David W. Swanson > Quotes

“For the most part, white Christianity is not making disciples who reflect and announce the division-healing kingdom of God, and the evidence is plain to see.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“From these women and men, I’ve come to see that the segregation inherent in the Christianity I grew up in is not neutral or merely a reflection of individual choices and preferences. We don’t really talk about segregation anymore. The word sounds like a relic of the civil rights movement, an era to be studied clinically from the distance of history. Most white people, despite the racial homogeneity of most of our churches, don’t think of ourselves as being segregated from people of color. And we certainly don’t imagine that we actively contribute to the racial segregation of our society. Consider, though, the racial and ethnic demographics of our churches. As a group, white evangelicals are 76 percent racially homogeneous while mainline Protestant denominations are 86 percent white. Though some denominations are racially diverse, the individual congregations within them are overwhelmingly not. Using a sociological definition, no more than 12 to 14 percent of American congregations are racially mixed.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Time and again, well-meaning white people who dispute the notion that they are privileged have told me that they, too, have experienced hardship in their lives. Some of us were raised with the belief that anyone can get ahead in our society if they’re willing to work hard enough; the notion that anyone has been given an advantage because of their race would be laughable if it weren’t so offensive. Ken Wytsma, founder of The Justice Conference, offers a helpful response to these pushbacks. He writes, “White privilege doesn’t mean your life isn’t hard. It means that if you are a person of color, simply by virtue of that, your life might be harder.” He continues, “White privilege means that even if you’re the unluckiest white person born in the United States, you were still born into a fortunate race.” 4 This is essential for us to understand. Regardless of the personal setbacks and struggles we’ve each known—including structural prejudices against women and poor people, for example—racial whiteness still grants white people a measure of advantage that differs for people of color.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“While we often think of where we live as a matter of personal preference, there is actually a massive amount of policy and legislation behind where we reside. As historian Richard Rothstein shows in The Color of Law, because racial discrimination was official federal policy through the middle of the twentieth century, black citizens were excluded from federally insured mortgages. 17 Not only that, housing developers were only eligible for government insurance if they maintained a strict policy of banning African Americans from inhabiting the homes they built. The racial divide we see today between many affluent suburbs and nearby urban neighborhoods is not an accident of history nor the amalgamation of countless individual choices; it is de jure (according to law) segregation, constructed and sustained by federal and, in many cases, state and local government policies. This means that the majority of us live where we do not simply as a matter of preference or convenience. How we decide where to live is shaped by what we might call a housing practice.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Taken together, these three tendencies of white Christianity contribute to making our evangelism tolerable to society. While individual people may disagree with our beliefs, a culture infected with the narrative of racial difference and white superiority does not feel threatened by our discipleship.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“How was it possible, wondered the abolitionist, to have, men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“In his classic book about discipleship and the kingdom of God, The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard claims that a disciple is, most basically, an apprentice “who has decided to be with another person, under appropriate conditions, in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is.” 4 This will become clearer when we turn to racial discipleship, but it’s important to notice that there is nothing uniquely Christian about discipleship. Basically, we’re thinking about the relationship between a student and her teacher in which the student follows the teacher to become like her teacher in order to do what the teacher does.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“but as Jennifer Harvey notes, The problem of racism—the actual racial situation in our faith communities—is not separateness itself. And togetherness is certainly no solution. Separateness is merely a symptom. The real problem is what our differences represent, how they came to be historically, and what they mean materially and structurally still. Racial separateness is evidence of the extent to which our differences embody legacies of unjust material structures. Racial separateness is a to-be-expected outcome of the reality that our differences literally contain still painful and violent histories that remain unrepressed and unrepaired. Racial separateness reveals that our differences are the very manifestation of ongoing forms of racial injustice and white supremacy. A paradigm that cannot meaningfully incorporate this understanding within its very framing of the problem cannot begin to realize its own hoped-for ends. 16”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“About the connection between inadequate discipleship and injustice Dallas Willard wrote, The lack of concern for social justice, where that is evident, itself requires an explanation. And the current position of the church in our world may by better explained by what liberals and conservatives have shared, than by how they differ. For different reasons, and with different emphases, they have agreed that discipleship to Christ is optional to membership in the Christian church. Thus the very type of life that could change the course of human society—and upon occasion has done so—is excluded from the essential message of the church. 3”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“the segregation within white Christianity is not fundamentally a diversity problem: it’s a discipleship problem.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“White evangelical Protestants support political movements to ban or severely restrict refugees at rates higher than almost every other demographic. More than any other religious group, white evangelicals believe that increasing cultural diversity in the United States is a negative development—this despite the fact that the majority of new immigrants are Christians. Consider also the segregation within white churches that we noted in the introduction.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“The other reason we must include our children in these discipleship practices has to do with their own spiritual formation. Our children are born into the smog of our racialized society. Whether or not they recognize it or their parents point it out, these children are born into the historical wound of racial whiteness that, as Wendell Berry says about his own life, was “prepared centuries ago to come alive in me at my birth like a hereditary disease, and to be augmented and deepened by my life.”3 Too often, rather than helping them see through the deceptive smog to the truth, we leave our white children’s imaginations to be corrupted by the narrative of racial difference. And when we abandon our children to the deceptions of our racialized society, they “will observe racial disparities for themselves and explain them by presuming something must be wrong with people of color.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Smith writes that “the liturgical practice of the offering indicates that Christian worship—which is a foretaste of the new creation—embodies a new economy, an alternative economy.”12 More than an act of charity or giving from our disposable income, the offering reveals “a reconfiguration of distribution and consumption” within the kingdom of God.13”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“While mutuality is something we should teach, I’ve come to believe that white Christians most need to see it visibly expressed by their leaders. Because we have been discipled to see ourselves as detached from place and in many ways from our neighbors, we mostly engage with people of color from a posture of power. Cross-cultural missions trips and local service projects are usually done in the role of provider. Rarely do we see examples of white churches engaging with people of color from a position of mutuality, much less from a position of need. So, while we might articulate a theology of mutuality, the practice of presence requires that we see it lived out.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“In some Communion liturgies the congregation will be asked to examine their hearts before receiving the sacraments, the language being borrowed from 1 Corinthians 11: 28: “Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup.” The current of individualism that runs so deeply through white Christianity leads us to think of this important part of the Lord’s Supper in highly individualistic terms. So, for example, we might recall an unacknowledged sin that can be confessed before coming to the table. This is all well and good, but the context for Paul’s admonition to examine ourselves is one in which class divisions and disparities had not been dismantled by the church. He is urging the church to consider how they, corporately, had succumbed to their society’s divisive hierarchies. The call to examine ourselves can include unconfessed individual sin, but we understand it more fully when we see it as an invitation to the entire community. Though it may initially seem strange, Holy Communion is a natural time for us to reflect on how racial discipleship has deformed our desires and assumptions.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“In effect, white people are, to quote James Baldwin again, “still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” 5 Then let’s try to understand.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity