The Limits of Resolutions

It’s been a few weeks since the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution condemning white supremacy at its annual meeting in Phoenix, Ariz. But it wasn’t easy.

The basics of the story can be outlined briefly: Dwight McKissic, a black pastor from Texas, wrote a resolution condemning white supremacy and the alt-right to be considered by the SBC during their annual meeting; as with all resolutions considered at the annual meeting, his was reviewed by a committee; the committee decided not to bring McKissic’s proposal to the floor of the annual meeting (reportedly, some considered the language “too strong”); during the annual meeting, McKissic made his way to the mic and asked for additional time for his resolution to be heard; and, there on the floor of the convention hall, his motion failed as the assembly bypassed the resolution once again.

READ: In Dramatic Turnabout, Southern Baptists Condemn ‘Alt-Right White Supremacy’

As Emma Green reported for The Atlantic, that’s when “all hell broke loose,” especially on social media. Black pastors, congregants, and SBC denominational staff, many still reeling from the fact that more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, whose racially divisive rhetoric has emboldened many within the alt-right, expressed outrage and anguish over the muting of the resolution.

Eventually, after much outcry, a modified version of the resolution was adopted.

“Ultimately, after a tumultuous process, the Southern Baptists unanimously voted for a resolution to ‘decry every form of racism, including alt-right white supremacy as antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ’ and ‘denounce and repudiate white supremacy and every form of racial and ethnic hatred as a scheme of the devil.’ And that is good news for all of us,” wrote Jim Wallis at Sojourners.

READ: White Supremacy Is Anti-Gospel. I’m Glad the Southern Baptist Convention Agrees.

But Green concludes her analysis less optimistically. “It may have been a procedural snafu, as some attendees would have it, but it revealed deep fracture lines — ones that won’t be erased with any resolution,” she wrote.

And that’s the problem with sin — whether racism or greed, classism or lust, xenophobia or envy, sin won’t be erased with a resolution. The presence of the alt-right, the SBC’s historic origins in relationship to slavery, and the pervasive role of a "Christian imagination" in fueling racism and other forms of cultural imperialism won’t be erased with a resolution.

The inadequacy of a resolution — much like Paul’s reflection on the law, in a passage from Romans 7 — is that it fails to get at the heart of the issue. No matter how strong or softened the language, a resolution by itself won’t erase the fracture lines. It won’t heal the open wounds that still divide this country. It won’t resolve America’s “original sin.”

A resolution, like the law, may tell us what to think or what to believe, but it cannot actually compel our action.

And we should be cautious in applauding this resolution too quickly. After all, it can easily become a condemnation only of others (the white supremacy of the alt-right) that leads to a self-justifying smugness. It is easy to denounce the explicit racism of the alt-right and fail to notice, confess, or lament my own complicity in systems that promote and benefit from racial inequality.

It is here that I find the honesty of Romans 7 to be the most appealing. As a self-identified “white do-gooder,” who falters and fumbles with issues of racial justice, poverty, and gentrification, I can read myself in the speaker of Romans 7.

Paul speaks to the limits of embodied existence and the limits of our resolutions in verses 21–23: “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” Paul speaks of two laws — the law of the mind and the law of the body, or the law of God and the law of sin — at odds with one another. The law of God invites us to a proper ordering of our lives and our priorities, a focus on God and on other people, but the law of sin works to disorder and deform our views of self, other, and the world.

Regardless of how one understands him — whether as Luther’s anguished conscience (channeling Augustine’s earlier spiritual struggle), as a human independent of God’s rectification, or as a Christian struggling to live rightly, there is something in Romans 7 that speaks to our common human experience. There is an honesty to it all: of our desire to do the good and our failure to actually do it, of our best-laid plans and the realities of life, of our genuine longings and our deep disappointment and shame.

Laws, like resolutions made by religious bodies, provide ideals but offer little assistance in the actual cultivation of those ideals. Like the law in Romans 7, the SBC’s resolution can reveal a deep and deadly fracture line, but it can do nothing in itself to address it. We can look at the SBC resolution positively — we can affirm each and every clause with all of our beings — but if those words remain simply words, without transformed actions, we remain captive to an entirely different resolution.

And, as many have expressed on social media following the SBC’s annual meeting, maybe a resolution simply does not go far enough. These responses to the SBC’s resolution point to the need for resurrection, not resolutions, in our churches. But all resurrection requires death first. Jesus’s resurrection birthed a new reality and a new creation but only after his death. Those who lament the events at the SBC annual meeting, not only at the meeting’s reluctance to accept the resolution but also the limited value of the resolution itself, cry out for resurrection. But this anguished longing for new creation, for a transformed church, will require the death of systems and structures and even theologies that originate in and support the white supremacy the resolution is meant to condemn.

So maybe the SBC’s resolution is not in itself good news. But it at least points the way to good work. And, if we can sit with the honesty of Romans 7 and consider our own failure, apathy, and sin in repenting of white supremacy — if we admit that we’re not where we’re supposed to be on this — we might find good news.