Andre Henry: Tracing the Christian Racial Wound

What does it mean for Christians to be accountable to their tradition's entanglement with racism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness? On this episode of 20 Minute Takes, Nikki Toyama-Szeto talks with musician and writer, Andre Henry. Andre serves as the program director for CSA's Racial Justice Institute. In this episode, they discuss the current backlash that against  racial justice efforts in the United States, and the long history of how Christians have both contributed to the upholding of racial hierarchy, as well as the prophetic actions Christians have undertaken to dismantle it.

Check out this four-part series that Andre recently published on "Understanding Racism."

You can listen to Andre's music here and learn more about his work here.
Additionally, you can follow him on Instagram and Threads.

20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action
Hosted by Nikki Toyama-Szeto 
Produced by David de Leon
Editing and Mixing by Wiloza Media
Music by Andre Henry

Transcript

20MT (SE08) - Andre Henry

[Nikki]
Hello, my name is Nikki Toyama-Szeto, and I'm the Executive Director of Christians for Social Action and your host for today's episode of 20 Minute Takes.

Today we talk with our very own Andre Henry. He leads our Racial Justice Institute here at Christians for Social Action, and he steps off the front lines to help us understand some of the ways that theology around race and racism has trickled into the American church, but also gives us some tangible ways that churches and faith communities can stand and engage in ways that help many people flourish.

Join us for today's conversation on 20 Minute Takes. 

[Nikki]
Andre Henry, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of 20 Minute Takes.

[Andre]
Thanks for having me.

[Nikki]
I know that you are a person who at any given time might be somewhere in the world. We sort of never quite know where you are. Can you tell us about what is a recent place that you found yourself kind of in awe or struck by beauty or something that kind of delighted you?

[Andre]
I guess I would say Barcelona. I was in Barcelona, Spain a month ago-ish for a send-off event for the Freedom Flotilla. There were some activists and volunteers who were sailing to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid, and I got to be a part of the concert that sent them off.

It was just beautiful seeing thousands of people gathered, singing together, wishing these folks off. That was really beautiful.

[Nikki]
I bet it was particularly poignant because you were not sending them off on a cruise, but you were sending them off on a vulnerable flotilla going to interrupt violence.

[Andre]
Yeah, absolutely. It's a little bit weird because there is so much joy when people come together for collective action, right? You can't help but feel good that we're together.

You can't help but feel good as the moment is happening when people are making noise and there's chanting and there's drums and there's singing. I did think for a second when I was actually performing on stage that this might be the last moment that some of them have. I did a set of resilient songs and encouraged them to practice a resilient skill called savoring.

I thought, man, this might be the last thing or memory worth savoring for a while.

[Nikki]
What a grace and a privilege to be there at that moment. Well, we have you on this episode because we're really curious and I was just so intrigued by some of the things that you have been sharing with us and wrestling with, and particularly as you're the leader of our Racial Justice Institute, you've been talking about how racism is a type of spiritual formation. I don't often kind of connect those things.

Can you just unpack that for us?

[Andre]
Well, I think that this has to do with the implication of the Western church in the slave trade and in the age of conquest and all of that, how theology was used to give moral cover to land theft and genocide and forced labor and all these things. So really, the modern racist ideas that we have can be traced all the way back to, obviously, the church of the age of conquest, but even further back. And so I would even say my upbringing in evangelicalism could be an example of this, of how we are not given theological frameworks to think well about race and racism and racial justice.

And in some ways that seems by, I don't want to say design, but it seems like it's at the foundation of the tradition of Christianity. I grew up in, I remember learning in seminary that Jonathan Edwards, who many might say was at least a co-founder of evangelicalism. He wrote a defense or he jotted down some notes, like an outline of a sermon that he planned to deliver in support of slavery on the back of a receipt for a person that he'd bought.

And I always, that kind of just struck me that that document is at the foundation of the tradition. So I think that's what I mean in that we're not given frameworks to think well about race, racial justice and racism. And at the same time, the tradition of Christianity that many of us have received is very much intertwined with the construction of the racial order that we live in.

[Nikki]
So what I'm hearing you say is that, that many of the voices that shaped some of how we understand theology in the Western context may have either by design or by omission, not really done good unpacking that gives us really good reference points to inform how we respond today to racism or racial injustice. But what I also have heard you say is that actually there are some really great stories and scriptures that are really helpful. They're quite analogous to how we're understanding the injustice of racism.

Can you help us basically leapfrog some of those intermediaries like Jonathan Edwards? But what are some of the places that you find are actually very helpful for the moments that we find ourselves in?

