I have long been troubled by the way white and black people interpret the same Bible. There is one Bible, one God, one Jesus... and yet, white and black people interpret that book in entirely different ways.
Charles Marsh writes, in his book God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights:
Of the images coming in the civil rights movement, none seems more replete with contradiction than that of white mainline Protestantism. In most cases, the Southern white Protestant adheres to an evangelical belief, the heart of which is the confession of a "personal Lord and Savior," who has atoned for the sins of humanity. Yet in most cases, the confession remains disconnected from race relations ... (p. 6)
He further writes that "in the final analysis, concern for black suffering has nothing to do with following Jesus."
The Rev. C.T. Vivian, who was a fixture in the Civil Rights Movement, said outright, "You cannot be racist and be Christian!" something which I firmly believe. But for white people, that proclamation would draw sharp criticism. Writes Marsh, "If people took seriously their identities as Christians, they had no choice but to also give up the practices of white supremacy -- and not only white supremacy, but also class privilege, resentment, the concession to violence, anything that kept one from sacrificing all for the beloved community..."
White people, for the most part, seem uninterested in having, helping form, or living in a beloved community.
The so-called "attack on Christianity" is coming primarily from white Christians who, while they hate abortion and gay rights, including gay marriage, ignore the reality of racism and white supremacy. They seem incapable of feeling even a modicum of the outrage they feel about aborted violence for the already alive black children living in abject poverty and living on the outskirts of society. They seem disinterested in the fact that already alive children suffer horribly in this nation, from bad schools to inadequate health care. They seem all too willing to blame the children for their lot in life.
And yet, they call themselves Christian.
Marsh writes that "white Christian conservatives ...(remain) largely indifferent to black suffering, preoccupied instead with evangelism and church growth, and with personal vices like drinking, dancing and heavy petting." In their religious practice, God, and God's son Jesus, is all right with their blatant disregard for the plight of people of color.
While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. relied on the presence of God for his work in the Civil Rights Movement, white supremacists called upon that same God to justify their actions. Sam Bowers, head of the Ku Klux Klan, saw as his godly mission the need to slaughter black people and those whites who worked for civil rights for black people. In his mind, those who worked for freedom and justice for black people had betrayed the Lord Jesus. He wrote and posted publicly a manifesto that said outright that "if you are a Christian, American Anglo Saxon, who can understand" the practices of trying to purge the religion and the country of black and brown people, Catholics and Jews, then "you belong in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi." He was dedicated to ridding his beloved America of the impostors who, in his mind, were an affront to God -- who, we might assume if we read the scriptures, created us all.
The issue and the problem of this "two-God dilemma" of the United States is that it creates a group of people who are as religiously fanatic in their religious and ideological beliefs as are the hated Islamic radicals. They, too, think they are on assignment from God to destroy Americans. If and when God is in the center of a fight, it is hard to stop that fight before it does irreparable harm.
Of course, having God at the center of a fight can bring about good, too. Ironically, the same zeal that fuels hatred in the name of God fuels the desire for justice and mercy... in the name of God. The results of the Civil Rights Movement is testament to that fact.
Donald Trump is feeding into the "white God" group, a group which is adamant about there being an attack on Christianity, even as they attack radical Islam. It feels like a bomb ready to detonate. The white God, they would say, is on their side, while radical Islamists would say Allah is on their side.
The question for me is and has been for some time, "Why doesn't the one God step in and stop this foolishness? God's silence and inaction in shutting down forces of evil and hatred have perplexed me for the longest time. The other issue is, though, that the presence in this country of there being "two Gods, one black, one white" means that racism will never end. The religious fervor which uses God to justify racism and white supremacy is not about to wane. The white God is a God of Empire; the black God is a God of liberation... and those two Gods are never going to meet in the middle and merge into one.
That being the case, I don't exactly know how we as a nation move forward. White Christians turn a deaf ear and a hardened heart toward the masses of black people who suffer because of white supremacy, while they wage war about the plight og unborn fetuses. Black lives do not matter to them, and really, never have.
And that is a troubling reality.