The U.S. Racial Crisis and World Evangelism

by Tom Skinner

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Any understanding of world evangelism and racism in our country must begin with an understanding of the history of racism. To understand why we are in the middle of a revolution in our time, to come to grips with what the black revolution is all about and to understand what the nature of racism in our society is, I must take you back approximately 350 years, to when the early ships landed in this country, in approximately 1619.

On those ships were approximately forty black people. Notable among them was a couple known as Isabel and Antony, who started the first black family on American soil in 1624. You must keep in mind that one year before the Mayflower, 150 years before the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence was ever signed, black people had settled this country and were an integral part of this society.

Between the periods of 1619 and 1660, there was relatively no race problem in our country. Rather, our country had what was known as indentured servanthood. An indentured servant was a person who, coming from the Old World, could not afford to pay his passage to the New World, was brought out by someone of means. He came to this country and worked for that individual for seven years as an indentured servant, something like Jacob did for his father-in-law. At the end of seven years, he was set free to develop his own life.

Now keep in mind (in that context) that those people - who, in the name of God, seek to say that America was founded on godly principles; and that our country was started by God-fearing people; and that the people who settled our country were deeply committed to the truths of God's Word - must reexamine that in light of the fact that the jails of England were emptied in order to bring people here to this country to settle it.

The state of Georgia is a classic example. Georgia was first settled by prisoners from England whom the English wanted to get off their hands. The English sold them to wealthy people for whom they worked for seven years until they finally were set free to develop their own lives. So, if you have any illusions that America was founded on godly principles, reexamine them.

We must also understand that between the periods of 1619 and 1660, black and white people worked together. Black and white people were indentured servants. Black and white people owned indentured servants. Black and white people lived together, ate together, slept together, fought each other, killed each other, sued each other, married each other, took each other to court, murdered each other and pretty well lived together with each other (so, as you see, there was no problem).

But, in 1660, there arose a tremendous problem: that was, white indentured servants tended to run away. It was very difficult to recapture those white indentured servants because they could easily assimilate into the majority society. When black people ran away, it was very easy to recapture them because of their high degree of visibility. It was therefore decreed in 1660 that only black indentured servants would be used. By 1702 slavery became a permanent way of life in American society.

Now, let's understand that slavery was upheld by three sectors of society. First, it was upheld by the political system, secondly by the economic system and thirdly by the religious system.

It was upheld by the economic system because slavery was economically feasible. A good, healthy male slave could be bought for $600; a healthy female for $300. You had them cohabit and within several years, you could breed a prosperous brood of slaves.

What is upheld by the economic system is generally upheld by the political system in our country, because you must keep in mind that politics and economics in our country are synonymous. They are parallel to each other. What happens in the economic world affects the political world. If you check out the state of politics in our country previous to the 1968 election, you will notice that when Richard Nixon was nominated at the Republican convention, the Dow Jones industrial average went up eleven points. The day before the election, when the polls showed that Mr. Humphrey was narrowing his margin on Mr. Nixon, the stock market reacted by backtracking. If something happens in the political world, it affects the economic world.

You must keep in mind that in our country only 1% of the total population controls the entire economic system. One percent of all the companies in our country produce 70% of all the wealth. One percent of all the people in our country have 46% of all the outstanding cash. And no matter what they tell you about people's capitalism in our country, that everyone can have a piece of American society, it really boils down to the fact that 90% of all outstanding common stock in this country is controlled by 5% of all the stockholders. It is those 5% who make the political decisions. It is those people who, in the smoke-filled rooms of political conventions, nominate who they want and at election time issue two of them to us to decide which one we like.

But the third sector that upheld slavery was the religious system. Numerous churches and denominations preached that slavery was a divine institution ordained by God. There were those who quoted a verse in the book of Genesis where Noah is supposed to have gone to bed drunk one night. He was also naked. His son Canaan mocked his nakedness. The following morning, when Noah discovered what his son has done, he cursed his son.

A group of ad hoc biblical dispensationalists argue that Canaan was a descendant of Ham. The word Ham means black; therefore, God has cursed all black people and relegated them to conditions of servitude. And, incidentally, I can name to you right now at least five Christian colleges and at least a dozen Bible institutions in this country that still teach that in their classrooms today.

