by Erick Sierra
I recently mentioned to a woman at my church that I was teaching a course at my Christian college on postcolonial literature—a class designed to help students trace the legacies of racial hierarchy and structural injustice through global narratives. Her response was a mix of confusion and horror: “But isn’t that Critical Race Theory? And isn’t that Marxist?”
A loaded question for Sunday-morning coffee hour, to be sure! But I saw the earnest concern in her question, and sent up a silent prayer for wisdom.
What proceeded to come out of my mouth surprised even me, as it voiced underlying motives that I hadn’t fully acknowledged yet. The study of systemic forms of inequality, I responded, had helped me recover something essential to my faith: my belief that I am “fully made in the image of God.”
That might sound surprising, but for much of my life, I carried an unspoken sense that I, and other Latin Americans like me, bore God’s image in shadowed relief or somehow less fully than others. It wasn’t that anyone directly told me this. It was the cumulative effect of the signals I’d received—from television, school, and even church spaces that treated certain experiences as central and others as peripheral. I’m not quite sure when I realized that most of life I’d harbored the quiet sense that the image of God was inexplicably deformed in me and other Black and Brown people. No wonder I’d instinctively lower my eyes and voice when speaking to white men all these years. These were not deliberate acts of submission; they were learned responses. And though Genesis 1 affirms that we are all made in the image of God, it often felt as if I bore that image in a dimmer light.
Every time I attempted to claim the theology of the imago Dei more fully for myself, my mind would turn to my cousins in jail, or the ones in poverty, and they seemed to form a final verdict. These outcomes weren’t just social data points—they were family. And when the same patterns repeated across generations, it began to feel like some kind of inevitable inheritance. Without any deeper framework by which to interpret or contextualize this, it was only natural for me to absorb this as a kind of inherited flaw. I silently concluded there was something fundamentally wrong with us.
However, all of this changed when I first picked up Derrick Bell’s 1973 book Race, Racism, and American Law. Well before anybody in the culture war was debating Critical Race Theory or systemic racism, Bell, a legal scholar at Harvard Law School, was studying the phenomenon of unequal outcomes in a way I hadn’t seen before. Not that he rejected the idea of personal responsibility—if anything, his own life was a testament to the grit required to overcome formidable personal and social obstacles. What he did instead was to challenge the notion that unequal outcomes across races could be fully explained by individual factors. His research simply illuminated the extent to which larger systemic factors—housing policy, access to education, and legal outcomes—contributed to unequal outcomes: such as measurable and persistent disparities in income, incarceration, health, and education that remain even when accounting for effort or intent.
One example from Bell’s work that struck me most was how the federal government in the mid-20th century subsidized white wealth creation while systematically denying Black families the same access. The Federal Housing Administration, through redlining, refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods, labeling them “risky.” Meanwhile, white families received low-interest, government-backed loans to buy homes in newly developed suburbs—homes that became the foundation of generational wealth. These policies weren’t driven solely by personal bias, but by institutional decisions codified into law. That structural choice contributed significantly to the massive racial wealth gap we see today. Bell’s analysis helped me make sense of the vastly different starting lines that people of color had compared to many of our white peers.
Since then, others have rightly engaged Bell’s work with both critique and care. While his insights have been personally transformative for me, I also recognize that some applications of structural critique have veered into extremes—advocating for reverse discrimination or reducing “America” to an unredeemable caricature. Christians are right to approach these ideas with theological discernment, always guided by a gospel vision of justice that holds space for both truth-telling and hope.
That’s why, as I began to understand these complex factors, I didn’t then draw hasty conclusions about “America.” All Bell’s analysis did was to illuminate the multi-layered complexity at work in unequal outcomes across the races.
But more than that, Bell’s work helped me feel a new form of hope—joy even.
