Atlanta megachurch pastor Louie Giglio set off a firestorm this week when he suggested during a recorded event at his church that the phrase “white privilege” could be replaced with the phrase “white blessing.”
Many white pastors have been addressing racism in the past few weeks, since the outbreak of widespread protests across the country over police brutality and the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in the custody of Minneapolis police. At Passion City Church in Atlanta, Giglio described slavery as a blessing after talking about “the blessing” of the cross on which Jesus died.
“We understand the curse that was slavery, white people do,” Giglio said during a conversation Sunday about race in America with hip-hop artist Lecrae Moore and Chick-fil-A chief executive Dan Cathy, who is an evangelical Christian. “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.”
Giglio is the founder of Passion, a popular Christian conference. He was slated to deliver the benediction at President Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, but backed out after news reports about a sermon he’d given in the 1990s in which he said “being gay is a sinful choice” and that gay people “will be prevented from ‘entering the Kingdom of God.’ ”