The Evangelical Wild Card

By: Luke Miao (a.k.a. the Evangelical Wild Card)

NOTE: This piece was originally meant for the fantastic United? We Pray podcast hosted by Isaac Adams and Austin Suter, I had written two pieces for them and while they’re publishing the other one, this one was deemed too long for their work so I decided to post this on my own blog instead. Still though, if you are a Christian who is passionate about racial reconciliation then please go visit their amazing ministry (their website is linked above)! You will definitely enjoy the wholesome and biblical ways in which they pursue racial and ethnic unity in the body of Christ.

“My theological opposition to same-sex marriage and transgenderism could be just as bad as my theological forefathers’ theological opposition to the abolition of slavery, racial integration, and interracial marriage.”

On an evening in the spring of 2019, as a second-semester freshman at a Southern Baptist affiliated university, this thought entered my head, and I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said it dramatically changed the entire course of my intellectual and ideological life and thought. 

I was raised in a traditional evangelical Christian home, my parents were both committed, Bible-believing, conservative Christians, and I deeply imbibed those values that they instilled in me. One of them was the beautiful God given distinction and complementary nature between male and female that defined what marriage was, a sacred covenant before God between one man and one woman. Naturally, like Christians in the past 2,000 years have nearly unanimously affirmed, this meant that same sex sexual acts were sinful and the verses in both the Old and New Testaments that condemned homosexual behavior affirmed this sexual ethic. I didn’t question it during my formative years, and when the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide came down in 2015, I, like the vast majority of evangelical organizations, opposed the decision as promoting a lifestyle that was incompatible with biblical teaching.

Little did I know, so, so many of my white evangelical brothers and sisters from generations past similarly twisted the exact same Bible to argue that support for slavery, segregation, and opposition to interracial marriage was essential to orthodoxy and following God’s commands. 

The thought had always been in the back of my head since I learned about the Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967 that legalized interracial marriage nationwide when doing a basic survey of America’s racial history. I lightly thought about the religious folks who opposed interracial marriage on “biblical” grounds but I never really took it seriously, dismissing it as a mere fringe that didn’t represent the majority of Bible believing Christians, and therefore not something that could be reasonably compared to the modern idea of same sex marriage.

However, an incident happened in the spring of 2019 that launched me in knee-deep into this conflation between interracial marriage and same-sex marriage, and it launched me into a spiritual crisis about my faith that to this day remains the largest episode of me seriously doubting and questioning my faith and religious tradition.

I was on the swim & dive team for my college, Oklahoma Baptist University, and one day I was casually sitting with two of my teammates and we were discussing couples on the swim team. We were speculating whether or not any of them would end up married, I brought up a couple in which the guy was black and the girl was white, and one of my teammates said that some of the white girl’s family might have a problem with it because the guy was black, all three of us then rightly sighed at how wrongheaded that opposition was. Then the other teammate turned to me and said, “Hey Luke, didn’t you retweet that thing the other day?” and I responded by saying “Well which retweet are you talking about? I retweet a lot of things haha.” And my teammate then said “That tweet that said “You can’t be racist and be a Christian.”” I responded to that by saying “oh yeah, of course, I stand by that.”

That’s when the seed got planted in my head.

I then thought “wait, but what about all of the ones in American history who were both racist and people who professed the name of Christ at the same time? And what if my views on homosexuality and transgenderism are actually as bad as that and I just don’t realize it?”

I did a Google search that night to research the history on the specific subject of white evangelicals and race in America, intending to quickly dispel the conflation between past racism and modern day opposition to LGBTQ+ ways of life, only for the exact opposite to happen.

I learned about Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield’s slave ownership, with Edwards not only buying a young slave girl off the docks of Rhode Island (and writing a sermon on the back of the bill of sale later), but also defending a fellow minister who was Arminian and therefore theologically different from him, all with the intent of justifying American race based chattel slavery as not sinful and disqualifying from ministry. With Whitefield it’s even worse, he actively advocated for the legalization of slavery in colonial Georgia when it was actually initially banned, and when he succeeded in pushing through the legalization he called it part divine will. That’s right, arguably the two most important evangelical leaders of the 18th century were also unapologetic practitioners and defenders of race-based chattel slavery.

I learned about the Southern Presbyterian Church openly defending segregation theologically for two decades from 1942-1966, with Lemuel Nelson Bell, Billy Graham’s father-in-law, being part of that defense.

I learned about the Southern Baptist Convention being founded on wanting to defend slavery, and their defense of white power during Reconstruction and racial segregation during Jim Crow. 

I learned about Bob Jones Sr.’s infamous sermon in 1960 “Is Segregation Scriptural?” In which the language he uses to “biblically” defend segregation and the idea that interracial marriage is wrong is eerily similar to the way non-LGBTQ affirming evangelicals talk about how we love all people but can’t affirm the lifestyle. 

I read the Gospel Coalition’s article by Justin Taylor, where he interviews four historians, Dr. Sean Michael Lucas, Dr. Matthew Hall, Dr. Carolyn Renee Dupont, and Dr. Rusty Hawkins, on the role of white evangelicals during the Civil Rights Movement, and all four affirm that white evangelicals throughout the South were overwhelmingly opposed to the Civil Rights Movement, often citing Scripture to justify their support for segregation and opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. 