During slavery, the slavemaster allowed no marriages. Where he did, they were only temporary arrangements, and they were usually pronounced with the words, "Do you promise to stay together until death or distance do you part?"

Rather, the slavemaster developed what was known as the "stud system," in which a healthy male slave was forced to cohabit with a healthy female slave in order to bear healthy children. When the woman became pregnant, the male was moved to other quarters to do the same thing. And within the course of ten years, he could have brought into the world a hundred children, never being allowed to father any of them. Very few children went around the plantation saying "Mommy" or "Daddy" because they did not know who they were.

Now keep in mind that numbers of slavemasters were also Christians. These same slavemasters - many of them deacons and elders in their own local churches - would have never tolerated sexual immorality in their own church, but found no difficulty in putting a black slave woman and a black slave man under immoral conditions together for the purpose of breeding slaves to maintain the economic system.

Slavery finally came to an end with the declaration that slaves were free - the Emancipation Proclamation. But keep in mind that all the Emancipation Proclamation said was that he was no longer a slave. The proclamation never defined him as a man. It simply said, "He is not a slave."

Between the periods of 1865 and 1877, the society then turned to the former slave and said, "Now that you are free, you are to settle down, become the husband of one wife, the father of your own children, and you are to assimilate into American cultural society." And they expected this former slave to undo in one night what he had been taught to do another way for 250 years. And the amazing part about it was that he began to do it.

Between the periods of 1865 and 1877, numerous black people were elected to state legislatures in South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina and Louisiana. A black man was governor of the State of Louisiana in that period. The speakers of the house and the state legislatures in 1876 in South Carolina and Florida were black. Black politicians controlled numerous state legislatures throughout the South. Scores of them were elected to the United States Senate and Congress, and they began to make a tremendous upsurge in political power.

But by 1877, there developed cries from certain sectors of society, which said, "This former slave is moving too far too fast." They said, "He has only been free for twelve years. Does he expect to have all of his marbles in twelve years? These people must learn that these things take time. They must learn to be patient. They cannot have everything at once."

Now that was 93 years ago. When was the last time you heard that statement?

In 1877, the United States presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Mr. Hayes, in order to be elected, entered into a compromise with Southern politicians in which he promised that, if elected, he would withdraw troops from the South, end Reconstruction and allow white people to deal with black people in their own way. It is ironic that that compromise was put in black and white and signed and sealed in the Alexander Hotel of Washington, D.C., which at that time was owned and operated by a black man.

In 1877, Mr. Hayes was elected. Troops were withdrawn from the South and white political leaders began to deal with black people in their own way. And from 1877 to almost the present, there began a wave of lynchings and murders and drownings and disappearances of black people, unequalled in the history of the Western world. Black people were lynched by the thousands, their homes burned, their women raped, their children beaten. They could not go to court or fight the issues. A black man was looked upon as property and not as a human being. He could be put to death for looking at a person too long, for being too familiar with a white person or wanting to do dumb illegal things like vote.

In 1914, World War I came, and the black man put on an American uniform and went off to defend America as "the land of the free and the home of the Boston Braves." As a result, he became stationed in the armed services in the northern metropolitan cities - Chicago, New York, Philadelphia - and word began to trickle back to the South (where then 90% of the black population lived) that if black people would migrate north, they would find greater economic opportunity and social justice.

Between the periods of 1920 and 1950, there was a mass movement of black people to northern cities. Songs like "So Long, Dixie" developed. The North became the Promised Land. And by the thousands, people made their way to the northern cities in hope that there would be liberation.

But when they arrived in the North, they discovered that the patterns of segregation were no different from the South: They were forced to live in certain communities; they could buy, sell or rent only in certain neighborhoods. They soon discovered that integration in the North was defined as that period between the time when the first black family moves into a neighborhood and the last white family moves out.

You must keep in mind that, during this period of time, in general (there were some notable exceptions, but in general) the evangelical, Bible-believing, fundamental, orthodox, conservative church in this country was strangely silent. In fact, there were those people who during slavery argued, "It is not our business to become involved in slavery. Those are social issues. We have been called to preach the gospel. We must deliver the Word. We must save people's souls. We must not get involved in the issues of liberating people from the chains of slavery. If they accept Jesus Christ as their Savior, by and by they will be free - over there."

