VOICES: Churches can build relationships across region’s racial divisions

Sociologist Korie Little Edwards, known for her groundbreaking study on leaders of multi-racial faith communities, claims that racial justice work is spiritual work — not because it is interior, private, or immaterial, but because it requires the courageous hope, born in faith, that the truth will set us free.

Edwards was one of the keynote speakers at a recent conference in Dayton, The Common Good in a Divided City: Racism, the Church, and the Challenge of Regional Solidarity. The conference, which was open to the public, was inspired by a question raised repeatedly by Br. Ray Fitz, SM, former president of the University of Dayton, civic leader, and scholar of Catholic social teaching: How can we promote the common good for all across the region, when we live in spaces that divide us? How can the church, itself so divided, be a catalyst and partner in building the regional common good? Bro. Ray himself has labored with many Dayton partners for decades to address this question, but much work remains to be done.

The conference gathered people from across the region to focus on the roles of Christian communities in both abetting and resisting racial injustice. Three keynotes by Dr. Edwards, Catholic theologian Maureen O’Connell, and community organizer and sociologist Rich Woods were followed by local respondents and dialogue among participants. O’Connell, speaking of white Catholicism’s long complicity in racial injustice out of her family history, illustrated Bryan Massingale’s insight that “White comfort sets the limit on racial justice.” Woods challenged the “gospel of niceness,” pointing out the prevalence of conflict in Jesus’ ministry and inviting participants to take up the work of building ethical democracy.

Local respondent Darryl Fairchild reflected on “inclusion friction” as necessary to the work of building the Beloved Community. Kateri Dillon asked why Catholics publicly, in the mass, confess individual sin but do not confess institutional failure. Rev. Renard Allen energized the conference with his reminder that the Kingdom is a social reality, not an individual choice.

These problems we face are legacies of choices from the past that have profound power in the present. Knowledge of history is essential to understand how redlining, highway construction and white flight have created spaces that are racially divided, even if those who live in them now do not wish for them to be so. But we must also reckon with the ongoing power of these spaces to divide. So much of what separates us is built into the everyday spaces that we take for granted: municipal boundaries, highways that connect and divide us, housing policies that undergird our experiences of prosperity and poverty, safety and vulnerability, abundant or limited opportunity.

Churches have always been important to these questions, on the one hand justifying and implementing white supremacy and on the other nurturing and sustaining creative resistance to it. Either way, Christian communities have resources important for this struggle, such as institutional memory of both complicity and heroic witness, spiritual disciplines, and scriptures that call for justice and community. They also have gathering spaces and mailing lists. Churches can build relationships across the region’s racial divisions — beginning by speaking and listening to each other truthfully.

Kelly S. Johnson is Fr. William J. Ferree Chair of Social Justice at the University of Dayton

Vincent J. Miller is Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture at the University of Dayton