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

by Jemar Tisby

Decades before the nation split into Union and Confederate sides, the dilemma of slavery had already frayed the unity of the American church.

The three of the most influential denominations at the time—Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians—all divided and fought over whether Christians could own slaves and remain in good standing.

John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, found slavery appalling. “It cannot be, that either war, or contract, can give any man such a property in another as he has in sheep and oxen. Much less is it possible, that any child of man, should ever be born a slave,” he said.11 Although it was far from advocating for racial equality, this antislavery stance—along with Wesley’s emphasis on revivalism, interracial camp meetings, a swift ordination process, and an appeal to the non-elite classes—initially attracted black Christians such as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones to the denomination.

James Andrew’s status as both an enslaver of human beings and a bishop in the church became the focus of the 1844 General Conference.

Refusing to give up his church duties, Andrew and his allies split from the MEC to form the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS), and they allowed their clergy to practice slavery.

Board members viewed the application as an attempt to purposely insert a divisive question into the denomination’s work. So the committee tried to avoid the issue of slavery altogether. In considering Reeve’s application, they wrote, “Resolved, That . . . it is not expedient to introduce the subjects of slavery or anti-slavery into our deliberations, nor to entertain applications to which they are introduced.”

The battle lines between northern and southern Baptists had been drawn, and in May 1845, almost three hundred Baptist leaders representing nearly 400,000 churchgoers from southern states gathered in Augusta, Georgia, to form a new church association, one inclusive of slaveholders, called the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

To complicate matters, abolitionists and socially moderate Christians struggled to argue against what seemed evident to many people—the Bible never repudiates slavery. Indeed, many of the godliest people in the Bible enslaved others. So the Civil War also sparked a battle over the Bible.

Southern theologians challenged their abolitionist opponents to produce the chapter and verse where Jesus, or the Bible generally, condemned slavery. They gave extended treatises on the scriptural validity of slavery.

The release of this book after the war reveals that the formal end of military conflict did little to change the minds of southerners about slavery. Many remained committed to slavery as orthodox, biblical truth. In his book, Dabney explained in precise detail, quoting from the Old and New Testament and from economics and experience, why the North got it wrong and why the South’s defense of slavery was justified.

Because black people were condemned to perish in their pagan beliefs, Dabney saw white Christian slaveowners as loving people standing between the enslaved and eternal damnation.

Noah concludes with a final pronouncement: “May Canaan be the slave of Japheth” (9:27). Proslavery advocates used these verses to make a biblical case that black people—as descendants of Ham—belonged in a state of slavery.

Even when abolitionists made their case from the Bible, they were criticized because they were not able to cite a specific passage that explicitly condemned slavery. Instead, they had to argue from broader principles such as “love of neighbor” and the unity of humankind.

For most Christians, even those sympathetic to the plight of black people, the southern proslavery advocates seemed to have a clearer and simpler biblical argument, one that did not require sources outside of Scripture or employ unfamiliar interpretations.

Whenever issues like slavery and, later, segregation rose to the fore, the spirituality of the church doctrine conveniently reappeared.

It should give every citizen and Christian in America pause to consider how strongly ingrained the support for slavery in our country was. People believed in the superiority of the white race and the moral degradation of black people so strongly that they were willing to fight a war over it.

No other period of American history held as much hope for black equality as the time of Reconstruction following the Civil War.

Union General William T. Sherman handed down Special Field Order No. 15, which reserved a tract of land for black families 30 miles wide and 245 miles long along the east coast extending from Charleston, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. He promised each family a mule to help them work the land. Sherman’s special order gave vitality to the dream of “40 acres and mule”—a hope for a redistribution of the land that would provide those formerly enslaved with a means of economic self-determination.3 Yet the dream was short-lived. The blatantly racist President Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, ordered that the redistributed lands be returned to former enslavers, and many freed people went back to working the land under the sharecropping system.

In opposing the use of government power to protect civil rights, Johnson voiced many themes that opponents of the political reforms that empower black people continue to invoke to this day.

The Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, only applied to a limited number of slaves.

To address this, the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, giving all black people in America their full freedom, decisively freeing all slaves:

The Fourteenth Amendment followed, granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” This did not apply to Native Americans who were still classified as “dependent” nations within a nation.

Lastly, the Fifteenth Amendment granted black men the right to vote:

The “Lost Cause” is a narrative about southern society and the Confederate cause invented after the Civil War to make meaning of the devastating military defeat for southern white Americans.

The Lost Cause mythologized the white, pre–Civil War South as a virtuous, patriotic group of tight-knit Christian communities. According to the Lost Cause narrative, the South wanted nothing more than to be left alone to preserve its idyllic civilization, but it was attacked by the aggressive, godless North, who swooped in to disrupt a stable society, calling for emancipation and inviting the intrusion of the federal government into small-town, rural life.

