So far this series about the way different Christian traditions have influenced me has gone from major divisions to more recent historical trends. The last three posts will be a bit more ‘ripped from the headlines’, in that I’ll be talking about movements that are front-and-centre in today’s cultural conversations. Today I’ll be talking very briefly about why I identify as antiracist.
The biggest reason is simply that as a Christian I can’t see how I can’t be. The whole teaching of the New Testament is about finding new ways of being in the world in which we are better able to show up for each other, irrespective of our differences. Jesus casts a racial ‘other’ as the hero of one of his most famous parables, and reached out across his society’s religiously-ordained boundaries to heal mind, body, and heart. And a major thrust of Paul’s teaching was all about how racial differences were to be irrelevant for membership in the Church. As an heir to these teachings, there is no way I could not work towards racial equity in the Church and in society at large.
A big part of this work as a white man is to know how to listen. It’s not always comfortable, and I may not always agree with everything I hear. But that isn’t a problem. We all need to be challenged to sit with discomfort and examine and re-examine our assumptions and beliefs about how the world works. But beyond this, by listening to voices of people with experiences very different from my own, my eyes are opened to so many things. This is a big reason why most of the theological reading I’ve done over the past few years has been by non-white theologians. For the most part, I’ve heard what the white West’s interactions with the Scriptures and tradition have to offer. There’s little new for me. But, reading the Bible with a Black, Indigenous, Latin American, or East or South Asian guide is often like reading it again for the first time, and causes me to fall more and more in love with the text.
I’ve written a fair bit about this over the years, so rather than repeat myself, I’ll like to my page where this material is gathered: Black Theology, Anti-Racism, and Decolonization.
Matthew Root 
I think where many white Christians go wrong about racism in the Church is that they interpret “in Christ there is no Jew or Greek” as “we are the default and everyone should be more like us, and any reminder that not everyone is like us and doesn’t have our experiences goes against this passage in Scriptures”. It’s ‘the complainer is always wrong’ mentality combined with ‘Christianity is our particular ethnic culture’. It is causing a lot of tension in my current parish.
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