Jim Wallis: Racism “in the air that we breathe”

White racism is endemic in the United States, according to a prominent Evangelical Left author and activist who preached Sunday at the Washington National Cathedral.

“For some, the potential loss of historic white supremacy and privilege – which all of us have become accustomed to, and which I believe was America’s original sin – is still with us,” warned Sojourners President Jim Wallis.

Wallis spoke March 13 at the Episcopal cathedral in Washington, D.C., where he gave a sermon at the 11:15 a.m. service and spoke at the cathedral’s 10 a.m. Sunday Forum.

In his sermon, Wallis stated that sin must be relegated to, quoting the prophet Isaiah, “the former things, the things of old.”

“But our original sin was at the foundations of this nation,” Wallis declared, citing the justification of slavery and the confiscation of land from Native American peoples. “That’s in our DNA, it’s very deep, and it won’t be overcome easily.”

Wallis described the water contamination in Flint, Michigan as a parable for racism “in the air that we breathe, in the water that we drink.”

“When racial fears are provoked and promoted it pollutes the environment and the atmosphere of American life,” Wallis warned. The Sojourners founder named repentance as the answer, but noted it did not involve simply saying sorry or regretting the past. “Repentance means turning around and going in a new direction”

Wallis observed that “many people” in America are angry due to economics, marginalization, or not being listened to or cared for.

“Such anger is now in great danger of being manipulated and used for self-aggrandizing political purposes to divide rather than unite America,” the Sojourners president assessed.

Wallis, who has been on a cross-country tour to promote his new book America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America, reported that he sensed “a hunger for multi-racial truth-telling”, for justice and for healing.” Public revelations of killings of young men and women of color, and a new generation of activists, are awakening many, Wallis insisted. “And now I hear even more white Christians saying that if we acted more Christian than white, parents would have less to fear for their children.”

The American Baptist clergyman asserted that Americans he encountered were interested in focusing on the state of race relations in the country, while the media was preoccupied with the “horse race” of the U.S. presidential election.

“This cannot just be a political movement. Politics will not be enough this time, and neither political party have embraced this in the way that they can and must,” Wallis determined. “It will only be a spiritual movement that can change our politics.”

Quoting Pope Francis that “building bridges, rather than walls, is the Christian vocation” Wallis proclaimed that the emerging American diversity was a gift and not a danger. “But this will take a battle, no doubt, a moral battle – a spiritual struggle for the integrity of our very faith.”

Wallis read Galatians Chapter 3:28: “there is no Jew or Gentile, no slave or free, no male or female, we are all one in Christ Jesus.”

“Given what is happening in our country, I want to shout out that text,” Wallis declared, noting that it was a baptismal text, with the church saying that it broke down barriers of race, class and gender.

“Whatever else we do, we say that we are those who want to unite and not divide: how do we get that message out in the face of this alarming and dangerous discord that includes hatred and even violence?”

Recalling a story that he frequently tells about speaking to his son’s fifth-grade class about immigration, Wallis told of the students’ bafflement at deportations and incredulity that congress and government officials were not stopping them. Telling the diverse students that lawmakers explained their constituents were afraid, Wallis exclaimed “they are afraid of you” because the students look like what America is becoming and “they don’t think it’s going to work.”

“Our mission is to teach the rest of America that you are really cool,” Wallis determined as the vocation of the people of God.

Wallis challenged that it was necessary to change a narrative that “privilege and punishment” are the result of skin color, insisting “that’s contrary to God’s purpose and God’s creation, and God’s future, and that’s a fact we must no longer accept.”

Noting that his wife, one of the first women to be ordained to the priesthood in the Church of England, changed perceptions about what woman can or cannot do, Wallis asked “what would it mean for people across the country to change our nation’s narrative on race, to repent of our original sin of valuing some lives so much less than other lives, and helping to build a bridge over the present turbulent waters” to “an emerging new America”? Wallis concluded quoting Psalm 126: “Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy! He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.”