This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity

Curtis Chang: When you try to make the case about systematic racism in Christian circles, what do you encounter?

Jasmin Shupper: It varies. Unfortunately, the idea of equity has been so highly politicized that it’s lost its humanity. It’s lost the human touch and, as people of faith, it’s lost the Imago Dei, that we’re actually talking about real people.

Sometimes what we encounter in this space is discomfort from the perception that we’re politicizing things, and politics has no place in Christian. Another thing is the perception that we’re somehow demonizing white people, which is the last thing we’re doing. We’re attacking the system, attacking oppression. We’re not attacking white people by calling out ways that they’ve benefited from an unjust system. That’s not calling them out.

So there’s some level of discomfort there that sometimes exists in Christian spaces, but there’s also a sense of ‘God loves everybody, Jesus loves everybody, so why are we singling out certain demographics for help or for assistance? How is that fair?’ And to that I would say, Jesus actually hated unjust systems and he got really, really angry with oppression. So we’re acting in a restorative and reparative and redemptive way that Jesus would have wanted to happen, because the church has an opportunity to redeem the evils of systematic racism and systemic oppression. So it’s really about diving into conversations and approaching it from that standpoint.

There are some Christian spaces that are already saying ‘yes, what you’re doing is absolutely necessary and we need to do it.’ Our first seed funding for launching Greenline was from a church – so there are churches that are willing and able and present for the conversation. I think that it will require bravery and boldness on the part of believers if this issue is ever to be adequately tackled.