Presbyterians and Race, Reflections on an Epic Failure

          Today’s church – just as did the church of the past – should seek daily to grapple within God’s directives and love with issues of social justice.  Being a committed Christian myself, and having many Facebook friends who are also committed Christians, I see newsfeed material that touches on three issues, in particular. These subjects are race, abortion, and immigration. I was able to engage recently with a good friend who wondered why I post more on issues of race than I do on abortion (or immigration).  I enjoyed the discussion with my friend and am grateful for the opportunity to organize some of my thoughts. 

          My views on abortion, race, and immigration are a present day application of my understanding of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, his finished work on the cross and the biblical doctrine of the image of God in all men and women. Because of my biblical views, I find I cannot stand before God and choose one issue over another, any more than I can choose to obey one commandment over another. The church today should be addressing all three of these issues in some way. Some churches/people will be drawn to all three issues, and others will focus on just one.  As for my church, the PCA, immigration and refugee issues are addressed through our missions  agencies, both in the states and outside of the states. The denomination has a long history of publically being a pro-life church, both in policy and practices.  We have partnered, for example, with Bethany Christian Services and other pro-life groups as they strive to work out these policies and practices before the world.  The 61 million deaths due to elective abortions are often used to rally public support of abortion being the most important social issue. 

          Where Presbyterians have a long history of failure when it comes to these three issues is in the area of race relations and policy.  Many Presbyterians throughout history were slave traders/holders, supporters of Jim Crow and White Citizens Councils, and silent observers during the Civil Rights struggle from the ‘40s through the ‘80s. 

          After Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, the conversation about race got louder and angrier, and people wanted answers quickly. I chose to wait for the findings to emerge. I have learned to not engage with angry people because I have seen my own anger produce self-inflicting wounds. I do not trust myself around anger. White folks were told to listen and wait to write online, and I did this. Then, in the summer, my church, the Presbyterian Church of America, postponed voting on a personal resolution “that called our denomination to ‘recognize and confess our church’s covenantal and generational involvement in and complicity with racial injustice inside and outside of our churches during the Civil Rights era’  and to ‘recommit ourselves to the task of truth and reconciliation with our African-American brothers and sisters for the glory of God and the furtherance of the Gospel.’” We were not ready to repent as a church. We went home, in June of 2015, and in a few weeks, the Charleston killings happened.  Nine fellow Christians were murdered at a prayer meeting, by a now- confessed killer with racial motives. Was this summer the tipping point in the conversation about race? Did the PCA miss an historic moment in its history?

          Let’s look at the shift that took place at the founding of our nation, at the same time that our Presbyterian Confession and Catechisms were being written by the Westminster Assembly. At that time, 1643-1647, the Westminster Assembly was the height of Reformed political power and influence. That influence grew even larger under the new King Charles II, restored in 1660. In the previous century, “The same anti-Catholic propaganda that had led Sir Francis Drake to liberate Negro slaves in Central America in the 1580s still prompted many colonists to believe that it was the Protestant mission to convert non-Europeans rather than enslave them.” (Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America by Peter H. Wood. Published by Oxford University Press.) But costs changed everything and profits shifted the mission from conversions to chattel slavery.

          Wood writes about this shift of thinking from an identity based on religious faith to what we now think of as racial identity. People started thinking of themselves as white, European or British over thinking of themselves and their families as Christian.

Therefore, another fundamental key to the terrible transformation was the shift from changeable spiritual faith to unchangeable physical appearance as a measure of status. Increasingly, the dominant English came to view Africans not as “heathen people” but as “black people.” They began, for the first time, to describe themselves not as Christians but as whites. And they gradually wrote this shift into their colonial laws. Within a generation, the English definition of who could be made a slave had shifted from someone who was not a Christian to someone who was not European in appearance. Indeed, the transition for self-interested Englishmen went further. It was a small but momentous step from saying that black persons could be enslaved to saying that Negroes should be enslaved. One Christian minister was dismayed by this rapid change to slavery based on race: “These two words, Negro and Slave” wrote the Rev. Morgan Godwyn in 1680, are “by custom grown Homogeneous and Convertible”—that is, interchangeable…As if this momentous shift were not enough, it was accompanied by another. Those who wrote the colonial laws not only moved to make slavery racial; they also made it hereditary. Under English common law, a child inherited the legal status of the father. As Virginia officials put it in 1655: “By the Comon Law the Child of a Woman slave begot by a freeman ought to bee free.”

          Because all of this took place after the four years of Westminster, the Reformed community should have known better in so many ways and should have raised loud questions about the shift. Reformed theology is summed up often by creation, fall, and redemption, and some of us add restoration. Our theology also is rooted in God’s covenant of grace. Scripture and the WCF express the unity of all the children of Adam and Eve as image bearers of the creator who then fell together and needed a redeemer. Covenant theology expresses the foundation of the Gospel of Grace. Genesis 12 reminds us of the LORD’s covenantal promise to Father Abram, “…in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Revelation 5 tells of the new song, “…you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.” This scriptural foundation was the basis– for the Europeans and British – of the  desire to convert the people they encountered in the new worlds. The every tribe and language and people and nation was part of those for whom Jesus died, “by your blood you ransomed people for God.” Greed, a fruit of covetousness, reshaped theology and created a form of racism so opposed to the Covenant and Gospel of Grace that it is still being undone today. Generations of Presbyterian pastors supported slavery based on race, supported Jim Crow and opposed the Civil Rights movement and would not allow the descendants of slaves to worship in their churches. 

