Thread by @AlsoACarpenter

It's clear to me that what @JemarTisby, @kkdumez, @socofthesacred, @ndrewwhitehead, @bethallisonbarr, @robertpjones, @DavidAFrench,
others are doing is attempting to expose the historically contingent, man-made, and extra-Biblical social philosophies that have been so 1/

2/ intertwined with Christianity in White American consciousness that the two are nearly indistinguishable.

Every age must do this self-critical work to avoid the ever present, and wildly toxic, age hubris from which we all suffer to varying degrees.

3/ (I mean, the SBC, for example, was created to defend the institution of racial slavery, and I'm glad many have since located the broad social philosophies that lived parasitically within that "Christianity" since. The forces of stasis, as we are seeing today, relentlessly

4/ attacked the deplorable jeremiads of their "deconstructors" as well. Someone even suggested the other day that ideas like "states' rights" and "freedom of association" are "Biblical" concepts of "freedom," or whatever, when they are easily shown to be the constructions of the

5/ Confederacy, the Lost Cause, and Massive Resistance to desegregation.)

For those committed to this man-made, historically contingent American social philosophy, any attack feels like an attack on Christianity itself.

6/ Any self-reflective person knows how powerful socialization is. (And no one chooses their own context of socialization, so this isn't about natural "guilt" or whatever.) But all one needs to do is study Christianity in other historical contexts, other nations and cultures, and

7/ the work of those historically marginalized within our own context to see how much of what passes "Biblical" is actually historically novel thinking developed for identifiably specific reasons at specific times for specific socio-cultural purposes. And these stories, culled

8/ from the work of historians, sociologists, and statisticians, need to be told and we need to listen. The worst we can do is respond as though we live with the god-like privilege of aperspectival vision and continue to uncritically hold to extra-Biblical ideas as though we

9/9 learned them from Jesus and Paul.

And if you disagree with something, just disagree with it. Rejecting the whole undertaking is an obvious cope to maintain position and reject the hard work of sanctification. IMO.

Here's an example: the difference between the White American tradition on the social mission of the Church and the Black American tradition. It is so easy to see how something presumed "Biblical" is historically and culturally contingent:

alsoacarpenter.com/2021/08/02/the…