What is the Bible’s view on systemic racism?

Question 60034.

Few phrases generate more heat in a Christian conversation than systemic racism, and a good deal of that heat comes from people arguing past one another because they are using the words differently. Before anyone can agree or disagree, it is worth being clear about what is actually being claimed.

At its simplest the claim behind systemic racism is that racial injustice can persist through structures, laws, institutions and habits, rather than only through the conscious prejudice of individuals. That is one claim. Attached to it in current usage is often a much larger framework about power, guilt and identity, and that is a different claim altogether. I would answer the two quite differently.

What Scripture plainly affirms

The Bible has a well developed category for injustice built into the way a society runs. The prophets attack legal systems that decide against the poor, dishonest weights that rig an economy, and rulers who write oppressive laws. Isaiah pronounces woe on those who decree unjust decrees, and Amos on those who turn aside the needy in the gate. None of that is about the private feelings of individuals; it is about arrangements.

So a Christian has no reason to flinch at the idea that sin can become embedded in a structure. Slavery was legal. Apartheid was legislated. The Jim Crow laws were laws. Britain’s own history includes the empire’s arrangements and the trade that funded a great deal of it. Where the accusation behind systemic racism is that injustice can be baked into institutions and outlive the people who built them, Scripture agrees without hesitation.

Where the framework overreaches

The difficulty comes with what is often bundled in. Where systemic racism is used to say that guilt is inherited, so that a person today is personally culpable for what people who share his ancestry did two centuries ago, Scripture rules it out directly. Ezekiel 18 was written to demolish exactly that principle. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, and each soul answers for its own sin.

There is a second overreach in the treatment of individuals as instances of a group. Where a framework tells me that my perspective is determined by my ancestry, that some people cannot be sinned against in a particular way and others cannot be innocent, it has replaced persons with categories. Scripture judges persons, and it forbids partiality in both directions, saying plainly that you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but judge your neighbour in righteousness.

A third problem is that the framework often provides guilt with no possibility of absolution. There is confession without forgiveness, and a permanent status of the accused. Whatever that is, it is not the gospel, and Christians who adopt it wholesale find themselves offering people a burden Jesus never gave them. My concerns here overlap with what I have written on intersectionality.

Consequences are not the same as guilt

This is the distinction that unlocks most of the argument. Historical injustice is historical, and personal guilt cannot be transferred down the generations. But consequences travel very easily. Wealth, property, education, neighbourhood, family stability and the assumptions of an institution all pass on, and they pass on unevenly for reasons that include past injustice.

So I can say two things at once without contradiction. I am not guilty of what my great grandfather’s generation did, and I may still be living in arrangements shaped by it that disadvantage my neighbour today. The first protects the conscience. The second keeps me from pretending that everything started fresh this morning. Systemic racism, understood as inherited consequence rather than inherited guilt, is a description that a Christian can examine honestly, case by case, on the evidence.

Test the claims individually

One of the weaknesses of the whole debate is that the phrase is used as a single verdict on everything, which means it is either accepted wholesale or rejected wholesale. That is no way to think. Every particular claim should be examined on the evidence: this policy, this institution, this outcome, this explanation.

Some disparities do trace to unjust arrangements. Others trace to geography, family structure, immigration history, economics or the ordinary variety of human communities, and treating every difference in outcome as proof of discrimination is a poor argument that discredits the good cases. A Christian committed to truth should be the person in the room asking for the actual evidence rather than the person supplying the loudest position.

Why the biblical categories are better

When Christians borrow a secular framework wholesale they inherit its assumptions, including its account of what human beings are and what can be done about evil. We do not need to. Scripture gives us stronger ground: every person bears the image of God, partiality is sin, injustice in a law is condemned, and the church is the community where the dividing wall has been broken down.

Those categories do the work without the baggage. They allow me to condemn a discriminatory practice as wickedness rather than as a systemic outcome, which is a far more serious charge. And they give me something the framework cannot, which is a way for a guilty person to be forgiven and changed. That is the difference between a diagnosis and a cure. I have set out the foundations in what the Bible says about racism.

What this asks of the church

Look at your own house first. Are people treated impartially in your congregation regardless of accent, background or income? Would a visitor from another community be welcomed as warmly as a professional couple from down the road? Is leadership open to anyone gifted for it? Those are questions about arrangements as well as attitudes, and they are answerable without adopting anyone’s framework.

Then be willing to listen before you argue. When a brother tells you what he has experienced, the Christian response is not to test his account against your politics. Listen, take it seriously, and where something can be put right, put it right. Much of the anger in this debate among believers comes from people feeling that their experience was treated as a political claim rather than as a testimony.

Keeping our feet

I want Christians to be neither captured nor dismissive. Captured, and we simply repeat the culture’s categories in a religious accent and lose the ability to say anything the culture could not have said itself. Dismissive, and we tell wounded people that their experience is a fashion, which is both cruel and untrue.

The steady path is to hold to what Scripture says, examine each claim on its merits, refuse inherited guilt, refuse partiality, and get on with being a church where the reality of one new man in Christ is visible to anyone who walks in. Systemic racism as a phrase will come and go. The command to do justice and love mercy will not.

Systemic racism and the trouble with the words

A good deal of the conflict here is linguistic, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time. When one believer hears systemic racism he understands unjust arrangements that outlive their architects, which he can see in history and is willing to examine now. When another hears the same phrase he understands an accusation against him personally on the basis of his ancestry, which Scripture forbids and he is right to resist.

Both of them then argue as though the other holds the position he has imagined. I have watched that conversation destroy the peace of a congregation more than once, and in most cases the two men agreed about far more than they realised. The remedy is unglamorous: define the terms, deal with particular claims rather than the slogan, and refuse to let a phrase stand in for an argument.

Christians ought to be unusually good at this, because we are people of a book and we know that words carry freight. If a term generates more heat than light, we are free to set it aside and say what we mean instead. Injustice built into an institution is a charge Scripture knows how to make, and it can be made without borrowing anybody’s framework.

That is why I try to describe the thing rather than deploy the label. If a hiring practice quietly excludes people, say so and show it. If a law bore down on one community and its effects are still visible, say that. Once systemic racism is broken into particular claims that can be examined, most Christians find they can talk about it without falling out, and the argument moves from identity back to evidence, which is where it belonged from the start.

So, now what?

If this subject has become a fight in your church, try lowering the temperature by asking everyone to say what they actually mean by the words. A great deal of the disagreement dissolves once people discover that one of them means unjust arrangements and the other means inherited guilt, because most believers can agree about both once they are separated.

And do not let a large argument become a substitute for a small obedience. It is easier to have a strong view about systemic racism than to notice the person in your own congregation who is being quietly overlooked. Start there, where you can actually do something, and let the theory follow the practice for once.

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:8 (ESV)