Preaching about Racism

A Guide for Faith Leaders

Carolyn B. Helsel

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780827231634
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Equipping white pastors to address racism faithfully from the pulpit. Of all the activities that come with being a minister, sermon preparation can loom largest - especially when racism is the subject. You've got to address racism with your white congregation from the pulpit. But, truthfully, you can't wrap your head around how to preach about this topic thoughtfully and sensitively.

In Preaching about Racism, preaching professor and pastor Carolyn Helsel speaks directly to other faith leaders about how to address racism from the pulpit. In her first book, Anxious to Talk about It: Helping White Christians Talk Faithfully about Racism, Helsel addressed the anxiety white Christians experience around conversations about race. In this follow-up, Helsel provides strategies and a theoretical framework for crafting biblical and theological sermons that incorporate insights from social sciences and psychology, gleaned from more than a decade of writing and teaching about racism.

Written for the busy pastor, several chapters are quick reads - helpful reminders as you prepare a thoughtful and sensitive sermon - while others dig deeper on the theory behind the crucial work of dismantling racism.

Chapter 1: Preaching to Ourselves: Beginning with Gratitude

In light of your busy schedule, dear preacher, let me cut to the chase: preaching about racism needs to come from a place of gratitude.

Not shame, not guilt, but gratitude.

Gratitude is what motivates us to preach about racism: we do this work to share with persons we love the ways they can know more fully the breadth of community God is calling us to experience, and to point to the work of God already in our midst, redeeming the brokenness of the world.

Gratitude as our motivation means we engage in these conversations in the same way that we tell people about the best aspects of our faith. Sharing this good news comes from a place of gratitude: God has redeemed us, and we are still being redeemed. And we want to tell the world about this good news.

It seems counterintuitive to speak of gratitude and good news when you’re talking about something as terrible as racism. And gratitude is complex: in the history of race in this country, whites told enslaved Africans to “be grateful” for the kindness of their slaveholders. More recently, persons of color have been insulted with the words such as: “You should be grateful we even let you into this country!” Demands for gratitude or expectations for others to be grateful are oppressive. Demanding gratitude is not “good news.”

Instead, I place no demands on you to “be grateful,” and I encourage you not to tell your congregation to be grateful, but I will also invite you to see how gratitude can help people envision talking about racism in new ways.

As a Christian preacher, I have been called to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. But as a white preacher, I have a special calling—to name the sin of racism that has plagued white Christians for hundreds of years, to help other preachers do the same, and to help white people find ways of living that acknowledges their whiteness, and yet no longer allows subconscious assumptions of white superiority to go unchallenged in themselves or in others.

For the past 10 years, I’ve been mulling over this question: How can white preachers preach about racism to predominantly white congregations? The question followed me as I graduated from seminary and entered ministry, serving first as a hospital chaplain on the U.S.-Mexico border, and then as an associate pastor in a majority-white congregation in Texas. The question kept demanding my attention as I became associate director of admissions for Princeton Seminary. The question became so persistent that I enrolled in an additional master’s degree program, studying part-time while continuing to work full-time as a seminary administrator. I focused on the history of African American preaching traditions and white preachers’ attempts to address racism in the past, as well as black theologians’ responses to racism. I felt like I was just scratching the surface. By then, the question was so loud I could not deny that I was being called to find an answer: How can I help other white pastors like me talk about racism? So in 2010 I left a good job with benefits to pursue a Ph.D., just after the major economic recession, when voluntarily giving up a good job to enter academia (where the jobs are already scarce) was considered crazy. But the question kept calling, and I had to answer.

As I moved into my Ph.D. studies at Emory University, I began finding more interdisciplinary approaches to understanding racism, drawing from linguistic anthropology, philosophies of justice, theologies of sin, and narrative theories. Consistent themes that emerged include how the word racism has changed over time, and that racism is hard to understand if you are not a person of color. These two themes developed for me into the challenge of recognizing racism and the challenge for whites of recognizing ourselves as white within a racist society.

As I approached the dissertation-writing stage of my program, I discovered a book by Paul Ricoeur, a hermeneutic philosopher whom I had studied during a seminar taught by my Ph.D. advisor, Tom Long. Ricoeur’s book The Course of Recognition, a published series of lectures delivered shortly before he died, centers on the challenges of recognition in three senses: cognition, identity, and gratitude.1 These three forms of recognition gave me a framework for describing the challenges I saw white people encountering when talking about racism.

Focusing on recognition as having a cognitive component put a label on the challenge of different definitions and understandings of the word racism. At the same time, simply understanding the word racism did not clear things up. Definitions of racism may not translate to a deeper recognition of racism’s ongoing presence in the world. In my experience, it often took listening to how racism impacts real people to recognize it: hearing and seeing that, yes, racism is real, and much more prevalent than we previously thought.

The identity aspect for whites, recognizing ourselves as white, and needing to change personally and as part of a larger unjust system, also proved challenging, creating discomfort and a sense of identity-disorientation. If we are to recognize ourselves within the history and legacy of racism, we have to talk about how racism has impacted all people in society, and confront the distortion of our identity resulting from the racial violence that has given priority to whites and dehumanized persons of color.

For those of us who are white, the recognition of our white identity creates significant challenges for talking about racism. This is where racial identity development theory2 can be a tremendous help. The theory, developed by psychologists, clarifies the predictable emotions that emerge when learning about racism. The stages of developing a racial identity point a way toward a healthier self-understanding for whites, even while learning how to challenge racism in society.

Ricoeur’s third element of recognition includes a turn toward gratitude, since recognition’s definition includes this “unexpected guest” of a meaning. Gratitude is often expressed as recognition—“I want to recognize everyone who helped me get to where I am today.” Recognition points us outward in gratitude toward others. This final element of the framework became a radical discovery: What if, instead of preaching toward guilt, our preaching on racism could move us to gratitude?

But what could gratitude have to do with talking about racism?

Here is where the light bulbs started going off for me. I felt the connection between gratitude and the good news I’m called to preach. The text known as the “great commission,” to “go…and make disciples” (Mt. 28:19), which is in many ways the first Christian call to go and preach, takes place after Jesus’ resurrection. We preach because of the good news of Jesus Christ, the news that God did not let sin and death have the final say, but instead raised Jesus from the dead, declaring victory over sin and death. If you are a religious leader from a different faith tradition, what is the “good news” that you share with your members? And how does gratitude play a role in the communication of that good news?

For me, awareness of sin and God’s response to sin had been a central part of my religious formation as a young person, attending youth group and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and other high school campus ministries. From scripture, I learned that humans are sinners—that we have all sinned and...

Table of contents

• Praise for Preaching about Racism
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: A Quick Guide for Busy Religious Professionals
• Chapter 1: Preaching to Ourselves: Beginning with Gratitude
• Chapter 2: The Role of Interpretation and Recognition
• Chapter 3: Communicating What Racism Means
• Chapter 4: Talking about Racial Identity with White People of Faith
• Chapter 5: Biblical Preaching about Racism
• Chapter 6: Theology for Preaching about Racism
• Chapter 7: Strategies for Preaching and Beyond
• Appendix: Preaching about Racism in Context—Sample Sermons
• The Work Continues: Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author