony across racial divides. I focus, though, on two modern waves of racial change advocacy that sought to transform evangelicalism. These are the flurry of activities that blossomed under the concept of racial reconciliation in the 1990s; and the multiethnic church (MEC) movement, which, despite its older origins, did not begin to coordinate its collective resources until the 2000s.⁵ To briefly summarize each:

Racial reconciliation focused on repairing long-standing racial fractures within evangelicalism through recognitions and apologies for racism at individual and organizational levels, new conversational forums about race relations, and the fostering of cross-racial relationships. The MEC movement pursues a range of models of racial/ethnic diversity, from fully integrated congregations to two or more language or culture groups holding different services under the same roof (Emerson and Kim 2003; Chaves et al. 1999; DeYoung et al. 2003; Emerson and Woo 2006; Garces-Foley 2007; Christerson, Edwards, and Emerson 2005; Anderson and Bridgeway Community Church 2004; Yancey 2003).⁶ While distinct, the two waves of activity have some overlap in time, and in shared convictions and objectives. Pioneers in the MEC movement were important players during the height of racial reconciliation discourse in the mid-1990s, and racial reconciliation continues to be a refrain within many existing or aspiring MECs, though practitioners have become more circumspect about the term.

It is difficult to measure the ERC movement’s exact reach in terms of how many people or churches have been involved at any given time. At this stage, the best estimates suggest that ERC initiatives constitute a minority strain, though an increasingly visible one, within the roughly 25 percent of the U.S. population that identifies as evangelical. At the peak of racial reconciliation activities in the late 1990s, over half of American “strong evangelicals” surveyed reported being aware of the movement (Emerson and Smith 2000, 127–28).⁷ Racial reconciliation had its dramatic public moments: apologies by prominent leaders and organizations for histories of racism; a Christian men’s movement, Promise Keepers, that emphasized racial reconciliation and caught the American public’s attention; and moments of fairly public self-reflection about race in the evangelical community that critics of the Religious Right would not have expected (Newton 2005; Stricker 2001; Sack 1996; Reed 1996a). The reconciliation movement did not only “live” in particular congregations or organizations but was also carried by individual people scattered across disparate churches and parachurch organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ and Promise Keepers. Testimonies of ERC efforts became a niche literature in the evangelical publishing industry, making racial reconciliation one of the most prominent topics in American evangelical discourse throughout the 1990s.

Better numbers are available for the MEC movement. MECs are usually defined as congregations in which more than 20 percent of the members are from the minority racial or ethnic group(s) in that church. Twenty percent nonmajority members is a threshold that, proponents suggest, requires all members to substantively interact across difference. Such a congregation might be comprised of whites and people of color, or different ethnic or national-origin groups within one racial category (as race is defined in the United States), such as Latinos or Asians. As of this writing, the MEC movement counts them as constituting only 8.5 percent (De Young et al. 2003, 2) of American Christian churches.⁸ That percentage would equate to tens of thousands of Americans involved (Emerson and Kim 2003, 217). Mosaix Global Network, the first national network of evangelical MECs, currently lists over 300 MECs in the United States in its directory, and at this writing claimed 1,200 individual members.⁹ Mosaix sponsors local, regional, and national conferences on MEC building, produces guiding literature, and attempts to serve as a clearinghouse of resources for interested churches.¹⁰

Miracles and Ambivalence

While conscious of themselves as a relatively small community swimming against the tide, MEC participants see the rewards as priceless. Choosing to apply the resources of their faith—theology, beliefs about God’s will for believers, rituals, and other ways of interacting in evangelical culture—to the goal of bridging racial divides, many find themselves relating differently to broader social dynamics than before. The more substantively they interact with others across differences in race, ethnicity, and/or class, the more likely they are to encounter problems of privilege, politics, and power within and beyond their immediate religious communities. But how to address such questions in multiethnic settings, and whether to consider those delicate spiritual spaces appropriate for the secular business of political engagement—or even for talk about politics—remains an unresolved issue for most.

