The recent confirmation hearings and voting on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court Appointment have gotten me thinking about racism and Evangelicalism. The sound bites from Republicans who question her ability to remain “objective” and their accusations that she is a liberal activist judge are reminiscent of the Evangelical understanding of racism. Follow me for a little bit on this:
The Evangelical understanding of salvation and spiritual life is built around the ongoing relationship the Christian has with Jesus. Being “born again” is the beginning of a lifelong one-on-one relationship with Jesus, that will change the Christian from the inside out, making him or her more holy and Christ-like. The focus here is on the individual and the locus of change is within the individual.
Similarly, Evangelicals tend to see racism as an individual problem. Systems, societies, and institutions don’t have racism—people do. Evil is an individual problem multiplied by each individual person. (For more on the Evangelical understating of race see Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith’s Divided By Faith.) The solution to evil, then, is the personal conversion of as many people as possible. Only then, can God change people and makes them more holy, more Christ-like, and in this case, less racist.
This is what is causing so many problems for the Republicans right now. Senators from states with high numbers of Latino/Latina voters find themselves having to, on one hand, deny the existence of institutional and social racism while on the other hand keep the votes of folks experiencing this impersonal systemic force on a regular basis. The “there’s no racism just racists” argument doesn’t fly in Houston, TX like it does on Capitol Hill.
The Evangelical understanding of racism as has its own internal logic. If evil is an individual problem and a personal relationship with Jesus can change a person and make them holier than clearly we don’t need government programs for minorities, we need people to accept Jesus. But Evangelicals have over-emphasized the individual to the point that the Christian is beholden to Jesus alone. The tradition has dropped the ball on emphasizing Jesus’ commands to love one another, to love justice, to love the poor and widowed. Only in the past ten years have some parts of the Evangelical culture begun to wake up to social realities on the ground in this country and around the world.
So, when Republicans cast Sotomayor as an activist judge because she acknowledges the social and institutional role of race in America they are adopting the same racism theory as modern Evangelicals. This is the beam shared by Evangelicalism and the GOP—the centrality of the individual. The individual is the locus for economic growth for fiscal conservatives and must be protected from the weight of society and its need for tax dollars; similarly, the individual is the locus for spiritual change and must find a one on one relationship with Jesus in order to dispense God’s grace into the world. Such an emphasis becomes problematic, however, when it begins to push the realities of our communal and social existence out of vision. When there becomes no racism, just racists.