It then dawned on me that my faith tradition, conservative evangelicalism, was consistently on the wrong side of racial issues in both the mid 19th century and mid 20th century, while theological liberals who had often departed from the fidelity of Scripture tended to be the ones that were on the right side. In other words, the theological ancestors of those supporting a traditional view of sexuality and gender right now, my tradition, were also the ones who were resistant to racial change both during the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, while the theological ancestors of those supporting a progressive view on sexuality and gender were the ones who supported the end of chattel slavery and racial segregation in the United States.

What I had intended to be a 5 minute Google search to disprove the attempted conflation between race and sexuality all of a sudden had me in a deep spiritual quagmire that I felt hopelessly trapped in. I was sitting in the study room of my dorm hall, just in a daze, not knowing what to believe anymore and feeling incredibly disillusioned. What was effectively going through my mind was, “Am I as bad as Christian slavery defenders and segregationists of the American past for my convictions on sexuality?!”

The thought haunted me to no end, I was unable to concentrate during class, I lost sleep, and I stopped talking about all my interests (which I normally talk way too much about, as all my friends can attest to), and everyone around me could notice that something was wrong with me. I was genuinely horrified that I would come before God after I died and he would tell me of how deeply I wronged my gay, lesbian, and transgender neighbors, much like Edwards, Whitefield, and especially Robert Lewis Dabney (as well as many other Christians) were inevitably confronted about their racism towards blacks after they came face to face with our Savior. I would constantly envision persecuted black people from our country’s past coming forward, telling me not to make the same mistake that Southern Baptists and Presbyterians in the 19th and 20th century made. I would often envision “endless falling” as my eternal punishment for my “sinful views” about monogamous, loving, same sex relationships, as I certainly hope Edwin Epps from 12 Years A Slave is getting what he deserved for his horrific treatment of his slaves. When I opened up to friends and professors about my spiritual plight, they all essentially in different ways just told me to focus on the Scriptures, and not what others said, but the problem was that I was fully aware of the fact that I’m as prone to bias as anyone else is, so what if I read the Bible and conclude that homosexuality is still sinful simply because that’s what I was raised to believe, much like segregationists and slaveholders of the past read the Bible and concluded that their racist theological positions were right because that’s what they were raised to believe?! This caused me disillusionment and doubt with my faith like never before, because I was starting to feel like everything I was taught, my theological tradition, was all just a lie.

I’m what a lot would call a “glutton for punishment”, and so I dug deeper, seeing all the horrific racism in our history, as well as the Christian complicity that often came with that horror. I learned about how Southern states immediately tried to subvert the 13th Amendment after it was passed by passing black codes and convict leasing to effectively put black people back into a state of slavery. I learned about the violence of the failed era known as Reconstruction, where white Southerners were so enraged at the idea of black people having equal rights that they formed up the KKK to intimidate blacks and violently force them back into their so called “place” through a campaign of terror involving lynchings, castrations, and mass murder. I learned about the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and just how utterly widespread it was, about how white Northerners and white Southerners, desperate to show a united America to the rest of the world as an emerging world power, both decided to propagate the false and mythical lost cause narrative (that portrayed the South as the victims of the war) to speed up regional reconciliation, all at the low, low cost of the violent disenfranchisement and oppression of African Americans. I learned about the 1915 movie Birth of a Nation, that allowed for both the propagation of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy (the US President at the time, Woodrow Wilson, played it in the White House and called it “history written with lightning”) and for the re-emergence of the KKK, as well as the ensuing spike in racial violence towards blacks the film (which portrayed black men as rapacious beasts out to prey on vulnerable and pure Southern white women) caused. I learned about the rioting and mass resistance that ensued during federal integration of Southern public schools and universities after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, as well as the murders of civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney in 1964 who were trying to help black Mississippians exercise their 15th Amendment right to vote, and that their murderer was a conservative Baptist pastor. The movie Murder in Mississippi (1990) covers the stories of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, and there’s a particularly disturbing scene in the movie where there’s a pastor that condemns integrationists and “Jew-mixers” and uses the n-word repeatedly in front of a congregation all adorned with Klan hoods. When I was watching the movie I kept remembering how most of my white Bible-believing brothers and sisters in Christ at the time who were in that place had the same theological beliefs as me and were opposing the good guys.

