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"I am a man torn in two. And the gospel I inherited is divided." Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, our compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction that undoes the injustices of the past. Wilson-Hartgrove traces his journey from the religion of the slaveholder to the Christianity of Christ. Reconstructing the gospel requires facing the pain of the past and present, from racial blindness to systemic abuses of power. Grappling seriously with troubling history and theology, Wilson-Hartgrove recovers the subversiveness of the gospel that sustained the church through centuries of slavery and oppression, from the civil rights era to the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond. When the gospel is reconstructed, freedom rings both for individuals and for society as a whole. Discover how Jesus continues to save us from ourselves and each other, to repair the breach and heal our land.… (more)
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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.
**--galley received as part of early review program
I guess that the topic that I’ll take is the idea of “blindness”, the opposite of which would be, I think, teachability. A good example of a teachable person would be Abimelech in Genesis
On the other hand, I hate speaking when it’s not wanted, to people who don’t want to see. People who are blind to racism are part of my life whether I like it or not, and I can’t convert them or think for them. It’s not up to me what happens on the day of judgment, nor mine really to puzzle, in the end, whether people are blind because they truly cannot see and think everything’s okay, not seeing anything not okay, or whether they are blind because at the bottom they hate and reject the light. (But why?)