During a recent Global Baptist meeting, talk of reparations came up. Jamaican Baptists leaders were the first to broach the subject during the annual gathering of the Baptist World Alliance in Nassau, the Bahamas. Why? Because, according to attendees, the case for reparations can be found in the Bible.
During the event, Jamaican Baptist pastor Devon Dick gave a presentation on the biblical case for reparations entitled “God Has Done Us an Injustice.” The title was inspired by a phrase spoken by a Jamaican Methodist leader in 1835. He said “it after being told by whites that God supported the British decree that enslaved persons serve as unpaid apprentices for four years – from 1834 to 1838 – rather than gaining freedom from slavery all at once,” Ethics Daily reported.
According to Dick, the “Christian” case of reparations is “grounded in the Bible,” including Exodus 22:1 and Deuteronomy 15:12-13, but he especially focused on the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1-10.
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“The present challenge for Baptists is that there is no place to remain silent or neutral in relation to the issue of reparations,” said Dick, the immediate past president of the JBU, during a session of the BWA’s Commission on Mission and who serves as pastor of Boulevard Baptist Church in Kingston, Jamaica. “There is even need for greater critical self-examination in terms of the role the churches played then [in slavery] and the role the churches play now.”
“Reparations is about vindication for persons who are victims and not compensated. Reparations is based on justice, which presupposes the equality of all races and equity for the disadvantaged,” Dick explained. “It seeks a reasonable, effective and prompt remedy for gross violations of international human rights law – under British chattel slavery – through available and appropriate resources.”
He pointed out that reparations goes beyond money and/or and apology. Dick says it is about “the restoration of dignity and recognition of the immeasurable worth of each person.”
The convention is a joint project between British and Jamaican Baptists, is named after a Black Baptist leader in Jamaica whose strike from 1831 to 1832 helped lead to the British abolition of slavery.
It’s not only Black Baptists who believes the issue of reparations is a Chistian one. Recently white male Baptist Alan Bean, who is also executive director of criminal justice reform organization Friends of Justice, wrote an op-ed in Baptist News enticled “5 reasons why reparations talk makes white people crazy.
He wrote that there are “five interlocking reasons why white America thinks reparations is a nutty idea.”
He said they were:
1. Reparations talk confuses our social boundaries. “Typically, white folks live out their lives in the company of other white folks. Rarely, if ever, are we forced to listen to Black men and women speak painful words rooted in personal experience. Our social barriers protect us from such talk,” he wrote.
2. Reparations talk confronts family pride.”Most white Americans can recite a family story full of struggle and hard-fought success. For us, slavery and Jim Crow segregation belong to an ancient world that has no bearing on the present,” Bean wrote.
3. Reparations talk messes with our religion. He recalled how a woman once told him that the Blacks should be thankful that the “providence of God brought them to America as slaves. Only here would they encounter the glories of western civilization and a shot at eternal life. Of course she had been carefully taught to think this way.”
4. Reparations talk challenges our patriotism. How can one be proud
5. Reparations talk messes with our politics. “After two decades on the front lines of criminal justice reform I concluded that white racial resentment was the dominant force in American politics,” Bean wrote.
He concluded that yes Christians and other people of goodwill can discuss about reparations “without driving white folks crazy” only is white Americans move outside their social comfort zone.
“We need to ground our self-esteem in the truth. We need to drop our whips so we can read our Bibles. We need a patriotism that flows from repentance. And we need a politics that replaces historical ignorance with historical inquiry. It seems to me that we white Americans who claim to follow Jesus ought to lead the way,” he wrote.
