Contact, Empathy, and Power

The growth of American multi-ethnic Evangelical Christian churches (MECs) since the 1990s places them in a position to develop processes that create meaningful discussions about racial injustice in their congregation and the larger community. This progress faces real barriers, given the complex history of racism in American society and the nature of American Evangelicalism. Early attempts of racial reckoning relied too heavily on a passive approach, centered on contact, empathy, and prejudice reduction. Recent social psychological research on the contact hypothesis shows that the passive approach is insufficient to meet the demands for racial justice. Recent advances in deliberative democratic theory highlight what meaningful racial justice requires. Mary Scudder’s concept of ‘uptake’ argues that profound listening is missing from most work on democratic deliberation. Chantal Mouffe’s ‘agonistic pluralism’ and Danielle Allen’s ‘justice by means of democracy’ similarly show that talking and listening are insufficient goals of the deliberation process. This article explores how incorporating lament into the MEC congregation is one way of moving beyond a reliance on contact and empathy alone.