“As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm.”
—Wendell Berry

I suppose if anyone’s to read what follows, I should up my bona-fides. I’ve struggled—if a white liberal can use that verb—with race and racism for years. I won’t bother with details, flattering or damning, save to mention that my family, trans-racial through adoption, keeps me focused. The moment my wife and I carried our Guatemalan-born daughter onto American soil, I knew I’d lost the unspoken white privilege of deciding whether or not to care about race. I also know enough of my own heart to locate, hardly without searching, the festering abscesses of what Wendell Berry calls our “hidden wound.”

So I looked forward to this year’s summer gathering of the Ekklesia Project, an ecumenical Christian group of which I am an endorser. The gathering’s title, “Crossing the Divide: Race, Racism and the Body of Christ,” points to a scandalous paradox: the very time Christians gather to worship the God who calls them into one body remains “the most segregated hour in America.”

Given the difficult subject, I was pleased the plenary speakers—African-American, Latino, Asian, and white—weren’t satisfied with pep-rally platitudes or comforting reassurances that we, the self-designated enlightened, will surely overcome. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn realized the line between good and evil crossed the human heart, “and who among us,” he asked, “is willing to cut out a piece of his own heart?” The same is true of the border between respect and bigotry.

Nor were the worship service leaders content with overeducated white folk clapping their hands and swaying, ever so slightly, to a few negro spirituals. The sermons and addresses were half-lament, half-indictment, exploring how tendentious readings of scripture divide rather than unite, how churches split culturally over music, dress, food, punctuality, service length and social mission, or how difficult it is for Americans, trained to see church as a voluntary private association of like-minded individuals, to shoulder the heavy crosses of reconciliation and mutual subordination.

Not surprisingly, Warner Sallman’s “portrait” of Jesus—and its lingering cultural power—came up in discussion. Calling the image vividly to mind, theologian Stanley Hauerwas lingered on the “Cocker Spaniel eyes” of Sallman’s Christ, lamenting the impoverishment of conversations on race when sentimentality reigns.

I know it’s easy, even fashionable, to pick on Sallman’s unrelievedly Nordic Jesus, but I’ve found him hanging on walls in snow-white suburbs, inner-city black churches and rural Honduran huts, and I’m sure many among the millions who’ve gazed upon countless reproductions considered them beautiful, good, even true. I disagree—vehemently, in fact—though I might thereby be accused of confusing ethics and aesthetics.

But that’s the point: aesthetics without ethics collapses into aestheticism, the most refined form of sentimentality, though sentimentality nonetheless.

The trouble with Sallman’s depiction is not primarily its counterfactual, non-Semitic whiteness, but the unearned, “Ah, ain’t Jesus cute!” response demanded by each crafted detail: perfect bone structure, dramatic lighting, that blonde tsunami of hair. It’s hard to imagine first century Judea’s law and order crowd wanting to kill something so lovely. Nowhere visible are the hard sayings, the bitter cost of discipleship, or our call to discover Jesus in the unlovely bodies now comprising Christ’s Body. Like pornography, the image arouses a response, minus the messy entanglements living persons demand.

So it is with much well-intentioned race talk today. Confident of our individual freedom from overt prejudice, Christians often ignore the structural realities keeping neighborhoods and churches divided, save those rare exceptions when socioeconomic class trumps race. Rodney King’s “Can’t we all get along?” minus the struggle, invites the already comfortable to make nice while doing nothing of substance.

Many Martin Luther King, Jr. celebrations are mawkish remembrances of a “nice man” who, being dead, threatens no one’s leisure or treasure. His nonviolence is honored, though his admirers are unlikely to adopt the costly practices such a life requires. His jail terms and assassination serve less as reminders of what “crossing the divide” may cost than as opportunities to condemn people who hate; people whom, we like to think, we have nothing in common. As for his hard sayings—“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” or his late condemnations of the Vietnam War—they’re ditched for the lovely, undemanding gnosticism of “I have a dream.”

But the young George Wallace had a dream, too, as sentimental and brutal as any violent alcoholic’s. Only late in his life did Wallace begin personally to ask forgiveness and make partial amends to his brothers and sisters in Christ.

Bad art doesn’t necessary make bad people. Still, it cheapens and defaces what should be beautiful. So does bad exegesis, bad theology, bad liturgy. Good forms, however, have the power to heal.

This year’s Ekklesia Project gathering concluded, as they often do, with a foot washing ceremony. Newly reminded of the harm we have (sometimes unwittingly) done, we touched one another’s bodies—the locus of racial difference—in an unlovely and smelly place, washing one another’s feet as Mary did for Jesus, and Jesus for his disciples. It was a liturgy of reconciliation and healing.

It was a start.