A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

On the other side of the Atlantic five years later, in 1995, another Church actually born in racism gradually and painfully came to a similar realization. The Southern Baptists, by now America’s largest Protestant denomination, in a charged and emotional meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, expressed repentance for their historic origins in a movement to oppose the abolition of slavery: twenty thousand delegates overwhelmingly passed a resolution to repudiate what they had once said on slavery and to make an official apology to African-Americans. They quoted the Bible to prove their new case for condemning slavery, albeit with more good-heartedness than profound scriptural exegesis – and it has to be said that they remain an almost entirely white denomination.