[Andre]
For sure. And I think that before I list maybe a couple of those, I think it's worth pointing out to that with the church being so implicated in constructing the racial order, it makes sense. It makes sense that they would not have like also some robust theological, maybe even prophetic framework that might hold them accountable to say, oh, well, we shouldn't be doing this.

It makes so much, it makes a lot of sense that we would not have inherited that because they needed or they wanted, they wanted theology to serve their ends of nation building and wealth building and all that kind of thing.

[Nikki]
That makes sense. So it's not a neutral and then applying or misapplying. It's actually, no, the Christian faith anchored and empowered some of what they wanted to protect.

[Andre]
Absolutely. You know, like when you think of the slave owners in the South who edited their own Bible, right, and they took out anything that the enslaved might see and or read or hear and take to heart about their own dignity, which is a perfect segue into the answer, the question that you pose, because, you know, you can and many have said, you know, the Bible does not outright condemn slavery categorically, right?

In some places it seems to actually support it, like Paul saying slaves will be your masters and whatnot. But there are other strains in the Bible that point toward human rights, you know, and I think the Exodus story is one of them, I mean, one of the most obvious because this is an instance of systematic oppression, right? The Hebrews are subjected to a system of forced labor and God looks at that system and says, no, you know, now some people, some people's rebuttal is that the only reason that Yahweh does that is because Yahweh had decided that Jesus was going to come from that line of people.

But that's not what Yahweh says in Exodus. Yahweh says, I've heard their cry and I've come down to rescue them. And you can trace, you know, those kinds of currents throughout scripture.

Ruth is another one that I would mention, whereas, you know, Ruth is this outsider. She's a Moabite and she's an outsider to the community of Israel.

[Nikki]
So that's a racial outsider, an ethnic outsider, is that right? Yeah, ethnic, right?

[Andre]
Because race doesn't really exist as a category at the time. But, you know, race and there was apparently some scholars believe that the Book of Ruth was written kind of as a polemic against anti-Moabite sentiment in the ancient Israelite community. And so you have this kind of novella of this honorable Moabite woman.

It's kind of a similar thing to what Jesus is doing when he tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, that people hearing this story would not think that a Moabite would be this person showing this level of faithfulness, being able to relate to Yahweh in that way or to Naomi in that way. And it ends connecting Ruth to King David, you know, who we all know how revered King David is, how important King David is in the Jewish faith and in the Hebrew Bible. And you can trace that throughout, you know, you can you can keep going, you know, from from there to into the New Testament.

[Nikki]
Thank you. That's that's really helpful to kind of see the places, because I think sometimes people feel like, especially right now, people will be like, oh, you're using Christian things to support a social priority. So this is like, you know, so it's helpful to sort of see where some of those dynamics were also existed in the Bible.

How do you think about like right now, at least in the region of the world where I am, there is a lot of backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion and that sort of thing, whereas I think in the Christian space, I'm going to say somewhere around like the twenty twenties, it seemed like actually the Christian church, the North American Christian church seemed to really engage things about racial justice and that sort of a thing.

Do you have any thoughts about as somebody who does racial justice work, the invitation to Christians in this particular moment or any analysis about some of this backlash to the diversity, equity, inclusion?

[Andre]
Not necessarily to diversity, equity and inclusion in particular, but I would say kind of just the entire broad backlash to the progress that that has been made through the Black Lives Matter movement, which would include the rolling back of D.E.I., but also I would include, you know, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and attacks on our voting rights in general in that way. And even trying to ban certain books from schools and all of these histories, certain histories are not allowed to be taught. Yeah.

And all of all of this really has to do with the fact that for we had, I think, from 2012 to 2020, we had this push from a new black liberation movement that as far as as far as the battle over common sense kind of won, you know, and when I say common sense, I don't mean like how people use it and think, oh, it's just something we automatically know. I'm conceding that a common sense is shaped. Right.

And in America, we have a common sense about certain things because it's what they teach in school is what we see on in media. It's what's repeated from the pulpit, all that kind of thing. Well, the Black Lives Matter movement shifted our common sense a bit.

Anyway, I kind of went off on a tangent there, but the the role of the church, I think the opportunity that the church has, I think, is to do what, you know, many, many churches and many faith traditions have done in other social movements. And that is participate. Right.

And that might be a very broad thing to say, but because participation is so contextual, I think that it should be that broad. And participation could look like, you know, the the Catholic priests who were at the ground level of the the Filipino people power movement. It could be the it could be the Desmond Tutu, you know, type of church during apartheid, you know, who is preaching against it.

And, you know, in the U.S. we have the black church and we have their allies. Right. I think that we should look to the black church of the civil rights era, not just as history or black history, but as church history as well.

