“White Flight and the Christian”

God on the throne

The 2020 election has brought with it a litany of evangelicals taking to social media to declare their belief in God’s sovereignty in the face of our current political reality. While I am not here to discuss the question of sovereignty (sorry, cage-stagers, not today), I do think this political-theological positioning points to a pervasive issue among evangelicals. 

If you have Christian friends/family/acquaintances, you’ve likely seen some iteration of “No matter who wins the election, Jesus is on the throne” on your timeline this week. If we’re assuming positive intent, these posts are written and shared with the goal of providing hope in the midst of a bleak election season. However, this mindset is cousin to the apathy, disengagement, and self-soothing of white flight. Jamie Plunkett gets at the heart of this issue in his November 11 Tweet:

“As a pastor, I want to encourage folks to avoid toxic theology today (and every day). ‘No matter what happens, Jesus is King’ is a form of faith that invalidates the lived experiences of faithful people all over the country who have been harmed by this administration.”

In reality, “Jesus is on the throne” is not the ultimate comfort for large swaths of our population. As much as we do not want to place our hope squarely in the hands of a certain political party or outcome, many among us face direct consequences as a result of partisan policies. Some of the most important issues in the 2020 election will not disproportionately affect the white middle class, such as Coronavirus response, health care, immigration, education, and Supreme Court appointments. 

However, the Coronavirus response adopted by our President could mean the difference between life and death for upwards of 230,000 people. It could mean affordable lifesaving treatments for citizens regularly unable to afford it. It could mean families being reunited and people fleeing oppression, poverty, and corruption. It could mean a politician with real education experience making decisions to put students and teachers before money. It could mean criminalization of yet another thing that will be unequally applied to poor Black and brown communities. 

I realize that there are many evangelical Christians voting “for the policies, not for the person.” I understand that the sects who worship Trump are extreme and not necessarily far-reaching. To be frank: Voters who cite abortion as their most important issue are often voting out of a place of socio-economic privilege, as they are trying to inform the morality of their nation. Voters who vote for economic policy, healthcare, education and immigration are voting in hopes that peoples’ basic needs will be met. I don’t think I need to delineate the difference any further. So yes, Jesus is on the throne, but that hope is not exactly tangible under an administration which denies you dignity and basic needs. 

What is white flight? 

White flight refers to the migration of white people out of (mostly urban) areas with dense populations of African Americans. White flight primarily refers to the period of 1940-1970 when many white Americans moved out of cities and into suburbs. This phenomena was largely influenced by racism, redlining, and wealth inequality. Between 1916 and 1970, 6 million African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North, searching for more opportunities and running from southern Jim Crow laws. This influx of Black Americans gave rise to a new breed of racism in the North through redlining.

In short, redlining is the trend of U.S. banks denying home loans to Black Americans. This resulted in Black Americans being effectively and legally segregated to certain neighborhoods (which were, as per the name, denoted by red lines). This wasn’t just the work of privately-owned banks– the federal government’s Home Owners Loan Corporation helped create redlining maps to ensure that banks did not lend to neighborhoods with “higher risks of default.” The Home Owners Loan Corporation built the middle class of America within the suburbs, and it built a middle class that was largely white. For more information on redlining, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is a great resource.

Redlining is necessary context for the pattern of white flight and for the makeup of our nation. The idea that Black and Latinx people were more likely to default on their loans seeped into the individual consciousness, too– creating white flight. Through the fear-mongering of real estate agents and the reality that property value plummeted when Black/Latinx families moved in, white families moved out of the city and into the suburbs. With these moves, white people effectively took with them access to quality businesses, education (funded by property taxes), job opportunities, parks, hospitals… you catch my drift.

That was a lot of history, so let’s look at the present. While redlining is no longer backed by the federal government, its effects are still very much felt. It’s not hard to look around and see segregation of neighborhoods, schools, or resources. But I posit that white flight is about much more than housing discrimination. White flight is an attitude that white, middle-class America has adopted when it comes to issues of poverty, racism, and oppression. White flight is apathy thinly veiled as self-protection.

Of course, families during the Great Migration had to choose to protect their family, which objectively meant to move while your property had its highest value into an area that had better opportunities. I can understand the impulse to one’s family. However, when white people left those neighborhoods, they took with them resources, as we can see. See, what redlining took from Black and brown communities was not whiteness, it was resources. 

