And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. | Ephesians 2:1–3
In my first post this week, I focused on the need us to draw our definition of sin from the Bible, as I believe that the Bible gives us a more complete picture of humanity then all of academia combined (because it was written by the Creator Himself). This doesn’t mean that we must dismiss, then, all that human study teaches us. The Imago Dei implies that human beings have the ability to find some of the truth that God has designed into creation. Our work is not simply to accept or reject, but to discern.
We must think about racism in line with how the Bible describes the implications of sin and affirm where non-Christian sources come to the same conclusions. To think through how racism plays out in the world, I want to use the breakdown of: the world, the flesh, and the devil. This is a repeated pattern in the Bible to describe the temptation of sin (the three trials Jesus faced relate to this), the description of ‘wisdom’ apart from God (James 3:15), and the blindness of living in sin in the Ephesians passage above. In it we see Paul refer to:
1. World | following the course of this world
2. Flesh | we all once lived in the passions of our flesh
3. Devil | following the prince of the power of the air
When we think of sin, we can think of it as impacting us on these 3 levels. Racism is a layered problem and understanding its different effects will help us process what solutions may look like.
WORLD
The structure of the world (government, courts, economy, and culture) will always be unjust. On this side of heaven, we will never experience an earthly structure that reaches equity. The results of the Fall are woven into every system that human beings create; the belief that there is no structural or systemic injustice doesn’t match how the Bible describes the far-reaching results of sin.
As we try to identify where these inequities lie, we have to see them in both group and individual forms. Some people will be oppressed by the system because they belong to a group that the system is set up against; some people will suffer individually based on an inequity within the structure. Many people (for a host of reasons other than race) will get wrongly arrested and charged, or unfairly terminated from their job, or have the government set up a law that unfairly burdens them; in one way or another, every person experiences the results of sin from the structure of the world.
While all people will face an individual injustice, people of color face specific hurdles because the course of this world (specifically the systems of America) are bent against them. This is where the term ‘systemic racism’ comes from. This does not mean that this injustice is present in every situation, all of the time, but that through the course of life, people of color will face barriers built into the system that white people do not have to overcome. These include, but are not limited to: being less represented in government, higher rates of arrest and prosecution, and biases in higher/firing. I am not here to make a case for these things, but to simply say that they exist, and we should not be surprised that they do. Sinful people set up sinful systems that have sinful results.
FLESH
Along with the injustice that exists as part of the system, we also all have sin within us twisting how we see the world. While we know that we should be impartial, we have biases. The fields of cognitive science and behavioral economics have been studying these biases for years and have begun to show that many of the biases that we come to are not rational deductions, but irrational leanings. Many of these biases vary from person to person, but some are shared as collective biases. These social biases are powerful because they tilt the whole culture in a direction.
Skin color is a shared bias. The Clark Doll test showed that there is a bias that sees white skin as pretty and good and black skin as ugly and bad (this was not limited to white participants). This bias is deeply ingrained and effects how society implicitly responds (this bias was recently recreated in Italy to similar results, which shows that this is more than an American issue). Ethnic hierarchies specifically tied to skin color fueled the Rwandan genocide, divide light and dark-skinned Hispanics in Latin America, and play a role in African politics. For whatever reason, part of being ‘in the flesh’ is using flesh color to measure the value of people.
This is where the term ‘White Privilege’ comes from. Though it is sometimes weaponized to point blame, at its core, it is simply an acknowledgment that there are biases that white people do not have to face, and even benefit from. The harder part is to admit that these biases are not just something out there that benefit us, but that we have them in us. Sin has twisted every good thing, and it has taken the unity of being human and divided us based on physical characteristics.
THE DEVIL
Those who are not Christians will dismiss this, but the Bible makes it clear that God has an enemy who is at work in the world to destroy all that He created good. Pitting people against one another is a perfect way to do this. While the world creates systems that cause injustice, and the flesh gives implicit bias, the Devil introduces an evil through hatred. This is the form of racism that we most often think of when we use the term. This is more than bias or structural injustice, this is evil. This is an offense to everything that God creates, teaches, and promises us in the New Heavens and the New Earth. When we see demeaning and disregard for people based on their race, we are seeing an evil that hates what God calls good.
In my next post I will address how we should and can respond to each of these levels of racism, but a few thoughts to end:
1. The evil of the Devil plays a role in the other two, but not at every point. There is a tendency to see all policy as being born out of evil, and all bias as being hatred. While some of the cultural bias is fueled by evil people and laws have been passed to uphold white supremacy, not everything is motivated by hate. It seems that we will not be able to move forward unless we can see the good along with the bad. We don’t always know the motives behind a person’s actions.
2. With that, there is a tendency to respond to all levels with the same level of intensity and anger. A person acting on implicit bias should not be shouted down in the same way a klansman should. We must learn to see race issues as a spectrum (or levels) and not squish it all into one big category. Doing so lessons the shock of pure evil and demonizes people who are actually trying to change.
3. While it is right to aggressively root out the evil and hatred that comes from the devil, defeating cultural bias will take conversation, and systemic changes will take legislative reform. Recognizing levels will help us to see that different tools are needed to work on the varied implications of injustice in our culture.
4. Seeing levels helps us to see how far sin reaches and how much it destroys. We tend to see a few effects, but as we see how sin is passed down generations and hits numerous levels of society, we begin to get a feel for how the Bible describes the destruction of sin.
5. Solutions are not simple. To only view one part of the problem and to think that tearing down the institutions, or simply changing people’s hearts will take care of the issues, doesn’t do justice to the depth of brokenness. In order to actually work toward reconciliation, is going to be a long, hard road.
Next post will be beginning to chart that path.