And to look at that as faithful witness, how they mobilize the resources of the church, their leaders, their land, their sanctuaries, even the frameworks of Christianity, theological frameworks of Christianity, to mobilize people to actually create a real intervention against the Jim Crow system through nonviolent struggle.

[Nikki]
Hmm. I do appreciate that. I think sometimes I hear churches or faith communities opt out of participating in fighting racial injustice because they sort of there's a sacred secular split.

And that's one of the things I think I appreciate that you see particularly in the black church, but I think you see it also in other global church contexts, is that there is a real understanding of the interplay between kind of what some might call sacred and secular. So even as you're talking about this is kind of both, I think the black church responded as both a pastoral issue as well as a systemic engagement. And that wasn't seen as like, oh, are these competing things?

It's like, no, these are two ways of Christian faithfulness in different spheres. I've heard of individuals responding to racism or even kind of the anti-blackness that exists in the American context. How is it that you think that and you've talked a lot about how the church and Christian theology has been needed as a part of creating this anti-black sentiment in the American context.

How do you think like what to you is the fruit that you see of a Christian person who has wrestled with this history? I guess what are the things that you see? Because I think a lot of people like, oh, if I if I know it, but what is it that you look as like, oh, that to me feels like a fruitfulness of a Christian who actually has wrestled with that role that Christian faith has played in giving some fuel and some oomph to an anti-black movement in the U.S.

[Andre]
I think that the church in the U.S. really has to think about what it means to repent, you know, because I know what's coming to mind for me is like when Paul in Ephesians says, like the person who used to steal needs to not just stop stealing, but needs to find something productive to do with their hands. And, you know, it's funny, I was just thinking about this last night about how, oh, it's because there's a Caribbean island.

I can't remember the name. It might be Bermuda that has drafted up a manifesto to ask for reparations. And that made me think about the fact that the descendants of African people are waiting for these nations, these great white nations, to be accountable for something that happened, even though it happened centuries ago, we're still reeling from it.

And what a lot of people think, and when I say people, I mean Christians, because these are the people I grew up around. And when I started talking about racial justice, these are the people who were talking to me or against me, is that people want to say, well, that happened a long time ago. You know, it's done.

And the fact of the matter is that we know that part of the reluctance of people being accountable is that the account is so big, right? The debt is so big.

[Nikki]
Yeah.

[Andre]
So I think that someone who's really reckoned with this history, be it a pastor, church leader, a layperson, a writer, is thinking about, as Frantz Fanon said, we need to trace along the wound that colonialism has left. So like, what are the wounds? Right.

And how has my church maybe participated in that actively or by passively like not engaging, you know, and what can we do in our context that makes sense for us, right, to not just say, oh, we're not racist. This is the thief saying, oh, well, I stopped doing that. But to actively, proactively act in the opposite spirit, as I once heard someone say.

[Nikki]
Yeah. One of the resources you put together that I think is so helpful because it's very practical and I feel like it's a question that I hear folks in churches and in communities asking is, what is it that churches can do? And you list six really specific things that churches can do.

I totally recommend the article for folks. But one of the ones that I wondered if you could just unpack, it says support direct action movement with resources. Can you give us an example of something that you've seen that you're like, ah, that is the church being the church?

[Andre]
I mean, there's so many. That's the thing I'm trying to think of. Oh, I'm trying to think of the best one.

You know, OK, so there was this. I believe this is an Amsterdam where this story comes from. Just don't quote me on that, but there was a family that was facing the threat of deportation.

I think they had to like they were waiting on some kind of paperwork. Or to decide their case. And because the law in that country or in that city was that immigration enforcement could not enter an active worship service.

This church decided that they were just never going to stop their service so they could keep the family in there. And this service went on for 98 days. Pastors flew in and musicians flew in from all over the world to help keep this thing going.

And I think that's I think that's a great example, because you have they have the building, they have the moral cover of the law, you know, they have the ministerial staff that is continuing to perform liturgies. They have their network of other leaders and friends and whatnot. So I think that's an example of the church mobilizing its resources for justice.

Yeah.

[Nikki]
And I also think it's an incredible example of you're worshiping for 98 days and that there there is a flourishing that happens on so many levels. It's not just that God's heart is blessed and that we're blessed in worshiping, but also that justice is forward. And I just feel like that feels like a fulfillment of something, a taste of something pretty awesome.

Well, Andre, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of 20 Minute Takes.

[Andre]
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.


[Nikki]
20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action. Our music was created by Andre Henry, and this episode was mixed and engineered by Wiloza Media. If you like this episode, spread the word by subscribing, reviewing or sharing.

I'm your host, Nikki Toyama-Zseto. If you want to find out more about our work, visit the website at ChristiansForSocialAction.org.