Virtue and Schori Face Off Across Racial Divide, End Up In Same Place by Peg Bowman

On Martin Luther King Day 2014 the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA, Katharine Jefferts-Schori, preached a sermon on racial reconciliation.  (The text of her sermon can be found here.)

The next day, conservative Anglican blogger David Virtue blasted Schori’s message in an article titled “Episcopal Presiding Bishop's Anti-Racism Sermon Stirs Racial Division.” (His blog post can be found here.)

That Virtue should object to what Schori says is nothing new.  That Schori and Virtue are talking past each other is also no surprise.

What is surprising – and saddening – is both authors show indications of racism, as well as a lack of solid scriptural teaching, in their words.

At One Step Into Samaria we believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ and racial reconciliation must go hand-in-hand; the Bible leaves no room for division in the Church along racial or ethnic lines. The above two articles are examples of what can go wrong when the Gospel and racial reconciliation are separated from each other.

Looking at Schori’s sermon, her words and examples are emotionally charged but her reasoning process is unclear.  We find ourselves jumping from Liverpool to colonial Virginia to Ghana to New Orleans to Haiti to France to Nazi Germany in a matter of sentences. After listing vignettes of victimization in these locations, Schori summarizes, “The human urge to expel, enslave, and exterminate the ‘other’ is as old as Cain and Abel, as old as Canaanite and Israelite, as old as Joseph and his brothers.  We are all connected by that sin.” 

In casting her rhetorical net so wide Schori minimizes the experience of African slaves in America.  The problem she presents us with is no longer how to build connections across the racial divide; the problem has become ‘all about us’. The ‘human urge to expel, enslave’ etc describes the actions of the victimizers, not the victims.  Like a repentant spouse-beater whose ego leads him to believe that if he apologizes abjectly enough everything will be all right, the focus of attention is on the quality of white peoples’ confession of their sin, not on the pain suffered by victims of racism.

Schori continues her analysis of slavery by looking at the story of Joseph in ancient Egypt.  She writes, “When Joseph’s brothers come looking for help, he notes that in spite of their evil intentions toward him, God has used their actions for good.” A little later she comments, “whenever individuals on opposite sides of the dividing wall between slave and master began to see the ‘other’ as human being, created in the image of God, the seeds of justice were planted.”

Drawing a parallel between Joseph’s meta-story and the meta-story of African slaves in America suggests horrific possibilities. Is Schori saying that in spite of the evil intentions of racists, God is using African-American suffering for the good of the victimizers?  Of course not; but that is the logical conclusion to be drawn from her quotation from Joseph.  The truth is Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery not because he was ‘other’ but because he was one of them and they wanted to make him ‘other’.  They wanted to disown him; they wanted him dead.  Joseph’s story, in his dealing with his brothers, is a forerunner of salvation, paralleling Jesus’ relationship with us – an example of God’s unmerited grace and forgiveness.  It has nothing to do with ‘planting seeds of justice’.  Just the opposite: Joseph’s story demonstrates why justice is insufficient, why God’s radical, self-sacrificing mercy is the only solution.

Schori continues: “Yet we continue to be a people of hope – that bond we have as beloved children of God is deeper and more powerful than death.  When Joseph claims that God has made him a father to Pharaoh, he is naming that reality.  We know the same reality, as Martin Luther King became redeeming father to “the man,” and Nelson Mandela to his captors.  The underdog can always choose how to engage the threat – it may not remove it, but ultimately our hope says it can change the interaction and the system.”

This is where Schori completely loses the connection between the Gospel and racial reconciliation.  Hope has its foundation in God, not in the ability of humanity to improve itself or its social systems.  The patriarch Joseph was not in the business of naming reality.  Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela were not redeeming fathers. Reality and redemption belong to God, as all three of these men would have acknowledged. 

Ultimately Schori’s paradigm, despairing that white repentance will ever be sufficient, places the responsibility for righting the wrongs of racism on the shoulders of ‘the underdog’ – the oppressed.  Is this not racism?

What a wide-open opportunity David Virtue has! 

But he misses it completely. Instead, Virtue indulges himself in vitriolic ranting, using thinly veiled manipulations aimed at getting white conservative knees jerking: “…Episcopalian antiracism is just the systemization of racial spoils. It's the same old money grubbing race card. It's Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton's game…”

He continues, going from bad to worse: “Victimhood from racism, slavery, and segregation, according to TEC, has only black victims. This denies our lived reality here in New Orleans.” And who are the ‘other’ victims of racism and slavery in New Orleans?  According to Virtue, the victims of black-on-white crimes. 

All of a sudden it’s all about white people again. Ironically Schori and Virtue have landed in the same place.Virtue continues:"Are we supposed to see Christ in violent thugs…

Are we supposed to cancel our private security patrol in the Garden District…

Are we are supposed to… fund more outreach to perpetually chaotic and dysfunctional black neighborhoods... TEC requires us to hurt those who aren't black by marginalizing the white 'other'…If we hire a white, we're accused of 'perpetuating White privilege.' When we hire a black instead, we're told that we were 'too slow and haven't done enough.”

Playing the reverse discrimination card for all it’s worth, Virtue refuses to even acknowledge discrimination against non-whites exists.  Instead he whines that whites are misunderstood and marginalized and nothing they do is appreciated.  What a perfect example of the racism that, sadly, lurks just beneath the surface of far too many conservative Christian movements.