DIVINE (NOT HUMAN) EFFORT SEEN AS SOLUTION FOR RACISM

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 30, 1993                   TAG: 9301290325
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TOM SCHAEFER KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
DIVINE (NOT HUMAN) EFFORT SEEN AS SOLUTION FOR RACISM
If Billy Graham could change one problem in society, what would it be? The 74-year-old evangelist's answer, given during a television interview last month, was racism.
It's a problem, he went on to say, that extends throughout the social structures of this country, corrupting people as well as institutions.
As we observed Martin Luther King Day recently, we reflected on King's dream of a society free from racial prejudice. But even that is still only a dream.
Yet both King and Graham, coming at the issue from different perspectives and with different backgrounds, at least had a common reference point to the problem. Sadly, the reference point is fading away for many people as a factor in discussions about racism.
What has changed, it seems to me, is that the problem of racism is identified less as an inherent defect in human nature - what Judaism and Christianity historically have called sin - that can only be overcome by changing human nature through divine effort, and more as a failure in human understanding that many think can be rectified only by law and education.
Well, we've tried law and education. (Yes, with some progress. And those efforts by no means should end.) But racism cannot not be eradicated, I maintain, if the focus of our efforts is limited to what in effect is human reprogramming through human efforts.
The fact is, a major part of the Rev. King's success in the civil rights struggle came from his awareness that people have a spiritual dimension. He believed they were dependent on and were eternally related to God. And in the context of standing against racial injustice, King constantly appealed to their desire to obey a higher law and a higher calling in facing up to racist attitudes and behavior.
Today, however, if anything is said about the role of religion in such matters, it often has to do with a mishmash of ideas about the human soul's achieving its own divinity. And divine dependence and divine-human relationships? These ideas increasingly are viewed as superstitious, restrictive and unenlightened.
It's sad that in our efforts to honor King and to strive to overcome racial inequality and injustice, many deny what King understood to be the key to righting the wrongs of humanity: the need for divine redemption - and people's awareness of that need.

Tom Schaefer writes about religion and ethics for the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB