Being angry about racial injustice is not the problem. Scripture leaves room for anger, and Bryan Loritts, senior pastor of Abundant Life Christian Fellowship in Mountain View, California, insists that injustice be named out loud. The danger is what anger turns into when it hardens. His counsel comes in two parts. Speak truth to power and grieve the wrong. Then look honestly at whom you are waiting on, because lingering disappointment can mean you have handed people a role only Jesus can carry.
That second part is the one most people skip. The usual question sounds something like this: I know this is wrong, and I know I’m supposed to love people, so why do I feel sour all the time, and is that sourness a sin? It deserves better than just forgive and move on, and better than your bitterness is righteous, so feed it.
Isn’t the anger justified?
In many cases, yes. Lisa Fields described the pressure that produces it. Because so many people in majority culture resist the conversation or are not honest in it, she said, “It could cause those who are in the minority culture, African Americans to always feel that we are not being heard, which can cause in us a bitterness.” The bitterness she describes has a cause outside the person feeling it. It grows from repeated experiences of not being heard.
Loritts does not treat race as a side issue that a mature Christian should be able to rise above. He calls it America’s historic sin, and he argues that American slavery differed from slavery in the ancient world because it attached value to skin color. He compares race to polyester: manmade, and very real. Because that history is part of our shared story, he says, “It colors everything about you.” You do not get to opt out of a thing that shapes how you see life, politics and the Bible itself.
Scripture does not ask you to pretend otherwise. Ephesians 4:26 says, “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath.” Paul is borrowing language from Psalm 4:4 and writing to a church about how its members speak to and treat one another. Interpreters differ on whether he is commanding anger or simply allowing for it. Either way, the verse assumes anger will come and puts a fence around it rather than forbidding it. Five verses later, in Ephesians 4:31, the same passage tells believers to put away bitterness along with wrath and malice. The text treats anger and bitterness as two different things.
Loritts also undercuts the idea that caring about injustice pulls you away from the gospel. He traces the split between “personal relationship with Jesus” and “love your neighbor” to the fundamentalist and modernist divide of the early twentieth century, and he rejects it. “So the Bible knows nothing of this bifurcation or this dichotomy, this either or proposition. Instead, it tethers both of them together.” His example is Zacchaeus in Luke 19, a chief tax collector who oversaw a corrupt system. After Jesus came to his house, Zacchaeus promised to give half his goods to the poor and to restore fourfold whatever he had taken by false accusation. Loritts points out that Jesus never told him to do it. The repair came as the first fruit of his salvation.
So if you are angry about injustice, you are angry about something the gospel itself takes seriously. That settles the first question. It does not settle the second.
When does disappointment turn into idolatry?
Here Loritts says something many readers will find hard, and he says it to fellow minorities. “On our side of the table, minorities, I think there’s something inherently wrong with us lingering in disappointment with our white brothers and sisters, almost expecting them to have some kind of a messianic role in our lives. They ain’t Jesus.”
Notice what he does not say. He does not say the disappointment is unearned, or that the people involved did nothing wrong. He immediately adds, “So yes, we speak truth to power. Yes, we call out the injustice, but I think some lingering disappointment is really an indicator light of white idolization on the part of minorities.”
An indicator light does not tell you the road is fine. It tells you to check something in your own vehicle. Loritts’ claim is that when disappointment lingers and keeps devastating you, the question is not only what they did. It is also what position you have given them. “Whenever you idolize somebody and allow them to have a position that’s greater than the messiahs,” he says. And when that happens, “you’re gonna allow them to disappoint you in ways that is out of step with the gospel.”
The distinction is between a standard and a dependence. Expecting people to do right is a moral standard, and a fair one. Needing them to do right before you can have peace, purpose or a sense of your own worth is dependence. When your inner stability rises and falls on whether a particular group finally sees you, they have been given a seat they were never built to fill.
Loritts’ line about this is the hinge of his whole counsel: “We grieve over injustice, but we don’t let it disproportionately devastate us because they ain’t our idol. I don’t need their acceptance or approval for me to do what God wants me to do in my life.”
The Psalms make a similar move. Psalm 146:3 says, “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” The psalm is not about race. It is a general warning against resting ultimate hope in human power. Read alongside Loritts, it sharpens his point: people letting you down is real and wrong, and building your hope on them sets you up to be wrecked by it. Hebrews 12:15 warns against any “root of bitterness springing up” that troubles and defiles many. A root grows underground before anyone sees it, which is a reason to take the early warning seriously.
Doesn’t this put the burden on the people who were wronged?
This is the hardest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. Telling minorities to examine their own hearts can sound like asking the injured party to do the repair work while the people causing harm carry on. If that were all Loritts said, the objection would land.
It is not all he said. His counsel to minorities is the second half of a two-sided answer. Just before it, he addresses white Christians: they need to recognize their whiteness so they can steward their privilege and power responsibly. “You cannot steward anything well that you don’t recognize and own.” The word to minorities does not cancel the word to the majority. Each side gets its own responsibility.
