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

by Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews

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.