To a great extent, the evangelical church in America supported the status quo. It supported slavery; it supported segregation; it preached against any attempt of the black man to stand on his own two feet. And where there were those who sought to communicate the gospel to black people, it was always done in a way to make sure that they stayed cool. "We will preach the gospel to those folks so they won't riot; we will preach the gospel to them so that we can keep the lid on the garbage pail."

And so they were careful to point out such scriptures as: "Obey your masters," those scriptures which said, "Love your enemy," "Do good to them that hurt you." But no one ever talked about a message, which would also speak to the oppressor.

It was during this period that my own parents found their way from Greenville, South Carolina, to the city of New York, where I was born and raised. I was born in a little community called Harlem, which is typical of most black communities throughout America. Harlem is a small, two-and-one-half square mile area with a population of almost one million people. The social scientists tell us that if you took the entire population of the United States of America - all two hundred million Americans - and you forced every American citizen to live somewhere in New York, New York still would not get as congested as Harlem is right now.

It was in that community that I was born and raised in a fairly religious home, religious to the extent that my old man is a preacher, and that makes me a preacher's kid. But don't feel too bad about it - I got through it. I went through the motions because it was expected of me. But I never bought any of it basically because, like a great number of black people, I could not reconcile Christianity with the kind of community that Harlem was. Harlem was more than 40% slums. Thousands of people lived in rat-infested, rundown, dilapidated apartments where the landlords never came around to provide services.

It was not uncommon for some mother to wake up in the middle of the night and send a piercing scream through the community as she discovered that her two-week-old baby had been gnawed to death by a vicious rat. You could set your watches by the police who drove into the neighborhood to collect their bribes to keep the racketeering going.

Now, during this great upsurge in revolution and rebellion that has been going on, there have been great numbers of evangelical Christians who have joined the hoot and cry for "law and order."

But how do you explain "law and order" to a mother who stands at the foot of her bed watching her baby lie in a blood bath, when she knows that that baby would never have been bitten by the rat in the first place, and the rat would have never been in the building, if the landlord to whom she had been paying high rent had been providing the kind of service she deserved for the kind of rent she was paying?

How do you explain law and order to her when she knows the building code inspector, who represents the city administration, who is supposed to check out violations in buildings, came by that building the day before but was met at the front door by the landlord who palmed a hundred dollars in his hand, and the building code inspector kept going? Now that is lawlessness.

But the point is, we never arrest the landlord. We never lock up the building code inspector. But I tell you who we do lock up. We lock up the frustrated, bitter, sixteen-year-old brother of that two-week-old sister who in his bitterness takes to the street and throws a brick at that building code inspector. Then we lock him up and say, "We gotta have law and order!"

Make no bones about it: the difficulty in coming to grips with the evangelical message of Jesus Christ in the black community is the fact that most evangelicals in this country who say that Christ is the answer will also go back to their suburban communities and vote for law-and-order candidates who will keep the system the way it is.

So, if you are black and you live in the black community, you soon begin to learn that what they mean by law and order is, "all the order for us and all the law for them." You soon learn that the police in the black community become nothing more than the occupational force present in the black community for the purpose of maintaining the interests of white society.

Now, you may not be able to understand that. But allow me to break it down for you. If you go to the city of Chicago for instance, you will run into a community there called the South Side of Chicago. In that community are several hundreds of thousands of black people. Black people make up 30% of the population of Chicago. To illustrate it in the words of Jesse Jackson: 30% of the population of Chicago, which is black, lives on 10% of the land. There are thirty thousand black people per square mile in the black community, and in the white community there are only three thousand white people per square mile. What they are seeking to do is the same thing that would happen if you took a quarter and tried to fit it into the area of a dime. Over one-fourth of the city's population is asked to fit into 10% of the land and is expect the community to maintain order. No way.

That is the reason why the emphasis is placed in the black community on property values, and the interest is placed in the white community in human life. That is the reason why Chicago's Mayor Daley can say, "Shoot the looters." What does he mean? "We must protect property at any cost. We don't care about human life. In the black community, we will shoot people in order to maintain property." But in the white community, because there are fewer people in proportion to property, the emphasis can be on human life and not on property values.

