The raceless gospel delivered me from white supremacy. Before receiving this message, I questioned my relationship with Jesus, given the history of Christianity in North America. Namely, American slavery and the belief that people racialized as white have supreme control over people racialized as black.
Not an uncommon inquiry, Frederick Douglass discerned the difference between the “Christianity of Christ” and “slaveholding Christianity.” Howard Thurman said it was the difference between “the religion of Jesus” and “the religion about Jesus.”
“How could any theologian explain the meaning of Christian identity in America and fail to engage white supremacy, its primary negation?” James H. Cone asked in “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” It was only fitting since European colonizers had conflated Christianity and whiteness.
The stakes have always been high, as expressed plainly by the Rev. J.W.C. Pennington in 1845: “Does the Bible condemn slavery without any regard to circumstances or not? I, for one, desire to know. My repentance, my faith, my hope, my love, my perseverance all, I conceal it not, I repeat it, all turn upon this point. If I am deceived here—if the word of God does sanction slavery, I want another book, another repentance, another faith, and another hope.”
Likewise, I needed to know where Jesus stood, or I would have to leave the faith—for my ontological safety. What was this good news that would protect my personhood?
The words of Galatians 3:27-28 came to me: “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.” No need to defend or explain my humanity, I was freed from the false black-white binary of race through my baptismal identity as well as the lie of white supremacy.
Spirit hovering over water, I was saved through an encounter with myself as a beloved child of God. With my self-concept clearly defined by the Divine and not race, the awareness of my autonomy and inner authority quickly followed.
Years later, with race decentered and after what Thurman called a “creative encounter,” I learned my work would follow that of an affirmation mystic. He says one “must embrace the social whole and seek to achieve empirically the good which has possessed (them) in (their) moment of profoundest insight.” This “creative encounter” produced a deepened sense of self and connection to all creation that I feel called to share with others.
This is what makes the raceless gospel an expression of the active mysticism tradition. Not practiced apart from the world, I believe all Christians—regardless of denominational affiliation— have a role in restoring our connection as next of kin in preparation for the coming “kin-dom.” This work is first internal and begins with affirming our sense of somebodiness, then works its way outward.
“Their vision for life is larger and more expansive, knowing that they are alive for a reason, a purpose that will benefit human spirits they may never meet,” Lerita Coleman Brown writes in “What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman.” She writes later, “When these mystics go inside themselves to God, they come up into community, or oneness.”
I feel this most profoundly in and through the transformative truth of baptism and baptismal identity, which calls Jesus-followers to create social change by rearranging the social order. The last one in will be first!
It is my conviction that if Jesus’ disciples got in line behind him to enter this baptismal pool, then we must follow a different set of rules of engagement. This includes no running back to former “relationships of ruling.”
If not, then keep your baptism classes, liturgy, hymns and certificates. As baptized believers, we should feel compelled to remove barriers that seek to reinforce a sense of unworthiness for all human beings. Because “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.”
This is the raceless gospel—not a color-blind lens, a post-racial vision or a DEI initiative. It is a baptismal pedagogy for the integration of segregated bodies and a part of the mystical tradition.
Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, 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.
