Reconstructing the Gospel

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove has created a piece both timely and thoughtful, a challenging affront to systemic racial attitudes. His background resonates with my own, and I feel a genuine sense of walking side by side through critical issues of humanity as I read.

Early on, Wilson-Hartgrove introduces the idea of Jesus healing the blind, paralleling that with the process many of us need to experience. It’s an easy line to draw from this idea to being “woke,” but the challenge goes beyond that. This is more than realizing that the world isn’t as you thought it was. It’s being able to claim the role you may have played in perpetuating the subversion of the gospel, whether on purpose or not. The issues of race and religion are real, division is something which should not be in our church. This is a mandate from our Savior, echoed in every page of this book.

The author has physically participated in the lives of “others” as he takes this journey himself. In that, we move from an academic discussion about race to a real person opening himself up to the experience of change. It’s honest at every turn, an open embrace to take part in the lives of those who share God’s image.

A passionate, emotional look at the Southern evangelical Gospel and its inextricable rootedness in racism and slavery. Though Part I is a bit muddled, I implore you to push through-- everything afterword is well worth your time.

Summary: “There is no way to preach the gospel without proclaiming that the unjust systems of this world must give way to the reign of a new King."

Over the past 15-20 years there has been increasing discussion about the meaning of the word ‘gospel’. At the top level most everyone can agree that the ‘Gospels’ are the four books that open the New Testament and the ‘Gospel’ is the message of Christianity. Gospel is derived from the Greek euangelion which means good news. Understanding what is, and is not, ‘the gospel’ matters, it isn’t just semantics.

I pushed back pretty hard against Matt Chandler’s The Explicit Gospel because he didn’t have an ending to what needed to be included in the gospel and while I affirm that we have to actually use words, the gospel does not require a belief in 7 day creation or male only understanding of the role of pastor to be the gospel.

Scot McKnight I think had a helpful corrective to the ‘gospel movement’ with King Jesus Gospel which refocuses the meaning of the gospel on Jesus Christ’s Lordship. NT Wright’s Simply Good News takes a similar approach focusing on Jesus as King and restorer.

But each of these authors batting around the term gospel seem to focus primarily on gospel as intellectual content. Allen Yeh in his chapter in Still Evangelical focuses the problem not on the meaning of the actual word gospel (or evangelical) but the bias toward orthodoxy without paying enough attention to orthodpraxy. This isn’t a new charge. Lesslie Newbigin in his 1986 Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture focuses on how the gospel has been rooted in the West in a particular view of culture and practice.

I could easily keep going on. I have 163 reviews at Bookwi.se that include the word gospel. The meaning of gospel or the focus of the gospel or the practice of the gospel matter because we believe that our Christianity matters. This is not a discussion that is going away and this is not a discussion that is solved by Johnathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s new book Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion.

Reconstructing the Gospel is playing on the title of the book The Third Reconstruction which Wilson-Hartgrove co-wrote with William Barber. Both of these books reference the historical period of Reconstruction which in popular historical understanding is a period of failed political intervention after the Civil War. Recent historians, like Eric Foner have been re-writing that popular understanding of Reconstruction for the past 20-30 years.

The Christian hiphop artist Propaganda created a firestorm with his song Precious Puritans in 2012. Propaganda suggested that something is missing from our gospel presentation when we point to historical Christian figures but miss the fact that many of these giants of the faith in the United States were slaveholders. Johnathan Edwards, often called the greatest theologian of North America, owned a slave.

Johnathan Wilson-Hartgrove recounts the last 20 or so years of discovering his faith and the holes in his faith because he had absorbed a Christianity that had blindspots toward injustice. Wilson-Hartgrove’s story is similar to stories of a number of people that I know. They knew that Jesus loves everyone. They knew that we can be saved by placing our faith in Jesus Christ. But when they actually started living with people that were poor they realized that something was missing.

Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, in their book Divided by Faith, talk about a ‘magic motif’ that is present in many people’s understanding of Christianity. Emerson and Smith found that when confronted about problems around racism many White Christians assumed that racism would be eliminated if enough people actually became Christians. There is an individualism in the assumptions brought up by the ‘magic motif’, an assumption that the problem isn’t systemic, but individual sin. Wilson-Hartgrove says clearly, “There is no way to preach the gospel without proclaiming that the unjust systems of this world must give way to the reign of a new King."

Reconstructing the Gospel isn’t just Wilson-Hargrove’s story, although his own discovery as an illustration of the weaknesses of Christianity in America is important. This is largely a historical book. It isn’t only that White Christians held slaves. It is that before, and after slavery, the problem is a Christianity that didn’t see slavery (or Jim Crow, or other injustice) as a problem.