A few snapshots provide a less abstract sense of this:

When he left his coveted youth minister position at a wealthy suburban church outside of Denver, Colorado, to plant an MEC in the inner city, Curt,¹¹ a thirty-five-year-old white pastor, had only the faintest idea how steep his learning curve would be. But within two years Resurrection Bible Church was hosting a motley congregation of homeless and ex-homeless people, middle- and working-class families, and a growing, multilingual contingent of Latinos, African immigrants, African Americans, and mixed-race families. After settling in the neighborhood, Curt and his wife sent their school-age boys to the local elementary school, where they were the only white students. Not long after, this pastor, who had “never been involved in politics in my life,” found himself lobbying for local school reform candidates, building alliances with homeless advocacy groups, and publicly supporting immigration reform in state and federal law.

The sense of a call to engage, at a political level, some of the issues affecting community members was new to Curt. Such things were frowned upon in the ultraconservative community in which he was raised. “I come from conservative training that says you are supposed to save souls—you know, as opposed to the social gospel approach that [conservatives argue] hurt the church,” he comments. “Now I’m saying, you can’t separate the gospel from the work of Christ. Technically, I’m moving into social justice. It’s more than social action.” This new orientation raised eyebrows among some of his funders from white, wealthy, suburban churches. But Curt was willing to let the chips fall. “I know that the minute you talk justice, you’re talking politics,” he says. “But it’s my life!”

Suzanne, who is also white, pastors an Evangelical Covenant Church in Chicago. Traditionally a Swedish immigrant denomination, and theologically closer to mainline Protestantism than some other evangelical churches, her church now hosts over a dozen first-generation immigrant communities of diverse ethnic backgrounds. As the small church grows, Suzanne is identifying a need for some kind of ministry that can help members navigate the immigration process, even as all this is new to her. “There is a huge injustice, not only in our [U.S.] system, but in the way their [countries of origin] handle them, to help or hinder them. How can we as the church make some difference in that?” she wonders. “There needs to be a space for them to know that, ‘we’ll stand with you.’ We need to tackle this justice issue. It’s a huge one.”

When he came to the Multiethnic Church Track of the annual Exponential church-planting conference in Florida in 2008, James was looking for resources. An African American, James headed up a church in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, that had once been a black church but as the neighborhood became more mixed, was now attracting young whites, Latinos, and Caribbean immigrants. Many longtime church members were nervous about the changes, but James saw exciting opportunities to build a new kind of community. Although identifying as dispositionally more “liberal” and “social justice–oriented” than many of the pastors at the church-planting conference, he expressed disappointment that neither the traditionally black church nor the traditionally liberal mainline churches had taken “stronger leadership in building multiracial churches,” even though the African American experience made them “uniquely situated” to do so.

In setting up his church as intentionally multiethnic, James ruffled some feathers. Some of the older members even left the church. But as it has actually become a diverse congregation, he reports, “I’ve changed.” Now, he says, “I want to see people have a relationship with Jesus Christ. But beyond that, what I would like to see happen is for the [multiethnic] church to lead the way to a society in which the common good of all people is looked out for, whether or not they are believers.”

Lastly, Felix, a second-generation Korean-American, pastors a small MEC in Orange County, California, in which the average congregant is a mid-thirties professional. The church’s vision statement is, as he puts it, gospel-focused and international: to “make and equip disciples of all nationalities to be Christ ambassadors to all the nations.” Although his church started as 90 percent Korean, now it is more mixed; about 75 percent of the members are Asian (55 percent Korean, 20 percent Chinese), the other 25 percent Caucasian. His staff is mostly white, and his leadership team is a mix of whites and Asians. Rather than a traditional first-generation ethnic church or a second-generation “assimilationist” church, Felix tries to foster a “third culture” mix of ethnic pride, stages of accommodation to American culture, and racial intermixing, even in marriage.

