IN 2008, I FELT LIKE AN AMERICAN for the first time because I saw a leader who looked like me. All my life I hoped my education and accomplishments would free me from the history of my skin color as inherently inferior and forever intimidating. It never did. But then Barack Hussein Obama became president of the United States, and I believed that I belonged here.1
I watched his inauguration, and with each phrase I felt more optimistic. I thought, Now things are going to be different. One word defined Obama’s campaign and resonated in communities around the country.
Hope.
It was on posters, buttons, and bumper stickers in all fifty states. Somehow, saying it over and over made it feel more possible. Hope seemed not like the perfect campaign strategy but something genuine and necessary. It sounded a lot better than mounting body counts in US prisons and soldiers not returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. Especially to me—a black male graduate of Columbia University who was unsure of my own ethnic identity, my place in this country, and my place in American Christianity.
I ask you to resist judgment, the urge to look away, and the opportunity to move on. I invite you to carry your skepticism through this entire book while leaning in to understand. Hold your gaze on the picture I am painting and consider its implications for how you think, speak, pray, and act. Your salvation is at stake, and your evangelism is compromised if you claim to be a follower of Jesus while building dividing walls of hostility and allowing them to govern your life. We are to be his witnesses, living differently in this world so we point others to him, and we cannot do that if we are not willing to engage with our differences to seek his justice and reflect his kingdom. I once lived this way, but because of Christ and for the sake of his gospel, I do so no longer.
Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama claimed that the United States of America is the last and best hope for the world. As a follower of the Jesus of Scripture, this should have immediately drawn resistance from me. But it didn’t because being a part of something bigger felt good. I can’t see God, but I can see opportunity and seize it. To believe that I, a poor, black, and racially profiled man, could be a part of the hope for kids in Yemen, Somalia, and Honduras felt empowering. I felt important, included, and useful. I thought my life could matter. I believed my black life did matter. A shift was happening internally as I perceived things to be changing around me. Perhaps now, with a black president of the United States, I could be taken seriously, given the benefit of the doubt, and assumptions of fear and intimidation and anger toward me would lessen. I started to function as though the following were true about me too:
“We are the people we’ve been waiting for.”
“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
These quotes from Obama and Mahatma Gandhi, respectively, started to take over barbershop walls, T-shirts, and store windows.
It felt good to feel integral to the movement to make this country a better place. Not only could I belong to this country, but I also could contribute to and even lead its transformation. That is not the narrative I grew up hearing. It’s the narrative I heard of white people, both here and abroad. The only place I felt valuable was in black churches. Gospel music and black preaching weren’t theater, performance, or entertainment, but just us being us before the Lord. And now we, the ball dunkers, fast runners, and entertainers could also be legitimate leaders and key contributors to the future of this country, not just its slave labor. But then the American = white = male = Christian forcefully reasserted itself.
I urge you to acknowledge the tension you might feel but not judge or disengage. With your skepticism and questions fully present, would you hold them and continue onward with a heart tuned to understand? There is a deep need for peacemakers in this world, and we can only mend to the extent that we are willing to engage with what’s broken.
The deaths at the hands of law enforcement of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, and the ever-growing list of African Americans now memorialized eroded any hope that formed in me. This realization continued for me as I came to understand that this was a problem not only for my immediate ethnic community but also for those I had previously been unable to consider because of the blindness induced by the plight of my own people. Native peoples in America make up the highest percentage of police-involved killings, and the Latinx community suffers numbers comparable to the black community. Both experience the plight of invisibility with little to no media coverage.2
The weight of this compelled me to pray, write, march, and organize. These were all efforts to feel seen, heard, validated, and valued in a culture that casts me and other people of color as dangerous and disposable.
