I wonder how white and black churches differ in their persecution tropes, Sam McKenzie Jr. Definitely, in my white, middle class church experience during my youth, we focused on persecution happening overseas, but especially persecution of white missionaries.

In fact, in one of my recent fiction pieces, a character of mine developed a crush on the teen son of a missionary who had come to his church to give a presentation.

Naturally, I was writing from my own experience. ;-)

I romanticized the missionary families who came to our church to raise money for support while they were on furlough from Africa, South America, Indonesia, or someplace else where brown people needed God’s word.

It never occurred to me then that the persecution and danger they sometimes faced came as a result of attempting to share or impose culture that those brown people were mostly not interested in because they already had their own culture.

So, I wonder if experiences are different in black churches where people might be more sensitive to cultural appropriation and so forth.

Does the persecution theme with respect to missionaries occur as much, I wonder.

And with brown people in general and black people in particular in the US dealing with very real persecution already, is there very much room to prioritize thinking about religious persecution?

If so, I wonder if the obvious reality of real and pervasive racial persecution juxtaposed against rather nebulous religious persecution might not make the latter feel more imaginary.

I’m speculating that black congregations, for a variety of reasons, might be less inclined to feel religiously oppressed than white evangelical congregations.