Must Everything Be Racialized? Reflections on a Recent Article by John C. Richards

Yesterday on his blog, The Exchange, hosted by Christianity Today online, Ed Stetzer gave space to his colleague, John C. Richards, to write about the recent SCOTUS nominee. Richards, a “Christian person of color,” serves as the Managing Director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. His article is entitled, “Brett Kavanaugh is a Troubling Supreme Court Pick for Black Christians.”

Richards’ article strikes me as an example of much that is wrong in American evangelicalism today. It reflects a conviction-shaping-narrative that cannot be sustained by historical facts (and, as we all know, you can have your own opinions, but you cannot have your own facts) as well as the kind of racialized thinking that clouds judgment.

He writes, “I long for the days when Supreme Court judges weren’t viewed as representing a particular ideology.” I assume he means “any” particular ideology rather than only one particular ideology. If that is correct, I wonder when those days existed? Both strict constructionism and loose constructionism are ideological approaches to interpreting the constitution of the United States (as is regarding it as a living document). The former fulfills the 9th Commandment while the latter is the spirit that permeated the days of the judges in Israel’s history (Judges 17:6). Every Supreme Court judge has an ideology. Granted, there may have been times when that was not as readily recognized as it is today. If so, it is a good thing that such naiveté no longer exists.

Richards also opines,  Never before in history has our country been so divided politically. In the past, Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justices were informative and valuable in determining a judge’s fitness to serve in this critical office. Today, confirmation hearings are nothing less than a political slugfest that often values partisanship over a jurist’s ability to fill a seat on the highest court in the land.

There is no doubt that we are living in an era of deep political division but, thus far, we have not paid the price of 600,000 deaths, as we once did, for our divisions. Further, I am not sure how far into the past Richards is looking to contrast to today’s “political slugfest[s]” that are confirmation hearings (which have only been going on since 1916). It must surely be more than three decades since during that time such hearings have given us a “high tech lynching” and coined “bork” as a new verb.

My greater concern stems from the way that Richards racializes the nomination of Kavanaugh.