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

by Jemar Tisby

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.

early legislation in the United States protected, or at least did not dismantle, race-based chattel slavery.

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. Oftentimes, children younger than thirteen years old were separated from their parents and sold, never to be reunited.

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. Some deliberately chose to shield themselves from the atrocities occurring in their own country, state, and community. Others witnessed slavery in action but chose not to confront it, preferring the political and financial advantages that came with human bondage instead of decrying the dehumanization they saw.

It was during this antebellum period that the American church truly made its uneasy peace with the enslavement of black people.

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.

Two facts about the Civil War are especially pertinent to our examination of race and Christianity in America: that the Civil War was fought over slavery and that countless devout Christians fought and died to preserve it as an institution.

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.

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). The convention’s first president, William Bullein Johnson, explained the reason for the separation and the new convention. “These [northern] brethren, thus acted upon a sentiment they have failed to prove—That slavery is, in all circumstances sinful.”14 In light of this affront to the southern way of life and the assault on the institution of slavery, Southern Baptists viewed separation as their best option.

Southern white Christians, far from viewing slavery as wrong or sinful, generally affirmed that God sanctioned slavery in Scripture and that bondage under white authority was the natural state for people of African descent.

The doctrine of the spirituality of the church has continued to influence the church in America, even to the present. Its adherents are diverse and often selective in how they apply the doctrine. The injunction against church involvement in policy issues was not upheld for the temperance movement, debates on evolution, attempts to keep prayer in schools, or discussions on how to overturn Roe v. Wade. Historically, the doctrine of the spirituality of the church tends to be most strenuously invoked when Christians speak out against white supremacy and racism.29 Whenever issues like slavery and, later, segregation rose to the fore, the spirituality of the church doctrine conveniently reappeared.

Pastors and theologians supported the Confederacy by providing theological ballast and biblical backing for the continuation of slavery. They prayed over the troops, penned treatises on the inferiority of black people, and divided denominations over the issue of enslavement. The Civil War paints a vivid picture of what inevitably happens when the American church is complicit in racism and willing to deny the teachings of Jesus to support an immoral, evil institution.

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 “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.

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. Confederates reluctantly roused themselves to the battlefield not because of bloodlust or a nefarious desire to subjugate black people but because outsiders had threatened their way of life and because honor demanded a reaction.

Plessy’s case against Judge John Howard Ferguson went all the way to the Supreme Court, and on May 18, 1896, the justices of the Supreme Court ruled that Plessy’s rights had not been violated because it was a fallacy to believe that “the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority.”13 The Plessy v. Ferguson decision legalized what soon became standard practice throughout the country for the next sixty years—the “separate but equal” doctrine.

The Klan of the early twentieth century “was not just an order to defend America but also a campaign to protect and celebrate Protestantism. It was a religious order.”

The well-deserved disgust that is common today at the mention of the KKK can make it tempting for those in the twenty-first century to disregard them as an extreme group with marginal views that did not represent the majority of the American people and certainly not the Protestant church. But the KKK of the 1910s through the 1930s was far from marginal.

Klan members successfully lobbied for the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited immigration from select countries.

Jim Crow took the form of both legal policies and informal traditions designed to segregate and subjugate black people in American society.

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 Dow...

Other Jim Crow laws and customs mandated that black and white baseball teams could not play on the same field, black and white people had to be buried in separate cemeteries, white students could not have textbooks that originally had been assigned to black students, and prison inmates had to be divided by race.

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 workers themselves, as prison inmates, were never paid for their labor. They worked in appalling conditions that bred disease and violence. Many died and were dumped into unmarked graves.

Most notoriously, any perceived infraction of the Jim Crow codes could earn a black person “death by tree”—lynching.

the lynching of Luther and Mary Holbert in February 1904 are not clear, but we know it was about love. According to historian Chris Myers Asch, Luther Holbert, a black worker on the James Eastland plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi, had been living with Mary, who was the wife (or ex-wife) of another worker, Albert Carr. Holbert and Carr had a dispute over the romance, and the plantation owner, Eastland, intervened. Carr and Eastland went to the Holbert’s cabin armed with guns. Only the results, not the details, of the encounter are known. But at the end of the altercation at the cabin, both Eastland and Carr lay dead at the hands of Luther Holbert.32 Jim Crow “justice” was quick and certain for any black man who killed a white man. Fearing for their lives, Luther and Mary Holbert went on the run. The alleged crime ignited the white population. Hundreds of white men, led by James Eastland’s brother Woods Caperton Eastland, pursued the Holberts with bloodhounds guiding them to their prey. Mary disguised herself as a man, and they hid in the swamp. Three days later, the Holberts were captured. What happened next is a horror of inhumanity. The lynching didn’t happen immediately. It was planned for the next day, a Sunday afternoon after church so a larger crowd could gather. The murderers strategically chose their location for maximum intimidation of the black populace. It was to take place on the property of a black church in Doddsville, Mississippi. The black church ...

