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

by Jemar Tisby

the most egregious acts of racism, like a church bombing, occur within a context of compromise.

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.

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.

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.”

At several points in American history—the colonial era, Reconstruction, the demise of Jim Crow—Christians could have confronted racism instead of compromising. Although the missed opportunities are heartbreaking, the fact that people can choose is also empowering.

The people who will reject this book will level several common objections. What stands out about these complaints is not their originality or persuasiveness but their ubiquity throughout history. The same arguments that perpetuated racial inequality in decades past get recycled in the present day. Critics will assert that the ideas in The Color of Compromise should be disregarded because they are too “liberal.” They will claim that a Marxist Communist ideology underlies all the talk about racial equality. They will contend that such an extended discussion of racism reduces black people to a state of helplessness and a “victim mentality.” They will try to point to counterexamples and say that racists do not represent the “real” American church. They will assert that the historical facts are wrong or have been misinterpreted. They will charge that this discussion of race is somehow “abandoning the gospel” and replacing it with problematic calls for “social justice.” After reading just a few chapters, these arguments will sound familiar. These arguments have been used throughout the American church’s history to deny or defend racism.

The goal of this book is not guilt. The purpose of tracing Christian complicity with racism is not to show white believers how bad they are.

On the question of whether baptism would render slaves free, the Virginia General Assembly decided, “It is enacted and declared by this Grand Assembly, and the authority thereof, that the conferring of baptism does not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom.”

So plantation owners discouraged the enslaved from hearing the Christian gospel and receiving the sacrament of baptism. They did not want to lose their unpaid labor and diminish their profits. At the same time, missionaries exerted pressure on the slave owners to evangelize their slaves.

To grasp how American Christians constructed and cooperated with racism, one has to realize that nothing about American racism was inevitable.

Yet if people made deliberate decisions to enact inequality, it is possible that a series of better decisions could begin to change this reality.

The development of the idea of race required the intentional actions of people in the social, political, and religious spheres to decide that skin color determined who would be enslaved and who would be free.

Over the next 300 years, the transatlantic slave trade transported more than ten million Africans to the Americas in a forced migration of epic scale. About two million people perished on the voyage.

The process of enslavement began with the European desire for products that needed raw materials from the Americas.

Though the process of dehumanization began at the moment of capture, it took on new dimensions on the ship. Slave traders often shackled Africans together to prevent them from jumping overboard or rebelling.

Instead of abandoning Christianity, though, black people went directly to teachings of Jesus and challenged white people to demonstrate integrity.

As many as one-third of African slaves died within their first three years in the Americas.

As slavery became more institutionalized, more rules regulated its practice. By the mid-seventeenth century, colonies began developing “slave codes” to police African bondage. 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 slave codes also defined enslaved Africans not as human beings but as chattel—private property on the same level as livestock.

As reliance on slave labor increased, sticky questions about Christianity, race, and bondage began to emerge.

Of course, most indigenous people did not see it this way. European missionaries made few converts because converting to Christianity included European cultural assimilation and the loss of tribal identity.

It must be noted, however, that 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 helped develop Trinitarian theology and defended the deity of Christ long before Western Europeans presumed to “take” Christianity to Africans.

Christianity served as a force to help construct racial categories in the colonial period. A corrupt message that saw no contradiction between the brutalities of bondage and the good news of salvation became the norm.

Instead of highlighting the dignity of all human beings, European missionaries told Africans that Christianity should make them more obedient and loyal to their earthly masters.

But if racism can be made, it can be unmade.

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. And the American church participated in and defended the contradiction between freedom and slavery embedded in the constitution of its young nation.

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

As a result of the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina passed the Negro Act of 1740. The act, which largely reiterated laws that had already been passed but not strictly enforced, prevented the enslaved from assembling in groups without white supervision, selling their own goods for profit, or learning to write.

the act mandated whippings on the back for recalcitrant slaves, but any slaveowner who cut out the tongue, put out the eye, castrated, or burned a slave would have to pay a fine.

Whitefield was more moderate on race than many of his white contemporaries. He excoriated enslavers for their physical abuse of slaves, calling them “monsters of barbarity.”

Over time Whitefield’s moderation on slavery morphed into outright support.

James Oglethorpe, the colony’s administrator, determined that Georgia would be a slave-free region. Oglethorpe and his supporters were not concerned with abolition, however. They simply wanted Georgia to be a settlement where poor Englishmen could labor without competition.

Faced with the vicissitudes of starting a nonprofit organization and ensuring its financial viability, Whitefield looked to slavery to secure Bethesda’s welfare. He turned to the wealthy allies he had gained during his revivals in South Carolina for support. With the help of his friends near Charleston, Whitefield purchased a 640-acre plantation and planned to use the profit from the crops produced there to support the work of the orphanage. Whitefield was virtually guaranteed a profit from his plantation activities because he did not plan to pay his laborers. “One negro has been given me,” he wrote in a letter. “Some more I plan to purchase this week.”

Historian Stephen J. Stein insists that financial concerns only partially explain Whitefield’s advocacy of slavery. “The focus upon contrast and change in his ideas which has dominated discussion to date obscures a more significant feature of his thought, namely, his deep-seated fear of the blacks.”

Edwards’s vaunted philosophical and theological acumen, however, did not lead him to reject race-based chattel slavery.

Although Edwards remains a significant figure in American religious history, his significance must also include the fact that he compromised Christian principles by enslaving human beings.

Edwards did oppose the African slave trade for evangelistic reasons, noting that it would make Africans more resistant to the gospel. But he never objected to slavery in general.

Why did Jonathan Edwards support slavery? In part, the answer may have to do with his social status.

More deeply, though, the particular brand of evangelicalism developing in America during the Great Awakening made an antislavery stance unlikely for many.

“As a revival movement . . . evangelicalism transformed people within their inherited social setting, but worked only partial and selective transformation on the social settings themselves.”23 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.

Edwards’s second son, Jonathan Edwards Jr., more fully grasped the revolutionary applica...

Edwards and Whitefield represent a supposedly moderate and widespread view of slavery. 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.

More often than not, the issue that divided Christians along racial lines related to the unequal treatment of African-descended people in white church contexts.

At the outset of the nineteenth century, the United States could have become a worldwide beacon of diversity and equality. Fresh from the Revolutionary War, it could have adopted the noble ideals written in the Declaration of Independence. It could have crafted a truly inclusive Constitution. Instead, white supremacy became more defined as the nation and the church solidified their identities.

“Of its eighty-four clauses, six are directly concerned with slaves and their owners. Five others had implications of slavery that were considered and debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention

Although the word slave is absent, this section clearly means that any enslaved person crossing state lines from a slave state to a free state had to be returned to his or her owner. From the beginning, the Constitution ensured that nowhere in America would be safe for an escaped slave.

some southern states refused to ratify the Constitution unless they had specific assurances protecting their right to possess human chattel.

Northern states did not want slaves to be counted, because that would give the South a numerical advantage over northern states.