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This chapter examines the theological foundations of the racial reconciliation movement, which has played an important role in Evergreen's development. After discussing the biblical basis of racial reconciliation theology and its development into a larger movement within mainstream evangelicalism, Evergreen's unique approach to racial reconciliation is assessed, an approach that differs significantly from the color-blind model.

This chapter explores the role young adults are playing in the push toward multiethnic churches and the converging factors — both secular and religious — that have contributed to their diversity. InterVarsity has played a key role in the lives of many young people at Evergreen. The ways in which InterVarsity in Los Angeles addresses diversity and racial reconciliation is examined. While many white evangelicals appeal to a color-blind, individual reconciliation approach to diversity, InterVarsity in Los Angeles has stressed ethnic diversity and, increasingly, social justice in its teaching on racial reconciliation.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the controversy sparked by the Virginia General Assembly's introduction of a joint resolution on January 10, 2007, atoning for Virginia's part in the enslavement of Africans and calling for racial reconciliation. It then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to come to terms with political theorists' reluctance to treat race and racial injustice as fundamental to the study of modern democratic life. Drawing on the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, the book examines how his efforts to craft a usable past from unspeakable loss can inspire efforts to conceive alternative, more democratic futures. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

By the 1920s, when the Assemblies of God began its Home Missions, centuries of colonization and missionaries had wrecked traditional Native American life. North American Native Pentecostals entered a new world of belief but blended Native and Pentecostal bodily experiences of singing, dancing, and healing. Struggling for autonomy, Native leaders implemented the “indigenous principle”—rooting Pentecostalism within their own cultures. Native Pentecostals redefined healing to meet their needs as colonized peoples: emphasizing healing from bitterness of past wrongs, racism, paternalism, and breaches of trust by White missionaries, and focused on reconciliation and divine judgment. Native missionaries fought stereotypes and misconceptions through publications about the Cherokee Trail of Tears and Navajo Long Walk. Native Pentecostals pushed the flexible boundaries of Pentecostalism and worked out their own religious identities—embracing their Pentecostal and Native halves and laying the groundwork for the modern racial reconciliation movement among Promise Keepers and the Christian Right.

Howard Thurman, who played a significant role in racial reconciliation in the United States during the period between the 1940s and the 1970s, was included in the group of African American religious leaders who journeyed to India for a pilgrimage in 1935. One of the most important highlights of this trip involved a conversation with Mohandas Gandhi regarding race relations in the United States and how even in the church, the color bar still had influence and power. Thurman then realized that the color bar was honored in the Christian religion. This chapter explores some of the efforts and experimentations made to integrate gradually racial reconciliation and multiracial congregations, with Howard Thurman's insights being used as a starting point.

Racial reconciliation must be the primary purpose of slave redress. When Americans accept the idea of slave redress, they welcome the belief that people must go back in time and place to right a heavy wrong and to make the present and future more racially harmonious. They comprehend that there is a price to pay for collective amnesia, for that type of destruction. Some might say that racial reconciliation is unnecessary or that the past should remain buried. These proficient people miss many points. They miss the point that the federal government committed a horrific racial atrocity for which it has never apologized. They miss the point that the government has little credibility on racial matters with the great majority of its black citizens. And they miss the point that black Americans continue to endure the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow.

This concluding chapter discusses how the Christian Right is no longer the only public voice speaking for American evangelicals. Since 2004, alternative leaders and advocacy groups have stepped out of the shadows to broaden the evangelical agenda. New voices appeal to evangelicals to consider poverty, creation care, and racial reconciliation as important moral issues. But this broadened political agenda will only gain traction with rank-and-file evangelicals if it becomes part of local religious practice. It is not enough to engage in top-down messaging about moral values. If these elites seek to challenge the hegemony of the Christian Right, they need to find substitutes for the powerful identity-work that goes on every week in evangelical congregations.