White supremacy lurked behind the Lost Cause narrative and helped cement the practice of segregation in the church as the new normal.

There was a significant spike in monument construction from 1900 to the 1920s and a second explosion of Confederate flags and iconography from the 1950s to the 1960s.8 These periods coincided with intense seasons of racial conflict in the Jim Crow era.

In the South after the Civil War, the Christian-Confederate connection was visible in public spaces and in houses of worship.

Supported by most whites in the South, several groups initiated a sustained and violent effort to reclaim the South from white northerners and freed black people. They saw their efforts as a divine mandate for the white man to take his rightful place atop the social hierarchy. They referred to this period as “redemption.”

The poll tax charged people money to vote, money that black people and even some poor whites did not have. They also enacted the “grandfather clause,” which permitted people who could vote prior to 1867 and their descendants to vote. Of course, this excluded most black people.

White “redeemers” selectively administered these tests to bar black voters from the democratic process.

Ulysses S. Grant ran against Democrat Horatio Seymour, a northerner from New York and a supporter of the Union but a critic of Abraham Lincoln. Picking Francis Blair for his running mate, the two men ran on a platform supported by racism. One of their fliers proclaimed, “Our Motto: This is a white man’s country; let white men rule.” Sadly, this type of overt appeal to white racial resentment would remain a feature of American politics for most of the next century.

The Plessy v. Ferguson decision legalized what soon became standard practice throughout the country for the next sixty years—the “separate but equal” doctrine. Had the nation’s highest court ruled differently in this case, the color lines of the twentieth century might have been drawn much differently. In Plessy v Ferguson Americans had a choice—would they treat black people as full humans and fellow citizens?

Within a few months the Klan turned violent, and their objective shifted to keeping whites in power by resisting Reconstruction efforts.

Instead, it fused Christianity, nationalism, and white supremacy into a toxic ideology of hate.

The Birth of a Nation was one of the first films shown in the White House, and President Woodrow Wilson enjoyed the movie so much that he allegedly remarked it was like “writing history with lightning!”

The KKK interspersed Christianity with racism to create a nationalistic form of religion that excluded all but American-born, Protestant white men and women. To maintain their concept of a well-ordered society, the KKK utilized lynching, rape, and intimidation to keep undesirable people groups in their place.

But the KKK of the 1910s through the 1930s was far from marginal. Their views were quite popular with mainstream white citizens.

“It’s estimated that 40,000 ministers were members of the Klan, and these people were sermonizing regularly, explicitly urging people to join the Klan.”

Jim Crow laws developed as a system of laws and customs to revive the older social order that slavery had enabled for much of US history.

Although he was not the first white actor to utilize “blackface,” his career skyrocketed when he began painting his face black and playing the role of a likable trickster named Jim Crow. The plays portrayed stereotypes about black intelligence, sexual appetites, contentment under slavery, and obeisance to white people.

The North and West, for instance, had “sundown towns”—communities where black people had to be out before sundown or face violent repercussions. Some cities even posted signs that read, “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in This Town.”

During this era, the prohibition against interracial sexual relations and marriage became one the most inviolable of social conventions in America.

In the minds of Christian segregationists, racial mixing would dilute the purity of the white race and result in the “mongrelization” of white people.

After the Civil War and emancipation, convict-leasing developed as a “legal” way for corporations to gain cheap labor and for state and county governments to get money. The process of convict-leasing began by entrapping black people, usually men but occasionally women, for minor offenses such as vagrancy, gambling, or riding a freight car without a ticket, and then saddling them with jail time and court fees. If the person could not pay the fee, as was often the case, they could have their sentence increased. A company, or even an independent employer, would then contract with a prison for inmate labor, putting them to work in mines, factories, or fields. In return the company would pay the local government entity a certain fee per worker.

The convict-lease system made black inmates “slaves in all but name.”

Few of the white people who participated in the lynching of black citizens ever faced legal consequences.

Clergy often had the most education and influence in the black community and were more likely to be engaged in politics, either as advocates of specific candidates and policies or as elected officials themselves. This made black church leaders natural targets of white supremacist brutality.

Turner’s political activism and theology helped position the black church as a staunch opponent of racism and an advocate for the dignity of black people.

Many white Christians failed to unequivocally condemn lynching and other acts of racial terror. Doing so poisoned the American legal system and made Christian churches complicit in racism for generations. While some Christians spoke out and denounced these lynchings (just as some Christians called for abolition), the majority stance of the American church was avoidance, turning a blind eye to the practice.