The lament many churches joined in 2020 was real, and so was its collapse. Latasha Morrison, founder and CEO of Be the Bridge and author of Brown Faces, White Spaces, explains both in her conversation with Lisa Fields. Churches felt a genuine conviction about racism. They lamented together, and some marched together. Few turned that conviction into commitments that could survive the cost. When political labels arrived, the work itself began to look dangerous, and conviction with nothing built under it was easy to talk people out of.
Her diagnosis falls mainly on churches and the people who lead them. It is pointed, and parts of it can be challenged, so it deserves a careful reading.
What made 2020 different?
The cynical view says the summer of 2020 was a trend: a few statements, a few book studies, and a quick return to normal. Morrison rejects that, and her reason is concrete. When she went to the marches, the crowds were not only people who looked like her. Christian leaders were there. Churches gathered, and she remembers Asian American churches in Atlanta among them. In her telling, it did not look like the marches of the 1960s.
She describes the moment this way: “there was this collective conviction, which is a beautiful thing, a collective lament that was happening.” She also saw an effect beyond the church. Many people who were far from Christ, she says, were watching, and “for the first time, many of them saw hope, and they saw hope in the church.”
Her next claim is the more uncomfortable one. Morrison argues that the unity was the threat. What followed, in her words, was an effort “to create fear and to create division, because people were afraid to lose power.” Her summary of the result is blunt: “And we just took that thing and deflated it as quick as it blew up.”
That reframes the question. A fad fades without anyone pushing it. Morrison describes something that met resistance, which suggests people took it as more than a mood. Her account still leaves a harder question open. If the conviction was real, why could it be deflated so fast?
Why didn’t conviction turn into commitment?
Lisa Fields offered the clearest answer. She reached for a line she credited to Martin Luther King Jr.: the law cannot make a man love you, but it can stop him from lynching you. Her point was about durability. A pricked heart, left on its own, does not stay pricked.
She applied that to 2020 directly. People watched George Floyd’s murder, were moved, and changed course for a while. Then, as Lisa Fields put it, “the conviction, the guilt, wore off, and then when it wore off, their money went with it.” Priorities followed the money. Nothing had been built to hold people in place. Her broader conclusion: “we see how fast people change if there’s nothing in place to make them stay in a posture of considering the other.”
This is the center of the diagnosis. Feeling often comes first, and it can be how God gets someone’s attention. Trouble starts when a congregation treats the feeling as if it were the change itself. A church can grieve sincerely on Sunday and still have no budget line, no hiring practice, no partnership and no regular habit of listening that would carry the grief into Monday.
Morrison widened the same logic to the nation. The civil rights era policies Lisa Fields had in mind, she said, have only been in place for about 60 years, set against two and a half centuries of oppression. She sees those policies being rolled back. Her point is about scale and patience. A short burst of effort against a very long history was never going to finish the work. Treating 2020 as a finish line was itself a way of stepping off the track.
Scripture names this gap plainly. James wrote to scattered believers whose faith was showing up in words more than deeds: “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” (James 1:22). In context James is talking about hearing God’s word and walking away unchanged, and his examples include care for the poor and the vulnerable. The application to 2020 is ours, not his. It fits because James describes the same move: being stirred by the truth and calling the stirring obedience.
How did a few labels stall the work?
Morrison is specific about what came next. Whenever there is progress, unity or partnership, she says, a fringe charge appears: this is CRT, it’s Marxism, you’re a liberal, you’re woke. Her own work, she insists, is something else: “I’m talking about reconciliation. It has nothing to do with CRT.” Her answer to the last label is a quip she delivers with a laugh: “I’d rather be woke than sleep.”
She does not treat the labels as a harmless distraction. “It’s ignorance, but it has hindered the progression of the work,” she says, and she explains why it worked: “it’s created a boogeyman.” A boogeyman does not need to be argued with. It only needs to be named. Once a pastor’s sermon on racial healing can be filed under a frightening word, he no longer has to answer for what he said, and a congregation no longer has to ask whether he was right.
Morrison also names who carried the charge. She describes reconciliation as “the work that has been politicized,” and says evangelicals, and white evangelicals specifically, are rejecting it. That is her assessment from years of working among them, and it should be read as testimony.
The labels did one more thing. They let people recast lament as an accusation. Morrison says that instead of sitting in the lament, many assumed the point was to make them feel guilty. Her alternative is simple: “maybe that’s conviction. Let’s sit here in it for a while. Let’s lament in it.” She separates guilt from responsibility, and the distinction matters: “We didn’t break it. It’s not our fault, but it is our responsibility as believers to be a part of the solution, because what impacts one and our body impacts the other.”