Sadly, this was not an isolated incident. In 1918, Walter White of the NAACP, writing about a recent spate of lynchings in Georgia, warned readers of his article that “the method by which Mrs. Mary Turner was put to death was so revolting and the details are so horrifying that it is with reluctance that the account is given.”35 Mary Turner had been vocally protesting the lynching of her husband, and her cries for justice made her a target for a white racist lynch mob. When they caught up to her, they tied her ankles and hung her upside down from a small oak tree. Turner was eight months pregnant at the time, but that fact elicited no mercy from the mob, who applied gasoline and oil to her pregnant body. They struck a match and lit it, burning off her clothes. Then, while she was still alive, one man took a knife commonly used for killing hogs and cut open her womb. The child fell from Turner’s midsection, and according to White, “The infant, prematurely born, gave two feeble cries and then its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel.”36 In the aftermath of this event, five hundred black people fled the community.

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. It’s not that members of every white church participated in lynching, but the practice could not have endured without the relative silence, if not outright support, of one of the most significant institutions in America—the Christian church.

The decades after the Civil War proved that racism never goes away, it just adapts.

power. The American church’s complicity with racism contributed to a context that continued to discriminate against black people even after the deadly lessons of the Civil War.

His statements both echo and foreshadow the sentiments of many theologically conservative Christians, who insisted that converting individuals to Christianity was the only biblical way to transform society. Fundamentalists dissuaded other Christians from certain forms of political involvement and encouraged them instead to focus on personal holiness and evangelism.

The unrest in East St. Louis was a precursor to what became known as the Red Summer. In 1919, more than twenty-five cities across the nation, usually large urban areas outside of the South, descended into bloody racial conflict.

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.

“Through blockbusting, brokers intentionally stoked fears of racial integration and declining property values in order to push white homeowners to sell at a loss.”50 Brokers would warn white residents of an impending “invasion” of black home buyers. Whites, who feared losing property value and who harbored stereotypes about black people, would sell at a lower price to the broker. The brokers would then sell the properties at inflated rates to black people desperate for homes and comfortable neighborhoods. Blockbusting is an example of how some agents leveraged racism for their personal advantage.

In reality, most of the black people who left the South encountered similar patterns of race-based discrimination wherever they went. Although they may not have faced the same closed system of white supremacy that permeated the South, they still contended with segregation and put up with daily assaults on their dignity, and the church contributed to this.

Bigotry obeys no boundaries. This is why Christians in every part of America have a moral and spiritual obligation to fight against the church’s complicity with racism.

Christian moderates may not have objected to the broader principles of racial equality, but they offered tepid support and at times outright skepticism.

Schools also became a battleground for Christians committed to segregation. Some Christian parents, faced with the unconscionable prospect of little white girls attending school with little black boys and eventually growing up, falling in love, and having brown babies, started “segregation academies.” Because these were private schools, these institutions did not have to abide by the Brown v Board mandate for racial integration, which only applied to public schools.

Before his untimely death from a brain tumor in 1991, Atwater had laid bare the racially coded appeals used by some Republicans to recruit voters: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.” He said all of this in an interview recorded in 1981.3 “Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites,” he continued. “ ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ ”

From the late 1960s through the 1980s, conservative Christians coalesced into a political force that every major Republican politician had to court if they hoped to have lasting success. But there was also a cost to this influence; it meant that American evangelicalism became virtually synonymous with the GOP and whiteness. While neither Democrats nor Republicans adequately addressed the multitude of issues that continued to plague black communities, people of color increasingly felt disregarded and even, at times, degraded by political conservatives. Politics became a proxy for racial conflict, and because of the Religious Right, that conflict translated into divisions in the church.

Though it was necessary to enact civil rights legislation, you cannot erase four hundred years of race-based oppression by passing a few laws.

Law-and-order rhetoric fueled an increasingly aggressive criminal justice establishment. Today, the United States has just 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its incarcerated persons.

In place of obviously racist policies, law-and-order rhetoric “had become a surrogate expression for concern about the civil rights movement.”28 One of Nixon’s closest advisers, H. R. Haldeman, said, “[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

Since the late 1960s, the American church’s complicity in racism has been less obvious, but it has not required as much effort to maintain. Nowadays, all the American church needs to do in terms of compromise is cooperate with already established and racially unequal social systems.

But in the early 1970s, abortion was not the primary issue that catalyzed the Religious Right, as it would in later years. Initially, the Christian response to Roe v. Wade was mixed.32 Instead, conservative voters coalesced around the issue of racial integration in schools.

Whatever their intentions, when the Religious Right signed up to support Reagan and his views, they were also tacitly endorsing an administration that refused to take strong stances toward dismantling racism. Here we see further complicity with institutional racism as conservative Christians chose to support certain elements of the modern Republican platform.

we begin to see that Christians have a responsibility to, at the very least, consider how the political connections between theologically conservative evangelicalism and conservative politics, namely through the Republican Party, have supported racial inequities.

Accountable individualism means that “individuals exist independent of structures and institutions, have freewill, and are individually accountable for their own actions.”

relationalism, “a strong emphasis on interpersonal relationships.”10 According to relationalism, social problems are fundamentally due to broken personal relationships: “Thus, if race problems—poor relationships—result from sin, then race problems must largely be individually based.”

antistructuralism refers to the belief that “invoking social structures shifts guilt away from its root source—the accountable individual.”