OpinionWendell Griffen  |  October 11, 2021
Tony Evans, founding pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, lately presented an idea he calls Kingdom Race Theology to his congregation as his choice to Vital Race Idea, by the use of two Wednesday night sermons. In keeping with a July 27 article in Baptist Press, Evans described Vital Race Idea as “a post-Civil Rights social assemble that seeks to show how unjust rules have served because the embedded basis and filter out wherein racist attitudes, conduct, insurance policies and constructions were rooted right through the material of American lifestyles and methods even after the ones rules have modified.”
Wendell Griffen
All over the ones sermons, that may be seen on the net, Evans declared his fear that Vital Race Idea — which he recognizes may also be helpful in addressing systemic racial injustice — turns into “divisive” and an obstacle to Christian cohesion and the ministry of reconciliation when it’s related to the New York Occasions 1619 Mission and the Black Lives Subject group (which Evans distinguishes from the Black Lives Subject motion).  That fear precipitated Evans to introduce Kingdom Race Theology, which he defines as “the reconciled popularity, confirmation and party of the divinely created ethnic variations wherein God shows his multifaceted glory as his other people justly, righteously and responsibly serve as for my part and corporately in cohesion beneath the lordship of Jesus Christ.”
Evans’ willpower to Christian cohesion is commendable. His argument that the 1619 Mission and Black Lives Subject organizational targets are “unbiblical” pyrotechnics from the Vital Race Idea firecracker (a metaphor he used all through his July 14 sermon) which threaten Christian effectiveness and Black households does now not cling up beneath cautious exam.
Evans gadgets to the 1619 Mission as a result of its writer, journalist Nicole Hannah Jones, contends america didn’t start with the Progressive Conflict in 1776 however greater than 150 years previous, when enslaved Africans had been brought to Jamestown, Va., in 1619. Within the 1619 Mission, Jones argues that the fundamental explanation why for the Progressive Conflict for independence from Nice Britain was once so white enslavers may create a country the place chattel slavery was once legalized.
In keeping with Evans and different Christian nationalists, this viewpoint in regards to the foundation of america threatens nationwide cohesion and fosters cross-racial war. Evans even claims close to the tip of his July 21 sermon that Frederick Douglass referred to as the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Charter “easiest” and “freedom paperwork.”
“In keeping with Evans and different Christian nationalists, this viewpoint in regards to the foundation of america threatens nationwide cohesion and fosters cross-racial war.”
That’s what Evans needs his congregation to imagine. However that isn’t what Douglass mentioned on July 4, 1852, all through a speech to masses of abolitionists in Rochester, N.Y.
“What to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I solution: an afternoon that finds to him, greater than all different days within the 12 months, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he’s the consistent sufferer. To him, your party is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your nationwide greatness, swelling self-importance; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hole mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all of your non secular parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy — a skinny veil to hide up crimes which might shame a country of savages. There isn’t a country in the world in charge of practices extra surprising and bloody than are the folk of america, at this very hour.”
To assert that Douglass uttered the ones phrases all through a Fourth of July public collecting but thought to be the Declaration of Independence “easiest” and a “freedom” file is worse than an inexcusable exaggeration. It’s nonsense.
Evans additionally claims that the Black Lives Subject “group” — now not the motion — threatens Black households. He didn’t cite any proof to reinforce that declare in both of his sermons. On the other hand, Evans stocks that view with Armstrong Williams, a conservative Black syndicated commentator and tv character, who claims that the “creators of the Black Lives Subject World Community Basis imagine, handle and train … towards the speculation of a nuclear circle of relatives with a father and mom within the family, and as a substitute espouse some great benefits of what they check with as a ‘village.’”
Earlier than Armstrong Williams become one of the vital main Black tv station homeowners, he was once a legislative staffer for Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina (who campaigned for president in 1948 to handle racial segregation), and a confidential assistant to Clarence Thomas when Thomas was once chair of the U.S. Equivalent Employment Alternative Fee (the placement Thomas held when Anita Hill alleges that he sexually careworn her).
Kingdom Race Theology suffers from different flaws. Despite the fact that Evans calls it a Christian theology, he didn’t urge fans of Jesus to call for societal therapies for the continued evils of systemic racism, sexism (together with bigotry and discrimination towards LGBTQ individuals), militarism, imperialism, capitalist-inspired classism, technocentrism, xenophobia and different oppression. Evans by no means spoke the phrases “repentance,” “restitution” or “reparations.”
“Evans is unfastened to name his perspectives Kingdom Race Theology. On the other hand, his perspectives don’t honor the custom of Jesus.”
Why does this subject?
Tony Evans is a well-liked Black pastor, radio commentator and spiritual writer who stocks his perspectives on day by day radio publicizes heard right through the sector. He’s unfastened to claim his ideals about racial injustice. Evans is unfastened to name his perspectives Kingdom Race Theology. On the other hand, his perspectives don’t honor the custom of Jesus, John the Baptist and different prophets of the Christian Bible (similar to Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel) who condemned societies that practiced and prospered because of social injustice. In addition they don’t honor Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., Samuel DeWitt Proctor, and different Black fans of Jesus who didn’t hesitate to sentence The us.
There may be not anything “new” about what Evans calls Kingdom Race Theology. It’s the identical pietistic pablum white Christian nationalists all the time have spoken, excluding that it’s now coming from the thoughts and mouth of a well-liked Black proponent of Christian nationalism to advertise a pietistic protection of American exceptionalism and objection to prophetic critique of white supremacy and American empire.
Wendell Griffen is an Arkansas circuit pass judgement on and pastor of New Millennium Church in Little Rock, Ark.
 
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