Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars (Religion & American Culture)

by Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews

Indeed, virtually all white Protestants, whether they supported fundamentalism, opposed it, or ignored it, assumed that white Protestant thought was normative and superior, so in that respect, fundamentalists were no different than non-fundamentalist whites.

The movement’s leaders had so racially coded fundamentalism as the purest form of Christianity that their racial inclinations could not allow African Americans the ability to confess it for themselves.

Religious life in America was segregated and racially coded. Moreover, our understanding of the distribution of the formative books—The Fundamentals—needs an asterisk. While the current narrative holds that oil baron Lyman Stewart financed their distribution to all American ministers and missionaries, black Baptists and Methodists appear not to have received them. The adjective “white” should precede “American” in our telling of the Fundamentals creation story.11

fundamentalism itself had a built-in mechanism that limited social outreach—the attention to conversion rather than amelioration of social ills meant that, once fundamentalists saw a group as being squarely in the “saved” column, they were less likely to work to assist that group in any social and political challenges they faced. In short, in their expectations of Christ’s imminent return, they did little to improve the social problems of their day, including those of racial segregation and discrimination.

For Dixon, African Americans could never escape the content of their character, to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King Jr., because they were doomed by the color of their skin. Here was scientific racism, the use of data to prove racial differences and to justify discrimination, at its worst. Dixon argued that African Americans needed to remember that they were, indeed, black and should be “willing to remain a negro, and give to posterity only negro children.” While he tolerated African American claims that Adam was “a colored man” and other statements of racial pride by black orators, he drew the line at intermarriage. “For [an African American] to assert and practice the right to intermarry with the whites,” Dixon argued, “is to doom his race to extinction.”

Social equality means inter-marriage, which would portend the extinction of the Anglo-Saxon race, and its transmutation into a race of mulattos.’”16 Like so many white Americans (and many black Americans), Dixon opposed intermarriage, stating, “‘I do not want the negro, or the Mongolian, to marry my daughter nor my son to marry his daughter. ‘They twain shall be one flesh’; and to my thinking, the one flesh includes one skin.’”17

For white fundamentalists, and white Protestants in general in the United States, Protestant Christianity was the chief weapon available to civilize the various races. Such a trusting belief in the positive power of Protestantism was not confined to conservative evangelicals or fundamentalists. Josiah Strong’s Our Country, published in 1886, lauded the civilizing effects of “true spiritual Christianity.”31 Indeed, for many white Protestants in the United States, the benefits of converting various immigrants and minorities to Protestant Christianity were myriad and far-reaching. Black, Jew, Roman Catholic—all could improve themselves through religion, and all required it to be considered “American.”

Common among these various pieces was the notion that whites could assist blacks in ridding themselves of the defects inherent in their character by virtue of their race. While it was an optimistic point of view, it was racist nonetheless and reduced African Americans to recipients of instruction rather than fellow travelers on the road to salvation.

Not only was Christianity a means to civilize African Americans, it was also a way of alleviating racial tensions. Writing about the Reverend Eugene E. Smith’s address to the annual gathering of Northern Baptists, Homer DeWilton Brookins explained that Baptists needed to help spread the Gospel to blacks to “help to Christianize the rising tide of race consciousness on the part of the negro.”41 Without the influence of Protestant Christianity, Brookins and Laws predicted a dire situation ahead for white and black Americans.

For him, as for other white fundamentalists who enjoyed black music, the music itself was a reinforcement of their views on blacks in general, especially in their belief that black religion was emotional. Because it came from black traditions, the music they produced was, in the eyes of whites, emotionally provocative, which allowed whites to continue their stereotype that blacks were caught in a religious childhood. The use of African American musicians reinforced whites’ racially coded ideas of black inferiority rather than provoking them to engage in a religious dialogue with the musicians and their pastors.

Moreover, the racially oppressive climate in the United States had been present for generations, thus removing for African American Protestants the urgency of dispensational premillennialism’s message of spiraling world crisis.

Within the ranks of the clergy, a debate raged about how best to reconcile religious belief with the currents of modern science, how to conform to the standards of uplift while avoiding a confirmation of white racial stereotyping, and how to present African American religion as both up-to-date and traditional.53 With few exceptions, black Baptist and Methodist writers did not tie the antievolution effort to the fundamentalists in their discourse. African Americans either did not see the notions as linked or were unwilling to tar the antievolutionists with the fundamentalists’ brush or tar the fundamentalists with the antievolutionists’ brush. The latter could stem from general sympathy toward fundamentalist causes, but it could also likely come from a more critical reading of news reports.

