On Wednesday, June 17, a young believer in white supremacy invaded the sacred sanctuary of the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. There he murdered nine black Christians who were gathered together for their weekly Wednesday-night prayer meeting. The killer had been welcomed by the African Methodist Episcopal church members to join them in prayer when he walked in, and he sat with them for more than an hour before he pulled out his gun and shot them dead at the prayer table. They were targeted and killed because they were black.
It is painfully true that in our time, in this year, in the United States, there is still no safe space for black people in America -- even in their own churches. Racism is America's original sin. It expresses itself explicitly and overtly in what we horribly saw last week in a black church, but racism continues on, implicitly and covertly, in American institutions and culture.
The sin of racism was very much alive at Mother Emanuel that horrible night. But it lingers and lives on in so many systemic ways throughout American life. The multiracial horror and rejection of this extreme act of white supremacy we witnessed last week is undoubtedly sincere, but it remains to be seen if this racial atrocity will awaken the soul of white America and create a multiracial commitment against the lingering sins of systemic racism. Will the continuing racial injustice in America now be more forthrightly addressed -- by all of us? That will be the moral test of white America's soul.