In America, there is division between many blacks and whites, yet racists come in all colors. And even greater than the black-white divide are the divides between Christians and non-believers, between liberals and conservatives, and between the inhabitants of fly-over-country and coastal elites. A focus on race and racism, particularly white racism, is not judging with right judgment the problems that divide America today.

Read Part 4 here.

In its work on “racial reconciliation,” the Presbyterian Church in America’s (PCA) 32^nd General Assembly in 2004 commended to presbyteries and congregations its Pastoral Letter on Racism. The letter, in the spirit of many mainline and evangelical churches’ work on this issue, declared us “guilty of judging particular individuals or groups of people … based on preconceived notions of the behavior of their particular group.”

But what if these preconceived notions are reliably based on experience and fairly depict reality? Is making judgments about how to relate to others based on what we know about them sinful? It might be, if our attitudes are sinful. But it does not have to be.

In John 7:24, Jesus is judged for healing a man on the Sabbath. But He does not tell those who are judging Him not to judge him. Instead, He tells them, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”

Though Jesus was judged here as an individual, judgment of groups also has biblical precedent in Jesus Himself: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves” (Matthew 23:13-15).

In this light, is the police officer seeking an Islamic terrorist being racist when he stops for questioning a man who fits the description in part because he appears to be of Arabic origins? Or, in Baltimore on business years ago, I decided to walk from my hotel on the harbor about 30 blocks through the Harlem Park and Sandtown neighborhoods to the New Song Community Church (PCA), that was ministering to the area’s black residents, many of whom lived in poverty. About halfway in, after being pelted with crabapples thrown by black teenagers unhappy with the presence of a white man in their neighborhood, I decided I’d better find a cab. When I did, the black cab driver chastised me for walking as far as I did. Did the desire to look for a cab make me a racist? It would depend, it seems from our brief review of Scripture, on whether I, the police officer, or others are using “right judgment.” In other words, it depends on what is in our hearts, not necessarily what criteria we use for screening.

Another example is insurance companies that routinely use credit scores to adjust premiums on homeowners insurance. Many “consumer advocates” lambast this practice, claiming “The damage that leads to many home insurance claims is often random, sudden and accidental—things like break-ins, slip and falls, or weather events. There is no way an individual’s credit score has a causal connection to those events.”

However, the data on this is incontrovertible. As one underwriting expert puts it, “It has been proven statistically time and time again that the way someone manages his or her credit correlates very strongly to whether or not they will have a future homeowner loss.” We can speculate about why this may be the case—it could be that those who pay their bills on time also  maintain their homes and so prevent many incidents leading to damage from occurring.

Whatever the reason, it turns out—not surprisingly—that people with lower credit scores are on average poorer than others. Which means that insurance companies often charge poor people more for homeowners insurance than they do wealthy people. Is this a sinful act on the part of insurance company executives? It would be if they held prejudices against the poor as individuals simply because they did not like being around poor people.

In the case of credit scoring, however, their motivation appears to be a desire to base their rates on actuarial risk in order to charge their customers the fairest risk-adjusted price. In doing so, they are both judging the individuals individually—people are responsible for their  credit scores—and collectively “based on preconceived notions of the behavior of their particular group”—some people with poor credit will not have excessive insurance claims. It is hard to see how we could charge insurance executives with sinful use of wrong judgment here.

Likewise, it seems wrong to collectively judge as sinful everyone who uses some  screening system to navigate through life. It would also, then, be wrong to impose a collective judgment of sin and racism in every case of judgment where race or economic circumstances are part of the equation.

Yet this is the approach that the many denominations have taken in their work on “racial reconciliation.” Everything seems to be about race and racism.

For instance, the PCA’s 2004 pastoral letter concludes that “racism denies the Gospel” because in Galatians 2 Paul “rebuke[s] Peter for acting on the basis of cultural custom, which the Gospel had transcended.” The PCA exegetes a passage on culture as being largely about racism.

Similarly, the letter states that “racial distinctives …are not defining categories that prohibit unity in the worship, fellowship and mission of the Body of Christ,” using as the proof text Revelation 5:9: “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.” While one might certainly infer that there are individuals of different skin color in this great multitude, skin color or race is not the primary focus of this passage.

In America, there is division between many blacks and whites, yet racists come in all colors. And even greater than the black-white divide are the divides between Christians and non-believers, between liberals and conservatives, and between the inhabitants of fly-over-country and coastal elites. A focus on race and racism, particularly white racism, is not judging with right judgment the problems that divide America today.

Bill Peacock is a member of Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Austin, Texas. His writings on religion, culture, and politics can be found at www.excellentthought.net.