Yes, you can, and the most useful place to start is with what the word “political” is doing in the conversation. Nona Jones, who founded Faith and Prejudice to help churches confront racism, argues that the church’s struggle here is a theology problem before it is a politics problem. Her method follows from that claim: make the case from Scripture alone. If the passage itself is what gets labeled partisan, the real question is no longer about parties. It is about whether the church will let its own Bible speak.
That answer has limits, and they should be stated plainly. Scripture-first confrontation does not settle every question about strategy, vocabulary or timing. It does not make every critic a bad-faith actor. What it does is move the argument onto ground where Christians are already obligated to listen. The rest of this piece lays out how Jones builds that case, where Lisa Fields presses it further, where the case is strongest, and where faithful Christians can still land in different places.
What makes something “political” in the first place?
The worry behind the question deserves a fair hearing. Many Christians have watched conversations about race turn into party branding. They do not want a voting guide read from the pulpit with a verse attached. If confronting racism meant importing a partisan program and calling it the gospel, resisting it would be right.
Jones does not dismiss that worry. She designs around it. Faith and Prejudice, she explains, deliberately sets aside the legal and philosophical theories that dominate public argument. In her words, “we use the Bible, like the Bible is our framework.” She adds that “we pull from the Bible because theology is, is, it stands on its own.” This is a self-imposed restriction. It narrows what she is allowed to say to what Scripture can carry.
The restriction produced an unexpected result. Jones reports that when her organization shared Scripture with no commentary added, people still responded by calling the work ideological. They would “say that we’re Marxists and we’re socialists and we’re communists.” Her reply exposes the problem with the charge. If the only content offered is the Bible, then calling it Marxist implies something about the Bible itself. “So ultimately, are you saying that God is Marxist?” she asks. She turns the accusation around: “you are the secular theorist, not us.”
That reply clarifies the reader’s question. A topic does not become political because politicians also argue about it. Abortion, poverty and marriage are argued in legislatures, and churches still teach on them. The test is whether the church’s claim rests on Scripture or on a partisan program. Jude 3 Project’s position here is direct. Biblical justice, as God defines it through his character and Scripture, is the standard everything is measured against. Jude 3 affirms both individual sin and systemic, structural sin, and grounds justice in God’s character rather than in any political ideology of the left or the right. On that footing, naming racism is not a partisan act. It is a moral judgment the church already has the resources to make.
What does Ezekiel 20 actually ask of a people?
The passage that drew the sharpest pushback was Ezekiel 20:4. Jones read it from a modern translation, which renders the charge as a call to “make them know accurately and understand fully the repulsive acts of their fathers.” The KJV puts it more briefly: “cause them to know the abominations of their fathers” (Ezekiel 20:4).
The context matters, and it strengthens her use of the verse more than a bare quotation would. In Ezekiel 20, elders of Israel come to the prophet to inquire of the Lord. God refuses to be consulted on their terms. He has the prophet rehearse Israel’s history instead: rebellion in Egypt, in the wilderness, and in the land. Later in the chapter the point lands. God asks whether the present generation is defiling itself after the manner of its fathers (Ezekiel 20:30). The history is not recited to shame the dead. It is recited because the living are still walking in the same pattern and cannot see it.
That is the hinge of Jones’s argument. People told her, in effect, to move on because the matter was over. Ezekiel 20 describes a God who will not let his people move on from a history they have not honestly faced. A careful reader should still mark the distance between text and application. Ezekiel addresses Israel’s covenant unfaithfulness, chiefly idolatry, not American racism. Using the chapter today is application by analogy. The analogy is reasonable because the principle is explicit in the text: unexamined inheritance repeats itself. But it is the principle that transfers, not a one-to-one mapping of ancient Israel onto any modern nation.
Read that way, the passage answers the “political” charge on its own terms. Asking a people to understand its own history accurately is a prophetic act in Scripture before it is a policy position anywhere.