Because Wilson-Hargrove lives in North Carolina he devotes more time to local history there. The first big movie in the US, The Birth of a Nation, an openly racist movie, was based on a book by a pastor in New York City. The Biblical Recorder, a Baptist Newspaper in North Carolina, encouraged people to go see it so that they could see an,

“Invisible Empire of defeated soldiers who in poverty and weakness by the might of right and courage of consecration to all that is holy, terrorized the aliens that had assumed to rule them, disarmed the black cohorts, struck down their white satraps, and drove out from the Temple of our Liberties the horde that had been put in possession of the holy of holies itself."
The myth of the Lost Cause that was celebrated in The Birth of a Nation was a reimagining of the Reconstruction period. That gospel of the Lost Cause infected the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The corrective to the gospel of the Lost Cause was the message Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited and others. Thurman and others, primarily minority Christians that understood the blindspots of the gospel, have been calling attention to those weaknesses for generations.

Wilson-Hartgrove references Martin Luther King Jr’s (strongly influenced by Howard Thurman) focus at the 1968 Poor People’s campaign. The point of that campaign was to:

“dramatize for the nation the divide between rich and poor, the story of Lazarus and Dives became a parable that spoke to the soul of America. Dives didn’t go to hell, King began to say, because he was rich. He went to hell because he could not see his neighbor, Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was blinded by so-called privilege. And America, too, would go to hell, unless she made a concerted effort to correct the systemic economic injustice created by generations of stolen labor.”
The second half of Reconstructing the Gospel is about how Wilson-Hartgrove has relearned what the gospel is about. And it is going to be a message that will be resisted because it isn’t a simple ‘have a better understanding of the gospel’. The way that the gospel is reconstructed is by spending years living with and learning from those that are poor and those that have been ‘disinherited’ and those that have been doing the work of the gospel for decades. That work is slow because the discovery of blindspots is slow.

This isn’t a straight line growth model. Because we are human. The opening of the book is a relatively recent story and Wilson-Hartgrove has been living among and learning from the poor for decades at this point. He hasn’t learned all there is to learn. His understanding of the gospel hasn’t ‘been fixed’. He will continue, like all of us, to have blindspots.

I have been on a journey to open my eyes to my blindspots around race for years. And I can see many of the ones I used to have, but the very nature of a blindspot means that I have not identified those that I have not yet identified. I was frequently frustrated by reading Reconstructing the Gospel. I want a quicker solution. I am afraid of the indictment that is presented here. I do not want to lose the historical church in the process of cleaning up my understanding of the gospel. But Propaganda was right. If our understanding of the Puritans (or anyone else) is more precious than the gospel, or more precious than the people around us that are in need of the whole gospel, then there is a problem.

Reconstructing the Gospel is not a negative book. The stories of individuals and churches, especially the stories at the end of the book are hopeful. Some really do get it. And there is hope for me and other readers if we are willing to keep pushing. But it is not going to be easy to remove the stain of sin from our understanding of the gospel.

Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I had a chance to read a copy of Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s new book, Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion, which examines the ways Christianity in America is, and has always been, torn in two. He further examines how especially as a product of white Christianity in the South who participates in the black led freedom movement that has always existed alongside the religion of slaveholders, he is also torn in two.

I wanted to read this for several reasons. First, Jonathan has been an influence on me for many years. In the early days of the Iraq War he was doing resistance and solidarity work there that I followed from afar, then he returned to the States and became a leader in the New Monastic movement. I was never directly a part of New Monasticism, but as part of the broader emerging church movement its proponents deeply influenced my own theology and spirituality, and have continued to do so. Jonathan, specifically, had powerful stories of submitting to and learning from the black church. I’ve read and been influenced by many of his books over the years, sometimes using the daily prayer book to which he contributed, and by meeting him several years ago at Cornerstone Festival. In recent years Jonathan has continued to follow the lead of black freedom activists such as William Barber II, as I’ve tried to do as well.

The other reasons relate directly to my own story. Jonathan was raised in the Southern Baptist church in rural North Carolina. I was also raised there. I left the denomination as a young teenager, and at this point I don’t live in the South, but I don’t discount how deeply the history of white Christianity, and Southern Baptists specifically, in North Carolina have been passed down to me and have shaped me. I don’t pretend that I’m not also a man torn in two, in many of the same ways Jonathan recounts.

He says:

I saw in a way I’d missed before how the diagnosis of a divided faith is the beginning of the good news Jesus offered to nearly every religious person he met during his time here on earth.

In the book, Jonathan does what I think is a great job tracing how this divide came to exist in American Christianity, and specifically in the South. More importantly, he uses this to explain why the overwhelming majority (81%) of white evangelicals supported Donald Trump, and why this wasn’t a surprise to people of color, especially black people, and those who were willing to listen to them. He explains how the gospel we’ve inherited had to make such a distinction between bodies and souls, pretending Jesus doesn’t care about black bodies so they could be enslaved, segregated and lynched, mass incarcerated, and so the white ones could be defended with violence and politics ever since, even as our own souls were disconnected from our bodies, from our ability to feel and humanize and change.

