Do Black lives matter to white Christians?

The empirical evidence is lacking, and centuries of enslavement, abuse, rape, and murder of Black lives by the dominant white culture of the United States suggest not. Instead of demonstrating how Black lives matter, far too many white Christians offer up a supposedly gospel-tinged counternarrative that says that “all lives matter.”

​The current historical moment, in which white Christians continue to allow bigots to hijack the language and symbols of the Christian religion to endorse their hateful ideology and then employ the language of love and forgiveness to undermine the radical urgency of antiblack racism exposes the morally compromised state of white Christianity. Therefore, I will continue to agree with James H. Cone that so long as Black lives continue to be exploited, brutalized, and destroyed with impunity, God is most clearly revealed in the suffering of Black men and women. 

If, as Christians, we profess the Incarnation—in becoming human God has made the suffering of the oppressed God’s own—then we must be able to affirm that Christ is Black. I just published a book chapter entitled, "Rethinking Radical Nonviolence: Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Racism" published in a new collection edited by Todd Walatka, Óscar Romero and Catholic Social Teaching (University of Notre Dame Press, 2024), in which I compare the views of St. Óscar Romero and James H. Cone on liberative violence in conversation with Catholic Social Teaching.

My goal is to find common ground between Romero’s and Cone’s understandings of revolution as prioritizing nonviolence yet allowing for self-defense in the context of unrelenting racial injustice. I hope you will read it.

undpress.nd.edu/9780268208752/oscar-romero-and-catholic-social-teaching/