Dr. Meghan McMahon Johnson joins Mark and Rex to discuss the current unrest in America regarding racial injustice. The Church has much to learn from King's prophetic and profound "Letter from Birmingham Jail".

TRANSCRIPT

0:02

Welcome to Jessup think I'm your host Mark Moore, and I'm your co host Rex Gurney. In today's episode, we'll explore the current unrest in America concerning racial injustice and inequality. And the conversation will be framed by Dr. King's profound and prophetic letter from a Birmingham Jail. The church in the white church most explicitly has so much to learn from his wisdom and insight. We're joined by Dr. Megan McMahon Johnson, who's our Director of Student care here at Jessup. And we hope you enjoy the sale. We hope it challenges you to think more deeply about issues of race in the church's response.

0:49

All right, well, we've we've got a pretty easy topic today, we can just smooth sailing through this one. It's clear in our world today, and particularly our nation, that we need help. We need healing. We need wisdom. We need guidance, guidance. And there's been so many responses to kind of the social unrest and the protests that have happened over the last couple of weeks. And some of the responses have been really helpful, and really wise, and others, not so much. And, and so we want to kind of talk about today, like how the church has been responding. And, and for me, considering some of the churches, some of the statements that I've heard from the church recently, particularly the white church, I was drawn back to Dr. King's letter from a Birmingham Jail. And I had to I had to remind myself that while King is praised now, he wasn't always praised by the church. And in the 60s, wasn't always well received, was misunderstood was misquoted. And, and I needed to kind of remind myself of that, you know, and so I kinda was just doing some research on, on how particularly how the white church responded to King during his, during his work for, for civil rights. And I was pretty shocked by reading the letter from Birmingham jail again, through the lens of our current situation, how timely it was, and how if you didn't know, that was written in April of 1963, you were thought he wrote it, in May of

2:45

a lot of the rhetoric, a lot of the rhetoric has not changed at all, at all, actually, Ryan, and especially the rhetoric that he was pushing up against hasn't.

2:53

Right. Yeah. And and it's sadly that case, you know, that we haven't maybe learned from, from our mistakes, learn from our Centurion, Rex, I know, we've talked about this a lot, like has a history professor, this is our chance to, to be able to look back at history and and really learn or relearn these things are attempt to learn.

3:20

Yeah, I actually have, we may not want to look back of that much right history, because it actually hasn't been that good with us. I mean, we might as well just sort of admit it. I am. Yeah, that's so true. Yeah. You know, I grew up into domination. And, you know, I'm grateful for the denomination I grew up in. That's the Southern Baptist Convention. You know, which is sort of like, I don't know, the Catholic Church of the south or something. You know, it is, um, you know, the very fact that that denomination exists, is because of slavery. And because of basically, the, the Southern Baptist wanted to appoint slaveholders, missionaries. And the Baptist in the north said, No way. And the Baptist in the south just went their own way, and then became this huge thing. That's sort of born literally in in racism. And And honestly, it's just true. And even until the early 60s, if you were African American, and you tried to go to First Baptist Church of I don't know, you know, almost anywhere in the south. Yeah. And tried to enter you would be ushered out by by the white deacons and the white ushers and told that you are not welcome. And that's not that long ago. In fact, that's that's kind of al