Atlanta megachurch pastor Louie Giglio had a conversation with Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy and rapper Lecrae in which he suggested rebranding “white privilege” as “white blessing.”
If you've been a longtime reader of this site, you may remember that Giglio is the anti-gay pastor who was originally signed up to give the benediction at Barack Obama's inauguration ceremony but removed himself after a sermon was unearthed in which he said gay people were going to Hell and could be ‘cured' through Christianity and conversion therapy. Giglio also urged Christians to prevent the “homosexual lifestyle” from becoming accepted in society.
But here's Giglio's take on “white privilege.”
Said Giglio: “I feel like on the inside of the church we're fighting this historical context you talk about. In other words, we love the blessing of the cross but we don't love to sit in it and realize this is what God's asking me to do, to die to myself, and live for him, whatever context that's going to look like for me. But I want to flip that upside down because I think the other side of it is true with our nation's history. We understand the curse that was slavery, white people do, and we say ‘that was bad,' but we miss the blessing of slavery that it actually built up the framework for the world that white people live in and lived in.”
“And so a lot of people call this ‘white privilege' and when you say those two words it's like a fuse goes off for a lot of white people because they don't want somebody telling them to check their privilege,” Giglio continued. “I know that you and I both have struggled in these days with ‘hey if the phrase is the trip up, let's get over the phrase and let's get down to the heart, let's get down to what then do you want to call it,' and I think maybe a great thing for me is to call it ‘white blessing.' That I'm living in the blessing of the curse that happened generationally that allowed me to grow up in Atlanta.”
Giglio's idea isn't going over so well on Twitter.
Giglio tried to backtrack on the remarks.
