Anti-racism and equity officer rethinks darkness and light

The United Church’s anti-racism and equity officer, Adele Halliday, is unhappy with our thinking of sins or evil as black or dark, and goodness as white or light. It hurts and is damaging to the soul. The Bible is full of such imagery, of course, but we should try to read such passages “through an anti-racist or racial justice lens”, and we must remember that “Biblical writers themselves had their own biases.” As I am sure you realise by now, Adele Halliday has no bias at all.

I have been going through my well-worn copy of Lord of the Rings and replacing “Dark Lord” with “D**k Lord”. I like to do my bit.

Read it all here. I should warn you, gentle reader, that the article does assume Adele’s gender and repeatedly refers to zir has “she” and “her”. Upsetting I know: please write to The Anglican Journal to voice your complaint.

Adele Halliday still remembers conversations from a church she attended years ago. The congregation constantly associated whiteness with purity and goodness, and darkness with evil. They talked about people being “washed white” from the blackness of sin.

Language is an important part of Christian worship traditions, whether in Scripture, song, liturgy or prayer. But when this language is unexamined, the result can be alienating—or worse, perpetuate longstanding prejudices, Halliday says.

At the time, Halliday says, “I didn’t feel I had enough personal power to speak up and say, ‘Can you please stop saying this, it is hurting me, it is damaging to my soul.’” Eventually she “voted with [her] feet” by leaving and joining another worshipping community. “But for some people it means leaving [church] completely.”

Halliday is the anti-racism and equity officer for the United Church of Canada, and has been working at the United Church’s national office since 2004 in various capacities, though always related to anti-racism or inter-cultural work.

The United Church’s work on these language issues is based in its anti-racism policy, developed in 2000, Halliday says. One major focus is discouraging the use of “dark” or “black” as synonyms for evil, and words like “light” or “white” as equivalent to goodness.

3 thoughts on “Anti-racism and equity officer rethinks darkness and light

  1. From a United Church background originally but left for the Evangelical Church

    Biblical terms refers to Spirit not skin color

    The United Church has Anchor Reference Books are pretty good

    The Author was the son of a Presbyterian Minister taught at Union College now called Vancouver School of Theology

    Creation vs Spirit

  2. May I humbly suggest that, for their next project, the United Church of Canada think deeply about the fact that their Bibles have black text printed on a white background–and there’s a lot more white than black, for sure. Problematic, yes, but how best to address it? Well, they could, for starters, use a non-white paper, to fix the whiteness. Secondly, they could then print the Bible text in the *same* colour as the background to address the colour inequality and pernicious contrast-making. By taking just these two simple steps, the United Church could create a bold, new, equitable pew Bible edition for their services! In case you haven’t noticed, the United Church is light-years ahead of everyone else on justice issues. (Or is that “dark-years behind”? Well, you know what I mean.)

  3. In reality, there are no purely black and white persons. Human skin colour ranges from the darkest brown to the lightest hues. Perhaps, the skin colour of Adam was somewhere between brown and light. God is not black or white. Humans are made in the image of God; we are not black or white either.

Leave a Reply