Hey, Churchill. Welcome back to another installment of Ask Me Anything. We are here with the man I affectionately call the good doctor.

He is, I think unprecedented. I love you, Dr. Jamar Tisby and our church loves you. Thank you so much for collaborating with us and being a friend of mine. I admire you. I love you. And I am going to ask you anything.

I am ready. Are you ready? Yeah, absolutely. Actually, you are ready. You are very, very ready. Okay, let's start off with a big swing. And that is people say in the church.

What an intro. People say in the church. Racism, justice. Isn't that kind of a social construct, social justice? That's not really biblical.

Hey, Pastor, can you stick to the gospel? Stick to the scriptures? And let's not get into the social justice stuff.

I mean, I just like seriously. Seriously, it's a great way to start. Seriously.

It is a hard objection to comprehend. It is. It is a hardest. First of all, you may not know this. I've been black all my life.

So like these issues of racism are real. My uncle couldn't be a pilot in the Air Force because he was black. So he ended up a mechanic.

But for his entire life, he had dreamed of being a pilot. My grandfather got run out of Shreveport, Louisiana because he was making too much money running moonshine, which you had to have this alternate income because of poverty.

And he was threatening white moonshineers and they got my grandfather from his above market job and said, don't go home. They're waiting for you.

Takes off and has to leave the state, right? So I grew up with that in my history and heritage, let alone my own experiences of being racially profiled and frisked by the cops and all of that stuff.

So like, you know, from an embodied perspective, that question or that objection about isn't the social, it makes zero sense to me.

It's outrageous. It's outrageous. It's absurd. It's absolutely absurd. I don't mean to insult anybody, but like, this is the lived reality for so, so, so many people.

So the very question is frustrating because because we spend so much time trying to unpack and justify why we're concerned about the welfare of our neighbors. Let's put it in biblical terms, right?

Like, like, like, like, we are one body. When one part of the body suffers, we all suffer. So what's the objection? And what it comes from historically is, is there's always been this bifurcation between the material and the spiritual.

In Western white evangelical Christianity, it goes all the way back to a historical event. I often reference in 1667, Virginia assembly white Anglican men say baptism will not emancipate an enslaved African indigenous person or mixed race person. What are they doing there? They are separating body and soul.

They're saying we can enslave your body, but you're free in Christ. And they don't see the integration of those things. That's been carried forward to the present day, such that when we talk about the physical material, lived realities and concerns of people, we said, oh, that's separate from the gospel, that's separate from what spiritual. And that's, that was never God's intention as I understand the Bible and Jesus is teaching.

And to not care for one another or care for our own body and just ignore that, it's like, well, then the hospital should be eliminated dentistry. Like if you're not going to care for the body, then you got to take that theology, that philosophy all the way to the

degree. But of course, we know that the gospel informs us in a very practical social construct. In fact, to serve Jesus is to live well and to live well is only to love well. So loving your neighbor is implicit to the fabric of the gospel. Correct.

But it's always been selective, right? Like like like people understand people get like I got to take care of folks material, consider this only if things called like mercy ministry, right? You know, that's what that's that's that's why we give to people and all of that stuff. They understand that they'll even be advocates and activists on certain certain political issue. But when it comes to race, that's where the division is because the sad reality is, especially

in the United States, the church has been the vehicle for so much racism. It's it has been the carrier of this wicked practice, right? And so the the habit has become we've even formed theologies around separating the spiritual in the physical or the material separating issues of of Jesus and justice as if they're two different things.

Right. I don't know what justice is without Jesus. So picking the part Jesus and justice is taking his body apart. Right. His person is character. And it has to come whole or it can come at all. Why? Why do we do this specifically in the area of race? To your point, it's like we're able to see and even institute into our theology, the embodiment, the soul and the body.

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