honest grappling with the Christianity of the slaveholder and the Christianity of Christ must, in the end, face the fact that white Christians in this land called America are the inheritors of tortured institutions, many of them rich in property and tradition, which nevertheless have experienced precious little church. What hope is there for such institutions? I hope by now the answer is plain enough—by God’s grace, a church did emerge on the edges of plantations in the American South. In it, people who had not called themselves Christian retold stories they had learned to read in the holy
...more
