LYNN, A WHITE woman in her 40s, sank into a porch chair beside me. I’d come to interview her neighbor, but when Lynn heard I was conducting research on the ways white Christians develop long-term commitments to racial justice, she asked to talk.

Lynn said she grew up in a Christian family in a white neighborhood where people didn’t talk about race. At a Christian college, professors taught about social injustices in a way she’d never encountered, inspiring her to join a summerlong internship designed to train young Christians to pursue justice. As she met people who had been doing this work longer than her lifetime, she began to wonder how they persevered. “I was working with people who had been in it for the long haul, and I’d ask them, ‘How do you keep it up? How have you been doing this so long? You burned your draft card in, like, 1969? And you’re still going? And you still somehow believe that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice? Like, how?’” She worried she didn’t have the tenacity they had. 

“I feel like I’ve kind of tapped out on some stuff.”

Her story sounded like the buildup to a punchy life lesson, so when she paused for a drink of water I asked, “What would you tell your former self now?”

Her response was quick. “I don’t know if I’m the best person to ask that. I feel like I have not sustained it in some ways.” Her “tapping out” involved shifting to a career that didn’t deal with injustice as directly as her previous work. It also included what she called a “pause” on Christianity.

Fading commitment

LYNN WASN’T ALONE in tapping out. In a Pew Research Center survey from this summer, five years after the death of George Floyd, 72% of Americans said the focus on race after he was killed did not lead to improvements in the lives of Black Americans. They haven’t stopped because the work is done—69% of Black Americans in the same survey agreed that there is still not enough attention paid to race today. But as with most social issues, interest in racial justice soars when tragedies hit the news then fades when news cycles shift.

For others, strains between Christianity and social activism have reached a breaking point. “Unchurched believers” like Lynn, who identify as not religiously affiliated while still believing many of the basic tenets of Christianity, rose from 4% to 11% of Americans between 1988 to 2012. Among liberals, that percentage rose by 18 percentage points while only rising by 3 percentage points among conservatives.

In an interview for the documentary Unspoken, musician and music producer Lecrae admitted he nearly became one of those data points. “My faith was pretty critically damaged by just hearing a Western, predominantly white, Eurocentric perspective of Christianity, especially at a time when there was a lot of hostility between races in America ... and I wasn’t hearing a lot of my white brothers and sisters give any answers or any thoughts on what was going on. I felt hurt, and for me I just assumed that this was how the whole faith was.”

Experience with collisions offers marginalized groups skills to respond that majority culture people often lack.

As a professor of anthropology at Wheaton College, I grew interested in the assumption that “this was how the whole faith was.” I teach classes about social injustice every semester, and five years ago, I found myself consumed by a doubt—does it work? Does teaching about the historical and present effects of racism and other injustices lead to lasting changes in people’s lives? And if not, does anything?

I set out to research this question using a methodology that would center the perspectives of people of color while specifically dealing with the question of how white people—who can more easily tap out from race activism—become lasting advocates for racial justice. I interviewed 30 faith leaders of color, asking them to describe positive and negative examples of racial justice advocacy. I then asked them to recommend white Christians that they had seen working for racial justice for the long haul. I met with 40 of those individuals, listening for the transformational influences on their lives and what kept them going. I’ve written a new book that describes the patterns that emerged across the life stories of people who pursue justice with resilient and active hope.

Based on that analysis, I’d like to suggest two-and-a-half steps anyone can take to become a more resilient advocate for justice. Let’s start with the half.

Steps in resilience

TO GET THERE, let me describe a moment in my college dorm in the ’90s. I was turning the handle of my dorm room door, carrying my backpack from a weekend off from my job as a residence hall assistant, when a resident approached me in a hurry.

“Did you hear what happened?”

I had not.

She said the parents of a shy white young woman had come to visit over the weekend. Their daughter complained about some conflict with her roommate, a confident Black young woman. When they heard this, the parents took charge. They taped a line of masking tape down the center of the dorm room floor, then shouted at the Black roommate loudly enough to echo down the hallway, “You won’t cross over onto our daughter’s side.”

I felt myself trembling with an overwhelming confusion and repulsion. Had this white family seriously attempted to re-create segregation in my dorm? Weren’t we long done with this by the 1990s?

COLLISION. This moment is what I call a collision. Collisions are moments when your social imaginary—your imagined picture of how society works and is supposed to work—is smacked by reality so hard that you can’t ignore it. Collisions can occur in everyday encounters like this one; they also happen when we face horrifying new stories.

For people who are marginalized, collisions happen often. Their communities are likely to offer guidance on how they have

dealt with these collisions for generations. Before the white parents had left the dorm, Black students across the hall had already gathered to comfort the affected student and process the situation together. Having experience with collisions doesn’t take away the pain or wrong—if anything the repetition of “This again?” moments adds to their frustration—but experience with collisions does offer marginalized groups skills to respond that majority culture people often lack. For people in dominant groups, collisions tend to come with the added shock of the question, How have I gone so long without seeing this?

People committed to justice for the long haul have been shaken by collisions, but that doesn’t make them a reliable route to perseverance. For one thing, you can’t make a collision happen, nor should you try. That’s why I call this only half of an action step. You can’t orchestrate a collision. What you can do is reflect on the collisions you’ve experienced and not turn away. But then you need to do more.