That last line echoes Paul’s picture of the church as one body: “And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26). Paul describes what the church already is. Members are bound together whether they acknowledge it or not, and a label can teach people to ignore that bond while leaving it fully intact.
Weren’t some of those objections legitimate?
This is the strongest challenge to Morrison’s account, and it should be stated fairly. Some of the resistance came from sincere critics. They were not afraid of losing power. They feared that secular theories about race would replace the gospel’s account of sin and redemption, or that the church would be pulled into a party’s agenda. Critics would also say that some churches and institutions did take up contested ideas about race in those years, and that the labels had real purchase there.
The episode cannot settle that. It gives Morrison’s view of the motive behind the resistance, fear of losing power, and her judgment that the labels were misapplied to her own reconciliation work. Those are claims about intent and about what her organization does. A reading drawn from one conversation cannot verify that every use of the labels was unfair, and it would overstate her case to pretend otherwise.
What her account does show is the cost of using a label in place of an argument. A sincere critic can name the idea, show where it departs from Scripture, and still sit with a brother or sister who says they are hurting. Jude 3’s own approach to words like “woke” and “social justice” runs the same way: find out what the person means, then measure it against Scripture. Morrison’s complaint is that the labels skipped that step, so the conversation ended before anyone had listened.
The second common objection is that race is political and does not belong in church. Morrison answers it head on: “Well, politics are about people. It doesn’t have to be partisan.” She points out that measures like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were once decided on a bipartisan basis. That is her historical claim, and readers can test it. Her larger charge is that over the last decade, through polarization and the idolizing of party, “we’ve seen where people have forsaken the gospel.” She is not asking the church to pick a side. Her warning is that many churches had already chosen one.
Why does Morrison place the failure on churches and their leaders?
Morrison aims her diagnosis at the church rather than at the news cycle or a tired public. Her image for the church’s record is sharp: “we’ve been more of the taillights versus the headlights in this conversation constantly, historically.” She adds that “a lot of the pushback has come from the body of Christ.”
Her reasoning about why leaders matter so much is historical and sobering. When societies have come apart, she says, the people first won over are often religious leaders, and she points to Germany and Rwanda. Her explanation: “it happens in the faith communities first because there’s so much influence there.” Those are large historical claims, and they are hers. Her underlying point stands without the details. Pulpits shape what congregations feel free to hear. When leaders retreat, people take the retreat as permission.
She sees the cost in people. This failure, she says, is part of what “caused so many African Americans to deconstruct Jesus right out of their faith.” Her questions to the church are personal ones: “If I’m saying I’m hurting, why can’t you listen?” And: “Why are you gonna deny and defend and deflect when I’m saying I’m hurting?”
Her diagnosis also resists an easy story in which one group of churches failed and another did not. Morrison says plainly that Black experiences differ: “Everybody doesn’t have the same exact experience.” She also turns her critique inward. Many churches have not educated their people well, she says, and “even a lot of African American churches don’t read from African American theologians or Asian theologians.” The problem she describes reaches churches of many kinds that settled for comfort over learning.
What would commitment have looked like?
Morrison’s alternative is less dramatic than a march and harder to sustain. It starts with leaders who listen in a structured way. She recalls round table discussions at a church in Austin where she served on staff. Members of color who had attended for years shared their experiences while staff were told to listen without asking questions. The staff were surprised by how many racialized incidents those members had lived through. They had no idea. A church that never builds a setting like that can honestly believe it is doing well, because it only hears from the people closest to the pastor.
Commitment also shows up in hiring and money. Morrison criticizes churches that bring in leaders of color as a performative gesture, or hire “just for the sake of diversity, but not for reconciliation.” Her alternative is partnership: learn from Black pastors and thinkers, serve with them, and invest in them. Rather than planting a church in a predominantly Black neighborhood where nobody from the community attends, she suggests funding a local pastor who already has a heart for that community, so he can serve full time. Her complaint about the usual approach fits in four words: “We don’t think equitable.”
None of this works, she says, without the root: “it has to be a conviction.” Lisa Fields’s point about the law supplies the other half, since a conviction needs something built to keep it in place.
Paul describes the difference between grief that changes people and grief that only hurts: “For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). He was writing about the Corinthians’ response to his own painful letter, not about race in America. The distinction still carries over. Grief is real in both cases, and only one kind leads somewhere. Morrison’s account of 2020 is a story about sorrow that never became repentance, because almost nothing was built to carry it there. The test that remains is quieter than a march: who gets hired, who gets funded, who gets heard at the table, and whether a congregation can hear a hard word without reaching for a label.