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The following essay is part one of a series. Please look out for part two on February 17.

I have observed while listening to a number of white members of the Church of the Brethren in sermons, articles, and conversations, a tendency for some to articulate a vision of evangelism that remains mostly silent about white supremacy. I have further observed that some white Brethren who seem to adhere to this vision of evangelism voice their support for such a vision in phrases like: “We just need to preach the simple Gospel.” Sometimes it seems that my siblings in Christ who say such things often also say that we should “just preach the gospel and not get distracted by political issues like talking about racism.” While I believe the church should be preaching the gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ, I firmly believe that this gospel directly confronts and destroys every deathly power including the deathly power of white supremacy. And I am further convinced that the destruction of white supremacy is truly good news for all people everywhere, including those peculiar people, of whom I am a part, called “white people.” Thus confronting white supremacy in evangelism is central to the task and far from a “distraction.”1

A few years ago, while I was working with my former church to start a support group for people struggling with substance abuse, the question struck me “What would a pacifist response to the “war on drugs” look like?” Over the years since that query arose in my heart, I have noticed its relationship to the question that a number of my friends and elders have been articulating in a variety of ways. Namely, “What might a gospel for white people look like?”2 One reason that I have become interested in finding a gospel for white people is that I am a white middle-class person who lives in a predominantly white county in rural Ohio. While facilitating a racial justice book study at the same church that I mentioned above, I noticed the ways that people seemed to frame the problem of racism. It seemed that some members of our church were confused about why we were studying racism in a county with barely any nonwhite residents. While there is much that can be said here about reasons why this county is now mostly white, I will leave those questions for another time. For now, I want to focus on the work that these kinds of assumptions enable white people to avoid. James Baldwin said that 

…I do not know many Negores who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this–which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never–the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.3 

When I read this passage years ago, I was struck with the realization that a large part of the work that white people in a place like Darke county might need to do is to learn to love other white people in such a way that we stop needing to be racists. It has been obvious to me for years that white people do not love other white people, much less nonwhite people, and do not love themselves, and so Baldwin’s insistence that white folks need to learn to love each other struck a deep chord within me. It was around this same time that I became familiar with the Baptist preacher, civil rights activist, and anti-racist missionary to the Ku Klux Klan, Will Campbell, who said that “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.”4 As I read more by and about him I became increasingly moved to follow Baldwin’s call to learn to love myself and other white people as an integral part of my work towards ending racial oppression. And so, this gospel meditation truly comes from a place of seeking to love God by loving my neighbors as I learn to love myself. It is in this spirit that I invite you to consider the meaning of the gospel proclamation “we’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.

It is my conviction that this gospel proclamation speaks to the way that white people are formed into false identities that alienate them from their identities as children of God through the practices of pretentiously judging others, exploiting poor and nonwhite people, and cutting themselves off from their experience of human pain. It is my conviction that by imaginatively pondering this gospel proclamation, white people can come to know the gospel of Jesus Christ as a gospel for bastards that frees them from the bastard gospels of white supremacy.5 It is my further conviction that perceiving the gospel in this way can help Christians continue to reconceptualize evangelism in ways that fight white supremacy and help people struggling with opioids to find hope and healing. In the first part of this essay, I will explore how white people are formed as bastardized human beings by the bastard gospel of whiteness. In the second part, I will articulate how God’s love redeems us bastard white people from this tragic state of existence.

Let us now consider some important ways that the phrase “We’re all bastards” applies to white people. The word bastard connotes a state of illegitimacy, fraudulence, and alienation. I want to first examine the practice of white pretentious judgment and how it contributes to making people into white bastards. Judging others according to a white standard is a primary way that the gospel of whiteness is a bastard gospel.

Judgment

One way that I have noticed white people practicing the opposite of love towards each other and non-white people is through the practice of judgment. One of the prominent areas in which white people pass judgments is substance use and abuse.  Many white people frame drug use as an “urban problem” or a “black problem.” This white judgment overlooks the reality that the actual usage of drugs in American society is fairly stable across racial groups.6 Furthermore, during the present opioid epidemic, I have heard various white people talk about how a certain (white) person was “such a good kid, we don’t know how this could have happened to him/her” or “we just aren’t used to having these urban problems in our small town.” I take these kinds of statements as evidence of white persons’ implicit faith in the power of whiteness to save them from the power of death. (Which of course it cannot.) By trying to exercise these kinds of moral judgments that condemn nonwhite others while justifying our white selves, we try to become like God in a way that is grossly inappropriate. God is the judge and thankfully, God is a merciful judge (James 2:12-13 & 4:11-12).7 I think that when Jesus instructs his followers to “judge not so that you may not be judged,” the issue that he is naming is the proper practice and place of judgment. (Matthew 7:1) When persons whose lives are as morally disordered as those of white people attempt to judge others, the result is that they invite judgment on themselves and obscure their own moral vision (Matthew 7:3-5).