As these writers grappled with the changes modern culture presented, they often took to their editorial pages to express their concern with the direction American society had taken. Those concerns, at first blush, very closely resemble the concerns white fundamentalists expressed about the world around them, but black denominational papers had different motives. Keeping African Americans on the straight and narrow was part of the tradition of uplift in black society, and when black denominational papers expressed their reservations about social changes, they did so using the lenses of race, class, and biblical adherence.

Gaskill was so upset by Clement’s support for Smith that he questioned the bishop’s religious sincerity and integrity, in an election in which the central issue was “world against the church, the devil against God.” The position for all good Christians, regardless of their denomination or race, was plain: “all Christians ought to vote for Hoover.”69

Such a long history of religious absolutism

This religious emphasis on the inherent equality of all human beings regardless of race pervaded denominational newspapers from the First World War through the beginnings of the Second World War. Almost every issue of every denominational paper in this study—whether Baptist or Methodist—contained at least one article about the need for either improved race relations or racial equality, and an overwhelming majority of those either mentioned or focused on the dissonance of inequality and Christianity.

The deeper question for these writers was one of ecclesiology: how could you define the Christian church and include segregationists, lynchers, and racists? The simple answer was that you could not. Any understanding of the Christian message had to include a steadfast belief in the equality of all people before God. Since many white Americans could not meet this simple test, they were not really a part of the church of Jesus. Much as white fundamentalists had labeled liberal Protestants as outside the fold, African American Baptist and Methodist writers defined the church as an organization of like-minded people, alike in that they believed in equality. There were, of course, more layers to the definition of “Christian church” than just equality, but the bottom line for these writers was that social justice had just as much of a role to play in defining the true Christian as did doctrines like the Virgin Birth, the inerrancy of the Bible, and the substitutionary atonement of Jesus. For African American Protestants, doctrinal matters were important, but as the twentieth century progressed, the most important test was one of the examples of Jesus. In this interpretation of “What Would Jesus Do?” they demanded that white Christians observe the basic precepts of equality found in the Bible.

it did take comfort in knowing that evil could not reign forever.

For Miller, and for many black ministers, the failure of white pastors to speak out or intervene in such an obviously evil act called into question whites’ interpretation of Christianity. That the Christian was called to oppose evil in the world was clear to Miller and his readers, and the white religious leaders of Sherman, Texas, had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

For the editor of the AME Zion’s Star of Zion, W. H. Davenport, the Klan’s newfound power exposed white racism’s pervasiveness. He contended that both major political parties had Klan members in their ranks and noted that it “is apparent that the only thing that would wrest the South from its Democratic moorings would be the nomination of a Negro for President.

The author then pointed out that churches in America already were segregated and that segregation everywhere was an affront to Christianity. He asked, “if it be unchristian to ‘refuse any Negro the privilege of enjoying any church privilege,’ is it not just as unchristian to refuse any Negro the privilege of enjoying any social privilege? The church is God’s house, but so also is the world.” He expanded on this line of reasoning to include discrimination in employment, theaters, hotels, railroad accommodations, and restaurants—“Should Christianity be practiced only on Sunday and in the confines of the four walls of a church or should it be practiced seven days a week and everywhere?” For the Courier’s reporter, white Christians had lost the meaning of religion, and he compared them to residents of “pagan Rome” who “strut blindly and boastfully down the broad road to decay and oblivion.”38

“There is something wrong somewhere,” he concluded, “this continued manifestation of the spirit of anti-Christ has its rootage in Pharasaical [sic] conceit and pride, and unless eradicated will find its fruitage in the alienation of the darker races of earth from Him whom we invoke as ‘Our Father.’”42 For Davenport, the continued hypocrisy of white Christians in the United States had global and eternal consequences. As long as Christ was presented as white and blacks as inferior, African Americans would turn away from the saving message of Christianity, as would “darker races” throughout the world. White Christians would inflict damage both in this world and the next with their continued insistence on segregation.

Despite the racism, segregation, and hypocrisy they saw in white Christian churches, African American Baptists and Methodists were not willing to abandon Christianity. Indeed, they insisted that the fault lay not with the religion but with its misguided white adherents. Even as they defined Christianity by its focus on equality and condemned the hypocrisy of white racists, religious periodicals exhorted their readers to hold fast to their understanding of the gospel. In so doing, they underscored their definition of Christianity as the church of believers in equality while marginalizing white segregationists. White fundamentalists had raised the allegation that the “church” was the community of believers only insofar as they held to the fundamentalists’ interpretations of Christianity. African American Baptists and Methodists qualified the definition of true believers in such a way that it omitted fundamentalists and many other white Christians from inclusion. Once again, black religious writers had employed the language of “otherness” and turned it back on its originators.

