"My Christian faith is not in tension with the drive to love people who are different from me. My Christian faith demands I commit myself to loving those who are different from me."
Nancy Hill is a developmental psychologist and a Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research explores how ethnicity, culture, and context influence parenting beliefs and practices on the one hand, and children's mental health outcomes and academic adjustment on the other. These questions are not theoretical for her, as she is a parent herself. She is also a woman of profound Christian faith, who has thought hard about the relationship between her deepest beliefs and her own ethnic and cultural heritage.
Growing up in an African American church
Nancy was raised in a Christian family and grew up in an African American Baptist church. This was formative for her not only in terms of her faith in Jesus, but also in terms of her ethnic identity. "I grew up in very culturally and racially mixed schools and a predominantly white community," Nancy recalls, "so part of going to church on Sunday meant we left this white community and we went to the African American community." For much of her upbringing, her church experience not only shaped her understanding of who God is and the salvation available to her in Christ, but also her sense of herself as an African American. "My understanding of Christ and religious practice, she explains, "were very tied to who I am ethnically and racially." (You can watch Nancy sharing her story with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat at the end of this email.)
Falling away, and coming back
Nancy recalls falling away from faith in high school and college, but continuing to attend church out of a sense of cultural identity. But rather than more education leading her further away from the Lord, she actually found herself coming back to her faith as she progressed in her studies. "It was in my graduate school and post doc years," Nancy recalls, "that God just really changed me."
I was living far from home and I was trying to find my way in the African American Baptist church and was not feeling connected culturally or religiously. I was studying issues of culture and race in my work and - not quite audibly, but understandably - God just said, “Hey, I’m bigger than your African-American-ness. I’m bigger than your racial background. In fact, I created racial and ethnic identity and different cultures, I created it, you’re studying it, let me show it to you.”
Now a professor at Harvard, Nancy finds that colleagues tend to "give her a bye" for being a Christian because of her racial background. In one sense, this is understandable. Almost 80% of Black Americans identify as Christians, and almost half of Black Americans say they go to church weekly, versus only a quarter of white Americans. But Nancy is keen to point out that her faith in Jesus isn't just part of her cultural heritage. It's a real, living, personal faith in Jesus, who died for her sins. "When they find out that I’m actually praying on campus, when they find out the integration," Nancy observes, "then I become something of an anomaly."
What's more, while some secular colleagues would think of Christianity as pulling people away from love across racial, ethnic, or ideological difference, Nancy takes the opposite view. At a Veritas Forum event at Boston College under the title, "Can we have Martin Luther King's dream without his faith?" Nancy explained:
"My Christian faith is not in tension with the drive to love people who are different from me. My Christian faith demands I commit myself to loving those who are different from me."
Encouragements from Nancy's research
Nancy's research on parenting styles and child outcomes reveals some insights that are encouraging and others that are challenging. As a parent myself, I found it encouraging to learn that teenagers really do want their parents to be involved in their lives! My kids aren't at that stage yet, but I dread the day when they don't want to talk to me about things. Nancy interviews parents and teenagers separately and finds that "deep down inside, they really want their parents' involvement." Even when kids push back and argue with their parents, "it’s not because they don’t want their parents involved. Particularly around the important issues of life goals and broad belief systems, teens turn to their parents." I found this reassuring.
But other findings of Nancy's work are more troubling.
Challenges from Nancy's research
Breaking parenting styles down by race and ethnicity, Nancy has found that "African-American parents are often much stricter and require more obedience than do other parents – aptly called "no-nonsense parenting."" There are reasons for this. "If a child might lose his life over making a mistake," Nancy observed in a 2016 OpEd for USA Today, "as a parent you have to ensure that they never make a mistake – hence strict parenting."
For Black kids, stricter parenting is correlated with "better academic and mental health outcomes." But that's not the whole story. "There is a double standard," writes Nancy: "stricter parenting works for African-Americans; democratic parenting works for whites." And there is a cost to this.
"Research shows that adolescents need autonomy; they should make and learn from their mistakes. Yet whereas parent-adolescent conflict is tolerated as necessary to build negotiation skills, self-assurance and confidence, African-American parents cannot afford to cultivate this self-assured assertion of their child's contradictory perspective."
Personal reflection
As a parent myself, with kids turning 10, 8 and 2, I am constantly negotiating the tension between giving my children boundaries and giving them freedom. I know my generation and ethnicity prizes personal freedom above all else, so I'm more concerned about disciplining my kids too little than too much. But unlike so many Black parents, I don't feel the need to coach my son on how to behave when he gets pulled over by the police, for fear that he'd be wrongly perceived as a threat. I don't have to live with that burden.
By contrast, after the death of Philando Castile in 2016, Nancy wrote:
"As an African-American mom of a son, wife of an African-American man, my whole being is weeping. I weep with grief for the lives lost, with diminished faith that our society has the will to heal itself and rise to its own ideals, and with a palpable measure of dread as my husband and son left this morning to do the things that nearly every American does without a second thought: Go off to summer camp and work. Like every day, I whispered a prayer, "Protect them Lord, wrap your arms around them, bring them home safely" – only louder today. I want my son to have the freedom to explore and express himself; I worry how he will be perceived and treated. I remind him to behave, to do as he is told."
As a professor at one of the top universities in the world, Nancy holds a privileged position in our society and rightly commands much respect. But as an African-American mother, she still has to fear for her son.
May God hasten the day when this is no longer true. May each of us play our small part in bringing that day about. And whatever our own racial heritage, we pray with Nancy over our Black brothers and sisters in Christ today:
"Protect them Lord, wrap your arms around them, bring them home safely"