This white practice of judgment strikes me as illegitimate (bastard) for a few reasons. For one, it denies the presence of a serious problem that is clearly affecting many white people. It bases this denial on a faulty judgment which is itself based on a faulty premise. To suppose that white people do not deal with the same kinds of substance use problems that black people deal with seems to be at least partially based on a belief that there exists a fundamental difference between black people and white people. There is no such fundamental difference between black people and white people. There are only the differences that white people have skillfully and deceitfully imagined and violently manufactured for the past centuries through to the present day.8 This pattern of white judgment is further fraudulent because it tries to locate the source of a problem that affects white people outside of white people. For white people in my community to imagine, which I have heard them do, that the flow of opioids in our community is from Dayton and thus can be blamed on an “urban” (read black) area is to engage in profound and tragic self-deception. And this is because the source of drugs is not nearly as important as the source of the addiction. What white people are really doing with these kinds of judgments is failing to imagine that pain and suffering exist within our “good,” “christian,” “white,” “clean,” “middle-class,” community. They cannot imagine that so much pain and suffering and death exists in our community that people would turn to alcohol, prescription pain pills, or heroin in order to dull the pain of their daily lives. Underlying this failure of imagination is the bastard gospel, as I understand it, that underlies the bastard identity of whiteness: to be white means that you are entitled to a safe and secure existence. All evidence that may contradict the supposed validity of this bastard gospel must be suppressed.

I think that these white bastard judgments and the thinking that they enable stem from a kind of idolatry of whiteness. These bastardized judgments stem from bastardized worship of a bastard god which is of course a form of idolatry.  Placing anything in the role that only God can fill is idolatry. The gospel of whiteness places a kind of impossible yet hypocritical standard of the ideal white life as the rule by which all lives must be judged.9 Jeremiah speaks about God’s people forsaking God and turning away to “cracked cisterns that hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). Trusting in the gospel of whiteness by practicing judgment of others against the standard of the ideal white life is a form of turning away from God, the Source of living waters, and of making cracked containers to replace this Fountain. It is no wonder that John ends his first letter with the admonition “Little children keep yourselves from idols.” Because trusting in the idol of whiteness, or any other idol, cuts us off from the Source of Love and the Fountain of Life. When we become cut off in this way, we effectively deny that we are born of God and thus become illegitimate children of the idols that we worship. When Jesus warned against the practice of judging others he elaborated concerning how the person attempting to judge others so often suffers from a kind of impaired moral vision. This is the case with white judgments. We white people try to judge others but do so in such a way that we impair our own moral vision and thus fail to see that we are guilty of far worse than are the ones whom we are judging.

Image Credit: Chibuzo Nimmo Petty

Lawlessness and Exploitation

The kind of life that is promised by the preachers of the bastard gospel of whiteness is one of safety from poverty, suffering, lack of any kind. It is premised on the suffering of other people. And in the end, it fails to save white people from that ultimate form of poverty and suffering: death. Upon further examination of this exploitative lifestyle known as whiteness, I believe that we will discover that death does not wait to visit until the end but rather is the constant companion of those of us in the tragic state of being white. 

James Baldwin wrote that “White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank. That is all it means, and the people who tried to rob us of identity have lost their own.”10 If the meaning of whiteness is a kind of power, then those who identify as white are identifying with power. To maintain white power, people labeled as white must perform in particular ways that reinforce their power over others. Baldwin spoke of how white morality stems from this kind of white power and how it is an illegitimate power because it is based on theft, murder, and lies. Because white power and the morality that gives it legitimacy is based on such grievous practices, white people must work very hard to cover these sins so that their exposure doesn’t undermine the white morality which undergirds white power. This is of course a fraudulent form of power and is in this way a bastard kind of power. Because it is a bastard kind of power, the standards that it produces upon which judgments are formed are illegitimate standards that produce illegitimate judgments. The ultimate standard upon which these judgments are based seems to be the standard of the perfect white human being. It further seems that this image of the perfect white human being must be preserved at all costs in order for the structures of white supremacy to maintain their power.11