Is the church’s silence really a theology problem?
Jones’s boldest claim is that the evidence points away from politics and toward the church. She cites figures of her own: by her account, roughly 30 percent of Americans identify as Republican, 31 percent as Democrat, and 65 percent as Christian. Her conclusion is that the church outnumbers both parties combined. “We are not where we are because of politics,” she says. “We are where we are because of theology.”
The strongest objection deserves its full weight. Self-identification is a thin measure. Many people who check “Christian” on a survey rarely open a Bible, so the numbers cannot prove what is happening in anyone’s heart or congregation. The statistic alone does not carry the argument.
Jones’s case does not rest on the numbers alone, though. Her stronger evidence is the shape of the inconsistency she keeps meeting. She describes Christians who will insist on fighting for the unborn yet dismiss a person killed in the street as someone who deserved it. She connects that to an older pattern, worship on Sunday followed by attending a lynching as a family outing. “It’s the exact same spirit,” she says. The claim is not that one party is righteous. It is that a selective reading of Scripture can live comfortably inside a church of any political leaning. That is a theology problem, because the remedy is better reading, not a different ballot.
She tells of a woman who insisted that Jesus never told anyone to seek justice and only told them to cast their cares on him. Jones pointed out that the same woman chose candidates based on abortion, a justice question. The exchange shows the problem in miniature. The objection to “justice talk” was not principled neutrality. It was a boundary drawn around one kind of injustice. Scripture does not draw that boundary. Isaiah 1:17 commands, “Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” The KJV’s “judgment” here is the word many other translations render as “justice.”
Jones also holds a restraint that keeps her claim honest. Reflecting on Matthew 7, where Jesus says to some who did works in his name, “I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:23), she admits she struggles to see how someone could know Jesus and not care when a person is killed. Then she adds that she cannot judge it. That distinction matters. Diagnosing a pattern of theology is different from pronouncing on an individual’s salvation, and she does the first without claiming the second.
The diagnosis is heavy. “It seems like the people who are professing Jesus are the ones doing the breaking,” Jones says. Whatever one thinks of her statistics, that is a statement about the church’s witness, and it can be tested against what congregations actually do.
Where Lisa Fields and Nona Jones press the same point from two sides
Lisa Fields brings a comparison from consulting work with a large evangelical organization. Asked how much hope she had in white evangelicalism, she answered, “I have more hope in Netflix diversity strategy than white evangelicals.” Her reason was not that corporations have purer motives. Her point was that corporate America at least admits a problem exists, whatever its intentions, while many white evangelical institutions deny it.
Jones, who works in the corporate world, agrees about the empathy but adds a complication. In those same spaces, she says, there is real sympathy for racial justice and open suspicion of religious freedom. She traces the suspicion back to the same root. When people who claim Christ wrap hostility toward others in Scripture, onlookers conclude that the faith itself is the danger.
Fields draws out the implication: Christians who refuse to see race as a problem often care deeply about religious freedom, and by misrepresenting the gospel they damage the public trust that freedom depends on. As she puts it, “you’re undermining your own freedom.” She also makes a careful distinction. Some hostility toward Christians comes from hostility toward Christ himself, and Scripture expects that. Some of it, though, is a response to how believers have represented him. The second kind is the church’s responsibility.
Here the two voices converge on one claim and differ only in emphasis. Fields stresses institutional denial. Jones stresses the cost to witness. Both locate the problem inside the church’s reading of its own faith, and both treat silence as something with consequences outside the church walls. Jones states the standard they share: “we have to be the ones who are representing Christ in deed and in Word, not just in Word.”
What does faithful confrontation actually look like?
If the problem is theological, the first step is not a campaign. It is a prayer that turns the searchlight inward. Fields observes that many Christians pray for the nation without first doing the harder thing, which she describes as “praying without asking God like to search me.” She is drawing on the language of Psalm 139:23: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.” Jones names the same failure in a compact line: “we’re reading Bible, but the Bible isn’t reading us. That’s what’s happening.”
