To End Racism, God Must Be Part of the Conversation

Photo courtesy Christy McGuffey

For starters, if you think race is real, then you are part of the problem.

Most social scientists now recognize that race is no more than a “culturally constructed label that crudely and imprecisely describes real variation.” In popular culture the term for this is social construction.

Race does not exist in nature, where there are continuums of differences stretching from one end of humanity’s biological spectrum to the other. Hair type, eye and skin color, bone and body structure — physical characteristics typically used to construct racial stereotypes — seamlessly transition into one another and cluster in innumerable combinations. 

Humanity is more like a rainbow than a box of crayons.

Historically, racial lines have been drawn by those in positions of authority who wish to protect their advantages of power and privilege. To do so, they have drawn lines at arbitrary points along the continuum of human diversity that provide them with the most benefit.

This is where the misleading but otherwise benign concept of race turns into the highly destructive instrument of racism.

History of racism and racial classification

The Greeks and Romans used a number of terms to reference the diversity they saw among populations in their far-reaching Classical world empires. Their concepts roughly equated with ideas of race and ethnicity employed today. Believing the differences they saw were largely due to environmental factors, they grouped humans according to geographical place of origin, shared lines of descent, and common culture. The emphasis was unabashedly practical and subjective.

In the Bible, neither a term for nor concept of race exists. Some people have imposed it onto the text to serve their own dubious agendas — as happened in America to justify slavery. The alteration and misinterpretation of the story of Noah’s three sons, Japheth, Ham, and Shem, was reconfigured to make them the predecessors of the Caucasian, Negroid, and Mongoloid “races,” with Ham’s descendants bearing Noah’s curse of becoming a slave to the others. 

How convenient!

Throughout the 18th-20th centuries, biologists and anthropologists attempted to systematize human differences into stricter, more scientific categories. Despite their illusion of objectivity, their results always served the colonial interests of Euro-Americans. Early scientific attempts to classify humankind were accompanied by the arrogant and now-debunked notion of unilineal cultural evolution — the theory that every society was in the process of moving up a hierarchical scale of progressive stages from primitive to advanced. Not surprisingly, the stages equated primitive with black and advanced with white, while other hues occupied levels in the middle.

Among non-Western cultures, India has a long history of racially linked discrimination inherent within its caste system. Historically, the higher the caste the lighter one’s skin was expected to be — culminating in Brahmins with the lightest hues of skin color. The centuries-old phenomenon persists today. White is still associated with purity and black with evil. China has its own historic version of racism, one exposed during the COVID-19 outbreak there. 

Even Africa has home-grown racism and a history of slavery that pre-dates European colonial rule. Arab Muslims have also discriminated against and enslaved non-Arabs for centuries, notorious for their ruthless slave trade networks in Africa. South America too has an unsavory history of race-based discrimination, especially toward indigenous populations and those of African descent brought as slaves.

From colonial days to the present, Americans have been divided by what we now call “race.” The Irish used to be considered “racially inferior” by the Anglo-Saxon English, as were the Italians and many other immigrant groups to America. A pecking-order of “whiteness” existed early on in our nation’s history, with groups moving up and down the scale depending on their changing roles in society and the status accorded incoming nationalities. 

Slavery doomed us to see one another through race-colored lenses, and became a handy tool to exploit minorities, the poor, and powerless.

When we elected our first “African-American” president, he, like so many others before him, was considered a black man, though he was half white (Caucasian). How did we arrive at that determination? Why not the opposite? Because race in America, as elsewhere, is a social construction. This is becoming ever clearer as genetic research by scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. helps us uncover a long history of interracial admixture in America.

The Problem with Race

If one believes that races actually exist as inherently distinct biological categories, the focus on differences opens the door for the worst of human nature to find expression.

Inevitably, humanity gets divvied up into various groupings of “our people” and “not our people,” making it easier to justify ostracizing and dehumanizing those “others.” Although Nazism is the prime 20th century example of the destructiveness of an ideology of racial superiority based on the misapplication of human biological variation, racist ideologies litter history and currently exist across social and cultural groups the world over.

Many people erroneously think that what divides us is what defines us.

The notion of racial superiority is firmly linked to ethnocentrism, an affliction that taints the whole of humankind, wreaking havoc between communities, “racial/ethnic” groups, and entire countries. Ethnocentrism encourages racism, even as racism is dependent on ethnocentrism to foster its myopic and diabolical agendas for the world. They are both bad apples that, together, have rotted the soul of many a nation.

But to view the current legitimate protests over racial discrimination solely along racial and ethnic lines is to utilize the “oppressor’s” own manipulative categories. It is to speak the same divisive language and embrace the same hated discriminatory mindset protesters are keen to change. The acronym BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) is complicit in the very process it opposes. You can’t use a divide-and-conquer mentality to unify and overcome.

Obviously, a different paradigm is needed.

The Human Solution

Yet what new vision does secular society and good-willed humanists have to offer? Their go-to approach relies on forcing change through various outward measures: among them protest and resistance, changing laws, defunding police, focused education, and good-old social shaming. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these methods and each can lead to long-needed improvements, none gets to the root of the problem. Therefore, none can fully achieve effective and permanent change.

Humanistic efforts assume that changed laws will magically cultivate and uphold moral values. Yet laws don’t work without the authority to enforce them through a policing and judicial system that has brute force and the threat of violence behind its ability to control and punish law-breakers. Guns and jails, not goodwill, make laws work.

Thus, those demanding change are relying on the same power-based system thought to oppress them. If the collective moral compass is broken or askew, laws mandating equality can easily be side-stepped, misapplied, or simply ignored — oft-used strategies that have allowed systemic racism to persist despite long-standing constitutional guarantees meant to abolish it.

That is why the very best efforts now underway in the Black Lives Matter Movement can never fully succeed, no matter how much passion, resolve, and determination gets expressed in the streets of our country or the halls of government. Legal changes are certainly necessary to protect against injustice and move all citizens toward true equality. But they are not nearly enough.

Something vital is missing.

Transcendent Faith

Systemic societal change must begin in the inward places of each beating heart. It must stem from an unconventional worldview that transcends race and ethnicity to embrace all of humankind in one singular family. It requires a vision that allows us to celebrate our differences, while providing the clear understanding that our primary identity lies in our unified standing before an omnipotent God.

Without the transcendent revelation God provides, every effort is destined to get bogged down in whatever is seen to separate us — race, socio-economic status, ethnic and national background, and even the oft-appealed to dichotomy of victim-perpetrator. They are all inherently divisive. A flawed starting point can never lead to the desired goal — true equality among every human being.

Simply put, morality cannot be mandated. It must be manufactured within every human heart by the Spirit of God working in tandem with each person’s free will.

Christianity’s Distinction

No other religious, philosophical, or political system has the power of Christianity to get the job done. And I am not speaking about the Christian faith as a formal religious institution or system of dogmatic beliefs. I mean Jesus, the self-proclaimed “Truth,” who lived and died to liberate us all from the sinful nature that births racism and every other destructive pattern of human thought and behavior.

In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). He was restoring his own badly tarnished image in humankind — the divine image we must learn to recognize in others if racism is ever to be abolished. Jesus is the singular hope that can put an end to bigotry and racism, as well as the animosity that underlies them both.

His is a call to love not only our neighbor but our enemy — to love indiscriminately — and so honor the God who adores each and every living soul. Divine love alone has the clout to permanently dissolve the divisiveness and hostility that plagues mankind, not only in America but within every seething nation and society around the globe.

Through Christ we become not so much color-blind, as able to see the resilient light of God’s ineffable image within each person. In Him we can find the only legitimate source of our unity (Galatians 3:28), as well as the will-power to love and embrace one another. Such a lofty transformation cannot rely upon mere human effort and good-intentions. They cannot get us to the “Promised Land.” Like the effect of yeast within dough, God can work in us the desire to do good, to love mercy, and to walk humbly together in his holy presence, honoring him through loving and serving one another.

It is a truth the world-at-large has largely rejected, preferring power, domination, and self-aggrandizement to achieve its tribalistic goals — either unconvinced or unaware that the transformative power of God is the only effective avenue to real and lasting change. But we cannot ignore this truth if we wish to see brutality and oppression replaced by compassion and freedom, exploitation and cruelty by justice and mercy, animosity and exclusion by love and acceptance.

In Christ we have the tools needed to finally vanquish the privileged and powerful’s subjugation of the vulnerable and disadvantaged. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew and followed this truth, which became the largely unacknowledged source of confidence and strength behind the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. To leave that source out of current reforms would be a monumental mistake.

A New Vision

Humans love to draw lines of distinction between themselves. Jesus went about erasing every line that did not highlight the kingdom of God.

Through Christ we can gain the capacity to see others from God’s perspective — the God who so loved the world that he sent his only son to redeem it (John 3:16). This God of love (1 John 4:8) changes our hearts so they become the vessels he can employ to continue expressing his ongoing, passionate love for the world, especially toward those who suffer its pain and injustices.

The simple truth is that you cannot love someone and be racist toward them. Laws alone can never get us to that place of indiscriminate love, where we truly desire the highest good for others. What God does through Christ is to write his law of love upon our hearts (Hebrews 8:9–10). That gives us the capacity to love and serve him through our love and service to others. He becomes the change within us that we want to see replicated in the world around.

There is no other way forward to achieve the end-goal of a society and world freed from racism’s ugly grip. Unless and until we recognize and deal with the true inward source of racism, we’ll only see it morph into ever-changing forms within our own hearts and society, no matter the legal changes instituted. Only transformed hearts can guide us in the difficult task of creating a more just, compassionate, and unified world. And only God has the power to transform them. Our part is allowing him to do so.

Ending systemic racism is a necessary if daunting task. As folks go about it, often demanding change, let’s encourage one another to allow God to dismantle the strongholds of evil within us, and replace them with divine love, mutual respect, and that true and lasting vision of the equality we have in him. A changed interior is a necessary part of assuring effective change on the outside. Unless we allow God to be an integral part of the equation of change, the goal to end racism will forever elude us.