This white power is built on a system of severe exploitation that brings to mind Jesus’ words in the gospel according to Matthew in chapter 23. Speaking of religious leaders who judge others harshly Jesus called these people “whitewashed tombs” which refers to the way that these people nourished a religion of death within that spread death without. To hide this stench and site of death, these religious leaders had to prettify the external appearance of their putrid tombs. How strangely appropriate to this essay that Jesus used the term “whitewashed tombs,” for this truly discerns the dynamic that I am here attempting to name. On the inside of white identity is a deathliness that infects everything with the works of death. Namely greed, violence, covetousness, envy, strife, exploitation, and oppression. I think that very few humans can live with the knowledge that their lives are based on these vices and so it becomes necessary for those who practice such things to hide their practice with decorative “whitewash.” And so Jesus helps us name the practices of white identity as bastard practices. 

I believe that much exploitation goes on under the guise of  “business as usual.” One seemingly popular way to exploit people and justify it is to cite budget concern as a reason to either take money from poor and nonwhite people or deny them necessary social services. One example that comes to mind is the systematic gathering of fines from black residents of Ferguson Missouri as a way to generate funds for the municipal budget.12 I think that another example illustrates how white people not only practice such fraudulent and murderous practices toward black people but also towards white people who fail to live up to the “perfect” standard of whiteness. 

An article in the Spanish newspaper El Pais titled “One County’s Solution to Drug Epidemic: Let Addicts Die” contains a chilling portrait of white judgment and white exploitation working hand in hand for the power of death. The author reports on the words and attitudes of a Butler County Ohio sheriff and a Middletown (a city in Butler County) councilman who both advocated slightly different versions of the solution in the article’s title: “let them die.” In this county and city with overwhelmingly white populations, these two white leaders expressed hostility towards people in their communities who are addicted to opioids. The sheriff cited concern for his officers’ safety as a reason for not wanting his officers to carry Narcan. The councilman cited the cost of responding to a growing number of overdoses as a reason to limit the number of Narcan doses administered to any one person. While the sheriff’s response is the most blatantly cruel, it is the councilman’s businesslike attitude toward human life that concerns me the most. His concern reveals the true heart of whiteness and why that heart is a bastard heart. He mainly expressed concern for money.13 And for that idol he expressed a willingness to sacrifice–through his apathy and indifference–the lives of human beings for whom Christ died and rose again. In a fearful effort to save sheriff’s deputies from the hassle of dealing with opioid addicts and Middletown’s budget from the burden of spending money on life-saving Narcan, the sheriff and the councilman embody the bastardy of whiteness. Middletown’s population is a majority white and so this seems to be a tragic example of Jesus’ words about the one who would “gain the entire world but lose their own life” in the process (Matthew 16:26, Mark 8:36). To lose one’s life while still living is to have a life that is really an ongoing death. And this is the kind of ‘life’ that the bastard gospel of whiteness promises.

These practices of exploitation evident in Butler county Ohio and also in Ferguson, Missouri (and all through America for that matter) are based on deep fears that form the animating center of the gospel bastard of whiteness and its illegitimate offspring. I have observed over my years as a white person who is so often in white spaces that so much of what animates the lives of white people and especially white middle-class people is a kind of mindless and anxiety-riddled striving for material security. This gospel seems to advocate a lifestyle of owning as much as one can possibly get one’s hands on and then securing that by getting some more so that one does not lose what one already has. This is evident in the type of advice that many older middle-class white people give to younger white people. It is also evident in many white church forums and meetings in which the vast majority of talk and time is dedicated to the maintenance of the church’s financial resources. This type of thinking leads people perilously close to becoming the kind of rulers that Jesus firmly forbade his followers from becoming (Matthew 20:25-28) And yet, in white churches and white spaces in general, this ethic of rulership seems to be exactly the kind of ethic that is somberly celebrated by the wise white rulers. While this white ethic is rooted in fear and seeks after security through acquisitive greed, we learn in I John that Christians should not love such things because they are a form of “pride in riches” and not from God. We further learn that to be “of God ” is to be one who loves others to the point of giving one’s life on the behalf of another. That to live outside of love is to live in “lawlessness.” And we learn that this kind of love is incompatible with the fear that drives the engine of the bastard gospel of whiteness (I John 3:1-19, 4:7-21). Given that this is what it means to be a ‘child of God,’ living in any other way, such as the way of whiteness, is an illegitimate, bastard way of living that makes us children of the devil (I John 3:10). 

