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

by Jemar Tisby

We also see that Scripture never hides the ugly parts of history when it comes to the people of God.

We live in a country centered around whiteness that disregards how the image of God is on magnificent display in nonwhite bodies

‘Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?’ The answer should be, ‘We all did it.’ Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and a decade ago. We all did it.”

The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow. 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.

“Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light,” he wrote, “injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

Even when Christians realize the need for change, they often shrink back from the sacrifices that transformation entails.

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.

“Not only did white Christians fail to fight for black equality, they often labored mightily against it.”11 Complicity connotes a degree of passivity—as if Christianity were merely a boat languidly floating down the river of racism. In reality, white Christians have often been the current, whipping racism into waves of conflict that rock and divide the people of God. Even if only a small portion of Christians committed the most notorious acts of racism, many more white Christians can be described as complicit in creating and sustaining a racist society.

white supremacy in the nation and the church was not inevitable. Things could have been different. At several points in American history—the colonial era, Reconstruction, the demise of Jim Crow—Christians could have confronted racism instead of compromising.

people invented racial categories. Race and racism are social constructs. As society changes, so does racism. Racist attitudes produced different actions in 1619 than they did in 1919 or 2020.

The malleability and impermanence of racial categories help explain how the American church’s compromise with racism has become subtler over time. History demonstrates that racism never goes away; it just adapts.

Black churches looked to the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt as a model for their own exodus from American slavery.

Black Christians saw in Scripture a God who “sits high and looks low”—one who saw their oppression and was outraged by it.

Through the centuries, black people have become the most religious demographic in the United States. For instance, 83 percent of black people say they “believe in God with absolute certainty” compare...

All too often, Christians name a few individuals who stood against the racism of their day and claim them as heroes. They fail to recognize how rarely believers made public and persistent commitments to racial equality against the culture of their churches and denominations.

Studying history forces people in the present to view people in the past as complex and contradictory figures.

Christians have been mandated to pray that the racial and ethnic unity of the church would be manifest, even if imperfectly, in the present.

Instead of acknowledging the full humanity and citizenship of black slaves, political leaders determined that each slave would count as three-fifths of a white citizen.

The Missouri Compromise effectively guaranteed that slavery would remain an American institution for the next several decades.

All of this demonstrates that early legislation in the United States protected, or at least did not dismantle, race-based chattel slavery. The nation’s political leaders used black lives as bargaining chips to preserve the union of states and to gain leverage for other policy issues.

The chattel principle is the social alchemy that transformed a human being made in the image of God into a piece of property.

As property, enslaved people were valued for their physical aptitude and obedient attitudes. Prices increased based on height, skin color, perceived intelligence, and a reputation for following orders.

of the more than 600,000 interstate sales that occurred in the decades prior to the Civil War, 25 percent destroyed a first marriage, and 50 percent broke up a nuclear family.

Rather than defending the dignity of black people, American Christians at this time chose to turn a blind eye to the separation of families, the scarring of bodies, the starvation of stomachs, and the generational trauma of slavery.

Enslaved blacks did not passively suffer abuse. Christianity, in fact, became a source of strength and survival, bringing hope to thousands of enslaved people.

Less than ten years later, in February 1831, the moon eclipsed the sun, and an enslaved man named Nat Turner looked at the sky. Turner believed the eclipse to be a spiritual message. Turner was a deeply committed Christian, and in 1828, three years earlier, he wrote that God had revealed to him “by signs in the heavens that he would make known to me when I should commence the great work, and . . . I should arise and prepare myself and slay my enemies with their own weapons.”11 Turner planned what became one of the most infamous rebellions of enslaved people in American history.

White Christians used this as an opportunity to advocate for slavery reform so that masters did not aggravate enslaved people to the point of violent rebellion, pointing to Turner as an example.

The gospel of Jesus Christ planted the seeds of resistance and liberation in the minds and hearts of oppressed black people, driving white enslavers to repress and regulate the religion of the enslaved.

Instead, paternalistic attitudes toward black people defined much of American Christianity.

White evangelists compromised the Bible’s message of liberation to make Christianity compatible with slavery.

“Sunday morning only became the most segregated time of the week after the Civil War. Before emancipation, black and white evangelicals typically prayed, sang, and worshiped together.”13 Yet this interracial interaction did not come from the egalitarian aspirations of white Christians; rather, interracial congregations were an expression of paternalism and a means of controlling slave beliefs and preventing slave insurrection.

Slaveholder paternalism viewed the enslaved as perpetual children incapable of adequately making their own decisions, dependent on white people for guidance and protection.

Finley, like many other white Christians, believed that free black people could never effectively assimilate into American society. “Could they be sent to Africa, a three-fold benefit would arise,” he suggested. “We should be cleared of them; we should send to Africa a population partially civilized and christianized for its benefits; our blacks themselves would be put in better condition.”

Organizations like the ACS believed that exporting black Americans back to Africa would “civilize” a dark and barbaric continent through gradual cultural changes and Christian evangelism.

One of the theological legacies of the Second Great Awakening was postmillennialism, the view that Christ would return only after an extended era of peace and justice. Christians saw it as their duty to usher in this millennium and to prepare for Jesus’s return by reforming society and tamping down its vices.

Segregation and inequality defined most of American Christianity—even in an age of great revivals. For example, many black people attended the Cane Ridge Revival, but they were forced to meet in a separate area apart from the white worshipers.

Finney was an outspoken abolitionist, but he was not a proponent of black equality. He advocated for emancipation, but he did not see the value of the “social” integration of the races.

This belief led to a fixation on individual conversion without a corresponding focus on transforming the racist policies and practices of institutions, a stance that has remained a constant feature of American evangelicalism and has furthered the American church’s easy compromise with slavery and racism.

“Both [Union and Confederacy] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.”3 The president concisely summarized the theological tension that lay at the center of the conflict. Was God on the side of the Union or the Confederacy? Did the Bible sanction slavery or oppose it?

The first fact, that the war was about slavery, was never in dispute during the conflict. The combatants knew what the stakes were. Even if there were additional disputed issues, such as the extent of federal versus state power, the future of slavery in America was paramount.

The second fact, that many Christians supported slavery to the extent that they were willing to risk their lives to protect it, has not been fully considered in the American church, even though 150 years have passed since the war.

Under the Fugitive Slave Act, free people who failed to assist authorities in recapturing runaways could be fined up to $1,000. The Fugitive Slave Act also made it easier for enslavers to capture fugitive slaves; enslavers simply needed to supply an affidavit to a federal marshal for the capture and return of an individual.

the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 shattered the uneasy truce between slave states and free states. This act permitted the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. The act effectively nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820,

This decision effectively closed courts to enslaved blacks. They could not sue for their freedom or pursue justice through the court system, and once again the American legal system had declared black people to be something less than fully human. The Dred Scott decision left no question in the minds of antislavery activists that the federal government, especially under the leadership of President James Buchanan, planned to extend and protect slavery across the growing nation.

Yet despite the anger of southern politicians, Lincoln was far from a racial egalitarian. He objected to the expansion of slavery, but he was not initially interested in abolishing it, nor did he advocate for civil or social equality for black people.

At one point Lincoln invited five black leaders to the White House to discuss a colonization plan that would send freed black people to Liberia, Haiti, or Panama.

As we have seen, colonization was an easy way for white people to skirt the issue of white supremacy. Rather than combatting racism, why not simply send people of other races far, far away?

South Carolina and the other states that withdrew from the United States considered slavery a matter of personal property ownership, and citing Article IV, they saw slavery as an institution explicitly protected by the Constitution.

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.” Yet again, the chattel principle came into play as Mississippi’s leaders used financial arguments to support slavery. In addition, they posited that the biology of black people uniquely suited them for slave labor because “none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.”