More poignantly, I remember sitting in a Sunday service on the Upper East Side of New York City the day after George Zimmerman was acquitted. The worship leader opened with a time of prayer and invited the congregation to pray aloud. Prayers for sick family members, a husband looking for a job, friends in need of healing, and more people to know Jesus filled the air. I was waiting. Waiting for anybody except me—the only black person in the room—to say “God bless the family of Trayvon Martin.” No one did. The “church” that was supposed to be my sanctuary did not see Trayvon, so this church didn’t see me; if it did see Trayvon, his black life wasn’t worth mentioning. His black life didn’t matter, and if I met the same unjust demise, my black life wouldn’t matter either. The pastor would stand before a congregation segregated by race and class with the proclaimed desire to be inclusive, but when prayers are invited, no prayers would be offered for marginalized communities that were not in the room.
When Terence Crutcher was killed in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I had never felt so disposable. Grief was unlocked within me, and I wept in bed beside my wife, Priscilla, trying to make sense of a country that did not want me. America’s systemic oppression of the poor and people of color were illuminated again by police murder. This, coupled with unparalleled protection and empowerment of those with privilege and power, left me depressed and in a daze.
I had to confess this is the country and the American church I’m a part of. The church that I long to belong to doesn’t avoid injustice, silence dissidents, and ignore oppression. It doesn’t tell me to know my place and stay in it with a station lower than my lighter-skinned neighbors. The family of Christ is a beloved community, but what I so often experienced was fear triumphing over love on a daily basis inside and outside the church, in person and online.
In 2015, the Guardian reported that 1,134 people were killed by police in the United States.3 And that number is only an estimate because it is still not mandatory to report these deaths to the Justice Department, FBI, or any other government agency.4 And despite being 5 percent of the population of the United States, African American males make up 15 percent of these deaths.5 These statistics only added to my feelings of disposability. Men and women who look like me, my momma, and my small group Bible study could end up as hashtags simply for “fitting the description.”
The lack of compassion and acknowledgment of systemic pain and suffering when a killing is broadcast online and in the news is deeply hurtful. The pain intensifies as the silence of indifference reverberates through vulnerable communities along with the vocal, visible, inaccurate, and retaliatory actions and dialogues that ensue after a broadcast of police brutality. But most excruciating is the disregard for the pain and suffering that those with “the privilege of moving on” exhibit on a regular basis in the church. I should not have to convince a pastor that police brutality is a gospel issue. My fear should not be dismissed or need substantiation. The conscious and unconscious fear of people of color needs to be dealt with, not swept away. Yet with every meeting, email, and Facebook debate with my supposed brothers and sisters in Christ, I felt less and less like family and more like a stray dog who was allowed to be around but to never belong. I was in someone else’s Father’s house.
Prayer requests, sermons, podcasts, seminars, discipleship tools, and other components of American Christianity enmeshed with white American culture remain largely unchanged amid political polarization and rising inequality. In 2016, some of America’s most famous “Christian” leaders and institutions doubled down on bigotry, homophobia, racism, and Islamophobia. These leaders reinforced their defense of gun lobbyists, silence on sexual assault, and endorsement of greed and militarism throughout the election cycle. This reality isn’t just ideological but has real-life implications, as 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump while 88 percent of African Americans voted against him.6 To claim that the white American church does not embody and enforce the ethnic, social, and political division and call it “Christian” is to live in denial. And to stop reading here because you disagree is cowardice.
Followers of Jesus must wrestle with what it means to have an authoritative, distinctly Christian witness in our context—not one rooted in American political power, clout, and relevance driven by talk radio, Christian conferences, and televangelism. All people must be called out of what I call White American Folk Religion (WAFR).7
Historically, the US Constitution protects a self-determined superior race of people called “whites.” White supremacy was and is sin—intentional and unconfessed. WAFR takes that premise and goes further. It ensures that men will hold power over women by giving men control of wealth, the right to vote, and the ability and preference to hold political office. Laws, amendments, and ordinances enshrine the institution of slavery, unjust distribution of wealth, and the segregation and subjugation of ethnic groups, women, and the poor. This includes Jewish immigrants and those from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The court system has the power to take the lives of poor people who have committed crimes, the unborn, mentally ill, or those deemed feeble-minded.
