A Form of Christianity and the Raceless Gospel – Good Faith Media

by Starlette Thomas | Apr 16, 2024 | Feature, Opinion, The Raceless Gospel Initiative
Starlette Thomas on the steps of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2020 (Credit: Starlette Thomas)
I have been leaving toxic environments since I was twelve years old. Prepared for the coming of Jesus as a new convert, I’m surprised my list now includes the segregated North American church.
I leave stores when I am followed around under the suspicion of shoplifting. I leave in the middle of cyclical conversations because I know where this is going, so let me stop you. 
I have left oppressive work conditions because who has time to be nickeled and dimed concerning their worth? Since I’m alive and, thus, still on the clock, I want my life’s time to count for something meaningful.
Maybe it’s because my parents abandoned me, and I’ve still got something to prove. Or I’ve just been practicing and building up my endurance for this very moment.
When it concerns injustice, leaving is easy for me to do.
During a discussion of my book, “Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church,” I was asked if I was a member of a church. I am not. Then I confessed what I had been keeping close to my chest: “I’ll join a church when the global church desegregates.”
I find the segregated church, the brick-and-mortar expression of white supremacy, to be the highest form of hypocrisy and evidence of ecclesiological malpractice. Until the North American church addresses race and its progeny (I’m thinking “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” style), there is nothing more to talk about.
The congregation’s shocked faces turned to understanding nods. It made sense to them and they immediately knew what it meant. 
I would remain outside the church’s doors because its members couldn’t integrate—not even for an hour and not even to worship the God they all claim to love.
There are wide gaps between the person of Jesus and the practices of his disciples. North American Christianity is a far cry from the religion of Jesus. A segregated fellowship that proclaims a racialized gospel, which capitalizes on Jesus’ message and merchandizes his teachings (as if the Word made flesh comes in all sizes), characterizes much of contemporary Christianity. 
With this form of Christianity in place, you cannot make me go into a church building unless I am invited. And even then, I can’t stay long, as I feel more at home on the margins of society.
I figured this out during the summer of 2020. During a fleeting moment of “racial reckoning” for the country, I will never forget how close to God I felt when I put my face on the concrete for eight minutes and forty- two seconds for George Floyd, who was asphyxiated by a Minneapolis police officer. 
We would later learn that the actual time was 9 minutes and 29 seconds.
Afterwards, we rose and said the names of those lost to police violence, offering them as prayer requests. We sang songs in protest, a holy rendering of hope. 
We marched in defiance while believing by faith that the Spirit would keep us free from arrest. City streets became labyrinths.
We took turns in the call and response of chanting our demands and naming our conditions, in leading the group and bringing up the rear. We worked in shifts, eating, resting on tree roots, street curbs and miscellaneous steps, passing out water and food to ensure that no one passed out from the extreme heat or exhaustion. 
We were in community, and it didn’t just feel good. It felt right. We were together in the fight against injustice and were pushing back on the narrative that justified extrajudicial force against African Americans.
We embodied this faith in the streets that summer. Not for form or fashion, we walked hand in hand across cultures and crossed “the color line.” 
These injustices were bigger than any social divide.
Consequently, I’ll never look at the North American church the same way again. I can’t go back and pretend this form of Sunday morning Christianity fits me. 
No, I want to live and breathe my casteless convictions every day of the week. I want to see justice walking down the streets. 
I want to hear hymns of resistance against the American empire. I want to see hands raised against the crushing machinery of race and its progeny.
And I can tell from the seating arrangement at 11 a.m. on Sunday mornings that this is not the place for me, so I’ll take my cue and leave. 
Instead, I’ll shout the raceless gospel from the streets until it is embodied: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:27-28, NRSV).
Associate editor, director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
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