A couple of weeks ago, in one of the Christian discussion groups, a young woman of African descent, asked, "Why am I the only Black person here!"
Most of the responses to the post were along the line of "The race post need to stop; we should be moving in a way that puts racial issues behind us and start living like we are all God's children."
While I agree with the statement that we should "start living like we are all God's children", the issue is a bit more complex than that.
In his 25 April 1957 address at the Conference on Christian Faith and Human Relations in Nashville, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated, "It is appalling, indeed, that 11 O'clock on Sunday morning, when we stand to sing "In Christ there is no East nor West", is the most segregated hour in Christian America."
Fifty years later, his statement is just as valid today as it was when he made the statement.
In case there is any doubt that achieving desegregation within the Body of Christ is a necessity, consider the following.
In John 13:34-35, Jesus said, "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
Can we truly say that we love one another, if we are not even able to come together to worship and pray?
Unity is the result of love. If we do not have unity, we do not have love for one another. If we do not have love for one another, we are disobedient to Jesus' command which would allow the world to know that we are His disciples.
I have no doubt that the average American Christian whole heartedly embraces the concept that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ united under the lordship of Jesus the Christ. However, the reality of the Church today is that she is a house divided.
After fifty years of "renewing our minds" and not achieving true unity within the Body of Christ, I think we can safely say that simply having the mindset of "we are all brothers and sisters in Christ" is not getting us there.
We need to dig a little bit deeper and examine why there is this disconnect between our mindset and the current state of the American Church and determine how best to bridge this gap.
Allow me to present three major obstacles. First, there is a physiological obstacle associated with the amygdala part of the human brain. Second, there is a psychological obstacle associated with the Gestalt Effect. And third, there is a social obstacle associated with segregated communities.
If we are to overcome these obstacles to achieve unity in the Body of Christ, we can not take the passive approach in which we wait around for the other guy to come to our church so that we can live "like we are all God's children".
In research published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurology, "Neurobiology of fear responses: The role of the amygdala" (1997), M. Davis (Yale University) found that the electrical stimulation of the amygdala part of the brain elicits a pattern of behaviors that mimic natural or conditioned fear.
Later, in research published in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, "Performance on Indirect Measures of Race
Evaluation Predicts Amygdala Activation" (2000), Elizabeth A. Phelps (New York University), Kevin J. O'Connor
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology), William A. Cunningham, E. Sumie Funayama, J. Christopher Gatenby, John C. Gore, and Mahzarin R. Banaji (Yale University) extended M. Davis' research on amygdala activities to racial prejudice.
Using a fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to measure amygdala activity, subjects are exposed to pictures of unfamiliar black and white male faces with neutral expressions.
During the imaging session, each subject participated in three additional behavioral tasks: the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a startle response and a survey.
The IAT measures the automatic association of positive and negative qualities to black and white social groups. The measure is based on time to respond to pairings of black+good/white+bad versus the opposite.
These same subjects were also assessed with the Modern Racism Scale, a survey that measures consciously expressed attitudes toward race.
The researchers found that the strength of the amygdala activity during the startle response test was related to unconscious social evaluation. That is, the stronger the activation in the amygdala, the stronger the bias on the test of association between race and positive or negative evaluation and the degree to which subjects startled in the presence of black vs. white faces. These are two behavioral measures that are not under an individual's direct conscious control.
In contrast to these correlations, there was no relation between amygdala activation and conscious racial attitude as assessed with the Modern Racism Scale.
i.e., While we may express no racial bias in our conscious response, our brains are hardwired in the amygdala to fear unfamiliar people of a different race.
The Gestalt Effect was first introduced by Christian von Ehrenfels. It describes our brain's automatic interpolation/extrapolation response. When we are presented a picture with missing pieces, we automatically fill in, where the missing pieces should be, what we expect to be there. e.g., If a subject were presented with the series of numbers: "0, 1, 2, 3...", most often the subject would automatically continue the series with "4, 5, 6..." using the scenario that he/she is most often exposed (in this case, the series of incrementing integers). Most often, other series (e.g., a series of prime number: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11...") are never used.
This process can be applied to racial bias. If the subject is constantly exposed to news items reporting young black males committing violent crimes and has little exposure to news items reporting young black males with favorable behavior, when the subject is exposed to an unfamiliar young black male, the subject would most likely extrapolate the character of the unfamiliar young black male using the scenario that he/she is most familiar: young black male committing violent crimes.
Having been involved with numerous inter-church activities, I found that the Gestalt Effect plays a significant role in the relationship between predominantly Caucasian Churches and predominately African-American Churches.
Often when a predominantly Caucasian Church was approached about participating in an inter-church activity involving predominately African-American Churches, their response would exhibit the assumption that resources would flow from the predominantly Caucasian Churches to the African-American Churches with little flowing in the other direction.
Likewise, often when a predominantly African-American Church was approached about participating in an inter-church activity involving predominately Caucasian Churches, their response would exhibit the assumption that the predominantly Caucasian Church would only be interested in a temporary relationship in which the predominately Caucasian Churches would behave paternalistically.
These expectations persisted even when they were assured that all churches would be equal partners. e.g., A city-wide worship and celebration program in which the facility and equipment are provided by a third party.
The racially divided church is merely a reflection of the racially divided society. Irregardless of social-economic station in life, most Caucasian Americans have mostly Caucasian friends and most African-Americans have mostly African-American friends. This voluntary segregation propagates to form separate culturally distinct societies with divergent perspectives.
e.g., I attend Sunday morning worship at a predominately Caucasian evangelical church in the northern suburb of Baltimore. I moved into the city to be closer to the inner-city ministries where I volunteered. When I ask my Caucasian friends, from the church where I attend worship service, "What is family value?", their response would mostly concern issues associated with preserving the structure of the nuclear family (husband, wife and their children). When I ask my African-American neighbors, in the city, "What is family value?", their response mostly concern issues associated with the extended family (grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins as well as the immediate family) pulling together when any part of the extended family is going through a crisis or pulling together to support a member of the extended family who is excelling beyond what other members have been able to achieve.
The differences in perspectives would often drive differences in priorities. We can clearly see it illustrated in the different ways each part of the church participated in American politics.
Overcoming these obstacles requires pro-active actions in which we, voluntarily, cross the racial boundary and purposely develop inter-racial relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ.
In the Race Evaluation/Amygdala Activation study, mentioned above, there was an additional finding. When the subjects were given a piece of neutral information about the person whose face was presented (e.g., This person likes spinach.) , amygdala activity was dramatically diminished. It took just one insignificant neutral piece of knowlege to calm the hard-wired subconscious fear of unfamiliar individuals of the other race.
Obviously, overcoming the Gestalt Effect and understanding the perspectives of the other side would require a little more effort. However, the key to overcoming all three obsticles are the same: getting to know each other as individuals one on one. That's the ministry Jesus modeled for us; Jesus' was a ministry of one on one encounters.
Perhaps, we can all take one Sunday out of the month to worship in a church that is predominately of a different race than ours and get to know the person to whom we sit next in the pew. This simple action alone would be a major step forward towards racial reconciliation within the Body of Christ.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
The Race Issue and the Church
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