Tool Kits

Tool Kits August 19, 2015

In their study of evangelicals and race, Divided by Faith, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith found that white evangelicals attribute American race problems to three causes: “prejudiced individuals,” “other groups – usually African Americans – trying to make race problems a group issue when there is nothing more than individual problems” and “a fabrication of the self-interested – again often African Americans, but also the media, the government, or liberals” (74).

Emerson and Smith think these are simplistic responses to a complex issue, but they don’t think evangelicals are nefarious or racist. They attribute the limits of evangelical treatment of the issue to the relative isolation of white evangelicals and to their cultural “tool kit,” the set of “ideas, habits, skills, and styles” by which people engage and evaluate the world (76).

They examine three tools in the evangelical toolkit: accountable freewill individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism. Evangelicals are individualists, not because they think they can do anything they please, but because “for them individuals exist independent of structures and institutions.” They are “accountable” individualists because they believe that people are accountable, ultimately to God, for their actions (76-7). Evangelical “relationalism” arises from “the view that human nature is fallen and that salvation and Christian maturity can only come through a ‘personal relationship with Christ’” (77). Evangelicals transpose this theology to other spheres, placing “strong emphasis on family relationships, friendships, church relationships” (77-8).

Armed with these two tools, evangelicals limit sin to individuals. This, “if race problems – poor relationships – result from sin, then race problems must largely be individually based. . . . The concept of individual sin lies behind many white evangelicals’ accounts of the race problem” (78).

What is absent is any acknowledgement that “poor relationships might be shaped by social structures, such as laws, the ways institutions operate, or forms of segregation.” Evangelicals are often anti-structural, and find “structural explanations irrelevant or even wrongheaded.” When structural explanations for racial tensions are introduced, evangelicals often detect a form of blame-shifting, from the structure to the system (78-9).

Emerson and Smith argue that “it is a necessity for evangelicals to interpret the problem at the individual level. To do otherwise would challenge the very basis of their world, both their faith and the American way of life. They accept and support individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism. Suggesting social causes of the race problem challenges the cultural elements with which they construct their lives. . . . This is why anyone, any group, or any program that challenges their accountable freewill individualist perspective comes to be seen as a cause of the race problem.” The authors believe that evangelicals honestly want a colorblind society and want people to get along, but “white evangelicals’ cultural tools and racial isolation curtail their ability to fully assess why people of different races do not get along, the lack of equal opportunity, and the extent to which race matters in America.” As a result, in spite of being “honest and well-intentioned,” the evangelical outlook is “a powerful means to reproduce contemporary racialism” because “a highly effective way to ensure the perpetuation of a racialized system is simply to deny its existence” (89-90; note: Emerson and Smith speak of a “racialized” not a “racist” society, defining it as “a society wherein race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities, and social relationships” [7]).

Two observations. First, as the authors hint, the evangelical tool kit is a thoroughly American tool kit. Evangelicals fail to address racial issues insofar as they conform to American presumptions. Second, and following from this, Christian faith has plenty of resources for grasping the social dimensions of racial problems. On the basis of a Trinitarian anthropology, we can see that we cannot possibly be isolated individuals; on the basis of the doctrine of original sin, we can see how we might participate in another’s wrongs; on the basis of a robust Eucharistic theology, we might imagine a piety that is inherently communal. To realize these and other aspects of Christian faith in practice, evangelicals would have to repent of their Americanism.


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