What the Gospel Story Can Tell Us about Identity Politics

“From this vantage point, it would be difficult to imagine a more intersectional person than Jesus.”

The deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, protests over racial justice, and mounting threats to free speech have, once again, brought issues of race, power, and identity to the forefront of our national conversation. While conservatives have rightly expressed outrage at the circumstances of Floyd and Taylor’s deaths, for various and understandable reasons, there has also been a hesitancy to acknowledge that these events might be indicative of a broader problem.

In light of this, the questions and sentiments I most often hear from fellow conservatives are as follows: “Will we ever be able to stop talking about race? I’m not a racist, and nobody alive in America today had anything to do with slavery, so why is this my problem? If we give an inch on this issue, then liberals will take a mile—just look how fast they’ve moved from Robert E. Lee to George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant.”

Yet, while I am sympathetic to these positions politically, my spiritual home is as a Christian. This means that when my political home and my spiritual home come into conflict, my spiritual home must win. And it is difficult to read the gospel story and come to the conclusion that issues of identity, power and justice, which racial concerns and identity politics seek to address, are irrelevant to the gospel message.