That inward move protects the confrontation from becoming self-righteous. A church member who raises racism should expect to be examined by the same Scripture they are bringing to others. It also gives the conversation a starting point that is hard to dismiss as partisan. A request to pray Psalm 139 together is not a policy demand.
From there, Jones describes a sequence her summit was built around: repentance, then forgiveness, then what she calls conciliation. She illustrates each with cases she cites, including a former Klan leader in Indiana who now serves as an assistant minister in a predominantly Black church, and Anthony Ray Hinton, whom she describes as wrongfully convicted in Alabama and held on death row for decades before his release. Hinton, she notes, had to work through forgiveness even though no one ever apologized to him. The order of the sequence matters. Forgiveness is not demanded before wrong is named, and repair is not skipped once feelings soften.
Jones also recounts a Christian business leader telling her that what the church lacks is contrition, a posture of grief over wrong rather than impatience to be done with it. She roots her own urgency in her family history. Her grandfather, she says, served in World War II, came home and was spat on and beaten. “He was denied a GI loan because he was a black man for no other reason.” For her, being told to get over it is not a neutral request. It asks a family to forget what happened to them while the people who benefited feel no need to understand it.
Where faithful Christians can still disagree
Not everything here is settled, and pretending otherwise would weaken the case. Language is the clearest example. Jones avoids the word “reconciliation.” “I don’t use the word reconciliation because that presumes that everything was okay,” she explains, and she insists the relationship was never okay to begin with. “Conciliation” names building something new instead of restoring something lost. Many Christians who share her convictions still use “reconciliation,” often because of its weight in passages such as 2 Corinthians 5, where it describes God’s work in Christ. That is a real difference in vocabulary, not in conviction about whether racism is sin.
Tactics are another open area. How a congregation raises the subject, how fast it moves, which programs it adopts, and how it relates to public policy debates are matters where faithful churches will differ. There is also a fair question about labels. Some critics who say “Marxist” may be reacting to sources they have encountered elsewhere, not to Scripture. Jones’s own method answers that worry well. The charge only sticks when the content is not biblical, so the best response is to keep the content biblical and ask the critic to engage the text.
What is not open is whether the church may stay silent about racism. Racism treats some image-bearers as lesser, and Scripture does not leave that unaddressed. Jude 3 Project holds that ultimate allegiance belongs to Christ and his kingdom, not to any party, and calls believers to thoughtful, justice-minded engagement without being captured by partisan loyalty. That conviction cuts in two directions. It forbids turning the church into a political arm. It also forbids using the fear of politics as a reason to stop reading the parts of the Bible that make a congregation uncomfortable.
The question that would actually resolve most of these disputes is simple to state and hard to answer honestly. When a passage like Ezekiel 20 is read aloud and someone calls it political, what in the text itself is partisan? If the answer is nothing, then the discomfort belongs to the reader, and that is exactly where Scripture expects to do its work.
Quick answers
Is confronting racism in church automatically political?
No. Nona Jones argues it becomes a matter of theology when the case rests on Scripture alone. A topic is not partisan simply because politicians also discuss it.
What does Ezekiel 20:4 have to do with racism?
In context, God makes Israel face its fathers’ history because the present generation repeats it. Jones applies that principle by analogy: a people cannot move on from a history it has never honestly understood.
Why does Jones avoid the word “reconciliation”?
She says it assumes things were once okay. She prefers “conciliation,” building something that did not exist before. Other faithful Christians keep the older word, and the difference is about language, not about whether racism is sin.
What should I do first if my church avoids the topic?
Start with Scripture and with prayer that examines yourself, as in Psalm 139:23. Bring a passage, not a program, and invite others to read it with you.
Does Jude 3 Project see systemic racism as real sin?
Yes. Jude 3 affirms both individual and systemic, structural sin, and measures justice by God’s character and Scripture rather than by any political ideology.