Thabiti Anyabwile: Considering Oneself a ‘Christian’ and Not a ‘Black Christian’ will Lead to ‘Annihilation’

(Former?) Gospel Coalition author and council member Thabiti Anyabwile has preached a sermon where He explains that all black Christians and minorities must imbibe a ‘twoness’ to their identities, and must not assimilate into the mindset where they see themselves simply as a Christian, but rather must view themselves as both Christian and Black, as failing to do so will result in their destruction.

Note. As a brief refresher to familiarize yourself with Anyabwile, the pastor has used his social media platforms to refer to his leftist positions as “pro-life” issues and yet endorses pro-choice candidates like Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden while claiming that all white evangelicals are guilty of racism. He has claimed that resisting reparations is ‘the echo of Cain’s voice’. and that white folk who reject systematic racism and reparations can’t read their bibles right.’ Anyabwile’s real name is “Ron Burns” but he chose the name “Thabiti Anyabwile” to identify with the “Black Nationalist Movement,” a move he made prior to converting from Christianity to Islam. Afterward, Anyabwile claimed to have been reconverted to Christianity but chose to keep his Black Nationalist name, which should tell everyone something about him.

He explains:

Here’s what the dominant culture often says to the exile: ‘forget about your identity, focus on assimilating, become one of us. If you just play by our rules, you’ll be okay. Those other problems are not really your problems, you’re one of the good ones or you can be.’

You ever notice that almost all of the incentives of the dominant society emphasize assimilation? Here’s what the dominant society does not or refuses to understand. If Esther assimilated then Israel would be annihilated.

It is group self-destruction when people who are exiles forget their own exile community and their identity, and assimilate entirely with the dominant community and adopts their interests. Dominant groups, especially those who are hungry and lustful for power, they really refuse to acknowledge that exiled and oppressed groups experience an interconnectedness, a mutual dependence that is necessary for survival.

Esther has what W.E.B Dubois would later famously call ‘double consciousness’. Across chapters 3 to7, Esther has grown more fully into that double consciousness, she’s become aware of her two-ness- that she is simultaneously Queen of the Persian Empire and conquered Jewish woman. Sometimes like in Esther 4:13-14 she has to choose between the two. As Dubois pointed out, this is the strange existence of African Americans. We are simultaneously American and ‘other’. Even inside the broader church, we are simultaneously American and Christian and ‘other’.

Thabiti shoehorns the notion of ‘ double consciousness’ in the scriptures. This notion was crafted by W.E.B Dubois in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, which describes the psychological challenges of black folk living in a racist society, particularly when just decades earlier slavery was legal and hundreds of thousands of slave owners were still alive.

More recently it has been co-opted by the LGBTQ Kommunity in order to describe living in a sexistbigotedracisthomophobic society. It forms the foundation of critical race theory and intersectionality, which draw heavily upon its ideas. The ‘twoness’ quickly came to be found insufficient to reckon with people’s lived experiences, and the idea of “triple consciousness’ was introduced- Ie, an ‘American Black Woman’ or an ‘American Hispanic Lesbian.’ As one can imagine, as the intersectional identities stack upon another, with black feminist introducing their version to describe living in the world under the patriarchy, it get can get a bit bloated as ‘quadruple consciousness’ is considered.

We simultaneously love and work for the betterment of our country and at the same time receive rejection and mistreatment from the hands of our country. This is why our poets (Langston Hughes) say ‘I, too sing America’. I’m the darker brother. I want us to understand that this kind of double consciousness is true with any exile group.

Christians submitted to their governments experience it. Latin Americans and Haitians immigrating to the US experience it. Afghan refugees fleeing persecution in their home land experience it . African Americans looking for justice from the criminal injustice system experience it. This double consciousness is an ordinary and complex part of being an exile people, whether we are exiled religiously or ethnically.

Let me lean on that last phrase, whether religiously or ethnically. Religious persecution and ethnic persecution can sometimes travel together. But at other times they are different. That’s why it’s a mistake to just make Esther a story about God’s covenant people when they are also ethnic, racial and gender things happening in this text. So sometimes they travel together, but other times it can be different.

And that’s why Christian conversations about racial injustice need to slow down. It’s more complex than Twitter could ever make it. Sometimes majority Christians say to minority Christians that ‘the only thing that matters is being Christian’. They’re calling for a kind of religious assimilation- a religious assimilation that seems unaware of kind of various identities.

However, the minority Christian knows full well when they are persecuted because of their faith and when they are being persecuted because of their ethnicity. The minority Christian knows full well that to ignore their ethnic persecution would be to comply with their destruction. We don’t escape this double consciousness , this double reality because we are now Christians. We understand that the foundation for solidarity must be the place where oppression and mistreatment are actually experienced. That’s what Elie Wiesel was saying- whether it is race, or religion, or national origin or gender. When that becomes the site of mistreatment, it also must become the site of solidarity.

So if it is experienced religiously, then we express solidarity religiously. If people persecute the church, then we identify with the church, and we respond in solidarity to that persecution.

If it is experienced based on gender, then we must enter express solidarity with the gender that is being persecuted in this text, with the way women have been mistreated throughout this book.

If it is experienced racially, then we must stand with the racial group being mistreated, whether it is African Americans suffering or Asian Americans and the rise of anti-Asian hate or Latin Americans and Haitians suffering various things at the border, we must stand with the group who is being mistreated.

Solidarity is not fundamentally a religious project. It is more fundamentally a human in the image of God project. This is why it is complex. And we need more than a soundbite understanding of how to stand with one another in the face of injustice. This is why people watching the various trials (Rittenhouse and Aubry) over this last week experience some mixture of both hope and ‘I knew it’. It is the echo of this two-ness, this double consciousness.

h/t to WokePreacherTV for the clip

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