The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.

History and Scripture teaches us that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth. The Color of Compromise is about telling the truth so that reconciliation—robust, consistent, honest reconciliation—might occur across racial lines.

most Christians in America don’t know how bad racism really is, so they don’t respond with the necessary urgency. Even when Christians realize the need for change, they often shrink back from the sacrifices that transformation entails.

racism is a system of oppression based on race.10 Notice Tatum’s emphasis on systemic oppression.

prejudice plus power. It is not only personal bigotry toward someone of a different race that constitutes racism; rather, racism includes the imposition of bigoted ideas on groups of people.

Christians participated in this system of white supremacy—a concept that identifies white people and white culture as normal and superior—even if they claim people of color as their brothers and sisters in Christ.

Historically speaking, when faced with the choice between racism and equality, the American church has tended to practice a complicit Christianity rather than a courageous Christianity. They chose comfort over constructive conflict and in so doing created and maintained a status quo of injustice.

Complicity connotes a degree of passivity—

Deaths outnumbered births, so it was more cost-effective for plantation owners to replace slaves rather than to invest in keeping them alive.

colonists may have initially seen Africans in America as laborers just like any other and patterned their economy and politics to allow for their full inclusion. American history could have happened another way. Instead, racist attitudes and the pursuit of wealth increasingly relegated black people to a position of perpetual servitude and exploitation.

In the early days of colonization, European and African mortality rates were both extremely high. The chance of living five years or more was about fifty-fifty, which made it more financially feasible to use indentured servants rather than enslaved persons, who had a higher up-front cost.

The codes determined that a child was born slave or free based solely on the mother’s status. They mandated

slavery for life with no hope of emancipation. The codes deprived the enslaved of legal rights, required permission for slaves to leave their master’s property, forbade marriage between enslaved people, and prohibited them from carrying arms. The slave codes also defined enslaved Africans not as human beings but as chattel—private property on the same level as livestock.

Christianity had inherent ideas of human equality imbedded in its teachings. If slaves converted to Christianity, would they not begin to demand their freedom and social equality? How could missionaries preach to the slaves when their owners feared the loss of their unpaid labor? Over time, Europeans compromised the message of Christianity to accommodate slavery while also, in their minds, satisfying the requirement to make disciples.

From their earliest days in North America, colonists employed religio-cultural categories to signify that European meant “Christian” and Native American or African meant “heathen.” Over time, these categories simplified and hardened into racial designations.

The English colonists’ goal was to evangelize and assimilate the indigenous peoples.

signified the possibility of making indigenous Americans into “respectable” English persons.

hereditary heathenism could be interrupted by marrying into the “better” spiritual lineage of English Christians.

Europeans did not introduce Christianity to Africans. Christianity had arrived in Africa through Egypt and Ethiopia in the third and fourth centuries. Christian luminaries like Augustine, Tertullian, and Athanasius

social, political, and economic equality was not part of their plan. Missionaries carefully crafted messages that maintained the social and economic status quo.

European missionaries maintained a strict separation between spiritual and physical freedom.

So from the beginning of American colonization, Europeans crafted a Christianity that would allow them to spread the faith without confronting the exploitative economic system of slavery and the emerging social inequality based on color.

Christianity became identified with the emerging concept of “whiteness” while people of color, including indigenous peoples and Africans, became identified with unbelief.

more authentically biblical message of human equality regardless of skin color.

Attucks symbolizes that bitter combination of freedom and bondage, racism and patriotism, that characterized the Revolutionary era.

While white soldiers and political leaders were declaring their inalienable right to independence, they were also enslaving countless women, men, and children of African descent.

being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker . . . they are his property.”

the government exists by the consent of the people.

A draft of the document denounced the transatlantic slave trade by accusing the British monarch of “violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people . . . captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” The antislavery clause was excised from the final draft of the declaration due to the objections of delegates from Georgia and South Carolina as well as some northern states that benefited from slavery.4

Despite the vigorous efforts of African-descended people to apply revolutionary rhetoric to the problem of slavery, the institution endured long after the American Revolution had ended.

Many of them practiced the indigenous religions of tribes in West Africa, and a significant number were Muslim. Africans preferred their own forms of faith to that of their white enslavers.6

the Great Awakening moved American Christians toward more informal and less structured forms of worship.

Aspects of the faith such as the notion of rebirth, baptism by immersion in water, and emotional expressiveness resembled African traditions.9

In 1785, Lemuel Haynes became the first black person ordained by any Christian fellowship in America.10 Prior to his career in ministry, Haynes fought in the Revolutionary War. After his conversion, he sensed a call to ministry and became a Calvinistic preacher in the Northeast. He drew much of his theological convictions from the teachings of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield.

He expressed ambivalence about the practice of slavery itself, but he had no doubts about how masters should treat their laborers. “Unsure of ‘whether it be lawful for Christians to buy slaves,’ Whitefield was positive that ‘it is sinful, when bought, to use them . . . as though they were Brutes.’ ”14

James Oglethorpe, the colony’s administrator, determined that Georgia would be a slave-free region.

his deep-seated fear of the blacks.”

18 The economic impulse for slavery can never be separated from the racist ideas that typecast enslaved Africans as dangerous and brutish.

he compromised Christian principles

by enslaving human beings.

The theologian seemed to accept slavery, so long as masters treated their enslaved persons with dignity, on the basis of slavery’s apparently tacit acceptance in the Bible.

Evangelicalism focused on individual conversion and piety. Within this evangelical framework, one could adopt an evangelical expression of Christianity yet remain uncompelled to confront institutional injustice.

Both accepted the spiritual equality of black and white people. Both preached the message of salvation to all. Yet their concern for African

slaves did not extend to advocating for physical emancipation. Like these two preachers, many other Christians did not see anything in the Bible that forbade slavery. In fact, the Scriptures seemed to accept slavery as an established reality. Instead, white Christians believed that the Bible merely regulated slavery in order to mitigate its most brutal abuses.

Baptists in Virginia declared slavery to be a civil issue outside of the scope of the church.

The divide between white and black Christians in America was not generally one of doctrine. Christians across the color line largely agreed on theological teachings such as the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and the importance of personal conversion.

Through a series of rules and customs, government employees and real estate agents have actively engineered neighborhoods and communities to maintain racial segregation.

Neighborhoods with any black people, even if the residents had stable middle-class incomes, were coded red, and lenders were unlikely to give loans in these areas. This practice became known as redlining.

redlining affected countless neighborhoods in metropolitan areas across the country—St. Louis, San Francisco, Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York City, just to name a few.