With Donald Trump taking the presumptive Republican nomination, Christians grow increasingly concerned about what this means for their churches. Among them is Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission President Russell Moore.
In an op-ed penned for the New York Times, Moore begs Christians to remember the Civil Rights movement and how churches then refused to take a political stance.
While civil rights protesters were beaten and children were blown apart by bombs, church members had said nothing. That would be “political,” church members said, and they wanted to stick to “simple gospel preaching.”
As the years marched on, the area became majority black. The congregation dwindled to a small band of elderly whites who now lived elsewhere. They tried, they said, to “reach out” to the church’s African-American neighbors, but couldn’t get them to join.
A canvass of the area would have told them that the church had already sent a message to those neighbors when it had stood silent in the face of atrocity. Those neighbors now had no interest in bailing out a congregation with a ministry too cowardly to speak up for righteousness when it had seemed too costly to do so.
Now, Americans face a similar tipping point with Trump poised to take the Republican nomination.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech did not envision that more than 50 years later “Go back to Africa” would be screamed at black protesters or that a major presidential candidate would tweet racially charged comments. Some American Christians may be tempted to ignore these issues, hoping they are just a wave of “political incorrectness” that will ebb in due time. That sort of moral silence shortchanges both our gospel and our future.
Moore praises the multi-ethic church, reminding readers that Jesus was not a fair-skinned Anglo-Saxon man. The vast majority of Christians are not white and have never spoken English, Moore says.
The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking “foreigner” who is probably not all that impressed by chants of “Make America great again.”
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