An Exhortation to Empathy from a White Evangelical

If you have been reading my latest posts, you may be able to sense my religious faith, or perhaps my conviction to try to understand my generation amidst the American political climate. I also am hoping to achieve more depth in my thinking about race relations and how we have come to this particular moment in history. I am deeply hurt over the actions of Abdul Razak Ali Artan, an Ohio State Buckeye, and am more challenged every day to seek to empathize with those who, daily, wrestle with an inner turmoil within their very being.

Artan was a student on campus in Columbus, who carried out a knife attack on campus Monday. He said in a Facebook post he was "sick and tired" of seeing fellow Muslims "killed and tortured," according to federal law enforcement officials. He felt fatigue, he felt his spirituality dry up as the insecurity of his own faith mounted as he feared persecution for praying on a campus that did not offer a space to do so. This helps us understand his declaration on his FaceBook page, claiming "Seeing my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped and killed in Burma led to a boiling point".

I am a white man, who tries to go to church every Sunday in the southern United States. I ready my bible and pray daily. I also try to share my faith with my friends and others who are put into my life.
These are simply disciplines, yet for the sake of my own faith they are essential to a healthy and thriving spiritual life. And as long as I live in America, I will (likely) never fear or feel the same as Artan did when trying to "live out" my faith. Never. And so it is my duty to empathize. One of my favorite rappers posted the above reading list on Twitter, saying "Books that helped my white friends 'get it'". Now, I am a Rhodes student, and have been graciously given an education I never thought or asked for. And it is almost over. But the need to read, to try to understand where my fellow citizen is coming from amidst so much blatant suffering on the college campus, is something I will seek to do. Perhaps the content in these books can help me to continually repent from my sometimes racist posture towards other races, for the sake of leaning into the discomfort and the daily danger they feel and respond out of.