“Reading While Black” by Esau McCaulley: Book Analysis Series (Part 2)

Here in my second post on Esau McCaulley’s book, Reading While Black, I am going to provide an overview chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 is entitled, “Freedom is No Fear: The New Testament and a Theology of Policing,” and Chapter 3 is entitled, “Tired Feet, Rested Souls: The New Testament and the Political Witness of the Church.”

Chapter 2: “Freedom is No Fear”
McCaulley opens this chapter with a personal story from when he was a 16-year-old kid. Even though he was a good kid, one night while at a gas station with some friends, some police officers stopped them because they looked like they were conducting a drug deal. They weren’t—they were just black kids getting gas at a gas station, and that looked suspicious to the officers. Nothing ended up happening because McCaulley and his friends kept their cool. Still, McCaulley states that he realized at that moment that even though he was a good kid, one wrong move or one wrong word that night could have ruined his life. That is the reality for most black young men in this country—where just being black is cause for police suspicion. All in all, McCaulley says that he has been stopped 7-10 times in his life by police officers for no other reason than his being black.

That personal story leads into the topic of the chapter, where McCaulley focuses on Romans 13:1-4 and asks the question, “Is there a New Testament theology of policing?” Here is what Romans 13:1-4 says:

¹Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. ² Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. ³ For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, ⁴ for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.

McCaulley makes the following points regarding this passage. First, Paul is obviously describing the ideal here. If the state is truly just, if it is executing justice as God’s servant, then an innocent person doesn’t have anything to fear. Of course, Paul isn’t directly saying anything about if the state is not just and is not executing justice. Simply put, what about the problem of evil rulers? To that, McCaulley points to the example of Moses’ confrontation with Pharaoh during the Exodus and states, “God brings his judgment against corrupt institutions through humans in his own time, and we are not given insight into our proper role in such matters” (33). Simply put, God using human beings to confront injustice, but exactly how we go about doing that isn’t always clear.

Second, McCaulley points to the relationship between individual officers and the overall state police structure and says, “Paul recognizes that the state has a tremendous influence on how the soldier/officer treats its citizens. Thus, if there is to be a reform it must be structural and not merely individualistic” (35). The bottom line being that the government should not be a source of fear for the innocent, and if it is, then there is something wrong that needs to be addressed. Even though individual officers need to be held accountable for any unjust actions they commit, if they aren’t, then that is evidence of, as McCaulley puts it, a deeper structural problem that needs to be addressed. And ultimately, who is responsible for addressing those problems? We, the voting public, are. McCaulley states that we are the ones who must hold elected officials responsible.

It is on this key point, though, where things get really tricky. McCaulley doesn’t delve into any recent specific high-profile cases in his book, so it is easy to agree with that statement in general—and I obviously do. He’s absolutely right. But as soon as we look at actual examples, it is sobering to see how hard it is to do that, and quite frankly, it’s our own fault. Let’s consider the officer who put his knee on George Floyd’s neck and killed him. That individual choice by the officer was clearly wrong. When there was an outcry over the video, people were able to make sure that officer was arrested and charged. In addition, there was immediate consensus that a certain amount of police reform was needed. That is exactly the kind of thing, I believe, McCaulley is talking about—it is up to us to hold the government accountable. That’s good.

But then the riots broke out and things spiraled out of control into anarchy and much of the rhetoric labeled all police as racist and unjust. And, not wanting to get too political here, when Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina brought forth a police reform bill he had been working on for years, certain Democrats killed the bill, not even letting it come to the floor of the Senate for debate, and we suddenly heard calls for the defunding of the police and a “re-imagining” of policing. The cities who have started to do those things have already seen soaring crime and murder rates which has disproportionally affected minority communities.

The events of the past year have been really sad to see. After George Floyd’s death, it seemed that everyone was appalled and every wanted to see real police reform. Yet, certain politicians killed attempts at real reform, and instead of holding those elected official accountable, people just retreated to their respective partisan foxholes and did their part to escalate the divisiveness and anger, and the results were deadly riots. Simply put, addressing injustice at the government-structural level in a democratic-republic like the United States should come in the form of holding elected officials to account. Riots and looting aren’t reform. It isn’t accountability. It is anarchy. And why did it happen? Because we, the voting public, allowed politicians we should have held accountable to turn the whole thing into political theater to get their respective bases inflamed and voting to keep them in power. We didn’t hold those responsible accountable. We allowed ourselves to be manipulated by them. And the result? No real reform, but a lot more danger and violence for minority communities.

