Are White Evangelicals Consumed Purely by Power At All Costs?
Is power the ultimate aim of white evangelicals, and their leaders? I just watched a discussion made up by evangelicals who think this is the inherent case. It does seem undeniable that there are many leaders in the evangelical world, but also in the mainline world, the progressive world, so on and so forth where power is the goal for them. But this is a rather ubiquitous reality that penetrates all spheres of every demographic, race, tribe etc. But of course, this also begs the question: what is “evangelicalism?” Isn’t there a continuum, even among the abhorrent white ones? Also percolating in this discussion was that this idea of power and its attendant racism is systemic. That it has been so baked into the systems of institutional white evangelicalism, in particular, and white American culture in the main, that the only hope is to ‘wake’ up to this reality; repent of it; and then do who knows what. Indeed, there was no talk of what we do next, once we confess our ostensibly racist white minds (or whiteness in general, cause black people and other minorities can be perpetrating this racist system as well). This is often how these discussions go, which I have been part of for decades, actually. It is done in the name of Christian faithfulness to the Gospel and its implications, but is it? It is almost simplistic and intellectually soothing to engage in this sort of deconstruction, but what is the answer? In other words, it comes down to: SO WHAT? Is the answer to go out in the streets and LITERALLY burn it all down? That seems to be the consensus in places like Portland, OR and Kenosha, WI. But the interlocutors in this discussion, I know, would not endorse all of that.
The problem, in my view, is that no matter what people attempt to re-construct their deconstruction with, it will always be oriented around a sinful people. This is not to say that there aren’t bad things in the various institutions, but it is to say that the sort of revolution currently underway is not reconstructing with Gospel ideals. The answer, I think, is still very simple: it was the message of Jesus Christ:: Repent! Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these other things will be added unto you. That is the simplicity of the Gospel, the power of God, that puts the Christian to death over and over again, so that the life of Christ might be made manifest in the mortal members of our bodies over and over again afresh and anew. Jesus certainly came to deconstruct, but He did so at the cross; and reconstructed when He rose again. This is the simple answer, and the only answer that will actually bring cultural transformation in the ways that the current revolution cannot and will not ever bring to this world.
The problem is that the Gospel is rarely actually taught in most evangelical churches. Many evangelicals don’t even actually know that Jesus is both fully God and fully human. Most evangelicals are taught self-help, rather than deep theological truths about who God is. This is where I see the problem, and the solution. The problem: that evangelicals in the main are not taught the Gospel reality. The solution: evangelical leadership needs to actually disciple their congregants with the Gospel reality that Jesus is Lord, and all that entails (and all that doesn’t entail). What not to do: engage in regressive psychologizing wherein we attempt to reach deeply into the church’s repressed thoughts, identify them, and work through the whole history of that morass back to a point where we are finally prepared to become participants of the Gospel reality. That isn’t how the Gospel works, nor was it ever intended to work (i.e. to make the disciples work through old sins). We can acknowledge where we have failed, and work from the premise: that TODAY is the DAY of salvation; not yesterday. We can live in the reality that we are new creations in Christ, today, and build on that foundation that no one else can lay, but Christ.
