Since his first book in 1968, My Friend, the Enemy, William E. Pannell has invited White Evangelicals to wrestle with him and grapple with real-time racial reconciliation. In The Coming Race Wars, Expanded Edition: A Cry for Justice, from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, Pannell contemplates the racial tensions between Black and White American evangelicals almost thirty years after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, which followed the acquittal of four officers filmed beating a motorist named Rodney King. As its subtitle states, The Coming Race Wars is a cry for justice. Like the first edition, this expanded edition places the beating, trial, and uprising at the center of Pannell’s plea for racial reconciliation.
The original subtitle of the book was A Cry for Reconciliation. The shift from reconciliation to justice reflects Pannell’s desire for Evangelical Christians to advance American racial justice based on the gospel of Jesus Christ. Pannell, one of the foremost African American Evangelical homileticians, enables the reader to absorb over fifty years’ worth of his ministry at the intersections of race and Christianity in America. It becomes evident that Pannell desires this volume to be more than a historical contextualization of race, class, and Evangelical Christianity in Southern California as the book progresses. At its heart, this book is personal: Pannell wrestles with the impact of American racism and the Christian desire for reconciliation in Black communities.
The seven chapters are mostly unrevised from the 1993 version. What is new in the expanded edition is an introduction by Jemar Tisby entitled “A History of War” and an afterword by Pannell, “The View From Here (27 Years Later).” In the afterword, Pannell laments that, in 2021, Rodney King’s querulous plea, “Can we get along?” is as relevant as it was 29 years ago, and Pannell has lost some optimism.
Throughout The Coming Race Wars, Pannell charismatically mixes personal observations about Los Angeles in the current day with descriptions of the state of Black America since the 1960s. The first chapter presents an overview of Pannell’s invitation to White Evangelicals to problematize their political ideologies and theologies in a world on fire. Towards the end of the chapter, he muses that over six decades, he expected Evangelical leaders “to be leading the way in considering how worship and evangelism and preaching can be combined with community organization so that marginal people will have hope.” (40) He concludes that he is disappointed in White Evangelical Christians’ complacency and reliance on individual grace concerning racial justice. Pannell alternately nudges, admonishes, and satirizes his “Friend”—a literary device he used as a proxy for White Evangelical Christians.
The subsequent chapters unpack stereotypes of Black men, how race and class intersect and collide within American politics, the persistence of Black-White framing of racism in a multicultural country, and how American economic and political systems perpetrate violence against Black people. Chapter 6, “Evangelicals and the Urban Crisis,” more explicitly presents Pannell’s general observations about traditional Black and White Evangelical churches in major cities and how both institutions can appeal to the younger generations.
Depending on the reader’s ideological or theological perspective, this chapter might be challenging to accept. Pannell’s argument, built on vignettes about the Rodney King trial and uprisings, contends that the “urban” environs represent a “needy mission field just a couple of dozens away” (118). “As cities take on a more non-Western ambiance, replete with substantial unemployment and political disenfranchisement,” he continues, “urban and suburban churches will be further distanced from one another along the faultlines of ideology and praxis” (119). Pannell wants urban evangelical churches to embrace economic justice and systemic racial reconciliation in their ministries rather than remain centered around individual salvation. The argument is that reducing economic inequities will lead to decreased race-based inequality. Though this chapter is more critical of US Evangelicalism, Pannell still holds out hope that religious reconciliation and a stronger focus on economic justice may save America from its racial turbulence.
The book’s weaknesses stem from how personal these reflections are. Because Pannell admits that this book is a monologue, it is impossible to generalize his assertions as representative of Black America or as prescriptive to White Evangelical America. “I acknowledge here—and now and again throughout the book—that the issues and problems are sometimes not as simple as I make them seem” (22). From the preface to the first edition, Pannell knows Black women are impacted by racism and violence. “It is tough enough to be a woman in a man’s world where black men are marginal or nonexistent in any wholesome sense” (23). Though Pannell nods to racial violence against Black women, Black women are not present throughout the rest of the book.
Tisby’s introduction, a summary of the first edition with some popular culture references that should reach a younger audience, laments this exclusion, briefly acknowledging the activism of Kimberle Crenshaw’s #sayhername campaign—explicitly created to name Black women killed by law enforcement agents. Considering how much had changed in American Christianity at the time of this book’s publication, more reflection about the “culture wars” embroiling US evangelicalism—the rise of Christian nationalism and debates about gender and sexuality come to mind—would have been rich material to address.
The Coming Race Wars surveys the fraught recent history of the Black American man in order to engender empathy and collaboration from White American Evangelicals. Admittedly, these ruminations stem from a Black American man who worked, worshipped, and lived in Evangelical communities for almost eighty years. Pannell is among the foremost content experts on race and the Evangelical Church. His vocation as a minister, faculty member, and former dean of Fuller Theological Seminary’s Chapel shines through each page. This book should be categorized as personal reflections with educative historical and political vignettes. The considerations uncover the embattled status of Black men in the United States and Evangelical Christianity’s tense relationship with racial justice; readers may find these reflections disarming or dismaying.
Stephanie Milton is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Study of Religion at the University of California, Davis.
Stephanie Milton
Date Of Review:
February 14, 2024