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.

Notably, he was able to show respect for the Afro-Portuguese syncretism of Candomblé, even submitting on his visit to Brazil in 1980 to a ritual cleansing conducted by a Candomblé priest, a pai de santo.

Particularly damaging was Pope John Paul’s consistent support for an ultra-conservative Catholic activist organization, the Legion of Christ, founded in mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Persistent accusations of sexual abuse against its founder, Marcial Maciel Degollado, a participant in the Cristero war in his youth, were ignored in Rome to the very end of John Paul’s pontificate.

While no state liberated from Soviet control decided fully to re-establish a Christian Church, the Christian Right in the United States continues to play a part in American politics which is an unmistakable bid for Christian hegemony in the nation, and there are signs of a possible new Constantinian era elsewhere.