The limit of his claim matters too. He is not saying that a minority’s peace is the solution to injustice, or that inner freedom replaces outward change. He is saying something narrower: whatever others do or fail to do, they should not get to decide whether you can obey God. That is not a burden placed on the wronged. Read carefully, it is a refusal to let the wrongdoer hold one more thing.
Isn’t that just a polished way of telling people to be passive?
Lisa Fields raised this objection directly. “Some people might even say that you’re being too passive,” she said, and she noted that anyone doing this work can be criticized from two directions: by people in the majority culture who do not want the conversation, and by African Americans who think a measured posture gives too much away. In her words, “there’s a chance to be bitter from both ends.”
Loritts’ answer depends on the situation, and it is anything but passive. He describes a minority hired at a church or institution on the promise of real systemic change, who discovers after the honeymoon that they are a token. In that case, he says, “you do ring the alarm.” And if it becomes clear that “they’re asking you to make bricks without straw, and you’re spinning your wheels,” you face a choice. “Either stay in the system and spin your wheels and let that intoxicate your spirit or move on.”
The bricks-without-straw phrase comes from Exodus 5, where Pharaoh orders the enslaved Israelites to keep producing bricks while refusing to supply the straw. Loritts uses it to name a specific kind of injustice: being held responsible for results while being denied what you need to achieve them.
Then he redefines passivity in a way that turns the objection around. “Passivity is staying in the situation and giving up while becoming bitter.” On this account, the passive person is the one who stays, stops trying, and lets resentment do the work that action should have done. Naming the wrong and walking away from a system that refuses to change is a decision, and a costly one.
He is careful about scope. He is talking about vocational settings, and he says so: “in a work scenario, I didn’t take vows.” A job is not a marriage. He also describes his own test for when it is time to go, a moment when you can say that “this thing is robbing me of my joy. It has turned me into a bitter negative, cynical person.” He admits that in his twenties and early thirties he was more idealistic about changing institutions from inside. That is his reflection on his own path, not a rule that every person must leave. Someone may be called to stay in a hard place, and Loritts himself stayed in one for twelve years.
What keeps a person from souring over the long haul?
Loritts gives two anchors, both drawn from his own ministry.
The first is calling. “I think the first thing you’ve gotta get clarity on,” he says, is what God has called you to do, and no one else can answer that for you. His own lane is working toward multiethnic local churches. Once that is settled, he says, “Life in some senses becomes so less burdensome.” Part of the relief is that you stop measuring yourself against people with different assignments. Calling also steadies you in depleted seasons. Of his twelve years in Memphis, which he calls the hardest place to do a multiethnic church, he says, “For me, the only way I made it 12 years was calling.”
Loritts does not spell out the link between calling and idolatry, but it follows from what he says. If your purpose depends on the approval of the people around you, every failure on their part threatens you. If it rests on what God has asked of you, their failure is still a real wrong, but it loses its power to decide whether your life makes sense. That is the same freedom he described when he said he does not need their approval to do what God wants.
The second anchor is rest among people who understand. “I just think every minority needs pockets to exhale,” Loritts says. For him it was a group of Black friends he golfed with, where “I didn’t have to translate nothing to ’em.” Afterward he had the strength to go back and engage his church. He urges students on mostly white campuses to find a church or community where they can breathe, because “you have to have that, or you’ll lose your mind.” He frames these places as what makes return possible. You exhale so you can go back in.
What does hope look like if change is slow?
Loritts does not promise quick results. His closing word to listeners was to “stay prayerfully hopeful,” and he was candid that progress feels uneven, sometimes forward and sometimes far backward. He believes the needle is moving, though not as fast as he would like. That is a pastor’s conviction, not a measured finding.
His reason for patience is historical: “this thing is 400 years in the making. It ain’t gonna change overnight. This is a marathon, not a sprint.” A sprint mindset expects visible change soon and sours when it does not come. A marathon mindset plans for endurance.
Endurance, in his counsel, means protecting what injustice tries to take: “don’t let anything or anyone rob you of your joy, rob you of the call to love.” He also tells listeners to guard their hearts, which echoes Proverbs 4:23: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” Proverbs offers that as wisdom rather than a guarantee. The heart is where bitterness takes root or is refused, and no one else can stand guard there for you.
Follow Loritts’ reasoning to its end and it explains why some people can tell the truth about injustice for forty years and others cannot. A person who still needs validation from those in power tends to end up in one of two places. They go quiet to keep the peace, or they wear out from the endless letdown. The person who has stopped waiting on people for what only Christ can give is free to keep naming the wrong, keep grieving it and keep loving, because the next disappointment can wound them without owning them. In that light, refusing bitterness is not a softer form of protest. It is what lets the protest last.