As a carpenter’s son, I spent a lot of time on construction sites. Over time, I picked up a few skills and even acquired some of the tools of the trade. More than anything, though, I picked up a fair number of workplace aphorisms like “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and “Use the right tool for the job.” But for most of my early adult life, I moved from apartment to apartment and so had little need for the few carpentry skills I had learned in my youth. If something was broken, I could either ignore it or call the landlord to come and do the repairs. That changed, however, when I purchased an eighty-year-old house. With the house came its problems—the chimney and roof both had leaks. To ignore these problems or to expect someone else to fix them would have been both negligent and foolish.
Isabel Wilkerson says that when it comes to race relations, Americans are like homeowners inheriting an old house that through the centuries has, at times, fallen into disrepair. She writes:
Many people may rightly say: “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. . . . But here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now. And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.
As Christian educators who are committed to equipping students to engage God’s good but broken world, we cannot ignore how racially broken our country is, and so we must equip our students with the right tools for the job of seeking racial justice and reconciliation.
If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It
Christians living in racialized America have inherited a house in dire need of repair; things are broken, and they need fixing. The cracks have always been there, but as a rainstorm can reveal leaks in a home, so 2020 has revealed the racial cracks that have been present in our society all along. The killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and many others and the subsequent racial unrest in cities across America did not create the racial divide, but they have exposed the systemic racial problems in our society.
We can see evidence of this all around. Study after study reveals the disparities between white and Black Americans. In virtually every measurable category—from criminal justice to economics, from employment to education and health—there are significant inequalities between white America and Black America.
When we turn our attention to the white evangelical church in America, we find that things are broken there too. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously stated, “It is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours, in Christian America.” That was in 1960. Little has changed since.
Not only are our Christian communities largely racially segregated, even our perceptions of racism vary significantly depending on racial and religious backgrounds. A major recent survey found that while 86 percent of African Americans see racism as a very serious threat only 36 percent of white evangelicals agree. The report makes this startling conclusion: “The deepest and most consistent racial division [in America] is found between White Evangelicals and Blacks” (Hunter and Bowman).
Our students are living in a racialized world that is profoundly polarized.
The fact is that regardless of the social location or demographic makeup of our Christian school, our students are living in a racialized world that is profoundly polarized. This is the context in which we are educating and equipping our students to be “agents of renewal” or “ambassadors of reconciliation.” Are we equipping our students with the right tools for the job?
Use the Right Tool For the Job
When I rented my first apartment, my toolbox consisted of little more than a couple hammers, a screw gun, and a roll of duct tape. But when I purchased my home, I realized that my limited toolbox did not match the scope of the work to be done. I needed more tools in my toolbox.
In their seminal book Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith make the case that white evangelical Christians have limited tools when it comes to addressing social problems like racism. According to Emerson and Smith, white evangelicals have three main “cultural tools” in their toolkit: freewill individualism, relationalism, and anti-structuralism (76–80).
As a cultural tool, freewill individualism is the conviction that “individuals exist independent of structures and institutions” (Emerson and Smith 76–77). So when it comes to racism and patterns of racial inequalities, the problems are understood as isolated issues and therefore solved individually. Put simply, there are racist individuals who do racist things, and those people need to be held accountable for their actions. Little attention is given to the cultural climate that may have helped foster such racist behavior. If individualism is the tool in hand, the problem and the solution rest solely on the individual.
The second cultural tool that white evangelicals use is relationalism, meaning they place tremendous importance on a “personal relationship with Jesus” and, by extension, the reconciling power of interpersonal relationships. Because racism is a sin of the heart, they believe if people simply had a better relationship with Jesus and a more diverse friend group, racism would go away. Of course, no one would deny that racism is a sin and that having diverse friendships is good, but relationalism alone is an insufficient tool to repair societal problems.
Another cultural tool white evangelicals use is antistructuralism,which is not really a tool at all. [
Instead, it is a suspicion of the existence or influence of societal structures and systems. For white evangelicals, to talk about structural or systemic racism is an example of the sinful pattern of humanity—not taking personal responsibility for one’s actions. Conversations about the effects of systemic racism are seen not as an explanation for the way things are but as only an excuse.
In addition to these cultural tools, philosopher James K. A. Smith notes a fourth tool in the toolbox: rationalism. White evangelicals, he says, have “a tendency to construe Christianity as a set of beliefs to be affirmed, a ‘worldview’ to which one gives intellectual assent.” Wielding rationalism as a tool, the problem of racism is largely about racist beliefs, so the remedy is simply to think differently.
Putting all this together, a predominantly white Christian school working with these “cultural tools” in their toolbox might try to teach anti-racist ideas (rationalism) to individuals (individualism) so that they can have better individual interpersonal interactions (relationalism) with diverse people groups.
