Black Lives Really Do Matter, says Author

With the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Christian Reformed Church and other evangelical denominations have the chance to address the scourge of racism in important ways, said social activist and author Lisa Sharon Harper.

“A window has opened, and now is the time for churches to talk about this,” said Harper, church engagement officer and mobilizer for the evangelical magazine Sojourners, in a talk sponsored by the Office of Race Relations at the Grand Rapids, Mich., office of the CRC.

“Unfortunately, many evangelical churches haven’t stepped up to respond to the Black Lives Matter movement,” she said. “Many people in churches don’t understand what is going on. They are wondering why we don’t just let it go.”

The Black Lives Matter movement was spawned by the death of young black men at the hands of police officers and has recently extended to such college campuses as the University of Missouri, where the president resigned after protests charging that he mishandled a series of racial incidents.

“The Black Lives Matter movement,” said Harper, “is God’s wake-up call to our country, and we need to follow it.”

Harper, who is also an author and anti-racism trainer, was in Grand Rapids to present the Bouma Lecture, sponsored by the Calvin College sociology department.

While many evangelical churches and leaders are lagging behind in speaking out, young people are on the front lines of the Black Lives Matter struggle, Harper said to the group at the CRC office in Grand Rapids.

“Seeing young people stand up at such places as the University of Missouri gives me hope. Their actions brought about real change at the school,” said Harper.

Harper said she also found this to be the case when she worked with young people in and around Ferguson, Mo., where Michael Brown was shot more than a year ago by a white police officer.

“I watched young people engaging the situation there and saw that they became people of faith. It was an amazing thing to watch,” said Harper.

Speaking to about 30 people in the CRC office, she said she believes too many evangelical churches today hold a narrow view of the Bible. “What has happened is that some evangelical churches have taken Jesus out of the whole story. They have truncated the gospel,” she said.

Harper said her theology is based on the concept of shalom — being persons of peace who serve and protect the vulnerable. She sees this right at the start of Scripture in Genesis.

“Shalom is grounded in the knowledge that in the very beginning God created all things and said they are very good,” she said.

“Genesis tells us that we are all connected and we are made in the image of God.”

But then enters the issue of race, she said, a man-made method that separates people. Race has become a way of defining who is in charge, about who holds dominion and controls what is in God’s world.

Over the centuries dominion has played out in painful ways, she said, teaching certain groups of people that they don’t matter and taking away their power to have dominion in their own lives.

“To diminish the capacity of people to exercise dominion, through poverty or oppression, is to diminish the image of God on earth,” Harper said.

Through shalom, which is mentioned more than 5,500 times in the Bible, justice can be achieved, as long as people realize and respond to the reality that everyone in God’s world matters equally, she said.

Harper helped build the Evangelical Immigration Table from 2011-2013.

Her first book, Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican . . . or Democrat, offers a look at the roots of evangelical faith, how evangelicals strayed so far from those roots, and what is bringing them back.

Her second book, Left, Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics, is cowritten with D.C. Innes (an evangelical Republican who is also a Tea-Party member).