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.