Can a New Yorker support Trump and not be a racist? Can a New Yorker oppose Trump and not be socially immoral?

 

 

Note from the editor Tony Carnes: A number of people have asked us whether they should leave their congregation because the pastor or rabbi favors Trump or hates Trump. Often, a person who has decided to attend a religious group of a different ethnicity is faced with this dilemma because the political division seems like a reinforcement of ethnocentrism.

If someone came up to a leader of a congregation with a complaint that he or she felt uncomfortable by the politics of the congregation or its members, how would you respond? In many cases, we have found that the concerns of the congregants are just shrugged off by religious leaders as not important, racist, or immoral.

For your consideration below, we are running excerpts from The New York Times’ article by Campbell Robertson.

 

FORT WORTH — Charmaine Pruitt wrote the names of 12 churches on a sheet of paper, tore the paper into 12 strips, and dropped them into a Ziploc bag. It was Sunday morning and time to pick which church to attend.

This time of the week two years earlier, there would have been no question. Ms. Pruitt, 46, would have been getting ready for her regular Saturday afternoon worship service, at a former grocery store overhauled into a state-of-the-art, 760-seat sanctuary. In the darkened hall, where it would have been hard to tell she was one of the few black people in the room, she would have listened to the soaring anthems of the praise bands. She would have watched, on three giant screens, a sermon that over the course of a weekend would reach one of the largest congregations in the country.

But Ms. Pruitt has not been to that church since the fall of 2016. That was when she concluded that it was not, ultimately, meant for people like her. She has not been to any church regularly since.

Ms. Pruitt pulled one of the slips out of the Ziploc bag. Mount Olive Fort Worth. O.K. That was where she would go that day.

In the last couple of decades, there had been signs, however modest, that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning might cease to be the most segregated hour in America. “Racial reconciliation” was the talk of conferences and the subject of formal resolutions. Large Christian ministries were dedicated to the aim of integration, and many black Christians decided to join white-majority congregations. …

The fruits could be seen if you looked in the right places, particularly within the kind of nondenominational megachurches that gleam from the roadsides here in the sprawl of Dallas-Fort Worth. In 2012, according to a report from the National Congregation Study, more than two-thirds of those attending white-majority churches were worshiping alongside at least some black congregants, a notable increase since a similar survey in 1998. This was more likely to be the case in evangelical churches than in mainline Protestant churches, and more likely in larger ones than in smaller ones. …

Then came the 2016 election. 

Black congregants — as recounted by people in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Fort Worth and elsewhere — had already grown uneasy in recent years as they watched their white pastors fail to address police shootings of African-Americans. …

Then white evangelicals voted for Mr. Trump by a larger margin than they had voted for any presidential candidate. They cheered the outcome, reassuring uneasy fellow worshipers with talk of abortion and religious liberty, about how politics is the art of compromise rather than the ideal. Christians of color, even those who shared these policy preferences, looked at Mr. Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants, his open hostility to N.F.L. players protesting police brutality and his earlier “birther” crusade against President Obama, claiming falsely he was not a United States citizen. In this political deal, many concluded, they were the compromised.

“It said, to me, that something is profoundly wrong at the heart of the white church,” said Chanequa Walker-Barnes, a professor of practical theology at the McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University in Atlanta. …

Ms. Pruitt had been a churchgoing Christian since the mid-1990s, first joining a mostly black megachurch in Dallas, where she was on the dance team. Inspiration began to flag after some years there, and one night she was drawn to a pastor whom she saw on television. He was, she later learned, Robert Morris of Gateway Church. …

Above all, for many members, there are Pastor Morris’s weekly messages themselves: wry, often self-deprecating, sprinkled with biblical scholarship and often affectingly personal.

“This is what I need right now,” thought Ms. Pruitt, moved to tears when she first went to orientation programs at the church. Members who happened to sit near her at worship came to ask about her when she missed a service, and some came to her grandmother’s wake. One couple began to refer to her as a daughter.