None of these things are hidden from people who want to see them, but most of us white Southerners like to pretend we’ve moved on from the theologies that fed those things; we like to ignore that the work to get past that has not been done in our churches, in our hearts.

In one place he says this:

Because even though slavery ended in 1865, most white Christians went on reading the Bible and seeing the world around them exactly as they had before.

And in another, this:

White supremacy doesn’t persist because racists scheme to privilege some while discriminating against others. It continues because, despite the fact that almost everyone believes it is wrong to be racist, the daily habits of our bodily existence continue to repeat the patterns of white supremacy at home, at school, at work, and at church. White supremacy is written into our racial habits. In short, it looks like normal life.

While tracing these histories, he spends time examining them through the message of Jesus, and through the years of black led freedom movements that have always been there to resist white supremacy.

There is nowhere you can go to find the pure, peaceable, and unadulterated Christianity of Christ. The slaveholder religion has infected us all. But that is not to say that all forms of faith are created equal.

Toward the end of the book, there’s a wonderful section that looks at the practices of monasticism that Jonathan and others integrated into the new monastic movement as a way white people can turn away from whiteness toward the freedom Jesus offers. He looks what these practices can look like: listening to black people who lead this movement instead of relying on ourselves to solve the problems, or on the false notion that proximity to people can free us from racism; staying put to grapple with our fragility, to lament, and in general to give ourselves to the work; and constantly taking steps away from white supremacy.

I found the book to be a great way of articulating what has caused the situation in which white Christians find ourselves, how we can be honest about what we’ve inherited in our faith, but also how we can use what our faith offers us, both in systemic and individual ways.

A personal story of reflection regarding the Christianity in which the author was raised and his reckoning and grappling with its roots in and complicity with slavery, white supremacy, and oppression, and the attempt to "reconstruct" the Gospel to be more consistent with the Good News of Jesus.

The author is white and shares his story of having to acknowledge how churches in the American South perpetuated oppression both in the days of slavery and long afterward, and how it remains embodied in much of what passes for Evangelical political action. He speaks of getting to know black people active in the community and the church in North Carolina and how those experiences transformed him. He writes of the work of justice being done which seeks to relieve oppression.

For those willing to hear, and especially those who already agree with at least most of the author's premises, the book is powerful and compelling. Yet I wonder how it would be viewed by who would be ostensibly the author's desired audience, those who have not yet come to his viewpoint: it may seem strident and overly, to put it nicely, "prophetic" in tone. At times the author becomes guilty of confusing the symptom from the cause: colonialism, and the spread of capitalism as the world's economy, for instance, do not stem from "slaveholder religion," but come from farther upstream, Western cultural and religious chauvinism which defined how it looked at the world, led its people to explore and conquer and enslave, and remains in many forms to this day.

Overall a challenging message to hear for those willing to hear it. Most of the time the author is not wrong. That does not mean that what he has to say is easy to absorb.

I grew up in non-denominational white Protestant churches. Growing up I heard nothing about racial disparity or racism/politics at all in services; however, tangentially, heard a lot of racist rhetoric from talking heads on tvs. I'm glad that my parents raised me with good critical thinking skills but it would have been nicer to grow up more with the type of Christianity presented in this book. The author is so vulnerable and honest talking about his realization of growing up in a passively racist environment and how different interactions in his life caused him to confront and grow out of that. Also the theology in this is good theology, the gospel presented is a more perfect gospel than the gospel of white Christianity that is a gospel of segregation and oppression (which of course isn't a gospel at all). My only complaint is that it gets a little repetitive.

Having spent many of my formative years in the church of the South (and the remainder of them in a Southern Baptist church north of the Mason-Dixon Line), this book was intriguing to me. I found it to be a passionate and eloquent exploration of racism in the American Evangelical church and how white people can make a difference in that realm going forward. It strikes a good balance between being academically rigorous and applicable to everyday life. Reconstructing the Gospel is not a quick or easy read but it is a challenging addition to the unfortunately necessary list of books challenging the racism of the Christian church today.

A strong interpretation of our need to reconstruct the Gospel being preached from all too many pulpits and persons to reflect the Good News that is Jesus Christ.
If it is Good News for one, it is Good News for all. Without segregation or discrimination. Without support of one people group over another.
Jonathan Wilson=Hartgrove presents strong examples of what has been and what needs to be.. A thorough representation of his own life experiences of life in America's south; bringing his first hand account to readers' for their own recognition of life experiences they may not have explored til this reading.

Powerful. Convicting. Encouraging.

Recommending as a reliable witness to the beauty on the mountain of the feet of a messenger who brings Good News . . .