I was born into a church in Chicago that was founded by fathers of the “racial reconciliation” movement in American Evangelicalism.
Led by those such as the late John Perkins, racial reconciliation aimed to encourage primarily Black and white interracial relationships meant to reconcile people to each other and to God, in a post-Civil Rights Movement (but still deeply segregated) U.S. I was taught to understand reconciliation as a ministry, as Paul advises in 2 Corinthians 5, where Jesus bestows the “ministry of reconciliation” onto the church.
As I grew up, I found the concept linguistically and historically fraught—misguided at best and destructive at worst. Reconciliation among contemporary racial groups implies a historical moment of racial harmony; the U.S. has none. Whatever Perkins and others envisioned for the movement, white evangelicals and others began to bypass the need for actual systemic change in favor of emphasizing spiritual harmony and claiming that the only way to true racial unity is through Christianity.
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