Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America

by Michael O. Emerson

Because the nineteenth century was dominated by evangelical Christianity—George Marsden estimates that over half of the U.S. population and 85 percent of Protestants were evangelical—it is likely that actions that occurred during this time were largely supported by evangelical Christians.57 Indeed, this was the case. Almost immediately after the war, before the formal institution of Jim Crow segregation, African Americans in frustration left the white churches en masse to form their own churches. Denied equal participation in the existing churches, “the move toward racially separate churches was not a matter of doctrinal disagreement, but a protest against unequal and restrictive treatment.”

Although people of both races were Christian, it was believed that God made the races different, and so blacks and whites should be segregated. They were spiritual brothers, but not temporal neighbors. If more evidence was needed, many whites pointed out that the freed-people preferred segregated churches because they had left voluntarily.

As new forms of segregation were made into law, southern evangelicals did not object. When they did speak on the issue, it was with approval.

Southern and northern Christians were in unison, though, in condemning lynchings and mob violence of the rebel few.

Relly? Nearly 5000 lynchings, some attended by almost all of the White population of a community was a rebel few?

Prominent at the same time as Washington were white evangelists D. L. Moody and, later, Billy Sunday. It is instructive that for these northern evangelists, social reform, which had been a central characteristic of evangelical thought since the 1830s, was dropped in favor of a nearly singular emphasis on personal piety.65

And this is the recent complaint about Billy Graham as well.

Between 1917 and 1921, one black home in Chicago was bombed, on average, every twenty days.67 African Americans, often used as strikebreakers by northern industrialists, were viewed with contempt not only for their color, but also the economic threat they represented. Urban riots—at the time, whites attacking blacks—became a northern problem. Violence heightened in the South as well. The Ku Klux Klan resurged and black servicemen returning from World War I were even lynched while still in uniform. Suddenly, the racial issue became once again, in the eyes of whites, a problem.

In a movement centered and most successful in the South, black Christians called, protested, boycotted, and died for an end to Jim Crow segregation. The connection between religious faith and the social movement is a remarkable moment in American religious history, attesting to the power of religion to call for and realize change. In this case, the goal was freedom from oppression and unequal treatment, at least as expressed through the laws and practices of the South. When the movement moved north and attempted to address northern race issues, namely ghettos, it was largely unsuccessful. This different version of segregation and discrimination was not easily addressed by direct-action campaigns. Clear villains were difficult to identify, clear solutions difficult to implement. Still, this relatively short period of black Christian action led to monumental changes in the South.

“Most evangelicals, even in the North, did not think it their duty to oppose segregation; it was enough to treat the blacks they knew personally with courtesy and fairness.”79 That is, they opposed personal prejudice and discrimination, but not the racialized social system itself.

And this is the complaint that many black evangelicals had of white evangelicals during this period. Some of the white elite evangelicals attempted reconciliation, but incompletely. The problem with whites’ conception of reconciliation, many claimed, was that they did not seek true justice—that is, justice both individually and collectively. Without this component, reconciliation was cheap, artificial, and mere words. It was rather like a big brother shoving his little brother to the ground, apologizing, and then shoving him to the ground again.

Although the form of racism changes with the form of racialization, its constant function is to justify the racialized system. We did not expect our respondents to view racism in this way, but we wanted to grasp how important racism was to them, what it meant to them, and what specific, concrete examples they would cite to illustrate it.

The last three chapters revealed two important findings: (1) The cultural tools of white evangelicals led them to minimize the race problem and racial inequality, and thus propose limited solutions. All these help reproduce racialization. (2) But in each chapter we found exceptions. Under the condition of extensive cross-race networks, white evangelicals modified the use of their cultural tools and their racial understandings, so much so that their understandings began to resemble those of African Americans. This suggests an important possibility. If white evangelicals were less racially isolated, they might assess race problems differently and, working in unison with others, apply their evangelical vigor to broader-based solutions. But it is of course no accident that the vast majority of white evangelicals—and other whites as well—are racially isolated. As long as the white American population is larger than the black American population, by mathematical law, whites will be more isolated from blacks than vice versa. And unfortunately, housing and other forms of segregation by race and class are institutionalized features of the American landscape. But one form of segregation carries particular importance in isolating evangelicals by race: congregational segregation. According to our survey, evangelicals are more likely to attend church overall, attend more frequently, and spend more time in congregational activities than are people in any other major American Christian t...