Beth Moore: Does God value justice? Read the Bible

White evangelicals who fail to stand against racism and injustice need to read their Bible, Beth Moore told a crowd at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary.

“How do people who claim to love God and place such a high value on Scripture place such a low value on justice?” Moore asked participants at a conference titled, “Time to Wake Up: Racism in the White Church.”

Moore described how the study of Scripture and several national events beginning with the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin prompted her halting pilgrimage toward social justice that gained clarity “when the fog started clearing” in 2016.

“I need you to think of me on this journey toward anti-racism as a middle-schooler at best. … Know that I have just begun my own journey,” she said. “I have been part of the white church and of white thinking within the church all my white life.”

Moore described growing up in Arkadelphia, Ark., where she never heard racism mentioned at church.

“There was no need to make a big deal about race in my church. We were as white as our walls­—whiter than snow, you might say. Just the way many of us would have told you God preferred it,” she said.

‘Fear was a core value’

She recalled her churchgoing and Bible-reading grandmother standing at the window watching her and her older sister cross the street each morning to make sure they arrived safely at school. She feared they would  be raped by the Black young men sitting on the schoolhouse steps.

“You need to understand, fear was a core value in my home. I might suggest it also is a core value in our country. And God help us, has it ever been a core value in the white church,” Moore said.

“If you want to control us, tell us everything is a threat—that everything is at stake every minute and everything is a slippery slope.”

Even as a young school girl, she understood her grandmother’s racism was wrong, but only because she “took it too far.” To many in majority-white culture—and certainly in the white church—there is an acceptable level of racism, as long as it isn’t taken too far, she asserted.

At age 41, when Moore wrote the “Breaking Free” Bible study, it included a session on the stronghold of racial prejudice, and she said her church honestly wanted to become more diverse but didn’t know how.

“I believed that generations of deep bonds to racism had been broken in my generation and in me by the very grace of God,” she said.

Slow awakening to racism

In the years that followed, she confessed she was so busy leading Bible conferences she did not pay attention to social issues that would have made it clear racism was still prevalent.

“At that time, such things as the titanic need for criminal justice reform had not even registered with me,” she said. “But disturbance did come stubbornly, and it did refuse to depart.”

Moore recalled the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and how white evangelical churches for the most part chose to “remain deafeningly silent.”

Then came the presidential election in 2016, at which point the evangelicalism she had known became “completely unrecognizable,” she said.

“What became increasingly and startlingly clear was that our politics informed our faith, rather than our faith informing our politics,” Moore said.

“And we can’t even see it. … I’ve been so much nicer on Twitter than I wanted to be. What I wanted to say is: ‘You’re not reading your Bible. You’re not reading the very Bible you are quoting. When your favorite verses are the ones that somehow support your sins and strongholds, something has gone terribly awry.’”

White supremacy is “deeply ingrained” in much of white culture and white churches, it requires “hard work” to uproot it, she said.

White evangelical Christians need to humble themselves enough to learn from the experiences of Black brothers and sisters, Moore said.

The Bible tells me so

Any injustice is too much injustice according to Scripture, she asserted, pointing to examples from the Hebrew prophets, the Gospels and the New Testament epistles.

“You cannot read the Bible through and through, you cannot read the whole counsel and get to the end of it and think justice is not a matter of great gospel importance to God,” Moore said.

She particularly cited the teaching of Jesus, echoed in the epistle of James, that the royal law is to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

“We have come to a point in time when even to put ‘love your neighbor’ on social media is to be called ‘woke,’” she lamented.

White Christian Americans have been reluctant to condemn injustice because they have benefitted from it, Moore asserted.

“Racism and injustice are not in step with the gospel,” she said.

Gradual healing from racism

Speaking from her own experience, Moore said white Christians need to examine closely the attitudes and beliefs about race that have shaped them.

“The question is not whether we have absorbed it. The question is how deeply and invasively we have absorbed it,” she said.

Too often, white evangelicals want ethnic diversity, but only if they remain in authority and “control the narrative,” she said.

Given the pervasive power of racism, the process of moving toward anti-racism can be a slow and awkward process, Moore said.

She pointed to the story in Mark 8 in which Jesus healed a blind man haltingly and gradually. After Jesus spit on the man’s eyes and laid hands on him, the blind man said he saw people “as trees walking.” So, Jesus again touched him, and the man then saw clearly.

“I’ve got such a long way to go in my healing,” Moore said. “I’m just going to keep saying to Jesus, ‘Keep touching them, spit on my sight, until I see people the way you see people.’”