Alongside these implications are the profound differences between the teachings and practices of Jesus in Scripture and those of WAFR. The United States and the kingdom of God are antithetical to one another. I once wondered how we got here. Now I know—this is where we have always been. We see this in the following laws and social norms:
1790. Before this year, the United States did not have a national policy for voting. This law stated that “free White men of good standing” could vote. Prior to that, only white men over the age of twenty-one and who owned property (including owning women and slaves) were eligible to vote in most states. Therefore, Native Americans, slaves, free blacks, women, indentured servants, the poor, and immigrants from Asia and Latin America were not citizens and therefore barred from the political process.8
1857. Dred Scott, a free black slave, saw his freedom taken away via a Supreme Court decision that set the stage for the Civil War.
1858–1865. Abraham Lincoln is held in high regard for penning the Emancipation Proclamation, but he did not believe that all people were made in the image of God. In the fourth presidential debate at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, Lincoln cleared up any controversy when he was accused of promoting “negro equality”: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” Lincoln also “opposed blacks having the right to vote, to serve on juries, to hold office and to intermarry with whites. What he did believe was that, like all men, blacks had the right to improve their condition in society and to enjoy the fruits of their labor. In this way they were equal to white men, and for this reason slavery was inherently unjust.”9 Lincoln did not believe that blacks and whites should or could live peaceably and favored colonization as the solution to this insurmountable problem. This colonization would have been mass deportation of people of color to South America and the Caribbean.
1882. The Chinese Exclusion Act signed by President Chester Arthur halted all immigration from China until 1943. This permanently separated thousands of men from their wives and children.
1887. The Dawes Act made it possible for Native Americans to vote if they gave up their tribal affiliation and dissolved their governments and rights to land.
1893. American diplomatic and military personnel conspired to illegally overthrow the monarchy of the Hawaiian kingdom. Queen Liliuokalani was stripped of power and land ownership, and voting rights were restricted for Hawaiians. Then in 1898, despite formal opposition, the United States imposed military occupation and unilaterally annexed the island to utilize its position for the Spanish American War. The Hawaiian kingdom’s latest complaint, filed with the United Nations in 2001, continued to protest their illegal occupation by the United States.
1906. The San Francisco Board of Education ordered the segregation of Asian children into separate public elementary schools. They justified segregation as a measure “to save white children from being affected by association with pupils of the Mongolian race.”10
1922. In Takao Ozawa v. United States, the US Supreme Court ruled that persons of Japanese origin are insufficiently white to qualify for citizenship.11 This move bolstered movements such as the Asiatic Exclusion League and led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. It also planted seeds for Japanese internment during World War II and other prejudiced laws and social norms that persist to this day.
1923. The US Supreme Court declared persons of Indian descent, even “high caste Hindus,” as ineligible for citizenship because they could not be legally recognized as white persons.12
1927. The Supreme Court Decision Buck v. Bell upheld the decision to allow forced sterilizations of those deemed “imbeciles.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously wrote in the decision, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” This meant that more than 70,000 impoverished, disabled, and mentally ill persons, as well as women deemed too interested in sex, were prevented from having children by the US government via forced sterilization.13
1929–1936. The Mexican Repatriation during the Great Depression removed between 500,000 and 2 million people from the United States. They were accused of stealing jobs by the attorney general, and Ford Motor Company and Southern Pacific Railroad encouraged employees to go back to their own people.14 At the same time, states began to cut welfare to these citizens.
1946–1958. The United States infected hundreds of people in Guatemala with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge in collaboration with the Guatemalan government, which America strongly influenced.15 Ultimately, the CIA would overthrow the government to ensure land use for the multinational corporation United Fruit Company.16
Felony conviction leads to loss of voting rights in many states to this day, which affects 2.5 percent of the US population. A high percentage of those people are from communities of color or areas with a high concentration of poverty.17
The infusion of government structures with a legal, deceptive “fear of the other” stands in opposition to the biblical mandate for us to love our neighbors (Mark 12:31) and care for the stranger in our midst as if they were native born (Leviticus 19:34).
