How a White Pastor Became a Race Realist

This is part of our continuing series of accounts by readers of how they shed the illusions of liberalism and became race realists.

I’m the pastor of a conservative multi-racial church in Britain. Over the past three years, I’ve become a white advocate largely through my pastoral experiences with non-whites. Two incidents in particular brought me to race realism. Both were ungrateful slaps in the face in return for the amazing generosity of our white-majority church.

The first incident was helping an African family that had fled religious persecution in their homeland. In the beginning, they were faithful and well-liked members of our church. Then, after a few years, they were having visa problems serious enough that they lost access to the British social safety net — welfare, food assistance, etc. Thinking this was a temporary problem, the members of our church offered to pitch in to help pay their rent and feed their children until things got sorted out. This went on for several months — much longer than expected. When the matter was finally resolved, the church stopped assisting them financially. With that, the couple split up and left the church. We never saw them again.

The second incident involved an African pastor from a nearby church. We regularly pray for persecuted Christians across the world, so we invited him to come and speak to our prayer group about the horrific persecution of Christians in his native land. He agreed to come, but first emailed us a video of a businesswoman in his country addressing a class of white American high school students. She spent 20 minutes talking about how comfortable and prosperous her home city was, how many shopping malls it had, etc. Then she rebuked these children for daring to imagine that her country was poor and in need of their pity. I couldn’t believe what this woman was saying — and I couldn’t believe a fellow pastor had sent me her comments in response to my benevolent invitation.

My congregation found these incidents quite hurtful and utterly incomprehensible. As a good pastor interested in global missions, I started doing some research into trying to understand Africa and Africans. In doing so, I came to realize that it is my own tribe that is in decline, and worthy of pity and charity. Just as in America, the white majority in Britain will not last for more than a few more decades — and we may become practically extinct within a century. I now believe that our compassionate God wants white Christians to wake up and to redirect our resources towards bringing healing and redemption to our own people. We’ve done our duty to the world. Now the world needs to step back and let us heal ourselves for the next century or so.

If you have a story about how you became racially aware, we’d like to hear it. If it is well written and compelling, we will publish it. Use a pen name, stay under 1,200 words, and send it to us here.