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Overcoming racism

Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States reminds us that we each have a role in healing every last vestige of racial inequality, and starting from a spiritual standpoint empowers each of us to do our part.

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While there have been notable signs of progress over the years, racism remains an issue across the globe. We’ve compiled some pieces from The Christian Science Publishing Society’s archives that highlight the value of prayer in overcoming racism. Within each one you’ll find ideas to inspire your own prayers and actions to further brotherly love, equality, and justice.

In a podcast called “The path to discovering our divine rights,” a woman talks about how she worked for change in the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement, and how she sees the First Commandment as a healing force that can help bring more uniform justice into the world today.

The author of “Can racism be healed?” shares how we can all play a part in healing racism by meeting every temptation to feel inferior or superior to someone else with the powerful recognition of everyone’s identity as a child of God.

The author of “Inherently worthy” explores how realizing that everyone has innate value as God’s child empowers us to fearlessly love others in a way that can turn a menacing situation around, and recounts an encounter with the Ku Klux Klan in which her grandmother experienced this firsthand.

In “An interview: on racial prejudice,” which was published during the civil rights era in the U.S., a Black businessman and Christian Scientist shares ideas on overcoming racism.

In “How can Christian Science help me address racism as a non-Black person?” the author considers how prayer can help us become more aware of ways we might inadvertently be participating in oppressive behavior, and empower us to move toward redemption and change.

“Reaching beyond resistance” explores how a spiritual starting point opens the door for inward change that leads to outward progress in civil rights and other areas.

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Mark Sappenfield
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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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