2 Books That Help Us Understand Race and Unity in the Church
Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America
By Christian Smith & Michael Emerson
“From the isolated, individualistic perspective of most white evangelicals and many other Americans, there really is no race problem other than bad interpersonal relationships.” – Christian Smith
“One consequence of thoroughgoing evangelical individualism is a tendency to be ahistorical, to not grasp fully how history has an influence on the present.” – Christian Smith
One Blood: Parting Words to the Church on Race and Love
By John Perkins
“The reason we haven’t solved the race problem in America after hundreds of years is that people apart from God are trying to create unity, while people under God who already have unity are not living out the unity we possess. The result of both of these conditions is disastrous for America. Our failure to find cultural unity as a nation is directly related to the church’s failure to preserve our spiritual unity.” – John Perkins
“We need to get beyond our ignorance of the other. We need to move beyond the thinking that white privilege means that all whites live a privileged life. This perspective ignores the reality of class in this country…When we understand the details of the other’s story we realize that we have much more in common than we ever imagined.” – John Perkins