Redemption of whole societies

The nasty guy attended a meeting of white Evangelicals, where the leaders laid hands on hims and prayed for him. A photo of the moment prompted Rev. William Barber to say:

When you can P-R-A-Y for a president and others while they are P-R-E-Y preying on the most vulnerable, you're violating the sacred principles of religion. A text in Amos chapter 2: religious hypocrisy looks like when a nation of political leaders will buy and sell people to do anything to make money, sell the poor for a pair of shoes, grind the penniless into the dirt, and shove the luckless into the ditch. That's an actual text. A text that says when you do not care for sick you are violating the principles of God. We have this extremist Trump Republican agenda that takes health care, transfers wealth to the greedy. That's hypocrisy and sin.

Denise Oliver Velez, writing for Daily Kos noted Barber’s response, then went into a discussion of how the media consistently gets an important detail wrong. They say that a major part of the nasty guy’s base is Evangelicals. But that’s not true. Yes, 81% of white Evangelicals did vote for the nasty guy. But 67% of non-white Evangelicals voted for Clinton. Yeah, the media is saying only whites are visible.

Velez linked to Deborah Jian Lee of Religion Dispatches, who adds:

The fact that 81 percent of white evangelicals supported a candidate who channeled white nationalism is not lost on minority believers. Nor is the unending news of travel bans, appointments of white nationalists, mass deportations and racial hate crimes.
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So while white evangelicals captured the election, they may have lost their fellow believers, the very people who could keep their churches, denominations and institutions from the attrition that has many Christian institutions and leaders genuinely worried for the future.

Lee notes that the Evangelical movement tried to engage in issues of racism for 40 years, though with not much success. But the last election prompted lots of black Evangelicals to disengage from discussions of racism, with a feeling all that effort was for nothing.

Velez also liked to Lisa Sharon Harper of Sojourners, who describes the difference between white and black Evangelicals:

Black evangelicals have a long history of interaction with oppressive systems and structures. When African Americans read the Bible, they see the more than 2,000 passages of Scripture about God’s hatred for poverty and oppression. They see God’s desire for systems and structures to be blessings to all of humanity — not a curse to some and a blessing for others.

And they see Jesus’ own declaration that he had come to preach good news to the poor, which, by the way, is decidedly not a reference to the “spiritually impoverished.” Jesus meant that he had come to preach good news (of liberation, freedom and new life) to people trapped in material poverty.

White evangelicals generally do not experience such systemic oppression. According to Emerson and Smith, most white evangelicals don’t prioritize or even see the thousands of references in the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament about structural and systemic injustice.

Accordingly, the Gospel — and by extension their evangelism — is about only one thing: Personal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, who died for their sins, and a *personal* relationship with him.

Black evangelicals also have personal faith that Jesus’ death paid for their sins, but their Gospel doesn’t end with personal (and individual) salvation. For Dr. King and Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rev. John Perkins and Nelson Mandela and for hundreds of thousands of Black Christians around the world and for me, the good news of the Gospel is that Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection were for the redemption of both individual souls and the redemption of whole societies.