Race Relations and the Local Church
What role should churches play in healing race rela-
tions in America?
America’s demographic landscape is shifting, and the U.S. is
now a brewing stew of ethnicities. While immigration and
migration have been bringing many ethnicities to America,
today’s ethnic conflicts still appear to occur mainly between
Caucasians and blacks. Ethnic division and discord in Ferguson (Missouri), Baltimore, Minnesota, and Texas tear at the
very fabric of our urban communities. Planted in the midst of
urban settings is the church, which should offer grace-based
solutions to race relations.
Growing racial division and discord require churches to
train Christians to build ethnic and cross-cultural relationships. Churches tend, however, to be more segregated than
other community groups: too often they do not reflect the
ethnic diversity of their communities’ schools, sports events,
workplaces, or neighborhoods. While churches focus on
preaching the gospel, they give little attention to training
people to practice the outworking of the gospel when it comes
to ethnic diversity, conflict resolution, cross-cultural sensitivity,
and diverse partnerships.
Christians must be challenged, informed, and trained to be
sensitive to the pain, hurts, fears, stereotypes, and needs within
their churches’ ministry context. Churches must move beyond
empathy by tearing down barriers and building bridges so
close relationships with people of different ethnic groups may
occur.
Three basic problems have led to division within and outside
the church. The first is the impact of a Darwinist worldview on
ethnic issues. The second is the impact of cultural fears due to
a faulty worldview. Third is the misinterpretation of Scripture.
Darwinism
While the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation was
a major step in the fight against injustice and the path of
racism in the United States, it did very little to affect the racial
divide in local churches. The culture was being forced to make
changes because of the legal system, but the church remained
in disunity and segregation.
At the same time that slavery was ending, Darwinist
teachings were starting to dominate the American mind-set.
Because society was no longer able to use legal justification
for the view that some races are inferior, Darwin’s “scientific”
theories were being used to rationalize the view of African-American and other people groups as inferior races or as
subspecies of humans (part animal and not fully human) that
were, therefore, not worthy of equality and justice.
What is Darwinist theory? “The theory of Darwinism evo-
lution,” say Ken Ham and A. Charles Ware in One Race One
Blood, “claims that human beings changed ‘from-molecules-
to-man’ over millions and millions of years, with one of our
immediate states being that of the apes. This theory logically
implies that certain ‘races’ are more ape-like than they are
human.”
This is the falsehood of racism sown into the soul of sinful,
depraved human hearts and minds. Although racism did not
originate with Darwinism, some say Darwin did more than
any other human being to popularize it. As a result of the
theory that all humans descended from apes, it was natural
to conclude, as F. G. Crookshank did in his 1924 book The
Mongol in Our Midst, that some races descended farther down
the evolutionary scale than others. It was believed that blacks
evolved from the strong but less intelligent gorilla, that Asians
evolved from orangutans, and that whites evolved from the
most intelligent of all primates, the chimpanzee.
Around the world during the course of history, evolutionary
theories were used to train and teach racism, oppression, injustice, and genocide. Even though Darwinian evolution theory
has been used to justify division and discord among the races,
God’s Holy Word condemns the mistreatment of human
beings in the Body of Christ. Jesus gave His disciples “a new
commandment,” that they love one another as He loved
them. He told them, “All will know that you are My disciples,
by VICTOR CLAY