For the first time, I felt a sense of agency, a sense that we had a roadmap to follow to do something. If we can more clearly understand how these larger factors work, then we, as a society, can better understand how to promote the flourishing of all people. Just as a scientific breakthrough may promote human health, similar insights in the social sciences can contribute to socio-economic health. And that means that there were ways now in which we, together, could more meaningfully come alongside people of color as they strive to do better for themselves.
In addition to that sense of agency, I began to question the story I had long believed about us Black and Brown people. All my life, I’d internalized a narrative that located the problem entirely within the individual—within me, within my cousins, within my community. That narrative bred shame, even perhaps self-hatred. But being able to give these questions context simply helped me imagine that maybe, just maybe, we weren’t mistakes after all. Maybe, just maybe, I could hold my head high as we dream forth a better world for my next generation of little cousins.
This is what I tried to convey to the woman at church: that engaging with systemic thinking didn’t pull me away from my faith, but helped me re-embrace one of its most profound truths: I, like every person, am made in the image of God. Not conditionally—but entirely. In this way, my gravitation to systemic critique was deeply interconnected with my sense of personal dignity as a child of God.
After that surprisingly warm post-church exchange, I began noticing this collective dynamic more and more throughout Scripture—the way biblical justice consistently addresses both individuals and the systems that shape their lives. The entire biblical tradition of prophetic justice begins with Moses’ confrontation with Pharaoh. The Exodus story represents one of the earliest articulations in Western history of systemic critique, rooted in divine justice. This story stands at the very beginning of the long arc of redemptive justice in Scripture—an arc that flows through Isaiah, Amos, and James. And as Michael Walzer argues in Exodus and Revolution, it has served as a recurring model for liberation movements throughout history, including the American Revolution, the civil rights movement, and anti-colonial struggles. In this sense, the father of systemic thought in the West is not Marx but Moses, whose prophetic voice continues to speak to aspects of our society that restrain the full humanity of God’s image-bearers.
And yet today, in the Christian evangelical spaces I tend to navigate, I constantly feel pressured to choose: I must believe either that racial disparities result from systemic inequalities or that they stem from individual behavior. But a nuanced biblical faith offers no easy dichotomy. It insists on the complex interplay of both. It recognizes that sin operates in human hearts and then takes on strange new shapes when many human hearts form a community. Why couldn’t the Bible be calling us to heal both? Why couldn’t the Spirit be helping us imagine what grace, when scaled up, might actually require of us—and how it might transform the world?
Here I think of my mother, Evelyn, who serves for me as an example of what this both-and approach might look like.
In the 1950s, my grandparents moved to Brooklyn from poverty in Puerto Rico. From a young age, my mother was bright and fiercely determined. Her breakthrough came with an internship for Black and Latinx college students, a program designed to promote diversity in the workplace. It gave her one precious chance to prove herself in Manhattan’s exclusive corporate world. From the vantage point of our gritty Spanish-speaking barrio (neighborhood), she never imagined she’d be allowed behind those gleaming doors on the other side of the East River.
Within a couple of months, her entire life changed. Now, suddenly, new and untold opportunities were within reach. The ball was in her court—would she prove herself and show her worth?
Decades later, after an illustrious 40-year career with ExxonMobil, I’m proud to say she did.
This diversity program didn’t make her life easy; it simply made certain things possible. Her life’s success is a testament to both personal determination and intentional collective opportunity. My siblings and I inherited the fruit of both and are now faithfully building upon it.
So, why are we told we must choose between systemic injustice and personal responsibility—as if the two were mutually exclusive? What if a faithful church response embraced both? What if we equipped believers to hold personal agency as sacred while also acknowledging that people don’t start the race from the same starting line? What would it look like for the church to champion both the importance of responsibility and the dismantling of barriers that constrain it? That kind of discipleship—one that honors both grace and justice, both growth and repair—would reflect a much deeper fidelity to Scripture than what the current culture war binaries allow.
Erick Sierra is a professor of English at Trinity Christian College, where he teaches courses on literature, race, and public theology. His writing explores the intersection of faith, justice, and identity in both academic and public contexts.