          The next part of this history I want to examine is racial slavery by heredity. Such slavery was against both English Common Law and Covenant Theology. Let’s look at the Covenant Theology issue as it relates to white fathers and their slave children. (I will leave the rejection of English Common Law, as written into Virginia law by the Virginia Assembly in 1662, to some of my attorney friends. I also will leave for another time a discussion of enslavement-with-the-end-desire-of-conversion-leading-to-ultimate-freedom.) What I am addressing here is part of the issue, race-based slavery and the children of white fathers.  As a father, I cannot understand how a father would abandon his child and then grandchildren to slavery, yet this happened for generations in families that owned slaves. Where were the pastors to cry out against the violations of the fifth, sixth, seventh, and tenth commandments? Never mind that the whole system was based on a violation of the eighth. I want to put the spotlight of this conversation about the hereditary nature of our race-based slavery by considering the fifth and seventh commandments, family, and sex.

          In today’s world some wonder about our dated confessions and catechisms, but these are part of our faith link, and I think instructive, when we consider how profit can cause people to overlook faith and the teachings of Scripture and the church. Consider Larger Catechism question number 130, one of the questions dealing with the fifth command to honor our father and mothers. “What are the sins of superiors? The sins of superiors are, besides the neglect of duties required of them, (Q 129), inordinate seeking of themselves, their own glory, ease, profit, or pleasure…provoking them to wrath;…” Then we have Q131, “What are the duties of equals? The duties of equals are, to regard the dignity and worth of each other, in giving honor to go before another; and to rejoice in each others gifts and advancement, as their own.” I am saddened when I read these statements from the Catechism that was meant to shape our hearts as we live with others.

          God’s covenant promises were made to us and to our children. Peter reminded those who listened on Pentecost, “For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” Again, I ask, how could a father abandon his child and the generations to follow to hereditary slavery? This happened for generations in families who owned slaves.

          Now to move to a consideration of the seventh commandment, “You shall not commit adultery.” Someday a data crunching researcher will look through all the records from slavery and we will know how many children, grandchildren and great grandchildren had white fathers living in the “big house.” Consider the scope of the Shorter Catechism’s question 71, “What is the requirement of the seventh commandment? The seventh commandment requireth the preservation of our own and our neighbor’s chastity, in heart, speech and actions.” The seventh commandment requires the preservation of our neighbor’s chastity. Part of the consequences of race-based slavery was that white fathers abandoned and denied their children, as a matter of law. How many grew up knowing that their own father could not and would not free them? The sins of fornication and adultery were overlooked. The crime of rape was unreported and ignored for generations. The hypocrisy of this culture corrupted family life and gave us generations of angry people. The culture supported by slavery should never be glorified. Race-based slavery was evil and corrupting. The true cost and consequences to all and their following generations has yet to be understood.

          Our 16^th century spiritual fathers did not make the connections from Scripture and the Confession and catechisms to shape their hearts hardened by the worship of profits and the comforts that slavery based on race and hereditary brought. We need to own that part of our history and spiritual roots. We also need to search our own hearts, knowing that if one generation we so honor could fail so badly, we also can be distracted from the historical consequences of our choices in our own generation.

          Covenant theology brings generations together, both in their sins and salvation. Covenant theology, the foundation of the Gospel of Grace reminds all of us “that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,…” (Ephesians 2).

          Finally, I would share some thoughts and application from SC Q 71, “our neighbor’s chastity.” Christians have Biblical covenantal rooted responsibilities for our neighbors. (See the Good Samaritan story as told by Jesus.) To stand by and say, “not my responsibility, not my fight” or not speak up against injustice is Biblically indefensible.  We cannot undo the past, but we can make sure the whole story is told truthfully. Race-based slavery began just after Westminster, 1643-1647. For reasons we do not understand our country’s founders were silent, and in many cases were part of the economic system that stole people from their villages and families to become slaves for life and their children’s lives. Many Presbyterian pastors actively preached sermons to support race-based slavery in all its evil and owned slaves themselves. We need to own this history and repent as often as the consequences bear fruit in our generation. Because of grace, repentance bears fruit in forgiveness which can become the seeds for reconciliation, part of sanctification on our path to shared holiness. I am not sure if in my lifetime we will even begin to know the language of reconciliation; the layers of the conversation are both deep and hardened.

          I do hope the PCA will repent at the next 2016 General Assembly and not kick the issue down the road again city a need for perfection or an excuse that many are not ready to own our shared roots and heritage, both politically and spiritually. The Assembly must return to local churches to start conversations about race. We have resources to help local churches and Presbyteries move beyond this motion.

          May we repent and humble our hearts and churches. May we be that Great Commission Church we want to be, beginning in our own neighborhoods, cities, and counties, and moving across educational, economic and ethnic differences.