Beneath Racism: Power, Polity, and Our Problem with Work(ers)

To what world do the most thoughtful and effective responses to racism belong? Perhaps it is the world in which attacking the roots of racism can look like picking up a shovel and honoring the Lord’s Day. Racism continues to be a very important and urgent matter being discussed in our population and in our part of the world, but it is also a question which invariably pushes us to consider the bigger questions of who we are, Whose we are, and what we are for. According to American Novelist Wendell Berry, the root of our racial problem is in our inordinate desire to be superior—not to a group of people, but to our condition. That is, we wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything: of ourselves, of each other, or of our country. 

In stark contrast, the Christian faith commends to us all the life-giving, humanity affirming, cadence of work and rest, work and festivity, work which does not look down on those God-given labors which sustain His handiwork and serve our other labors. A work followed by rest not defined by the absence of labor, but as the fullness and provisional form of the heavenly life to which we have been called and for which we have been redeemed. That life-giving rhythm and cadence can look like picking up a shovel and honoring the Lord’s Day, pointing to a different way of life for a people—for a church—which, as a community dedicated to the goodness of labor and the goodness of festivity in proper and ordered relationship to one another, can in its own way be the counter-cultural kingdom and city the church has been called to be. To what world do the most thoughtful and effective responses to racism belong? To this world, the church.

To discuss this and more, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, sits down with Greystone's Fellow in Christian Tradition and Associate Director of the Reformed and Presbyterian Studies program at Greystone, Dr. Alan D. Strange. Dr. Strange is also the Professor of Church History and Registrar at Mid-America Reformed Seminary in Dyer, IN. Joining the conversation is the Rev. Jesse Crutchley, pastor at Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church (PCA) and member of Greystone’s Presidential Ministerial Council.

Dr. Strange’s Greystone course on Advanced Polity will be offered later this year, and made available to all Greystone Members. Become a member today for unlimited access to the growing Greystone Connect library.

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FOR FURTHER READING:

Wendell Berry, “Racism and the Economy,” (1988) reprinted in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 2003), 47-64.

Josef Pieper, In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity (St. Augustine’s Press, 1999).