Reconciliation Blues

Summary: A discussion of the difficulties of being a Black Christian in predominately White Christian institutional spaces. 

I met Edward Gilbreath at a Jude3 conference in August 2019, back in the pre-pandemic get together in-person era of conferences. However, I have known of him for a long time. He was a writer for Christianity Today, their first, and for many years only, Black staff person. And I previously read Gilbreath's book on Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I also have known his father-in-law and sister-in-law for years (15-20) through work, and I think we both attended the same church for a while, although I am not sure if we were attending at the same time. That somewhat shared experience and roughly similar ages (he is about 3-4 years older than I am) mean that as I was reading Reconciliation Blues, his story of the differences of experience between Black and White Christians was even more tangible for me.

Gilbreath attended Judson College. I attended Wheaton, not far away. Judson is denominationally affiliated with the American Baptists, and I considered going because I grew up American Baptist, many people I know went there. But by the point Gilbreath entered Judson, he was already conversant in White Evangelical because of his teen youth group experience in a White Evangelical church. The era of the experience does matter. Dante Stewart is roughly 20 years younger than Gilbreath, and their college experiences are different. Stewart was at a large state school, and his White Evangelical experience was through para-church college sports ministry. Gilbreath was at a small, predominately White college on the Evangelical edge of a Mainline denomination. But there was also a lot of experiential overlap. The experiences were similar, but I think some of the expectations were different because the era was different.

The Promise Keeper's style friendship-based racial reconciliation movement may not have peaked until about when Reconciliation Blues came out in 2006, but that culture was common a couple of decades before its publication. The critiques of the individualism of that era's racial reconciliation movement in books like Divided by Faith and the more recent I Bring the Voice of My People and Myth of Colorblind Christians, but the kernel of the critique is still the same. Gilbreath mainly reflects on his experience of college and his early work at Christianity Today and in Christian publishing from roughly 1991 until 2006, a 15 year period that had a lot of feel-good approaches to handling race.

Reconciliation Blues was one of the personal experience memoirs showing that those approaches did not always work. Memoirs like Austin Channing Brown's I'm Still Here and Shoutin' in the Fire came later, but this story of the frustration of Black Christians trying to survive in White Christian spaces is such an old story. It goes at least back to Frederick Douglass' critiques of White Christianity and his leaving William Lloyd Garrison's supervision. WEB DuBois' double consciousness was one of the early sociological explanations of the problem. Memoirs are always about a point in time. Reconciliation Blues is about the 15-year era before Obama's rise and the false idea of post-racial America. It is a reminder of how common and harmful the colorblind theology of the post-Civil Rights era was. And it is a reminder that hearing voices from other generations can help contextualize our current period, especially for people coming to current conversations around race for the first time.

So many issues are the same, politics, individual vs. systemic responses to race and poverty and other social problems, the insular nature of White Evangelicalism, the attacks against directly dealing with race as a type of liberalism or Marxist/Communist thought. It is both encouraging and discouraging to see that there are things that have changed, but that so little fundamentally has changed. It has only been about 15 years since Reconciliation Blues was written, but that 15 years feels much longer in many ways.