Where we go, there our resources follow. What we choose to pay attention to, and to support or ignore, is closely tied to our bank account, our time, our energy. The example I’m closest to is the public school system. Like I mentioned before, the public school system is perhaps the greatest success of redlining. Middle class, suburban schools draw funds from the property taxes of their comfortable families, while poor Black and brown kids are relegated to inner-city schools with significantly less resource-wise. This is a self-perpetuating cycle, as families want their kids in the “best schools,” which means they move into the “best suburbs,” which then means they pay property taxes which help resources those schools, and so on. 

A large part of what is missing for inner-city schools is community investment. That’s not to say that families and communities are not invested in their kids’ education– they are, arguably more so, invested. But due to income inequality and opportunity, these families are limited with what time and money they can invest. Adding to the problem are teachers and administrators, important stakeholders in these schools, who come from outside of the community. (I’m including myself here, as a teacher in a public charter school in Dallas who commutes to work from Grapevine.) Not only are these stakeholders not supporting their own schools financially with property tax, they are in many ways less invested in their schools because of a lack of familiarity or belonging to the community.

That might sound unfair, but hear me out. Teachers/administrators from outside of the community, especially if they are not part of the same culture(s) represented by their students, may not understand the school community’s culture as valuable, meaningful, or relevant to the classroom. At worst, they will adopt a diminutive view of their students’ culture, as they only come into contact with it during school hours, which can lead to punitive actions and the very real school-to-prison pipeline. These teachers or administrators may not speak the language(s) or dialect(s) represented in their schools, which greatly inhibits their ability to communicate with kids and parents. Teachers/administrators from outside of the community often send their own children to schools closer to home, which even subconsciously can change their dedication to their own school or signal to their students that the school at which they work is “not good enough” for their own children. 

Obviously, this is one specific example of the way attitudes of white flight show up in our society, but I think the idea can apply in many sectors. And hear me: the answer to this issue is not white people flocking back to urban centers (i.e. gentrification)– it most often looks like supporting income equality, supporting quality public education for all, quality healthcare for all, and other initiatives to truly “level the playing field.” I want to say again: white flight has less to do with a lack of whiteness and more to do with a lack of equal access to resources.

White flight and the Christian

But what does this have to do with the Church? Isn’t this just a political issue? In short, no. 

Evangelical Christianity has masterfully positioned itself as both very socially involved and also very apolitical. A staple of evangelical Christianity is a commitment to missions and the broad scope of morality. Christians are ever-eager to fly fifteen hours overseas to build houses and share the gospel with those who haven’t yet heard the good news. Further, conservative Christians waste no time politically organizing when it comes to abortion or 501c3 status for churches. 

But these sentiments are not consistently applied. The same people with a passion for overseas missions find it too scary or uncomfortable to engage with their city’s housing crisis. The people attending a March for Life lump Black Lives Matter protesters in with ANTIFA, rioters, and looters. At large, the church has continued the white flight apathy of American history and left “social issues” to work themselves out. The climax of this ideology, to me, is the notion that God is on the throne regardless of politics. 

It is a luxury for one’s life to be relatively unchanged by the administration in power, just like it is a luxury to be able to pick up and move to a place with better property values, or better school districts, or to vote for morality over basic needs. 

I’m not saying that Joe Biden is our savior. Far from it, actually– I know very few people for whom Biden was their first choice. What I’m saying is that we, as a Church, have to stop living comfortably in the arena of white flight. Just because the policies in question might not affect us directly doesn’t mean we can disengage.

The Rev. Fleming Rutledge offers a helpful paradigm through which to see the role of justice for Christians in a world where God has already and not yet redeemed all things. I’ll close with her wisdom:

“If only God can bring peace and goodwill, … then what is the point in our doing anything? If there’s nothing we can do to improve the situation, then we really might as well withdraw into a private world of gated communities, exclusive clubs, and personal privilege and enjoy it as best we can before we are overtaken by cancer or senility.

Here’s where the ‘action in waiting’ comes in, the ‘hastening.’ It’s all a matter of what we’re pointing toward. … The church responds to the ‘thrilling voice’ by doing the works of the day, the works of the light, the ministry to the prisoners, the soup and the sandwiches for the hungry, the houses for the low-income families, the birthday parties for the children who have no parties. These are lamps shining in dark places. These are the works that glorify Christ while we wait for him. This is action while waiting.”