First of all, I want to be fair and give credit to the ICOC and (especially) our local church for starting some encouraging conversations about the events of the past few weeks. Obviously sooooo far to go (and the process will and should never end), but every journey starts with small steps. 💫
All of that said… (insert record scratch sound)
As evangelical momentum slowly builds on addressing institutional racism, we cannot afford to ignore the continued (and growing) threat posed by the robust misinformation ecosystem that helped inflame much of the ignorance in the first place.
An eye-opening and heartfelt message about black experiences with law enforcement on Sunday morning will go right out the window if it’s bookended by absolute garbage in social media feeds every other day of the week.
While it’s uplifting to finally hear some “I just wasn’t aware” comments from white evangelicals, it’s time to also consider why they weren’t aware, and if they’ve adjusted their media consumption habits to ensure that they’re weeding out sources of misinformation along with their old, uninformed thoughts about race in America.
In other words, if you’re starting to burn down institutional racism, all of the blatantly untrue, conspiracy-based or agenda-driven content from the likes of QAnon, Candace Owens, PragerU, Breitbart and so many more all also need to be tossed into the fire.
I’ve posted before about the importance of carefully monitoring and scrutinizing your sources of information, and while I hope that we continue to scream this from the rooftops during all-church discussions (we had an encouraging lesson about this a few weeks back, fingers crossed for much more), for those interested in starting this process themselves, I wanted to build upon my wife’s list of race-related media to explore with this short set of “radicalization and misinformation” recommendations:
- How To Tell Fact From Fiction And Trust The News Again
- Media Bias Chart
- The Brainwashing of My Dad
- Rabbit Hole (the entire podcast, but especially the QAnon episodes)
- Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States
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House of Kyle 