ASK WHY. The next full step is to ask why. Look at the evidence of injustice, and trace the historical, political, economic, cultural, social, and theological context. This means talking to many experts—both experts who study these things and experts who live them. Asking “why” is a lifelong process. There’s no wrong place to begin.

For me, asking “why” meant taking advantage of my context as a college student and finding professors who spent their lives studying racism, colonialism, and poverty. I absorbed what I could learn there, then moved to places where I could learn from communities experiencing the effects of these injustices firsthand.

Asking “why” questions is often referred to as “doing the work.” It takes agency, and over time, it unsettles false social imaginaries, building more accurate understandings of how society works, including what goes wrong. This is where a lot of justice education focuses—training people into a fuller picture of history and society.

But there’s a problem. “Doing the work” of asking why is heavy. It breaks down the naïve, flabby hopes that characterize popular approaches to justice, especially among people in dominant groups. It introduces complexity. As I heard from one Black leader, “There will be ‘danged if I do, and danged if I don’t.’” There will be no easy solutions.

Collisions and asking why bring us face to face with a troubling reality: People hurt people. And those hurts don’t just go away. They leave us tender, traumatized, or tiptoeing.

Asking “why” is a lifelong process.

RUGGED GRACE. That brings us to another thing people who persevere for the long haul do: They practice rugged grace. Grace is a word that has so often been weaponized against people experiencing injustice that it’s sometimes avoided in justice conversations, even by Christians who consider grace to be the core of our faith. Practicing rugged grace doesn’t mean telling victims to “get over it,” “forgive and forget,” or “let the dominant group off the hook.” Grace—both giving it and responding to it—might be the toughest thing you ever do. In more than half of my interviews, people used the word grace or the related terms mercy or forgiveness. Many more told stories of grace using terms like surprised, unexpected, undeserved, indebted, and forgiven. When I listened back through my research interviews, I realized that nearly every time someone cried, it happened when they told a story of grace.

Here’s what rugged grace has to do with justice: Grace happens when someone owed a debt is able to freely—not under compulsion—give back something to a person owing the debt, in a way that anticipates but does not demand a future response. As one white man put it, “You don’t get to demand grace. If you do, you’ve missed the whole point! As soon as you say, ‘Hey, I deserve grace,’ that’s not grace anymore.”

Giving and responding to grace is a necessary practice for people of any faith in any society, as author Julia Baird argues in her book Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything. But Christians, who model their understanding of grace after God’s gift of Jesus’ life, should be the first people to practice grace.

When I talked to people of color, they emphasized that giving grace for injustice is not easy, but for them it’s what makes justice possible and sustainable. One Black man told me, “If our thing is reconciliation to Jesus and reconciliation to the Father, and that’s through unity, that’s through love, the only way we can do that is by giving grace. Grace has to be the core of what we’re doing.” He saw reliance on Christ as source of his own ability to give grace. “Grace is costly, but ultimately the cost is paid by Christ, who initiates grace into humanity and also enables humans to give grace through Christ’s example and empowerment.”

What does it look like to actively practice grace? For people who have been hurt by a particular injustice, it could mean leaning into the challenge of loving a person who perpetuates injustice, not out of compulsion and not ignoring the injustice, but in the brave freedom of choosing not to let injustice control you.

Discerning how to practice grace in a particular situation is rarely simple. One Asian American pastor pointed out that all Christians are called to grace, but that doesn’t mean everyone shares a calling to bridge racial divisions in the same way. Another Black leader in a multiethnic church said he still finds it challenging to work among people who might not share a loyalty to racial justice. “That’s scary for me,” he said. “That’s intimately scary for me.” He leans on God to find the strength to practice grace there. “God has just kind of worked with me.”

On the other side, practicing grace means noticing what you’ve received without deserving it. That could include benefits you have that are rooted in coercion experienced by others in the past or present—land stolen from Indigenous people, inherited wealth earned through slavery, the right to live in a wealthy country that turns away immigrants every day. It also includes gifts given in love, beginning with God’s unconditional provision.

No cheap grace

LONG-TERM ACTIVISTS don’t expect cheap grace to whitewash past harms, nor do they wallow in unresolved guilt or bitterness. One white man described how he navigates his fear of falling short in intercultural settings. “I’m terrified,” he said. “I know that I could really cause some damage. ... I am scared that someday someone’s going to ask me to do something to prove that I’m antiracist enough and I’m going to feel like I don’t want to do that. But I’m still going to show up. I’m still going to be here. I’m still going to trust God even if I don’t understand all the time or I’m still working through it.”

Grace—both giving it and responding to it—might be the toughest thing you ever do.

Grace doesn’t let people off the hook. Instead, it hooks us into ongoing relationships of passing grace forward. When doubt creeps in that the harm can never be undone and the hurt never healed, we can look to the ways the world already runs on incongruous, interrupting, grace that rattles our imaginaries.

People who persevere for justice don’t push collisions out of sight and mind. They develop a lifelong practice of asking “why” questions. And they find the link between grit and grace. Out of this combination of practices grows a rugged hope and a way of relating that one man called “a real Jesus-y type of love.” What would it look like to live that Jesus-y love across our lifetimes?