Richard Wright stated as much in the A.M.E. Christian Recorder in 1925 when he called for “inter-racial cooperation.” For Wright, the most important duty of “American Christianity” was “Race Adjustment, on a basis of the teaching of Jesus Christ.” Rather than helping their fellow humans, the members of the white churches were divided into “those who honestly believed that the church had to do with the ‘spiritual,’ and who did not believe that the ‘social’ should occupy their minds.”

Hard not to read modern controversies into this

In 1927, Wright expanded and refined his call for equality under the banner of Christianity by employing the Hebrew prophet Amos and likening white Christians to “oppressors.” “Moral failure,” he declared, “proceeds with treading upon the poor all sorts of economic robbing,” including denial of crops, undercharging for labor, segregated and inferior school facilities, and the like. The “oppressors are morally decaying,” he continued, “whether they call themselves Israelites, Christians or what not. And God’s justice will certain assert itself if there is not a change.” The case was simple: white America had become what Amos had warned against—excesses and injustice. Wright chose verses from Amos, including the passage that Martin Luther King Jr. would later make famous in his “I Have a Dream” speech, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). “Amos does not mince words,” Wright aptly observed, “God wants Israel to repent, ‘to hate evil and love the good’—that is the only thing that will satisfy the justice of God.” But the United States was not engaged in such an effort. Instead, he argued that “it is wrong to mistreat your brother and think you can make it all right with God by giving Him a burnt offering. One of these days this American nation will wake up to understand the justice of God is not in the fine churches or great educational institutions, the wonderful choirs and eloquent sermons, it is in hating evil a...

For example, in 1917, the National Baptist Union-Review ran an Atlanta Independent article on Billy Sunday’s upcoming visit to the South and the opportunity he had to make a statement for racial equality. “It will not suffice for Mr. Sunday to invade the Southland,” the secular black paper wrote and the traditionalist Union-Review reprinted, “and denounce adultery, fornication, liars, hypocrites, bums, hobos, rascals, scoundrels, crap shooters, tramps and loafers, and leave untouched the lynchers, the ballot box thief, the segregator, the discriminator, the Negro hater, the promoter of racial strife and the mob leader who burns human beings at the stake because they are black.” Instead Sunday needed to confront the fact that his audience in the South would be composed of such people. Rather than be “deathly silent” on the matter, he should speak out. “If Mr. Sunday is sincere and is a lover of God and humanity,” the paper continued, “he has a splendid opportunity to preach the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” and, further: That the gospel of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ knows no color line and that Jesus Christ died to the saving of all men who would believe on Him; that the black man is a common brother of the white man, and that the white man owes him both Godly and humane treatment; that before the law, the Negro is entitled to every privilege, every benefit accruing to the white man; that the double sessions in the Negro schools are wrong and wicke...

As this book has shown, African American clergy in the interwar years navigated a treacherous course for their readers and parishioners as they sought to maintain traditional religious beliefs while also employing that same hermeneutic to advance racial progress. Challenged indirectly by fundamentalists to defend their orthodoxy, they could not call themselves fundamentalists. The white leaders of the fundamentalist movement shunned black religious leaders, demeaned their intellect, and prepared instead for a coming catastrophe. Black Baptists and Methodists, in turn, distanced themselves from the fundamentalist movement’s millennialism and its indifference to resolving racial issues. But at the same time, modernism held no real appeal for these commentators, who labeled the movement a white heresy even as they embraced some of its methodologies.

Instead they turned the biblical literalism against their oppressors, showing that the message of Christ was meant for all and was meant to eliminate differences, not reinforce them. For these black evangelicals, being a Christian meant right belief and right living, being theologically traditional and socially progressive in terms of racial equality. A Christian did not frequent dance halls and speakeasies, nor did a Christian prevent someone from voting because of skin color. For the ministers in this study, the message was abundantly clear, and Christ demanded it. White fundamentalists had part of the equation right, but they did not have all of the answers, nor did those black leaders who rejected religion or who urged revolt. Truth did indeed run on a narrow gauge. The track of these writers’ discussions should lead historians away from the legacy forced on us by the fundamentalists and modernists themselves—that a Christian had to choose only one side.

Racial minorities do not necessarily see common ground with each other, nor do those same minorities liken their struggles to those endured by the LGBTQIA community. When pundits lump disparate groups together—all those who suffer discrimination, for example—they minimize the experiences and views of the various groups and create artificial affinities. The end effect is a form of marginalization imposed by outsiders without regard to beliefs, motives, or experiences.