A Big Name Rapper Makes Statements about "White Evangelicalism"

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CT has run a series of articles about the rapper LeCrae’s movement away from “white evangelicalism.”  They have been provocative and a bit uncomfortable. 

Bryan Lorritts, Crawford’s son, I assume, really addressed the elephant in the room on Friday, October 20 by saying that he needs to give up caring whether the white bigwigs of evangelicalism invite him to their conferences or give him a seat at the table.  He said that it needs to be the other way around; minorities have their conferences and invite the whites to the table. (Maybe then they can all stop being separated.) He is pointed, a little sarcastic, but at the same time self-deprecating and right.

I think white evangelical leaders have a basic fear that minority evangelical leaders will infuse more democratic or progressive political ideas into the church or theology, like the South Americans did with liberation theology in the Catholic Church. I may be wrong, but I may be right, to paraphrase the song.  We then become the self-proclaimed guardians of the gospel, forgetting how much our own culture and politics control our view of the gospel and Biblical theology.  We are making an idol of conservative politics, and I’m not sure it’s because of legitimate ideological reasons or because it protects our comfortable lifestyles. 

At its foundation, we are being paternalistic and condescending to the minorities in the church, saying “you don’t really understand what is at stake here, you don’t really know that a different approach that incorporates the minority experience in the U.S. will ruin the gospel and a Biblical world view.”  It is the same thing we saw for years with white missionaries coming in and bossing around the leaders of the church in nations of color.

I express this because I have been guilty of it, that same paternalism and superiority and ethnocentrism. I should add though that the world view that says only whites are guilty of this ethnocentrism and racial superiority is wrong as well.  It is the human condition. The same human tribalism that caused European countries to fight horrendous wars for centuries until, after WWII, they decided they were above all that and superior to the racist U.S. (yeah, right) is the same human tribalism that caused the Japanese to oppress the Chinese in WWII and Hutus to kill Tutsis in Rwanda.  Nobody gets off on this one.