Got my issue of the Journal of Counseling Psychology today. Had an article in it on the psychosocial cost of racism on White folk. Reminded me of some good work by Michael Emerson and his colleagues (click this link for more on him and his important work: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~soci/faculty/profile/emerson.html). He has detailed the hidden costs on minorities who choose to participate in multiracial churches. Definitely an eye-opener. But this work details the costs to white folk. We know that racism brings white folk benefits of white privilege but does it have a hidden cost? This work looks at how racism increases fear, guilt, shame, loss of connectivity, etc. What the work doesn’t detail (and I wouldn’t expect it to) is the cost to our sense and understanding of the Gospel. When a any group is mono-cultural, it loses its sense of need of other voices from other sectors of life who have rich understanding of how the Gospel has facets not often seen by that particular group. In the case of most white folk, we do not fear attack, rejection, suffering just because of their ethnicity or skin color. When the church faced these features, whether in the early church or in Jim Crow USA, how did the theologians and pastors express the character of the Gospel to their people? Do we White Americans care?
I happen to be a Presbyterian, but Reformed theology from Europeans often lacks the focus on how God’s kingdom principles address community and corporate life (i.e., corporate sin, corporate justice). If we hope to spread the Gospel to a disenfranchised population, then we’d better find out what we have been missing all these years.
Musings on Faith and Psychology 