dagblog - Comments for "On anniversary of King's, some white evangelicals are reexamining their role during the civil rights movement"

Speaking of evangelicals..

AmericanDreamer — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 20:06:52 +0000

In reply to On anniversary of King's, some white evangelicals are reexamining their role during the civil rights movement

Speaking of evangelicals...Trudeau, yesterday: http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2018/04/22

From the WaPo article

rmrd0000 — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 19:08:55 +0000

In reply to On the fiftieth anniversary

From the WaPo article

The Rev. Jennifer Harvey, one of the keynote speakers, rejected reconciliation as the old practice of the church. “We must not ask ‘how’ to unity and reconciliation. Our own history makes clear that that’s not the question our brothers and sisters of color have been asking since the mid-’60s,” she said, recounting a litany of specific incidents in which white churches failed to stand up for racial justice. “They’ve been demanding we call ourselves, the church, to repent and repair. They’ve not been asking for more togetherness. They’ve been organizing and insisting on justice.”

These are the true Evangelicals. The Trump apologists are missing the message.

good to see them getting this

artappraiser — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 19:02:45 +0000

In reply to On the fiftieth anniversary

good to see them getting this coverage

On the fiftieth anniversary

AmericanDreamer — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 18:52:19 +0000

In reply to On anniversary of King's, some white evangelicals are reexamining their role during the civil rights movement

On the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, one of the activist pastors who has tried to follow in his footsteps spoke of the task at hand after half a century.

“We cannot be those who merely love the tombs of the prophets,” said the Rev. William Barber II. “We do not celebrate assassinations and killings of our prophets. We find the place they fell; we reach down in the blood; we pick up the baton and carry it forward. And we must.”

Religious activists from a wide range of faiths commemorated King’s death in that spirit on Wednesday: with pledges to carry on his work of tackling systemic racism at memorial events in Washington, Memphis, Atlanta and more cities.

.........

Conservative evangelicals in Memphis are also working to define what ending racism looks like. The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, was shocked that what they expected to be a small April 4 conference had drawn 3,500 pastors and lay leaders as of Tuesday.

..........

"On the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, faith groups rally to combat systemic racism", Michelle Boorstein, Julie Zauzmer, and DeNeen L. Brown, WaPo today at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/04/04/on-the-a...

It s been 50 years and many

rmrd0000 — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 21:39:22 +0000

In reply to On anniversary of King's, some white evangelicals are reexamining their role during the civil rights movement

It s been 50 years and many white Evangelicals still have not gotten the message. Some black Christians did join white Evangelical churches. There has been some buyer’s remorse. Blacks are quietly exiting these churches because they feel no support from white Evangelicals regarding issues of race.

From the NYT link

Then came the 2016 election.

Black congregants — as recounted by people in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Fort Worth and elsewhere — had already grown uneasy in recent years as they watched their white pastors fail to address police shootings of African-Americans. They heard prayers for Paris, for Brussels, for law enforcement; they heard that one should keep one’s eyes on the kingdom, that the church was colorblind, and that talk of racial injustice was divisive, not a matter of the gospel. There was still some hope that this stemmed from an obliviousness rather than some deeper disconnect.

Then white evangelicals voted for Mr. Trump by a larger margin than they had voted for any presidential candidate. They cheered the outcome, reassuring uneasy fellow worshipers with talk of abortion and religious liberty, about how politics is the art of compromise rather than the ideal. Christians of color, even those who shared these policy preferences, looked at Mr. Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants, his open hostility to N.F.L. players protesting police brutality and his earlier “birther” crusade against President Obama, claiming falsely he was not a United States citizen. In this political deal, many concluded, they were the compromised.

“It said, to me, that something is profoundly wrong at the heart of the white church,” said Chanequa Walker-Barnes, a professor of practical theology at the McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University in Atlanta.

Early last year, Professor Walker-Barnes left the white-majority church where she had been on staff. Like an untold number of black Christians around the country, many of whom had left behind black-majority churches, she is not sure where she belongs anymore.

“We were willing to give up our preferred worship style for the chance to really try to live this vision of beloved community with a diverse group of people,” she said. “That didn’t work.

It is hard to reconcile a vote for Trump with racial harmony.