Here’s what this might look like in one of our schools. Rebekah, a white student in a predominantly white Christian school, begins her day in US history class where she watches a documentary on the development of Jim Crow segregation during the Reconstruction era and beyond. She then goes to American literature class where she is reading To Kill a Mockingbird and has a class discussion about the problems of a “white savior complex.” Next she attends her Bible class where she reads Genesis 1 and a few related articles on the doctrine of the imago Dei in preparation for a research paper on the topic. She concludes her day in economics class by taking notes on the racial wealth gap in America. Remarkably, Rebekah has intellectually engaged the topic of race and racism in each of her classes—all from a Christian perspective!
This, of course, is better than not teaching about racism, but James K. A. Smith notes that racism is not just an intellectual problem, rather “it is absorbed through practices we never think about.” Therefore we need pedagogical tools that are aimed not just at individuals and their intellect but at our hearts and desires. Eddie Glaude, professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton, agrees. Glaude says that our views of race and racism are formed by “racial habits” like where we live, what we watch or listen to, and where we shop. He argues that right thinking alone does not always produce right living. To illustrate his point, Glaude explains that while he intellectually believes climate change is real, that belief is not evidenced in the car he drives, the home he owns, and many other lifestyle choices. His intellectual belief in climate change is largely incongruent with his actual “habits” of living. So it is with race and racism; right information about racism doesn’t automatically produce anti-racist living.
Each of these tools (individualism, relationalism, anti-structuralism, and rationalism) can be useful for certain tasks, but on their own they are not sufficient tools to address the racial cracks in our culture. Emerson and Smith conclude, “As carpenters are limited to building with the tools in their kits . . . , so white evangelicals are severely constrained by their religio-cultural tools” (78). For those of us like myself who identify as white evangelicals or who teach in predominantly white evangelical spaces, this is a stark observation.
Tools from the Christian Tradition
When I purchased my home, I had to add tools that I was missing to do the needed home repairs. Similarly, as a white Christian educator, I need additional tools that help form anti-racist habits and ways of living, not just beliefs. Thankfully, the broad Christian tradition offers Christian practices as a large toolset that go beyond mere individualism and rationalism. Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra define Christian practices as “things Christian people do together over time in response to and in the light of God’s active presence for the life of the world” (5). As cultural tools, Christian practices are action-oriented, communal, sustained over a period of time, and morally formative.
As such, Christian practices are essential pedagogical tools in the work of educating and equipping our students to work for racial justice and reconciliation in our racially broken world. While there are numerous Christian practices from within the Christian tradition, I will highlight three for our consideration: stability, lament, and hope.
Stability
The practice of stability is a way of being deeply aware of and grounded in one’s specific geographic place out of a recognition that we are shaped by our surroundings. To put it in real-estate parlance, the practice of stability says that location is everything.
The practice of stability has its roots in the incarnation, because God did not redeem humanity abstractly; God became incarnate at a particular time in a particular place to a particular people. Jesus was a low-income first-century Jew living in obscure Galilee—the geographic, economic, and political margins of the Roman Empire. Jesus, being fully human, was shaped by his historical, geographic, and cultural context. Jesus’s ministry was shaped by the specific realities of his place; he taught as a first-century Galilean Jew to the concrete, lived reality of his fellow first-century Galilean Jews.
Similarly, our lives are not lived in abstraction but in very concrete locales. We live in and are shaped by our particular city with its complex mix of history, economics, race, and politics. The practice of stability invites us to become aware of these specifics and the ways that we are shaped by them. We are invited to carefully attend to our ecological systems, immerse ourselves in our city’s complex history, and become curious about the varied cultural practices of our hometown. According to the practice of stability, these factors are not neutral; they form us in profound ways. As a Christian practice, stability helps us see that we are shaped by our time, location, and culture far more than we think we are. As such, this practice can help counteract the white evangelical tendencies of freewill individualism and anti-structuralism.
As a pedagogical tool in the anti-racist educator’s toolkit, the Christian practice of stability forces the teacher and the student to move from the abstract to the specific, from the universal to the local. For example, a history lesson on red-lining might name local city blocks where African Americans were not allowed to purchase a home; a lesson on “white flight” might use graphs from one’s hometown suburb to show the sudden spike in white population in the 1950s.
These pedagogical moves from the generic concept (i.e., red-lining) to the local reality (local city neighborhoods) can help create patterns of thinking for students so they can see that issues of injustice and racial disparities do not nebulously exist “out there” but affect each of their lives in some way. At times, these practices can even point out their complicity in the problem. To borrow a phrase from the Reverend Dr. King, the practice of stability reminds us that we are all caught up in a “web of mutuality.”