This chapter explores the history of Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis after the kneel-in crisis that engulfed the church in the mid-1960s. Its focus is the ways the church has acknowledged and sought to address its exclusion of African Americans from the church at that time. The chapter traces the church's emphasis on urban ministry and racial reconciliation in Memphis, particularly since the 1990s. The chapter tells the story of Second Presbyterian's failed attempt to partner with an African American congregation to found an interracial congregation at Clayborn Temple, former home of Second Presbyterian and later headquarters for the Sanitation Workers' strike of 1968. It concludes by highlighting external and internal perspectives on the church's efforts to address the problems of racial injustice and alienation.

The first chapter acknowledges that structures matter. Matthew Pratt Guterl discusses the practice of racial passing in the supposed post-racial age, dwelling on what it tells us about structures—and about racial reconciliation. Guterl takes up the story of Rachel Dolezal—with the benefit of a year’s reflection—and her “trans-racial” subject position. He reads it, as she did, through the experiences of Caitlyn Jenner, the trans-gender sports figure. He asks what it means to celebrate racial self-fashioning as if it were akin to gender transitioning and thinks about the broader cultural responses to Dolezal’s story of passing and subterfuge.

This chapter traces the history of calls for “racial reconciliation” in policing and, in so doing, identifies the potential pitfalls of current reform efforts. New proposals for “racial reconciliation” fit within an old architecture of policing reform, extending from the pursuit of stable police “race relations” in the 1950s, to healthy “police-community relations” in the late 1960s, and to proactive “community-oriented policing” of the 1990s. Tracing this post–civil rights history of racial reconciliation in policing, Naomi Murakawa identifies potential dangers that lurk within well-intentioned efforts to reconcile police and black communities through truth-telling forums and procedural justice. Murakawa concludes that the language of “racial reconciliation” demands reform but resists normative commitments, effectively translating the potentially transformative work of Black Lives Matter into a set of technocratic, proceduralist fixes with an air of emotional sensitivity.

This chapter explores the representation of Arabs, Islam, and Arabo-Islamic culture in early twentieth-century black uplift discourses. These representations are hardly consistent and often speak directly to differences in theories on self-representation, as well as to the aesthetic divides that these differences engender. The most prominent figure of black engagement with Arab and Islamic culture is the Moor. Indeed, the figure of the Moor was mobilized for both spiritual and secular discourses on black identity. Tracking its uses in the first decades of the twentieth century reveals how intraethnic class and religious reconciliation were often sacrificed in black uplift discourses to intraethnic racial reconciliation. The chapter also discusses the term barbaresque, which describes black intellectuals' aesthetic engagement with North Africa, as well as with the narratives of African American empowerment these engagements produced.

By the fortieth anniversary of the civil rights murders, Mt. Zion Church was supported by new organizations that supported its witness. In June 2004, a triracial community group, the Philadelphia Coalition, organized the commemoration service and called for a new trial for the murderers. The work of the coalition was facilitated by the Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, housed on the campus of the University of Mississippi and loosely modeled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Dick Molpus, a senior institute member, told the large community gathering at the commemoration that “we are not each other’s enemies,” and that the new needs were jobs, housing, schools, and health care. Mt. Zion’s witness for forty years had consistently connected the murders with the goals of the activists, and now, prompted by the advocacy of Andrew Goodman’s mother, Carolyn, the leader of the conspiracy, Edgar Ray Killen, was brought to trial.

This chapter focuses on the place of evangelicals in the contemporary social world, through an examination of their representation in Left Behind. It finds that although the evangelical characters have a clear missionary imperative in the early novels of the series, this quickly gives way to evangelical isolationism as they develop into a separatist faith community which is increasingly hostile to those beyond its ‘inner circle’. The chapter also engages with the series’ attitudes towards race, multiculturalism and, specifically, Islam, through an examination of its depiction of Muslims and non-white converts to evangelicalism. It finds that the series’ messages about multiculturalism and what is often described as ‘racial reconciliation’ among evangelicals are surprisingly ambiguous and at times even progressive.

This introduction briefly outlines the contemporary evangelical concern with racial diversity and justice and attributes part of this newfound interest to Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s book, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford, 2000). After broadly sketching out Emerson and Smith’s arguments in Divided by Faith, the introduction concludes with an overview of the chapters in the book and provides a summary of each.