Summary: An exploration of what it means to seek racial reconciliation.
Christ Over Culture is a good book for the right reader. I have gone back and forth about writing about this book. Generally I write about almost all of the books I read for more than 15 years now. But I am always conflicted about writing about books of people that I know. And I both know Dan Crain fairly well and I have read multiple drafts of this book from early stages until just before the final draft to the publisher. So I am not objective or distant from the book. I am going to have two different threads to this post. A more positive one and then a bit more critical. I am not really critical about the book as much as I am wary of a good book in the hands of a bad reader.
First the positive, Christ Over Culture is a sincere and earnest book about what it means to seek after both racial reconciliation as a Christian and to honestly grapple with what it means to be part of a society that has historically embraced racial hierarchy; both parts of that matter. If we could wave a magic wand and be in a society that hasn’t embraced and fostered racial hierarchy, then the honest grappling with racial reconciliation as a Christian would be something very different. But we are in a society that has actively embraced racial hierarchy, and not just any racial hierarchy, but overt white superiority over all others. There are many other books that have explored the history, The Bible Told Them So is a good book about Christians that called for embracing white supremacy, in those terms. I think many have not really understood the extent to which our history has been shaped by distortions of Christianity to justify cultural preferences. Mark Noll’s series about the public use of scripture in the United States, especially America’s Book or Emerson and Bracey’s The Religion of Whiteness tells some of that story from different perspectives.
Dan Crain isn’t ignoring that history or those problems, but no single book can do everything, so he is primarily addressing the white Christian who is seeking to transform culture in light of their understanding of the gospel that calls them to respond to injustice. We have an unjust world in regard to the social construction of race, so what do we do now? His response is to take us on a journey to see how Christ is over all cultures, and how the gospel challenges and encourages us no matter where we are in history or what culture we have been raised in.
Personally, I like the way that George Yancy has described being in and impacted by a culture, but also trying to work to change that culture. He uses that language of “an anti-sexist, sexist” or “an anti-racist, racist”. I think as a Christian this is best thought of in terms of “an anti-sin, sinner.” Yancy isn’t writing to an explitly Christian audience and so doesn’t take that final step that I use, but Christians in their use of original sin doctrine, talk about the way that sin has impacted all of society and history. In context of Christ’s death and resurrection, the power of sin has been broken. But in this time, before Christ’s return where he finishes making all things new, we still still have to live with the reality of the impact of sin on us and those around us, even if we embrace the work that Christ has already done to break the power of sin over us. We are still sinners and in a world that has been impacted by sin, but we are in opposition to sin. We are anti-sin, but still honest in our assessment that we are in a society and world that has been impacted by sin. We personally sin, even as we attempt to discern how to oppose sin, in ourselves and in society. We are “anti-sin” both in opposition to sin, but in a positive sense of working to restore the effects of sin through restorative practices of community building and justice seeking.
I think Christi Over Culture is attempting to use a similar framework to acknowledge sin while seeking justice. Dan Crain works with Josh Clemons and Hazen Stephens who wrote the book Know, Own, Change which also is assuming a similar framework of working toward racial reconciliation, but doing it as a result of first knowing the history of race in the US, owing the reality of Christian complicity in that history, and then working to change society as a result. There is no one way forward. Part of why I personally have make a long term exploration of the concept of Christian discernment is because I think that personal and corporate discernment is part of what is necessary to take on big issues that are more than what a “silver bullet” can address.
As I said before, I am a bit wary, not of the book, but of bad reading of Christ Over Culture. I have been in communities that have attempted to address racial issues for more than 30 years. I attended Rock of Our Salvation Church while I was in college. Raleigh Washington and Glenn Kahrein wrote the book Breaking Down Walls out of the work that they were doing of racial reconciliation at Rock of Our Salvation and Circle Urban Ministries. Pastor Washington left the church to work full time at Promise Keepers on racial reconciliation right about the time I graduated from college and moved to go to grad school. I interviewed Glenn Kehrein a few years later as part of my Master’ thesis about how different Christian non-profits think about their interaction with community ministry and part of what I asked him (in slightly different language) was about the discernment that different groups use as they try to think about the way that they structure their organizations and approaches to community. Already by that time, it was apparent that the methodology of Promise Keepers had failed around racial issues. Emerson and Smith’s Divided by Faith was still about 2 years away and the even more critical I Bring the Voice of My People by Chanequa Walker Barnes was nearly 2 decades away. But there was plenty to see about weaknesses of Evangelical approaches to race at the time.
In the years since, I have seen both very positive approaches and very negative approaches to thinking about how Christians discern how to grapple with injustice, especially around race. I am wary of approaches that do not spend enough time grappling with Christ’s general approach of inverting cultural assumptions about power. Jesus said that the last shall be first and demonstrated that the way that leaders lead, is by serving, as he modeled by washing feet. Paul illustrates this in Phil 2 that talks about how Jesus, as God, didn’t keep his own privilege and authority as God, but took on human weakness to show us how to truly live. One of the problems of trying to think about how to grapple with what is means to be white in a society that has created racial hierarchy is that I believe that the model of Christ is to work to invert hierarchy. I have known Dan Crain for more than six years and we have had many long conversations about this individually in and in large and small group settings. I trust him and believe that he is doing that in his work in this book and with his job at One Race.
But I also know that others do not believe that. Doug Wilson has said in many different ways that he believes that Christianity is fundamentally hierarchical and to oppose hierarchy is to deny Christian tenants. I am not going to link to explicit discussion of this, but it is easy to find. Wilson’s understanding of Christianity is that that hierarchy is not an expression of sin, but God-ordained reality that was in place before the fall and should be continued now as a requirement for Christians. Anyone with assumptions similar to Wilson’s will read books like Christ Over Culture as justification of domination of culture. This is why the publisher that Wilson founded published the book The Case for Christian Nationalism. Wilson has described himself as a paleo-confederate because while he thinks that slavery in the Confederacy included sinful harshness, he also think that there are ways that he thinks it rightly reflected hierarchy.
That may seem like an extreme position, and it is. But Wilson and his views are gaining purchase. Pete Hegseth attends a church started by Wilson. Wilson has been profiled recently by CNN and Politico and many other news organizations because of how he illustrates those who are positively using Christian Nationalism as a self descriptive term because they understand their role as Christians to dominate society and not just live in a hierarchical security, but to be on the dominate side of that hierarchy.
I am wary of even bringing up all of this in regard to Christ Over Culture because none of that is advocated in this book. But this has always been my wariness about even discussing questions like “how to be white” or “what is the role of the predominately white church in society.” Christ Over Culture grapples with the problem of “whiteness” (understood in the academic sense of the cultural belief in racial hierarchy where people commonly defined as White are racially superior), so I think for those who have eye to see, there are good answers to the questions raised here.
I have been a part of groups that have discussed race in the church for decades. And I have seen a regular (but small) stream of people who start to grapple with the reality of the social construction of race and the history of that within the church, but who then move toward a white nationalist position similar to Wilson’s. Christ Over Culture rejects that framing and is written explicitly against that, but in the wrong hands, there are people who distort the message of Christ and the gospel to be one of hierarchy, not one of freedom.
Christ over Culture: A Gospel Journey to Racial Redemption by Dan Crain Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition