The Faith of the Floyds
On June 1, 2020, after commanding law enforcement officers to use tear gas and riot control tactics to clear a group of peaceful protesters seeking justice for George Floyd, a Black man who was killed in Minneapolis on May 25 by former police officer Derek Chauvin, then-President Donald Trump marched to the front of St. John’s Episcopal Church holding a Bible.
Standing with Trump in front of the church for a staged photo op were members of his family, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and members of the military, including the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Trump’s Attorney General William Barr also joined him.
Trump did not mention George Floyd on that day, nor the legion of other Black men and women killed by American law enforcement since the days of slavery and Civil Rights. Trump did not mention the ugly history of racism and the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist ideology infiltration into American law enforcement, including the Minneapolis Police Department where Chauvin worked, notably its union president, Bob Kroll.
Trump didn’t mention these things because Kroll and his ilk were among Trump’s greatest supporters. And though he stood in front of a church holding a Bible, the only Gospel that mattered that day was the Gospel of Donald Trump, and of power.
Trump did not pray. He did not open his Bible. He walked away after the photo was taken, leaving in his wake injured protesters with burning eyes, crying children in the streets.
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For a majority of white Americans, particularly white Christians, this was their “Christian” president. He brought megachurch pastors and Evangelical Christian musicians into the White House. When I traveled across the country to interview Christian Trump voters for my book Red State Christians, in 2018, people told me again and again they were so glad to have a “Christian” President in the White House again, that they believed Trump was praying.
His comments about his lack of need for forgiveness and his “little white cracker” and “2 Corinthians” notwithstanding, for a majority of white American Christians, Trump’s wealth, his white skin, his conservative social politics, these were enough to consider him their Christian President. Some white Christians told me that they assumed former President Barack Obama had been a Muslim, despite a well-documented track record of attending a Black church in Chicago, and Obama singing Amazing Grace at the funeral of a Black pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed during Bible study by white supremacist youth Dylann Roof.
The white Christians I interviewed never mentioned Roof, that he’d been confirmed in an overwhelmingly white denomination (the same one I serve in as a Pastor), and they never mentioned America’s history of terrorizing Black people, particularly Black Christians in Black churches.
On June 1, 2020, an American faux-Christianity was on full display: a Christianity that had forgotten its brown-skinned Savior, who died poor and forsaken and killed by his own government as an enemy of the state, for daring to proclaim liberation and justice for the poor, and in doing so getting crosswise with the religious leaders of his day.
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Somehow, just as the stone was rolled away against all odds that first Easter morn, the Gospel finds a way to endure nevertheless. After four years and many more decades and centuries of a whitewashed Christianity that abuses women and practices financial grift of its church members, on April 21, 2021, a more ancient Christian Gospel elbowed its way to the forefront of American Christianity.
It did so without overwhelming political power or money or a whole cottage industry of Christian books, music, and culture. It did so against all odds, in a family rooted in Houston’s Third Ward, a historically Black neighborhood where residents like George Floyd faced growing up with “aging housing, underfunded schools, health-care disparities, high unemployment, and other forms of systematic inequalities,” according to an April 10 article in the Washington Post.
Much of the popular white Christianity voiced in America in recent years has oozed with bitterness: the idea that Christians were under attack from the “culture wars,” that they couldn’t say “Merry Christmas,” that their beliefs and traditions were being squelched, that their liberties and freedoms were being trampled upon, most recently by government edicts requiring the use of facemasks during a global pandemic.
George Floyd’s family could have easily swallowed this same pill of bitterness. And inside, I’m sure they did feel bitter: bitter at the ways American law enforcement targeted people of color, especially those living in neighborhoods without a lot of options. Bitter at the ways that America criminalized addiction. Bitter that their brother, their cousin, had gone North to find better opportunity as an ex-felon, only to die at the hands of the police for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill.
I’m sure the Floyds felt bitter when politicians who could not bear to utter their brother, their cousin, their nephew, their friend’s name instead chastised the millions protesting over his violent death to “go home” and “be quiet.” They condemned the riots but did not condemn George Floyd’s death, even though the world had watched Chauvin kill him on cellphone video shot by a 17-year-old girl.
Many white Christians across America went to church that week after George Floyd’s murder and heard sermons that called for peace but ignored Biblical edicts for justice; they read passages about quietism and calm but did not listen to the command of Genesis 4, when God hears Abel’s blood crying out from the earth and God will not be calmed, because Cain had betrayed his responsibility to his brother by killing his brother.
Too many white American Christians never saw Black Americans as their brother or sister or sibling in Christ.
The Bible has always been holy words in human hands, interpreted in human minds, and the Bible is too-often twisted to support a narrative that defends an American status quo that keeps white Christians comfortable.
Anyway, the Floyd family did not owe America its grace. They had every right to return bitterness with bitterness, the bitter fruit of a poisoned tree.
As Paul writes, “I will show you a still more excellent way,” however.
On April 21, 2021, Philonise Floyd reacted to the Minneapolis jury’s finding of Derek Chauvin guilty on all counts with words like these, as I quote from memory: “The name we lift up this day is Jesus. Thank you Jesus!”
Philonise Floyd had prayed silently in the courtroom: without a photo op, without a prop Bible, without tear gas or riot control. He’d prayed alone and without his brother. He bowed his head and simply prayed, even though he’d been told in America that the Christian God was not for him. That God’s justice was not for Black lives.
Philonise prayed anyway, and in his words he resurrected again the Savior who rose 2,021 years ago on Easter morning. Jesus was not at the Law and Order photo op after all. Instead he was wounded, crucified, and eating with so-called sinners, speaking to Samaritan women, and proclaiming for all to hear that he had come to “proclaim release to the captives … to let the oppressed go free.”
This Jesus — the God who humbled Godself and took on human form to save the world through weakness — this Jesus spoke in America this week, through the faith and the grace of a Floyd family who white Christians in America didn’t quite deserve.
Philonise’s prayer was a protest; his words a proclamation.
No, God did not ignore my brother’s death. No, God is not on the side of violence and human power and wealth. No, God does not ignore the cries of the oppressed. No, God does not tell us to help ourselves. No, God does not wield a gun. No, God does not silence those who cry out for justice. No, God does not claim peace where there is no peace.
Again and again, in their grief and in their brief moment of forcing accountability in American policing, the Floyd family talked about prayer, about faith, and about Jesus. In doing so they issued a challenge to the prevailing wisdom about Christianity in America, about those lily-white paintings of Jesus that hang in churches where Pastors once claimed enslaved people were less than fully human because of the color of their skin.
It is that pernicious lie, the lie of racism, that is destroying the American church, wrapping itself around and squeezing the life out of parishioners, fostering the seeds of hatred and sexism and homophobia and abuse.
Standing in the breach is the faith of the Floyds: the irreproachable witness of centuries of African American Christianity, a protest against the hijacking of Jesus, and a reminder that an America that was truly rooted in the Gospel would never have done the things it did to Black people.
To view America through the lens of the faith of the Floyds was to see both a desolating sacrilege and also an almost impossible hope for justice, love, and maybe finally peace.
The guilty verdicts were not justice. But Philonise Floyd called upon the name of Jesus anyway, because in this truthful telling about America, and in this final honoring of the value of his brother’s life, Philonise Floyd heard Jesus speak.
And then, as they had since May 25, 2020, and long, long, before, Black Christian leaders in America, Black Lives Matter protesters, and people from every race, faith, and ideology all over the world, grounded their movement for justice and equality in the power of prayer.
They reminded all of us, as we stared at an America so devastated by sin, a reflection of an America too long ignored by white eyes, of Jesus’ words to the disciples in Luke 9:14-29.
Jesus’ disciples had tried everything to heal a boy who was brought before them. But they could not do it. They believed the boy was dead. Then, Jesus took the boy by the hand, and suddenly he lived.
Jesus’ disciples asked him why they couldn’t cast out the demon.
“This kind can come out only through prayer,” Jesus said, and in these words I think about a country and a Christianity we sometimes think is dead — and an original American sin we are trying so hard to cast out.
May we learn anew to pray, in the wake of a tiny step toward justice, in the powerful example of a family whose faith turns American Christianity upside down, and reverts it back to Jesus.
