Dear White Christians

Summary: A critique of the primary orientation of approaching racial issues within the church through relational unity, and an assertion that an approach of repair and restoration is more adequate. 

Anyone reading my reviews regularly knows I have been reading widely about racial issues within the church for years. I first became aware of Jennifer Harvey with her book on parenting white children. At some point in time after that, I picked up the first edition of Dear White Christians but did not read it until the audiobook for the second edition came out.

Dear White Christians, like I Bring the Voice of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation, has a clear critique of the friendship-oriented racial reconciliation that was popularized by Promise Keepers and the many books on cross-racial friendship that came out in the mid-1990s until now. Like Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Harvey's complaint is not that friendship is not important, but that if the orientation is to friendship as the goal, then restoration will not be accomplished. Instead, there has to be an orientation toward restoration, and in the process, relational unity across racial and cultural, and class lines will be a byproduct.

I think Walker-Barnes and Jennifer Harvey's books are a good pairing because they have a similar purpose, but are written to different audiences and from different backgrounds. Harvey is a white ethicist and clergy in the American Baptist denomination. Walker-Barnes is Black, a Womanist theologian and a professor of practical theology at Mercer, but her doctoral work is in clinical psychology. The orientation toward ethics and psychology comes out in their writing. But these books are also written to different audiences. Walker-Barnes is pitched to the evangelical and non-denominational Christians who looked favorably on Promise Keepers. Harvey's book is written to the mainline Protestant world of American Baptists, United Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopal churches, which are more theologically, socially, and politically liberal, but still very racially white. Womanist critique is the heart of both books, although Harvey does not claim to be a womanist theologian, but only influenced by womanist theology and ethics.

The first edition came out in 2014 and did not have reference to Michael Brown's shooting which occurred weeks before the release, or the subsequent attention to the shootings of Tamar Rice, John Crawford, Philando Castile, and many others. Contextually, the research with the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church's (USA) work on reparations was primarily pre-2008. In many ways, the mainline work around racial justice and reparations is about 10-15 years earlier than the more recent work around reparations in the Evangelical world exemplified by Kwon and Thompson's book. But as the appendix in the 2020 second edition, shows there is little concrete work beyond study committees and educational work.

The central problem that both Harvey and Walker-Barnes identify is that most white Christians do not understand the true history of slavery and the long-term social and cultural implications of subsequent discrimination. The historical work of Jemar Tisby, Randal Balmer, and others is important to create a shared understanding of history and to address the intentional forgetting that has been the central response of white Christians in the post-Civil War era. Without historical memory, white Christians primarily view reparations and repair as unnecessary and a political act instead of a theological one.

This is a challenging book because questions assumptions of the individualism of many white Christians. While mainline Protestant churches are as a whole more politically liberal than evangelical Protestant churches, but in 2020, a slight majority of white mainline Protestants voted for Trump. That slight majority is far less than the estimated 76 percent of white evangelicals, but it does give an explanation about why there has been little significant movement past study commission stages. As the appendix discussed, at this point, white education about racial history is necessary to build enough support for Christian institutions to really address repair. I think these books paired together would be a fascinating follow-up for a church small group that may have previously read Color of Compromise or gone through Be the Bridge curriculum. Both of these books have an academic bent to them but are accessible.