Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology - Группа авторов - Страница 54

The stigma and stain of African American inferiority developed over centuries of life in America, beginning with chattel slavery. The “curse of Ham” and other biblical arguments were early tools of stigmatization of African Americans and illustrated the meaningful role scripture played in promoting racism, slavery, and segregation. Erving Goffman notes that stigma refers to “an attribute that is deeply discrediting.”⁵⁴ Stigmatized individuals are not simply different or peculiar, but are deeply flawed and less than human. Racial stigma has characterized the plight of African Americans since the beginning of chattel slavery.

Glenn Loury has theorized about the consequences of racial stigma and its profound impact on social inequities that still exist in American social structures. Loury observes that racial stigma creates “vicious circles” of causation in which African American failure to progress in society justifies the prejudicial attitudes that often ensure that African Americans will not advance in society.⁵⁵ In a religious context, racial stigma, justified by biblical interpretation, made it difficult to include African American Christians as part of Christian unity on an equal basis with whites. Moreover, this racial stigmatization of African Americans reinforced racism within the SBC’s own membership.

Stigma normally attaches to “aliens” and “others” in society and is part of the common narratives of American religion that discuss race. It typically is not discussed from the perspective of racially oppressed groups. Here, however, we can see that stigmatization has been a two-way street, one that is both reciprocal and consequential. The cumulative effect of the SBC’s long-standing support of racism, slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow segregation led to the stigmatization of the SBC itself as being racist. It was especially the apathy the SBC displayed toward African Americans over the many years as they suffered through slavery and the daily humiliations of Jim Crow segregation that was damaging to African Americans. As Dorothee Sölle explains, “the toleration of exploitation, oppression, and injustice points to a condition lying like a pall over the whole of society; it is apathy, an unconcern that is incapable of suffering.”⁵⁶ In the eyes of many African Americans, the SBC is a discredited religious body that has stigmatized itself as a racist organization.

The SBC’s powerful resolutions and inactions over many years have had such a lasting impact in large part because they expressed their view of African Americans as racially stigmatized beings – as being less human than whites in the eyes of God, and thus as being unworthy of Christian brotherhood, charity, and the universal application of the Golden Rule. The unforeseen consequence for the SBC, however, was that many African Americans also came to distrust the denomination, saw it as a racist organization, and have not accepted its change of heart on matters of racial equality.

One should not underestimate the damage the SBC’s ideological affiliation with white supremacy has had on its ability to engender trust and lessen its racist stigma among African Americans Christians. Belief in white racial superiority clouded the SBC’s belief in 1995 that African Americans quickly and without question would accept the SBC’s “right hand of fellowship” following the SBC apology. One of the lessons of atonement and reconciliation processes, however, may well be that they only work when aggrieved parties see a change of heart both in words and in institutional deeds, or else the atonement and reconciliation process may not work at all.

While SBC official statements after the mid-1960s have been part of a consistent pattern of symbolic change that should not be minimized, evidence of change in actual policies and institutional practices also is important. For example, the SBC should be credited for its resolution to repudiate the Confederate Flag during its June 2016 convention. The resolution read in part, “We call our brothers and sisters in Christ to discontinue the display of the Confederate battle flag as a sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ, including our African-American brothers and sisters.”⁵⁷ Such statements on Christian unity and the inclusion of African Americans continue to signal the SBC’s change of heart on racial matters.