Justin Giboney is the founder of the AND Campaign, a wishy-washy organization that seeks to strike a middle ground between the democrats and republicans by always leaning toward the former, as well as a prominent The Gospel Coalition (TGC) contributor.
In a talk with David French as part of the Good Faith podcast, Giboney says that all white Christian churches owe racial reparations, even new ones who weren’t directly involved with it or who have no history with it, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is just trying to get off on a ‘technicality.’
French: The Protestant church in the US is just a whole bunch of brand new institutions, right? You’ve got all kinds of non-denominational churches that have sprung up in storefronts, for example. They have a history, but it might be to 2011, you know, that particular church? What do you say to a lot of these much newer Christian institutions? There’s all kinds of them in an evangelical spaces that have exploded and grown up since the end of slavery, since the end of Jim Crow. And they’re gonna look at you and say, ‘Justin, what are you talking about? We, my institution that I had, I’m a part of, had nothing to do with it. I have had nothing to do with it. Yet. This institutional analysis doesn’t make any sense to me, because we’re not at a seminary that benefited from slavery. We’re a church that started with 23 people and an old, you know, an old 7/11 building 15 years ago, what do you say to us along those lines?”
Giboney: I would say that you’re part of a culture and institutions that have benefited in general, right? So you know, whenever we look at sin, whenever we look at Christian ethics, you got to look at the spirit of it. Because if we want to get out of something, if we want to be overly technical and be lawyers, like you and I are, we can do that. I wouldn’t do that with God, though.
And I think if you really look at the spirit of, honesty, if you really look at the spirit of what the ethic is saying, have I in direct or indirect ways had a benefit? And even if I didn’t, have somebody been, has something been taken from somebody? What is my responsibility? So yeah, we can get technical, we can say, well, you know, ‘if you look at this, we didn’t exactly you know, we weren’t the ones, we shut this organization down and started something new’.
Yeah, but the benefits of that old institutions still flow in one way or another to the new institutions, right? Even if it isn’t a line item in the budget, right? There’s still ways that that flow from one of the other.
So you got to look at the spirit of it, and Christians know that in other in other spaces, we know that in other situations, but we want to get very technical and just find ways to get out of it. You can convince yourself with that. I would be worried that you could convince God that. And so we need to look at a little bit different