I had always known that racism existed in the abstract, but I had largely thought it was mostly a thing of the past before this. I had vague awareness of the issues of police brutality but thought most racism today was isolated and individual, and that there was plenty of racial bias in society but that widespread racial conflict was mostly just drama. I had my own personal experiences of racism/racial bias as an Asian man in America (which I highlight in my other piece that got published on the United? We Pray podcast), but I thought the best solution for all that was to strive for colorblindness (I was a huge fan of Ben Shapiro style colorblindness at the time…yeah…not my proudest era). I more or less held to a more defensive mindset in regards to the criticism of racial issues in America, my parents lived through the Communist revolution in China as kids in the 60s and 70s and experienced horrible oppression under Chairman Mao’s regime that left their families and country destitute, and they were able to work hard, move to America, the land of the free, to give my sister and I a better life they couldn’t have dreamed of giving us in China, my thought process was something along the lines of “don’t black Americans understand just how good they have it in America? My parents experienced real oppression, and while slavery and Jim Crow was certainly bad, it’s all over now! Black Americans have more opportunities here than they could ever dream of in most of the world, they should be more grateful instead of complaining so much about what happened in the past! How could they claim to be systemically discriminated against and oppressed in the great free land of the United States of America that’s done so much for me and my family?” This whole spiritual crisis changed all of that for me. I got to know the sordid details of just how deeply entrenched racial injustice was in our history, for how long it was deeply entrenched, and that all of  it really wasn’t that long ago. Slavery started in America in 1619, ended in 1865, and Jim Crow lasted until 1964/1968 (depending on which Civil Rights Act you consider the “end” of legal segregation). In other words, that’s 345-349 years of openly legal and violently enforced racial oppression, and it’s been less than sixty years since all of that, my parents are both older than the famous Civil Rights Act of 1964, that’s right, my parents were already alive during a time when racial segregation was still legal. There are still people today who remember segregated schools, segregated water fountains, watching their friends and loved ones getting hosed down and hounded by dogs just for wanting basic civil rights, and watching their loved ones get lynched while the perpetrators got off scot-free. Is it any wonder that whenever there’s another high profile racial incident, there’s a collective wail amongst the African American community? The idea of black inferiority and criminality was entrenched in the United States for centuries, it’s simply unreasonable to think that it doesn’t still play a big factor in many people’s subconscious minds in America that cause them to react in a biased way when they see a black person (whether that be for a job interview or coming across them on the street). I used to think that America’s serious racial problems and issues were mostly behind us, and any lingering racial issues that still existed weren’t that big a deal, but my deep dive into American racial history completely obliterated that illusion. There are still significant lingering effects of past racism that affect and impact American society today, both systemically and individually, and we need to have honest conversations about it with humility, empathy, and understanding, as well as always centering the Lord as our guide in these conversations.

It took me over two years, but I was finally able to—after copious amounts of research and digging—shake off the conflation between race and sexuality, and I have fortunately remained faithful to a biblical view on marriage, sexuality and gender. But a byproduct of that whole multi-year ordeal was a new understanding of the way race and racism still operate in our society today that I didn’t understand—and probably couldn’t possibly understand—before the whole ordeal. Racism is a real sin, it afflicts us as sinful humanity, always has and probably always will. What we need to do to combat that is to do what is instructed of us in Micah 6:8, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before our God. Do justice for our ethnically diverse neighbors, have mercy and compassion for our neighbors with racial wounds, and be genuinely humble and empathetic during these conversations about race and not defensive or dismissive.

Ending Prayer: Come, come O Lord! Please show us both mercy and justice for our evil racism and the racial division in our society today! Please bring us the racial healing that only You can bring through your power and might! May us showcase the true love and unity that’s on display in Ephesians, Galatians, and Revelation, and may we be united in Your Glory and for Your Glory and Praise! Please help those who are blind to historical and contemporary racism open or turn their eyes to see the suffering of their racially different neighbors and please fill them with compassion and empathy to their race-related struggles! Please help all of us look inward and find the sinfully racist thoughts we may unconsciously harbor towards others and please help us combat that sinful nature and temptation in us! Please help us see the beauty in our ethnically diverse neighbors and have intentionality in loving them and living Spirit-filled multi-ethnic lives with them! Help us Lord! For we are weak and you are strong! Come, come help us O LORD!

Amen.

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

“It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,” said Lord Henry languidly. “You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.”

“I don’t think I shall send it anywhere,” he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. “No, I won’t send it anywhere.”

Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette. “Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.”

“I know you will laugh at me,” he replied, “but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.”

Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.

“Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same.”

“Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn’t know you were so vain; and I really can’t see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you—well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don’t flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him.”

“You don’t understand me, Harry,” answered the artist. “Of course I am not like him. I know that perfectly well. Indeed, I should be sorry to look like him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”

“Dorian Gray? Is that his name?” asked Lord Henry, walking across the studio towards Basil Hallward.

“Yes, that is his name. I didn’t intend to tell it to you.”

“Oh, I can’t explain. When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life. I suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?”

“Not at all,” answered Lord Henry, “not at all, my dear Basil. You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet—we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke’s—we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it—much better, in fact, than I am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do. But when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me.”

“I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry,” said Basil Hallward, strolling towards the door that led into the garden. “I believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.”

“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,” cried Lord Henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into the garden together and ensconced themselves on a long bamboo seat that stood in the shade of a tall laurel bush. The sunlight slipped over the polished leaves. In the grass, white daisies were tremulous.

After a pause, Lord Henry pulled out his watch. “I am afraid I must be going, Basil,” he murmured, “and before I go, I insist on your answering a question I put to you some time ago.”

“What is that?” said the painter, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.

“You know quite well.”

“I do not, Harry.”