Followers of Jesus believe that reconciliation through Christ is the only way to attain an eternal identity through adoption into an everlasting covenantal love, which is what all people of every background and ethnicity profoundly need. American history composed by white, wealthy men was written to argue otherwise. The Bible, however, exclaims that we do not need citizenship, voting rights, or access to property and capital, but a constant, unchanging status in Christ Jesus, which cannot be taken away. All of humanity is in need of a home, but that home is not the United States or any place. It is a person, and his name is Jesus.
So this is where we begin our journey. In each chapter, I will discuss a dominant lie in our culture, how it is in opposition to the gospel, and how living within these false narratives compromises our Christian witness and leads to division and destruction. Moreover, I will provide stories of what it looks like to pursue an ever-deepening union with God in love, in direct resistance to the idols that seek to remove Christ from our hearts. Last, I will describe accounts of lives lived in freedom among people who have yet to experience the freedom of Jesus, exemplifying how we might bear witness to him like the early Christians in Acts 1–7 along with next steps for you to take.
I believed these twelve lies because I believed falsely that in the face of oppression and adversity I could hold myself together with grit, hard work, and resilience. I see these destructive patterns at work on campuses and around kitchen tables in every region of the United States whether it’s among people born here or now living here but from elsewhere. These lies are at work among donors with millions of dollars and with those who have no homes. As the director of InterVarsity’s New York City Urban Project, I often found myself at intersections of race, class, status, and sexual orientation, where the invitation to worship something other than Jesus was always present. Instead of abiding in Christ (John 15) and finding abundance, growth, discipline, and identity in Jesus, I chose to follow the American dream. And so many of us are doing the same.
The dream so profoundly called for by Martin Luther King Jr. was not the American dream but a longing for the kingdom of God. Clouded by my longing for inclusion and significance, I believed the lies and bought into the gospel of America. All I had to do was accept my invitation to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. In the words of Denzel Washington, playing Malcolm X in the movie of the same name, I was “hoodwinked, bamboozled. Led astray.”18 I was willing, like so many other Christians, to receive America in exchange for the kingdom of God.
Many Christians hold the same level of commitment to the Pledge of Allegiance that they hold to the Apostles’ Creed. I thought I was following Jesus when I was actually a cultural Christian and a biblical hypocrite. Jesus is inviting us, just as he did the first disciples in Luke 5, to put down our nets (the twelve lies) and pursue a life with him. And that invitation is as pertinent today as it was two thousand years ago. He invites us to trust him and push out into deep water. He beckons us to witness his power because of faith and obedience. And finally, he invites us to stop our false pursuits, deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him.
As an experiential discipleship director, it is my privilege to lead one-day, week-long, and two-month leadership development programs. God called me to stand on the bridge between the rich and poor—physically and spiritually—and journey with those desiring to walk with Christ in this way. We require anyone in our programs to journey with at least one other person, so I hope you are turning these pages with a neighbor who is different from you in some way. We also ask anyone participating in our programs to begin each day by praying corporately. As we journey together, please pray this Franciscan prayer with me.
God bless us with discomfort at easy answers,
half-truths and superficial relationships,
so that we may live deep within our hearts.
God bless us with righteous anger at injustice, oppression,
and exploitation of people and the planet,
so that we might work for justice, freedom, and peace.
God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer pain,
rejection, hunger, and war,
so that we might turn their pain into joy.
And God bless us with enough foolishness
to believe that we can make a difference in the world,
so that we might do what others claim cannot be done.
To bring justice, kindness and the gospel to all people,
especially the poor.
What were your dominant feelings as you read this introduction: curiosity, surprise, confusion, numbness, familiarity, distance, or something else?
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, or want to stop reading?
What questions are you carrying into the next chapter?