Chapter 3: “Tired Feet, Rested Souls”
In Chapter 3, McCaulley opens with a story about how early on in MLK’s protest movement, there were actually a lot of black clergymen from various denominations who were openly against what he was doing. That basically thought he was too radical and they didn’t want to take any decisive stand against the clear injustices against black people at the time. Obviously, they weren’t happy with the injustice, but they simply were too afraid to do anything about it. But as McCaulley points out, MLK, as well as Frederick Douglass, clearly saw the stark hypocrisy of “white” Christianity and how it supported racism, flatly contradicting the clear witness of the Bible itself.

McCaulley then turns his attention to passages like Romans 13:1-7 (again) and I Timothy 2:1-11 to discuss the question, “What does the New Testament have to say about the political witness of the church in response to the oppressive tendencies of the state?” He first quickly summaries the main points he made regarding Romans 3:1-4 from the previous chapter and makes this additional point: “This does not mean that a Christian cannot protest injustice, it means that we cannot claim God’s justification for violent revolution” (51). His point regarding I Timothy 2:1-4 is that yes, we are to pray for our rulers, but at the same time, as we see in I Timothy 1:8-11, one of the behaviors Paul points out that is wicked is slave trading. Hence, as McCaulley states, “slave trading is a theological error to be shunned by Christians” (53).

McCaulley continues by then looking at Luke 13, particularly Jesus’ comments about Herod, who clearly saw Jesus as a threat to his own rule, for when the Kingdom of God breaks in, corrupt rulers will be in trouble. Jesus calls Herod a “fox,” and he was. He was a corrupt politician who was directly responsible for the suffering of his people. Therefore, McCaulley says, if Jesus called out corrupt rulers in his day, and Christians are to follow the example of Jesus, then Christians should call out corrupt rulers in our day as well. Of course, Jesus also says that no prophet can die outside Jerusalem—an allusion to the traditional Jewish belief that Isaiah was killed in Jerusalem. He wasn’t killed for any strictly “religious” message. He was killed because his prophetic message was a clear challenge to the politics of King Manasseh. He was killed because he proclaimed that true worship of Yahweh had implications for how one treated their neighbor: “For Isaiah, piety must bear fruit in justice” (58).

McCaulley makes similar points in his comments about Galatians, Colossians, Revelation, and the Sermon on the Mount: Christians are to proclaim the Gospel and work for peace. As McCaulley says, “Jesus asks us to see the brokenness in society and to articulate an alternative vision for how we might live” (66). Ultimately, McCaulley makes the following point: Peacemaking cannot be separated from truth telling. He writes, “If the church is going to be on the side of peace in the United States, then there has to be an honest accounting of what this country has done and continues to do to Black and Brown people” (68)—things like housing discrimination, unequal sentencing, and unfair policing. “The call to be peacemakers is the call for the church to enter the messy world of politics and point toward a better way of being human” (69).

Again, like I said in my comments on chapter 2, it is really easy to agree with what McCaulley says in the abstract. I mean, who is really going to disagree and say, “Oh no, the church should be on the side of peace, but it shouldn’t say anything about racial injustice?” The real challenge is how the Church should get into the messy world of politics and avoid getting corrupted by it? Too often, I see the political agendas from groups outside of the Church co-opt any potential witness the Church does have. Instead of bearing witness to both the Political Right and Political Left, it seems individual Christians are quick to swear allegiance to one particular camp and then see the other camp as the enemy that must be crushed. Again, that is what we witnessed over the summer. There was a legitimate crisis, a clear need to hold politicians accountable and to insist on real police reform, but instead it was turned into political theater, and nothing beneficial got accomplished.

Now obviously, getting involved in the messy world of politics is going to mean each Christian is going to have his/her particular political point of view. But if the Church (and individual Christians) really is about proclaiming peace, insisting on human dignity and freedom, it should be able to actually work for peace and put the divisive political slogans to the side: Black Lives Matter vs. Blue Lives Matter—why do we end up going to war over slogans? Instead of engaging in putting for practical proposals that actually work toward bringing peace and freedom, people (and sadly this includes many Christians) instead engage in the very propaganda war that our unaccountable politicians throw out there to distract us from actually solving the problem.

Sadly, in light of McCaulley’s insistence that we, the voting public, are the ones responsible to hold elected officials accountable, what this means is that we only have ourselves to blame.