His largely upper-middle-class and politically diverse congregation cares about social issues—poverty, international slavery and human trafficking, AIDS—and contributes resources in those areas. Felix believes attending to justice issues is a way to apply the gospel in practice. But as a theologically conservative evangelical, he is also wary of identifying as a “social justice” church. “I think the problem has been, among evangelicals, when you combine social justice with the gospel, that becomes the gospel. In other words, the whole liberalism—the reason that people . . . shied away from those issues is because social justice issues ate up the church.”

Felix’s implication that linking “the gospel” with “social justice” is potentially dangerous illuminates a peculiar characteristic of conservative evangelical Christianity in the United States, the trajectory of which I trace in subsequent chapters. The fact that the racial change advocates introduced above are squeamish about whether and how the work they do in their churches might bear on larger political questions is not a demonstration of simple apathy or disinterest. These pastors want to employ the resources they find most meaningful in order to help transform their world, and the world. They are usually aware that pursuing substantive racial equality and diversity in their communities may entail taking political stands on some things—say, access to equity in public education or to a fairer and less cumbersome immigration process. They know (or have learned over time) that superficial gestures toward “color-blind” Christian love often compound the problems (Emerson 2000; Loury 2002).

To suggest that conservatism explains the ambivalence would be too simple. Though most ERC participants in the movements I’m looking at describe themselves as theologically conservative, meaning committed to a literalist reading of scripture and certain biblical fundamentals, their political orientation in the aggregate differs in some respects from the larger conservative evangelical community. As we will see, with regard to certain topics like immigration, many are better described as political moderates. The movement also draws leadership and involvement from Christians of color from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, some of whom do unabashedly identify as social justice activists. Most movement participants nevertheless embrace conservative positions toward other social issues such as marriage, abortion, and homosexuality. But even if they self-identify as conservative Republicans in general, they see themselves as part of a positive submovement within evangelicalism that purposely challenges old, “sinful” racial worldviews sometimes described as “conservative” by the people who defend(ed) them.

Yet political ambivalence persists among many individuals and organizations in the ERC movement. More precisely, as they engage in multiracial settings, they feel simultaneously drawn to and turned off by the possibility of collectively reflecting, much less acting, on their racial change–related pursuits in political (or what they often call “politicized”) terms—even though the same individuals may be less conflicted about other issues, such as abortion. Some participants attempt to resolve internal ambivalence by avoiding politics altogether. But others committed to ERC work over time actually experience political awakenings and even transform into activists of one kind or another, sometimes to their own surprise. Their fellow congregants, however, are not always ready to join them because, as we will see, psychological, theological, and conceptual obstacles often stand in their way.

On one dimension, then, the ERC movement exemplifies the pursuit of the social “miraculous”—that is, exciting, out-of-the-ordinary events and processes that participants see as motivated, mediated, or directly produced by God working through faithful human efforts.¹² On another, it is about political ambivalence threaded through pursuits of transformation. Put differently, working within a context of political ambivalence that is, for culturally specific reasons, more comfortable than engagements framed as explicitly political, people often believe they can create safer spaces for the kinds of interactions they experience as social miracles. In the process, they can produce meaningful change within their communities, yet simultaneously limit their influence more broadly. How does that happen, and what are the benefits and costs of politically ambivalent approaches to change?

Interpreting Under-the-Radar Change

It was no small event when in 2012 the sixteen-million-member Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest American Protestant denomination, elected its first African American vice president, Pastor Fred Luter Jr. (Eckholm 2012). Luter prevailed over his closest competitor, a Chinese American. While not a political event per se in the nation writ large, it is reflective of a complex process of change within the denomination over the past two decades, one that challenged the internal political climate of the SBC and gradually shifted its racial power structure and general membership profile. The ascendance of more leaders of color in formerly white-dominated churches and organizations in turn impacts the kinds of strategies evangelical elites are able to pursue on the broader political landscape, as they take stances on issues like marriage or immigration.

However, because for the most part the ERC movement has avoided identifying with traditional party positions on race and class-related policy issues, it’s the sort of social phenomenon that would not register on the radar of mainstream political science, even if it does represent a considerable social change phenomenon. On the occasions wh...