The congregation is mostly white, but not entirely; the pastors at two of the six satellite campuses are black men. Church videos and promotional materials are intentionally filled with people of color. The goal, says Pastor Morris, who is white and has a black son-in-law, is to have a church that looks like heaven as described in the book of Revelation: “from every nation, tribe, people and language.” …

Pastor Morris had become aware of the disquiet himself, mainly from listening to black pastors at other churches. Still, while they would meet and talk and pray, not a lot would happen. …

Pastor Morris preached a message entitled “Still.” It began with a series of qualifications. God is still in control. There is no perfect political candidate. Voting is choosing the lesser of evils. Yes, there is gender inequality. And yes, there is a race problem in the country, though racism, implying hate, is not the right word. Pastor Morris said it was a subtler problem of prejudice.

Then he focused attention on the upcoming presidential race.

“The election,” he said, “is extremely important.”

The country is in trouble financially; a critical Supreme Court appointment awaits; one of the major parties advocates using “taxpayer dollars, your dollars,” for abortion. Evangelical Christians sit at home on Election Days, while “those who are trying to change our Constitution” go to the polls, and look at what happens: Prayer is taken out of the schools.

“We are going the wrong way,” he concluded. “We need to get involved, we need to pray and we need to vote.”

He never said to vote for Mr. Trump. But the implication in the sermon, and in the leaflets that were handed out at church, was lost on no one: that one must vote to uphold Christian values, and that the Republican Party platform reflected those values. And Mr. Trump was the Republican candidate.

Ms. Pruitt sent messages to several white couples she had befriended at the church, telling them she was going to take some time off. She had become uneasy at a church, she told them, that speaks of overcoming racism on one Sunday “and then turns around later and asks me to support” Trump, who she believed was “a racist candidate.” …

Ms. Pruitt never went back. …

Carla McKissic Smith stayed until one Sunday in March 2017, when a guest speaker, a messianic rabbi from New Jersey, spoke of the 2016 election from the pulpit, saying that it “threatened to seal the acceleration of America’s apostasy,” but that Mr. Trump’s victory was the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Israel. “It was not the Russian intervention that determined it,” he said to a congregation that frequently broke into applause and cheers. “The intervention was a bit higher.” …

Mr. Trump’s win, which one elder at Gateway described as a “supernatural answer to prayer,” generated a frisson of excitement at the church. Pastor Morris told the congregation that he was one of Mr. Trump’s faith advisers. The church was a sponsor of an inaugural ball in January 2017.

Jelani Lewis, one of the two black campus pastors, knew this was creating unease among many black members of Gateway. A black deacon approached him at one point and asked how he should reconcile his trust in Pastor Morris with “some of the things that I’m seeing from the current president.” …

As a tumultuous 2017 unfolded, Pastor Morris understood that some wanted him to address race directly.

“As I prayed about it as I talked with black pastor friends of mine, I realized I don’t really understand the depth of the pain they feel,” he said. “This is personal to them — it was history to me. I would talk to my friend and it was personal to him because it was his great-grandfather.”

In October 2017, he preached a message entitled “A Lack of Understanding.” Addressing “all the ignorant white people,” and acknowledging his own past grappling with prejudice, the pastor listed reasons that racism was evil — among them that it was an affront to God’s creation, given that Adam and Eve were probably brown-skinned. A video played of a black pastor talking of the racism he experienced as a child in East St. Louis in the 1960s. Pastor Morris concluded by urging people of color in the congregation to spread out and pray with whites in small groups. …

The response, Pastor Morris said, was “overwhelmingly positive,” and indeed the reaction on Facebook suggests as much. Pastor Lewis remembers a black woman weeping in her seat, and was thankful that he finally had an answer for black worshipers questioning how their church truly felt about racism.

On Facebook some white congregants were angered at the sermon, especially at the focus on white people as the root of the problem.

“I believe Robert spoke from his flesh in this message,” one of them, Steve Groebe, later recalled in a Facebook message. “I gave him another week to correct the message and make it biblical. I didn’t feel he did that so I left the church.”

The message was not better received among the black worshipers who had already left the church. It did not, several said, address the enduring structural legacy of racism, instead adhering to the usual evangelical focus on individual prejudice. Most significantly, they said, it gave no sense that Pastor Morris had ever wrestled with his support of Donald Trump. …

Click here for the full story in The New York Times.

 

 

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