Stephen L. Carter, the Nelson Cromwell professor of Law at Yale University, believes that Christians are uniquely positioned to further racial equality.  In an essay in the June 29 “Christianity Today” Magazine, Carter reflected on the recent 50^th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in public schools.

Though Carter argues that his education in the mostly black schools he attended in New York and Washington, D.C., was good, he sees that the nation’s public schools have largely resegregated, “with some three-quarters of black children attending predominantly black schools.” 

Carter sadly points to a new report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and the Urban Institute that shows that while 75 percent of white high schoolers graduated in 2001, only 50 percent of black high school students did.

While “the bright hope of Brown was to build a society without the racial caste system that had for so long determined destiny according to skin color,” Carter says the true measure of racial equality in the 21^st century is measured by sacrifice, something Carter now feels is in short supply.  Until Christians sacrifice, Carter says racial equality will never occur.

John Piper, now the pastor at the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, spent the first 18 years of his life in Greenville, South Carolina.  In the divided southern city he new as a child in the 1950s, Piper says that fear trumped sacrifice.  Piper never knew the young black boy about his age in racially divided Greenville whose name was Jesse Jackson.  Piper and Jackson’s mother liked the same radio station, but that was as close as they ever were.

In a June 30 essay called “Sin, Civil Rights and Missions,” Piper says he believes “the biblical doctrine human depravity is a great antidote to racism.”  The Great Awakening in America and England in the mid-1700s gave rise to the modern foreign missionary movement in a way that helps Piper understand how to fight racism.

The missionary movement unwittingly fought racism, according to Piper, by clarifying the unity between the sinful homeland and the sinful heathen.  There was a consistent view of human solidarity in depravity that helped shield the first missionary generation from some of the worst excesses of racism.

Piper writes, “In other words, a dark view of our own depraved hearts, and a sense of brokenness before God, and a dependence on mercy in Christ make it harder for us to view other humans – whatever race – as less advantaged before God,” Piper writes.  The doctrine of total depravity unites all humankind in desperate dependence on mercy.  The early missionaries, with all their flaws, knew this.

When it came to the civil rights movement, Piper says Martin Luther King, Jr. and the other black leaders equally understood human depravity, believing this world and human institutions (including churches) tended toward corruption.  And yet, this did not generate despair, but a hopeful pessimism.

Piper says the theological convictions of the black leaders of the civil rights movement were often different from those of the white liberals who supported the movement.  Liberalism as a movement put its confidence in human reason and the inevitability of human progress.

The black leaders, says Piper, preached “the bond of human depravity among all humans and all races.”  Thus, their hope of redemption in Jesus provided a deep and powerful impulse for the civil rights movement that some white liberal participants did not understand. 

Blacks did see whites as sinful, and with good reason.  But they also acknowledged the inherent sinfulness of black southerners.  Piper puts it simply:  “Humans are bad, but God is good and powerful.  He can and will establish justice.”

Piper quotes from Elisabeth Fox-Genovese’s review of David Chappell’s new book, “A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and The death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2003)”:  “The whole point of the civil rights movement was to affirm that fundamental equality of condition (inherent sinfulness of all humankind), yet many find irresistible the temptation to paint one side as entirely good and the other as entirely evil … A heroism grounded in optimism is admirable and uplifting, but a heroism grounded in the pessimism of prophetic faith is decisively more impressive and moving.”

If believers hold to the sober truth of total depravity in both the global missionary movement and the civil right movement, that truth will do its good work in ways we never dreamed.