Schools are Banning Diversity Instruction, is Your 501c3 Status Next?
As a child, one of the greatest benefactors of my social growth was the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. For example, the socially conscious Sunday School curriculum at DuPage AME Church addressed my social needs as a minority living in a predominately white environment. The church’s surrounding community refused to mainstream black culture into its school curriculum, so this congregation identified the social and spiritual needs of its membership. In simple terms, if my peers did not get the social uplift at home or church, we never would receive it. And so, when a teacher in a Chicago suburb told me that “most slave owners were kind and the movie Amistad was a lie,” it was my Sunday School that revisioned this historical inaccuracy with a contextualized bible lesson.
“Lost Cause” White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) theology has been challenged by Sunday School classes across the connection for centuries. In fact, this season’s Sunday School may need social and political contextualization more than ever. The reasoning for this proclamation is simple: the Florida DeSantis “Woke Bill;” the Tennessee HB2670 bill; the Georgia “Protect Students First Act;” and the Delaware “Loss of Tax-Exempt Bill.” These bills are all seeking to ban conversations on “divisive concepts” in public schools, as they go against the hagiography (idolizing biography) of American exceptionalism. The Delaware bill even goes as far as penalizing Churches that “get political” and includes the concept of wokeness religiosity as a banned practice. These divisive concepts can include conversations on current racial discrimination, racial privilege, racial oppression, and systematic oppression. Therefore, topics like slavery, lynching, voting disenfranchisement, minority medical malfeasance, and even religious blasphemies by WASPs may be topics many AME Church children will not gain in their educational explorations. Can the same be said for religious exploration as today’s concern?
As a professor at a Tennessee public university, I can attest that conversations are taking place in college departments concerning intellectual freedoms and instructional limitations. Professors are being encouraged to discuss “diversity without saying diversity.” There is literature being distributed encouraging instructors to discuss content that does not make students uncomfortable and what we should do when a red herring disrupts a class. In states like Delaware, Church leadership will likely need some training against bullies trying to attack the vein of our existence. Acknowledging the cost of our discipleship is more important than ever within our secular and spiritual spaces.
