I GREW UP IN BRODNAX, VIRGINIA, on a road where my mother’s family has lived for more than a century. The town has about four hundred people, and my house didn’t show up on Google Maps when it launched in 2005. The closest big town of about four thousand is South Hill. They have the Walmart.
There were no neighborhoods in Brodnax, as my young mind understood them at the time. I thought, If you can’t see the house next to you, like on TV, then that’s not a neighborhood. But South Hill was different. They had Circle Drive and Fox Run, along with Pettus Town and Chaptico Road. Most important was not that I knew where they were but that I knew who belonged there. Even the smallest towns in America had versions of redlining, a complex set of discriminatory housing practices that included mortgage lending, insurance rates, and other financial and social means to keep races and classes apart. Circle Drive and Fox Run were for black folks, and Pettus Town and Chaptico Road were for white people with “old money.” Old money refers to the money, land, wealth, and resources these people possessed because of colonization, slavery, and institutional racism. These resources were obtained at the expense of the slaves they owned, their advantages gained through the benefits of Jim Crow, or racial discrimination in education, housing, and financing. These resources and statuses were kept in place by acts of violence like threats and verbal intimidation along with lynching, police brutality, cross burnings, and murders.
By sixteen I was familiar with this way of life. They weren’t theories or ideas, but stories I heard and experiences I had. I’ll never forget arguing with the mom of one of my best friend’s in her kitchen. They were white and lived on Chaptico Road. She told me they wanted to send their daughter to Kenston Forest, a private school. In my mind that meant one thing: people went to private schools in southern Virginia to get away from “bad behavior,” the “wrong crowd,” and “negative influences.” To me that meant getting away from black people and potential “race mixing.” God forbid a white girl take a black boy to prom or a black woman marry a white man. In 1967, Loving v. Virginia made interracial marriage legal, but you could still be beaten or killed for “mixing.”1 I knew that public money, including taxes paid by black folks, helped start these private schools during integration.2 I knew that “more opportunities” and “better classroom management” meant no blacks and no poor people. I knew this at sixteen years old but could articulate none of it. After all, what was I doing in a house on Chaptico Road anyway—if I wasn’t cutting the grass? So, this little girl left her middle school to head off to Kenston Forest, and I went back home to Allen Road. Unfortunately, this was and is not only a Southern problem. The New York Times points out that the entire country shared a common ethos of racial segregation, especially in education.3
Around the same time, my girlfriend went to study at the home of one of her classmates. She is black and he is white; he lived in Pettus Town. His mother, who taught my younger brother in middle school, asked him to come into another room. She proceeded to tell him, loud enough for my girlfriend to hear, that he “should have never brought a n——– in her house.” What were people going to think? What would the neighbors say? So, he came out with his head down and drove her home.
The perception of America might be that we’re a melting pot, but common belief, wisdom, and practice is that some folks aren’t supposed to have friendships with, date, marry, or even go to church with people of another race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background. This isn’t limited to black and white people, though it’s the most socially egregious. Personally, I’ve watched the prejudice and hatred pour out between the parents and potential spouses of Chinese and Filipino couples: “You know, they’re like the Mexicans of Asian people, Jonathan.” I’ve heard more explicit instructions that immigrant parents give their children to maintain their “purity,” especially their daughters: “Here’s the list of people that my [Chinese] grandfather told me I could marry: Chinese, Cambodian, Korean, Thai, Laos, Filipino, Japanese, white, or Latino.” And I’ve heard comments that are vague but wound just as deeply: “I would want you to marry someone Korean because it’s just . . . easier.”
I’ve never heard someone say that black men are preferable for marriage—even from those who share my skin color from a place of wholeness. These comments are painful. And white American folk religion will work to ensure that marriage between ethnically or racially different people never actually happens.
THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT
A melting pot is used during the process of heating metal to obtain purified ore. For example, to make bronze, one has to melt tin and copper and then combine them. The metal is heated in order to strain out what the metal worker doesn’t want and then the pure tin and copper come together to produce bronze. Specifically, for copper smelting, a crucible must be used. In smelting, two purified elements come together under intense heat to produce one completely different compound. Bronze is neither copper nor tin but a different substance altogether that takes the best from both.
The term melting pot as applied to social life appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was used to describe the diverse mosaic taking shape in America. The idea was popularized and effective. It made the United States seem like a promised land where folks could live together in unity. Not only that, but the melting pot image also projected a wonderful prospect where many people come together to form a unique and better people. E pluribus unum (one out of many) captures that ideal so perfectly that it appears on every coin.
It is a wonderful motto except for the fact that it’s contrary to the vision of the world God intended and will bring to pass. Early American leaders worked to make the melting pot a reality. Conversely, we see in Revelation 7 how and why their vision is woefully inadequate and not grounded in the word of God.
A speech that came to be called “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man” was delivered at George Mason University in 1892 by Captain Richard Pratt. The caption under a photo of him notes him to be the “Father of the Movement in Getting Indians Out from Their Old Life to Citizenship.” This is accurate because he was the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial Schools, one of the many oppressive, abusive, and violent places where Native American boys and girls were cruelly forced to assimilate.
Pratt’s remarks began,
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.
We are just now making a great pretense of anxiety to civilize the Indians. I use the word “pretense” purposely, and mean it to have all the significance it can possibly carry. Washington believed that commerce freely entered into between us and the Indians would bring about their civilization, and Washington was right. He was followed by Jefferson, who inaugurated the reservation plan. Jefferson’s reservation was to be the country west of the Mississippi; and he issued instructions to those controlling Indian matters to get the Indians there, and let the Great River be the line between them and the whites. Any method of securing removal—persuasion, purchase, or force—was authorized. Jefferson’s plan became the permanent policy. The removals have generally been accomplished by purchase, and the evils of this are greater than those of all the others combined.4
He continues to explain how melting together was never the intention, but an explicit melting into would be more accurate. He used enslavement of Africans as his lens for how to deal with Native Americans. After explaining that all of the United States should come under the rule of God, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, he claims that slavery was a blessing to the seven million Africans taken from “cannibalism in the darkest Africa” to enlightened America. The great lesson of slavery as he sees it is:
The schools did not make them [slaves] citizens, the schools did not teach them the language, nor make them industrious and self-supporting. Denied the right of schools, they became English-speaking and industrious through the influences of association. Scattered here and there, under the care and authority of individuals of the higher race, they learned self-support and something of citizenship, and so reached their present place. No other influence or force would have so speedily accomplished such a result. Left in Africa, surrounded by their fellow-savages, our seven million of industrious black fellow-citizens would still be savages. Transferred into these new surroundings and experiences, behold the result. They became English-speaking and civilized, because forced into association with English-speaking and civilized people; became healthy and multiplied, because they were property; and industrious, because industry, which brings contentment and health, was a necessary quality to increase their value.
What he explains is less of a melting pot and more a filter that strains out what the dominant culture finds undesirable. Pratt’s remarks twist Scripture, and linking forced submission to a god defined by those in power with support for America’s core beliefs and actions. Consequently, all people who live in America and under its social, political, economic, and military influence have two choices: either resist, and thus exist, on the outside of this system at its mercy, or enter into this common story of WAFR. Those who assimilate begin the race to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, beginning where the starting line is determined by racial assignment, social class, gender, and status. This includes and is also true for those society considers white.
Oppression, discrimination, and racism press American community to assimilate or force them to turn inward for protection. As InterVarsity student leader Katie McCarty observed, “We are less of a melting pot and more of a buffet. We are together, but we don’t touch.”
What WAFR prescribes is “assimilate or die.” If not literal death, then certainly it produces a disadvantaged life: a person or group of people who refuses to assimilate or is prevented from assimilating is forced into American society’s silos, such as reservations, ghettos, internment camps, and prisons.
Racial hierarchy based on gender and skin color is married to false religious ideas and receives moral justification. The following passage from American Crucible by Cambridge professor Gary Gerstle explains the melding of cultures into one superior identity:
Understand that America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, your fifty languages, and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to—these are fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.5
The end result is not a place where every ethnicity and culture receive space to flourish and be celebrated; instead, all cultures yield to “the will of God” and become American, because that is certainly his will. But examining Scripture, we see that a melting pot is not God’s plan.
GOD’S KINGDOM IS NOT A MELTING POT
Even if America were able to achieve a perfect blending of each ethnic identity and racial group into one social image that embodies e pluribus unum, that would fall short of God’s vision revealed to the apostle John in Revelation 7:9-17. In this passage, the people gathered before the throne of God are not white people and black people or those forced to forget their distinctive ethnocultural identities by checking boxes like Asian, Hispanic, Native American, or Other.
In China and Korea, people don’t self-identify as Asian. There are dozens of ethnic groups in those countries. There are no Hispanics in South America or Pacific Islanders in Tonga and Samoa. Even those nations and islands are identified by names given to them, not the ones they used for themselves. On the land where I grew up and the soil under Columbia University where I studied, people groups rich in culture, tradition, and beauty once resided and were dispossessed and displaced.
These categories were created in America and places where white supremacy, racism, and ethnocentrism reign. These categories were instituted and are kept in place only while a dominant culture seeks to elevate itself and subjugate others.
In the kingdom of God people are not forced to fit into a racial hierarchy for the sake of easy classification, control, or exploitation.The kingdom of God is not a melting pot. Those gathered before the throne of God in Revelation 7 are precisely where they are supposed to be without having to code switch or translate their mother tongues. They are at home in front of the God who always intended them to be with him. They are also at home with one another and all those in the multiethnic body of Christ.
This is not every tribe, tongue, and nation assimilating into a singular culture. If it were a large, diverse group of people now speaking the same language and sharing the same culture and heritage, John could have specified that, but the Greek words chosen reveal shalom amid difference: nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues.
Luis Bush, an Argentinian-born, Singaporean-based leader in global Christianity notes:
The emphasis of these combinations is on completeness, totality, fullness . . . γλῶσσα (glossa) in the Revelation passages emphasizes people as a linguistic unity and is the Greek term that best expresses ethno linguistic peoples. In conclusion, as we consider the four synonyms used in the Bible related to peoples, the term ἔθνος (ethnos) relates to ethno cultural peoples as distinct from ethno linguistic peoples, γλῶσσα (glossa) or ethno political peoples, λαός (laos) or φυλή (phylē) which refers to people as a national unity of common descent.6
This is a place where striving ceases and provision flows abundantly. This is not a place where ethnic groups are pitted against each other like the sugar plantations of Hawaii. This is not a place where lightness or darkness of skin determines your treatment as on the tobacco farms of southern Virginia. Heaven is perfect peace in the presence of God with the people of God, including our ethnic identity, language, and culture. These things are given by God and pleasing to him when we consecrate them to his glory. They were not meant to be squeezed out of us by oppression, violence, or the lack of education, wealth, or social mobility.
The rejection of WAFR and the embrace of the kingdom of God beautifully reconciled under the reign of Jesus Christ reminds me of standing on the floor of the Edward Jones Dome at the Urbana 06 Student Missions Conference in St. Louis. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship hosts this triennial conference where twenty thousand mostly college students gather to contemplate the call of Christ and take prayerful, practical action in response to Jesus. There were nearly as many people there as live in Mecklenburg County, where I grew up. I was nineteen and had never attended a Christian conference. All assumptions I had were shattered when I arrived. This was not a Christian concert! It was not a collection of famous Christians I’d never heard of and motivational speakers wanting me to buy their books. The speakers were not all white and male, and no one asked, “Can I help you?” with the undertone of “You don’t belong here.”
I had never met a Christian from Korea or sung a song in Malayalam. I didn’t know that the majority of the people who followed Jesus were not American or white. I knew about the Underground Railroad but had no idea about China’s underground church. This Jesus fascinated me. And standing in the convention hall, where no one was selling anything but instead inviting me to discern what context Jesus was calling me to, I was curious, convicted, and awestruck.
On New Year’s Eve at that Urbana, something clicked. I felt it every time I stood in that dome and looked around at the hands raised in praise and adoration. For a few hours, many of the tribes, tongues, and nations that will gather around the throne of God praised him in unison on this side of glory. For a time it was as if all that is promised in Scripture was possible. Maybe there could be reconciliation between the blacks and whites in my town. Perhaps the immigrants who were moving to Southern Virginia didn’t have to become black or white to belong and be loved. Though I didn’t know where my people were from, perhaps one day Jesus will tell me. In the meantime, life could be joyful amid the suffering and uncertainty. This was not a melting pot where I had to leave behind who I was and fully embrace the dominant monoculture. At Urbana we could bring ourselves to Jesus to mend what had been broken and bring personal, relational, and systemic shalom to the body of Christ.
At that moment I began to seriously question the life, liberty, and the pursuit of everything—except life with Christ. This was the beginning of my discipleship out of WAFR and into the family of God. That is what I truly longed for—not to be a slave, immigrant, or citizen—but the son of a Father who loves me and will do anything for me to know it. That includes descending from heaven to put on flesh and beat death so I know I will beat death too, because he who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God and abide for eternity with him. He was born, crucified, and raised not that we might become citizens of the United States and call ourselves a city on a hill. There is only one light, Christ. And the true gospel proclaims:
He who believes in Him is not condemned; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. (John 3:18-20)
To believe, practice, and preach WAFR is to call the darkness light, and the light darkness. Jesus offers his way, his truth, and his life that we might live and be set free. The personal and corporate sins of our individual and collective history, whether committed by us or perpetrated against us, are covered by the blood of Jesus. Thus all people who decide to follow Jesus can lament, confess, repent, and be reconciled to God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
QUESTIONS FOR INDIVIDUAL REFLECTION AND SMALL GROUP DISCUSSION
What were your dominant feelings as you read this chapter: curiosity, hope, surprise, confusion, numbness, familiarity, distance, or something else?
When were those feelings most present?
What phrases, stories, or historical events resonated with you?
What events or narratives were you unaware of? What did you learn?
Where do you disagree or have concerns?
What questions are you carrying?
GET TO KNOW YOURSELF MORE DEEPLY
What are your primary feelings toward people of your own ethnic group and heritage?
What traditions from your family would you want your children to continue?
What stories, sayings, or songs that shaped your childhood would you want your close friends to know?
What are two meals that communicate the most about your family or cultural heritage? What is the significance of each dish or unique ingredient?