Cultural Conditioning

“It's just what we're conditioned to do as Black men. Making people comfortable with your Blackness." - Matt James, The Bachelor, After the Final Rose

I don’t expect the Bachelor franchise to offer a satisfying resolution to the topic of race and identity, and this past season has shown us that it’s not enough to do something in the name of diversity without fully understanding its implications. It’s less of a reach to select a black male lead for a reality TV series than to meaningfully address the black male experience in America and the inequity therein.

If network television (and larger institutions like our government) can only present an unsatisfactory picture of racial equality, what does the church of Jesus Christ give us? Indeed, its own beginnings were roiled with race-based issues between Jewish and Gentile believers as evidenced in Acts 15:7-11:

And after there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, “Brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God, who knows the heart, bore witness to them, by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith. Now, therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.

Peter is addressing the fact that circumcision was being placed as a yoke by the Jewish believers on their Gentile brothers. The decision of the apostles and elders was to then “lay on [the Gentile believers] no greater burden than that [they] abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality.” (v.29) When the church in Antioch received this news, “they rejoiced because of its encouragement” (v.31). The church does well to recognize the unnecessary yoke that they placed on fellow believers and to address it faithfully.

For the church in America, we do well likewise to not place an additional yoke on brothers and sisters of another race to enter our fellowship. It is important that we listen to the stories of those on the outside and identify ways in which they are conditioned into the majority. It is inadequate to say that “we see no color,” because that is to negate the fullness to which God has created that fellow image-bearer. The complete picture of our salvation includes “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9). We will see race in eternity, and we should stake our claim to that day in the present.