This white bastard identity of rulership requires white people to forget the poor and thus bastardizes the Christian calling to “remember the poor” (Galatians 2:10). When people of European descent choose to forget their histories as workers, as people in poverty, as draft dodgers, as oppressed people, in order to join the ranks of the rulers by becoming white, they turn against themselves and all other people who are poor, persecuted or otherwise oppressed. This is the exact opposite of St. Paul’s statement that “They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do” (Galatians 2:10). Saints Peter, James, and John were the ones who asked this of Paul as they affirmed Paul’s ministry to the Gentiles. I take this as a reminder of Jesus’ words to his disciples instructing them to not be like the Gentiles princes who “lord it over” others (Matthew 20:25). Remembering the poor stands in stark contrast to the practice of “lording it over” people. White identity is built on the systematic forgetting of the poor in order to become grafted into the ruling body of society. The Episcopalian theologian William Stringfellow said that “where money is an idol, to be poor is a sin.”14 I think that this same structure can be used to express a similar truth: Where whiteness is an idol, to be black or nonwhite is a sin. It is this mentality that leads to and supports a lifestyle (or more accurately a death-style) of rampant exploitation.

  1.  I am deeply indebted here to James Cone’s thought with regards to placing the problem of white supremacy at the center of Christian theological reflection. See James Cones, God of the Oppressed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997. And James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011.
  2. Here I have in mind conversations, in person and via Facebook with my friends M. Ashe Van Steenwyk, Chibuzo Petty, Brett and Sarah Lynne Gershon, James Cosby, Stephen Flores, Brian Hohmeier, Bryn Harding, Caleb Kragt, my wife Julie Brewer, and my brother Daniel Zika. I also have in mind the following resources from elders in various movements for a just world. Ruby Sales interviewed by Krista Tippet, “Where does it hurt?” On Being. September 15, 2016. https://onbeing.org/programs/ruby-sales-where-does-it-hurt/.  Jin S. Kim, interview by M. Ashe Van Steenwyk, “White Supremacy And The Logic Of Empire,” The Iconocast, Podcast audio/visual, December 6, 2012. Accessed September 1, 2021,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CranGbb6Po and Magaraet Anne Ernst, “Whiteness, and The Responsibility of White Faith Leaders: Notes from Conversation with Ruby Sales,” Radical Discipleship, September 3, 2020. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2020/09/03/kyle-rittenhouse-whiteness-and-the-responsibility-of-white-faith-leaders-notes-from-conversations-with-ruby-sales/ and Cornel West interviewed by Emma Green, “Cornel West on Why the Left Needs Jesus,” The Atlantic, August 13, 2021. Accessed December 30, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/cornel-west-jesus-progressives/619741/
  3. James Baldwin “Letter From a Region in My Mind.” The New Yorker. November 9, 1962. Accessed on December 15, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind
  4. Will D. Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly, (NewYork: The Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1998), 220. Accessed November 16, 2021. https://archive.org/details/brothertodragonf0000camp_s1f9/page/66/mode/2up and both that entire book as well as Will D. Campbell, Forty Acres and a Goat. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986 for biographical information on Campbell.
  5. The phrase “bastard gospel” struck me as I meditated on Campbell’s phrase, but since writing this I have remembered that it is in the title of a dissertation and have learned that it is a phrase that John Calvin employed in a sermon on Galatians. See Marshall Johnston. “Bombast, Blasphemy, and the Bastard Gospel: William Stringfellow and American Exceptionalism.” Dissertation. Baylor University. Marshall Johnston. 2007. Accessed December 28, 2021. https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2104/5068/marshall_johnston_phd.pdf?sequ..And, John Calvin. Sermons On Galatians. in The Ages Digital Library Sermons. (Albany, OR: Books For The Ages, Ages Software. Version 1.0, 1998) Used by Permission From Old Paths Publications, 1996, All Rights Reserved, 83, 125, 127. Accessed December 29, 2021. https://media.sabda.org/alkitab-7/LIBRARY/CALVIN/CAL_SGAL.PDF
