Twenty years ago, sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith published a landmark study called "Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America." They pointed out that white evangelicals had a limited “toolkit” for dealing with racism. Since white evangelicals construed faith individualistically, as a “personal relationship with Jesus,” their faith (and theology) offered a limited capacity for understanding social issues.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and when your hammer is “accepting Jesus into your heart,” every nail is an affair of the heart. So when white evangelicals do recognize racism, they tend to see it as a “personal” sin requiring repentance, not a structural injustice demanding rectification. When the sin of racism is reduced to personal animosity, the “solution” is simply relationships.
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