Dick Gregory says that when Mayor Daley said, "Shoot the looters," he agreed with him. In fact, he sent him a telegram to say, "I agree. We ought to make that retroactive 250 years and put the guns in the hands of the Indians."

In this context, the question then becomes: how in all the world do you communicate the gospel - whatever that is? How do you go in and communicate the message of Jesus Christ to a society that has been cut off from the rest of society, especially when those people who wish to proclaim Christ have participated in their oppression?

I couldn't put that together, so I rebelled against any concept of Jesus Christ having any relevance. In that particular time, I put people in two basic extremes (I think I still do). On one extreme was what I called the pseudo-existentialist. Don't get excited by that word; he's better known as the beatnik or the hippie. He is the cat who looks at life and says, "Life is too mixed up to get involved." He withdraws, sits on a mountainside, creates his own world, establishes his own values and, in fact, becomes his own god.

But on the opposite extreme was another coward. He was what I called the hyper-Christian. He called himself, and I quote, "a Bible-believing, fundamental, orthodox, conservative, evangelical Christian," whatever that meant. He had half a dozen Bible verses for every social problem that existed. But, if you asked him to get involved, he couldn't do it. If you went to him and told him about the problems of Harlem, he would come back with a typical cliché: "What those people up there need is a good dose of salvation." And while that might have been true, I never saw that cat in Harlem administering that dose.

If you went to him and told him about the social ills of Harlem, he would say, "Christ is the answer." Yes, Christ is the answer, but Christ has always been the answer through somebody. It has always been the will of God to saturate the common clay of a man's humanity and then to send that man in open display into a hostile world as a living testimony that it is possible for the invisible God to make himself visible in a man. One must then come to grips with the fact that God has always been the great manager of all time: He gets his job done through people.

But, you see, because of the silence of the evangelical witness in the black community, it is unfortunate that God had to raise up other witnesses. This may be difficult again for us to understand. But allow me again to break it down for you. Throughout the world it has not been the message of the evangelist which has liberated people, unfortunately. What I mean by that is this: almost a hundred years ago today, a position paper was written entitled "The Social Gospel." It said something about Christians having to become involved in the issues of the day and making Christ relevant in those issues.

Immediately, that position paper produced a dichotomy. On one hand there were those who said, "No, we are not called to be involved in social issues; we are called to preach the gospel." On the other hand, another group said, "No, our position is to feed hungry people, feed empty bellies, put clothes on people's backs." And the more the fundamentalists said, "Preach the gospel," the more the liberals said, "Feed people." And the more the liberals said, "Feed people," the more the fundamentalists said, "Preach the gospel."

The problem was that both positions were wrong. Both were extremes. Both compartmentalized me. One said, "Just give him a passport out of hell to heaven, get him saved, give him eternal life and never mind about his oppression. Never mind about the fact that he has to live with rats and roaches. Never mind that he's a fourth-class citizen. Never mind that he will be shot on sight. Never mind that there are places he can't go."

On the other hand the liberal compartmentalized me because he wanted only to feed my belly. He did not see me as a total spiritual being. Both of them were extremes. Throughout the world we have developed the same problem. But you see, God will not be without a witness, which is precisely why, when the evangelical church began to become silent on the issue of preaching the worth and the dignity of all men, God had to allow communism to sweep the world in the last fifty years with its emphasis that the state is more important than the individual. And because it emphasized the state, there finally rose up those people who began to reconsider the dignity and the worth of the individual.

Because the evangelical church became silent on the issue of humility, and we evangelicals went out and supported the industrial complex, we, too, began to preach technological efficiency. We lost all sense of spiritual life, humility and spiritual being. That's the reason why God has not been without a witness. And this time he has had to raise up a great upsurge in consideration of Eastern religions. Why do you think young people are caught up with mysticism, Buddha and Hinduism? Simply because they want something that teaches humility, something that teaches spiritualism. In the midst of all the technology and super-scientism that has engulfed our society, God will not be without a witness.

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The U.S. Racial Crisis and World Evangelism

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December 27-31, 2009