We can’t look to those voices that are so intertwined with the political Right Wing agenda, it’s hard to tell them apart.
HARD TRUTHS
Remembering George Floyd: Where's the Social Gospel?
“We cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and
exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human
life”. Pope Francis on the killing of George Floyd
I grew up during
the 1970s in evangelical churches. We lived in the shadow of the turbulent 60s, a
time when like the response to George Floyd’s death, former colonized peoples pushed against the knees of their oppressors on their necks. Angola. Jamaica.
Zimbabwe. Cuba. Albania. Kenya. Many Latin American countries. Here in North
America Watts and Harlem burned, triggering the by now familiar response to the
revolutionary call of Black Power.
Maybe it was the urgency of the times. Or maybe it was because
evangelicals were ‘heavenly minded’ to the point of being ‘no earthly good’, as
we were called: but for whatever reason, every second sermon we heard seemed to
be about the Apocalypse. The Second Coming. The Anti-Christ. As young people we
listened with wonder. Who is the Anti-Christ? Who will be the False Prophet
that supports his System, causing people to take the dreaded Mark of the Beast?
As peasant uprisings dotted the landscape of the times, our preachers gave us their answer:
the False Prophet would come from among those who stood with peasants against their
oppressors. The World Council of Churches was a favorite target.
As these preachers saw it, supporting the downtrodden rendered the
Church politically and spiritually compromised. They even coined a term for this
drawing on Jesus’ teachings in the fight for liberation. They called it--disdainfully--the
Social Gospel. And with that, Social Gospel became the mark of Cain for any
Church that dared weigh in on the desperate fight against injustice.
Fast forward to today where the social uprisings in the wake of George
Floyd’s have created space for a voice—a consistent voice—that reminds the world of the need for a counter-cultural stance against oppression. We can’t look to those voices that are so
intertwined with the political Right Wing agenda, it’s hard to tell them apart.
Nor can we accept unquestioningly those now proclaiming racial justice,
while still clinging to and supporting the systems that undermine racial
justice.
I don’t know who sits on the World Council of Churches, or whether they
have a role in the End Times. I do know that their Social Gospel message, as we see in their statement on the killing
of George Floyd, has not changed in over four decades:
“We reject the brutality of violence and racial injustice.
Therefore, we express our abhorrence for the murder of George Floyd and we ask
that those responsible for his death assume responsibility…How many more must
die before affirming collectively that the lives of Afro-Americans matter and
before radical reforms are implemented in the culture and practices of the
police?”
Roman Catholics (another group our preachers viewed with suspicion for
their social justice stance) have also remained consistent. Their voice, articulated
through Pope Francis, is still in defense of the downtrodden. The Pope calls
the death of George Floyd a “tragic” result of the “sin of racism”. We could be
back in 1975.
In his description of what will happen at the
Final Accounting before God Jesus once said: "The King will reply,
'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and
sisters of mine, you did for me.'” (Matthew 25:40)
It’s the Original Social Gospel. It has remained
unchanged for over 2,000 years. And it still has a place at the table of social change.
In Solidarity.