The more specific and local we can be in our teaching and learning, the more we are forced to come face to face with the very real brokenness and injustice in the world, in our communities, and even within ourselves.
Lament
The practice of lament, writes African theologian Emmanuel Katongole, “is the prayer of those who are deeply disturbed by the way things are” (78). Lament “involves not only seeing the church [and world] as broken but also seeing our own complicity, how ‘I’ am also part of the problem” (86). The practice of lament is voicing a prayerful dissatisfaction with the way things are in the world.
Psalm 13 provides the basic vocabulary of lament: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Ps. 13:1). “Where are you, Lord?” “Why, Lord?” These are the painful yet prayerful groans of lament, and they can be found all throughout the Scriptures. David lamented the personal sorrow of the death of his friend Jonathan; the Israelites cried out in anguish at the destruction of their beloved Jerusalem. Jesus, too, named his sorrow through lament: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). Our biblical teachers of lament, from David to Jesus, teach us to pay attention to our sources of pain, name them, and lift them to God in prayer.
The practice of lament, then, is an acknowledgment that things are not the way they are supposed to be; our lives and world are out of alignment with God’s good intentions. Katongole, who has worked in post-genocide Rwanda, says that lament is “the cry of those who see the truth of the world’s deep wounds” and refuse to look away (78). As such, the practice of lament invites us to pay careful attention to the deep hurt and injustice in the world. When so many of us prefer to quickly gloss over the dark shadows of our nation’s history and digest our news by quickly scrolling through our Twitter feeds, lament forces us to slow down and face the realities of our world—past and present—for what they are. Because the deepest injustices of the world, like racism, evade easy intellectual explanations, lament is often expressed through questions (“Why, Lord?”). Therefore, the practice of lament can be a helpful corrective to white evangelicals’ emphasis on rationalism.
Because lament is so laden with emotion, it may seem like an odd tool to add to the pedagogical toolkit. However, wedding knowledge and emotional empathy is one of lament’s educational strengths. Perhaps you remember Reb Saunders, from Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen. Reb’s son Danny has a remarkable intellect but he lacks compassion. At one point in the story, Reb expresses his deepest desires for his son: “A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!” (272).
When lament is used as a pedagogical practice, students are invited to pay attention to injustices, to identify with those who are hurting, and to cry out on their behalf. A literature teacher might have his students write a prayer of lament from the perspective of one of the marginalized characters in a novel the class is reading. As a way to review, an economics teacher might have her students write prayers of lament that are informed by various economic concepts or politics that have advantaged some and disadvantaged others.
By creating space in the classroom for the practice of lament, students are invited to name the world’s hurts and, with those who are hurting, long for the day when God will make all things right.
Hope
If lament is an acknowledgment that the world is not right, practicing hope is a way of living that demonstrates that the world can be and will be different. Christian hope is an act of imagining and creating a new way of being in the world. One might even say that the practice of hope is a practice of protest in the face of the world’s injustices.
Hebrews 11 says that our ancestors in the faith hoped for a land that they did not yet see and lived their lives according to that hoped for land. In 2 Peter, Peter instructs Christians to “live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming” for “we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where [justice] dwells” (3:11–13). Christian hope looks forward to a new day of justice and begins to arrange life according to that new coming reality.
Dante Stewart, citing theologian Jürgen Moltmann, says those who have hoped in Christ “can no longer put up with reality as it is but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.” Stewart lifts up Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as one example of a “life of hope in protest.” He says that King “did not put up with the American reality he experienced, but as one who was charged with the task of carrying on the ministry of Jesus, he suffered against it and contradicted it.” The practice of hope is an act of protest against the current brokenness of the world.
As a pedagogical tool, the practice of hope empowers students to identify real-world injustices in their community, to lament the suffering that it creates, to imagine a better way of addressing that injustice, and then to seek to implement change to that particular situation. For example, a student in a world language class might investigate state and federal immigration policies and then write letters to her government representative advocating for more just immigration policies. Through the practice of hope, students are given the opportunity to dream and act in accordance with God’s coming kingdom.
Conclusion
Complex home repairs take time, skill, and the right tools. As Christian educators seek to equip students to be agents of justice and reconciliation in a complex world, we need to ensure that we are using all the tools available to us. Christian practices can be helpful pedagogical additions to the educator’s toolbox.
Mark VanderWerf (MDiv, MEd) teaches Bible and theology at Grand Rapids Christian High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he is also the high school chaplain. Previously, he taught history and literature at Calvin Christian High School in Escondido, California. He is an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church in North America. He and his wife and three boys live in the Alger Heights neighborhood on the southeast side of Grand Rapids, where he frequently visits the local hardware store seeking home repair advice.
