The Church After Rodney King

As the fires of South Central Los Angeles died out, leaving only the charred skeletons of that inner-city community, the flames of black rage continued to shock, frighten, and haunt America. The country’s editorialists and political candidates self-righteously arraigned the usual suspects before the bench of public opinion.

But while the stock analyses of black rage were assembled like Fords on a production line, one columnist’s query stood out.

His simple question: Where is the white outrage? As black leaders were saying, Stop destroying your community; you’re only hurting yourselves, why were white leaders not saying they were committed to seek justice, that they shared the moral outrage at the many less-publicized miscarriages of justice against racial minorities in the U.S.?

Where is the white outrage, indeed?

Satanic Indifference

If a violent response to the Rodney King verdict was the sin of the largely black community of South-Central L.A., perhaps indifference to morally evil social conditions and racial discrimination was, and continues to be, the sin of white America—including Bible-believing, church-going white Christians.

In his perceptive study of the Hebrew prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel noted that the great contribution of those men who were moved by the mind of God was to declare the evil of indifference. “The wrath of God is a lamentation,” wrote Heschel. “All prophecy is one great exclamation; God is not indifferent to evil! He is always concerned, He is personally affected by what man does to man.… This is one of the meanings of the anger of God: the end of indifference!”

To be holy as God is holy is to be kindled by his passionate concern for the well-being of the creatures he has made, the children he has ransomed. Anger, outrage, and wrath are fearful and potentially destructive emotions. And Christians have wisely been suspicious of them. For anger, when it becomes a ruling emotion, continuously stoked by spite, recklessness, and tenacious grudges, is Satanic. But anger is not in itself sinful. And when, like God’s purposeful wrath, it springs from deep concern for others, it becomes the fuel that energizes constructive activity in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Patience is a Christian virtue, but shoulder-shrugging acquiescence to the suffering of others is surely a vice.

Our suffering cities will not be healed by social programs alone. Government money and good intentions may help or hurt. In the past, they have done both. Our fractured race relations will not be mended by programs imposed from the top, for programs do not motivate. And sufficient motivation to break free of our inertia and do the constructive thing is what we white American Christians seem to lack.

We may feel we lack the physical resources to remedy completely the poverty that results from racism and classism. But we should take a cue from the Christians of all ethnicities who joined their fellow citizens in the spontaneous broom brigades to clean up South Central L.A. Not all of them lived in the immediate area; not all had friends there. But stirred by the passion of the time, they spent themselves.

We may feel we lack the ability to change significantly the complexion of many of our churches as long as our home communities are ethnically monochrome. But the churches can provide a real opportunity to see the full range of God’s richly hued palette. Volunteers can be recruited simply to hold “crack babies,” to help rehab deteriorating housing, or to visit and shop for urban seniors—to name a few activities that will put faces and names on the marginalized. The problem is not opportunity, but inertia.

Passion. Fire in the soul. Burning concern. Compassion. This is the stuff from which change springs. Acquiescence and resignation may lie on the path of the Buddha. But passionate concern for the well-being of others is an indispensable element of what translator Clarence Jordan called “the Jesus movement”—the kingdom of God. And passion is the substance in which the poor in spirit can be rich.

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