"‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much as child of hell as yourselves...For you...have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others’"-Matthew 23:15,23
Ever since the landing of the first settlers and their Black slaves America has been defined and separated by race with WASPs (White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants) at the top of the food chain, absorbing all the wealth and benefits of this country while people of color have always been at the bottom suffering the oppression of white people and having had their labor exploited by the white elite class. Consequently Christianity, and the Lord’s Christian church, has been effected by this white oppression and the doctrine that "everything white is right." This white doctrine of supremacy has perverted the true nature of Christianity and in turn, this has effected its mission of world wide evangelism. Instead of the elitist spreading of our Lord’s word by evangelists who hold a view that mainstream American culture is the end all in history and is vastly superior to any native culture it encounters we need a new way of spreading our Lord’s word that actually reflects the teachings that Jesus taught us when he was walking on this earth.
Firstly, we need to look at the message of Jesus. More than anything Jesus preached against wealth and the ruling Phariseetic and Sadduceetic elite and preached for the downtrodden and the oppressed. In Mk 10:25 Jesus said that, "‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.’" At the same time Jesus spent his time with those who were mostly poor and exploited such as the blind, lame, and prostitutes and others who were reviled by Jewish society, such as the tax collectors. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus stated, "Blessed are you who are poor...hungry...when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you...But woe to you who are rich." (Lk 6:20-22, 25). Jesus shows as that our true Christian mission is to fight with, and for those, who are meek, poor, and oppressed. Isaiah implores us to wash ourselves clean and to "cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow." (Isa 1:16-17). In order to be true Christians we must help those who are oppressed in society and we must tackle the evils of our day and fight with the oppressed against today’s "neo-Pharisees" and to not align ourselves, or to use the language of, the "neo-Pharisees," i.e. the ruling class of our society.
Yet this form of Christianity, that I have just stated above, is practically a foreign concept to most of us in the United States, even though it is based on Biblical principles and the teachings of Jesus Christ. This mainly has to do with the perversion of Christianity by white America and the white ruling class. Whites justified their oppression of Blacks and other people of color in this nation by shaping Christianity to fit their own psychological needs, their views of society, in which they were in a position of power because God favored them. Part of this can be seen in the 19th century in where Protestant preachers talked about the value of the free market system and how they were of Godly principles while the working class and people of color were exploited by the capitalist class. W. E. B. Du Bois, the great Black American intellectual of the early 20th century, stated that this white Christianity "became organized in social clubs where well-bred people met in luxurious churches and gave alms to the poor...On Sunday they listened to sermons," about the blessed poor, to do good, and turn the other check yet, "listen and acted as though they had read, and in very truth they ought to have read–‘Might is right’...’Kill your enemies or be killed’; ‘Make profits by any methods...’" This form of Christianity, distorted by white supremacist theology, shows the utter "hypocrisy(!)" of the people who practice it. This is not the true Jesus, the white skinned, blond haired Jesus of white people is but another form of oppression, as a 1st century Syrian-Egyptian western Semitic Jew Jesus was far from being white. Yet with the distortion of Christianity to fit the oppressive needs of white society came a distortion of our Lord and savior as a white male, instead of the person of color he truly was, and is, and since God identifies with the oppressed and takes up their identity any God who is depicted as white is not God, for truly God is a God of color, of dark skin, since those in America and around the world who are truly oppressed are people of color.
This corruption of Christianity and of Jesus is taken onto the stage of world wide evangelism since most of those who "cross sea and land" to make converts are normally American, and those in America who normally make those trips are ones who practice some form of conservative Christianity perverted by white America (i.e., the ruling class). When we, as world wide evangelists (and white people and/or those who subscribe to this form of Christianity) encounter other cultures in the developing (i.e. the so called "Third") world we tend to view these cultures, whether subconsciously or consciously, as "inferior" to our "blessed" American culture and when we preach to them the Gospel we preach it through an elitist perspective with images of a white Jesus whom in reality, is not really our true God of salvation because the true God of salvation identifies with those whom are oppressed since Jesus, in Matt 25:45, states, "‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me." So for every oppression that is hurled upon those whom have been continually oppressed in our society and throughout the world we do unto Jesus Christ, and being that the people whom are most oppressed in this world by those who hold power are of color, so to is Jesus Christ, or Lord and God, a person of color identifying with the oppressed. So the very fact that we preach a white Jesus and a white theology to mainly people of color oversees means that were are fulfilling our own self-made prophesies of becoming "neo-Pharisees." We are taking the side of the oppressors and perpetuating our internal white supremacy onto a people whom we are turning into Christians " twice as much as children of hell as" ourselves. We are saying to them that their culture is inferior to ours, their skin color (if we the evangelizers are white) is inferior to that the dominant race of America and the West, and that they are inferior people.
At the same time we are preaching this Gospel of white supremacy to people oversees we are also following in the footsteps of U.S. corporate and cultural interests. Many of the countries that we evangelize in are developing nations that are, essentially, clients to institutions of the West such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and American and European corporate interests. As we bring the Holy Bible into these countries we are often followed by, or following, these Western corporate and cultural interests. More often then not these interests serve the bottom line and not the interests of the natives within those countries, this can be seen in a place such as the Congo which U.S. corporate mining companies mine minerals for the use of cell phones, yet these corporate interests align themselves with dictatorial war lords, whom massacre their own people, in order to keep these mines "safe" and open for U.S. corporate interests and profits. As we preach this Gospel of white supremacy and preach about a white Jesus we also justify the greedy interests of the corporate elite of the West (i.e. the dominant region in the world today, the region also dominated by the white elite) and we don’t side with the oppressed. We cannot justify the defense of U.S. corporations while preaching the Gospel without, in turn, becoming the "hypocrites" that Jesus was preaching against. "You cannot serve God and wealth." (Lk 16:13).
In order to truly evangelize the Word of God we must rectify these problems, contradictions, and hypocrisies which are deep seated in this culture of white supremacy that have perverted the true nature of Christianity. We must realize that the Christianity that we mostly preach today is a religion that has been perverted by white elites in order to justify their own actions and thoughts. The white Jesus and the theology that surrounds it is not the true God of the world and every time we preach the white Jesus to people of color oversees we alienate them and tell them that their culture is inferior to that of our American culture. We have to recognize the radical message that Christ preached to us, that the poor and the oppressed are indeed the true blessed children of God for God is on their side. When we bring our own cultural baggage to people around the world we are just perpetuating the very thing that Jesus Christ was against, hypocritical theology. We must recognize this true Christianity over that of the "neo-Phariseetic" Christianity. We must recognize the white privilege/hypocrisy that pervades our theological thoughts and attack it in order to make ourselves better evangelizes of God’s word. In order to do this we must deny the white supremacy that permeates through our Christian doctrine and ourselves, since, as Jesus told us, "‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’" (Mk 8:34). When we evangelize we must deny this foreign white Jesus and put the native culture of the people to whom we are evangelizing to above our own dominant American culture, because it is only through one’s native culture, and a critical understanding of God’s word, that people one can find the true liberation in Christ. In the Congo (an example I used above) this would mean worshiping a Black and oppressed African Jesus and spreading God’s word to others through the Holy Bible and through social action against American and European institutions that rape and pillage that country. In order to fully spread and evangelize the true Gospel of Christ not only must we teach and preach about the true Jesus Christ but we also must fight against the diabolical forces that try to dominant people of color, and oppressed people of all races, all over the world, by fighting white supremacy, jingoism, racism, and elite corporate interests. Once all of this is recognized we can truly evangelize on truth about the true God, the true Jesus, and the true Gospel to all peoples around the globe.