  6. United States Department of Health and Human Services: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality. Results from the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Summary of National Findings. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality. Accessed November 16. https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUHresultsPDFWHTML2013/Web/NSDUHresults2013.pdf
  7. Here and throughout this essay all quotes from the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version.
  8. See Theodore W. Allen, “Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race by its author, Theodore W. Allen.” Cultural Logic 1, no. 2 (Spring 1998). http://www.elegantbrain.com/edu4/classes/readings/race-allen.html, James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies” in Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White, ed. by David Roediger, (New York: Schocken Books, 1998). 180. And Roediger, David. “The White Question.” In Race Traitor. 1, no. 1. Cambridge, MA. 104-107. Accessed November 22, 2021. https://libcom.org/files/Race%20Traitor%2001%20(1993%20Winter).pdf  Garvey, John and Noel Ignatiev. “Abolish the White Race–By Any Means Necessary. ” Editorial in Race Traitor. 1, no. 1. Cambridge, MA. 1-8. Accessed November 22, 2021. https://libcom.org/files/Race%20Traitor%2001%20(1993%20Winter).pdf and Ignatiev, Noel. “The Point Is Not to Interpret Whiteness but to Abolish It.” Talk given at the Conference “The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness” University of California, Berkeley, April 11-13, 1997. Accessed on December 29, 2021. https://blog.pmpress.org/2019/09/16/the-point-is-not-to-interpret-whiteness-but-to-abolish-it/And Willie James Jennings interviewed by Matthew Vega. “Whiteness Rooted In Place.” The Christian Century. October 26, 2021. Accessed December 29, 2021. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/interview/whiteness-rooted-place For further reading on the social and historical construction of race, whiteness, and white-supremacy.
  9. Drew G. I. Hart, Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism. Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2016. 109-112. Hart offers a helpful description and analysis of how whiteness functions as an idolatrous ideal in white Christianity.
  10. James Baldwin, “Black English: A Dishonest Argument.” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. New York: Pantheon Books. 2010. 129. Accessed on November 20, 2021. https://archive.org/details/crossofredemptio0000bald_k3q5/page/128/mode/2up
  11. See James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Jame Baldwin, “Black English: A Dishonest Argument.” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. New York: Pantheon Books. 2010. 125-130.  Accessed on November 20, 2021. https://archive.org/details/crossofredemptio0000bald_k3q5/page/128/mode/2up, James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies” in Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White, ed. by David Roediger, (New York: Schocken Books, 1998).177-180. Accessed on December 14, 2021 https://bannekerinstitute.fas.harvard.edu/files/bannekerinstitute/files/on_being_white.and_other_lies_baldwin_0.pdf 177-180. Roediger, David. “The White Question.” In Race Traitor. 1, no. 1. Cambridge, MA. 104-107. Accessed November 22, 2021.  https://libcom.org/files/Race%20Traitor%2001%20(1993%20Winter).pdf
  12. United States Department of Justice. Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. Accessed December 14, 2021. https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf and “Five Years After Ferguson, Policing Reform is Abandoned.” EJI, 2019. Accessed on December 14, 2021. https://eji.org/news/five-years-after-ferguson-policing-reform-abandoned/
  13. Jan Marinez Ahrens, “One Us County’s Solution to Drug Epidemic: Let Addicts Die.” El Pais. translated by Henry Hahn, July 25, 2017. Accessed on December 11, 2021. https://feeds.elpais.com/mrss-s/list/ep/site/english.elpais.com/section/international And Esther Honig, “As Opioid Overdoses Bleed City’s Budget, Councilman Proposes Stopping Treatment.” All Things Considered, NPR, June 29, 2017. Accessed on December 29, 2021. https://www.npr.org/2017/06/29/534916080/ohio-town-struggles-to-afford-life-saving-drug-for-opioid-overdoses
  14. William Stringfellow, Dissenter in a Great Society (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 40.
Image Credit: Miami Valley Music Therapy.

Isaac Zika is a husband, part-time piano teacher and music therapist, full-time parent, part-time seminary student, gardener, carpenter, and also a congregant at West Charleston Church of the Brethren. He lives with his wife Julie and their two kids, Arthur and Rosemary, near Greenville Ohio.

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