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

by Jemar Tisby

Accountable individualism means that “individuals exist independent of structures and institutions, have freewill, and are individually accountable for their own actions.”9 This belief promotes skepticism toward the idea that social systems and structures profoundly shape the actions of individuals. The white evangelical understanding of individualism has this effect, and it tends to reduce the importance of communities and institutions in shaping the ways people think and behave. Another belief in the cultural toolkit is 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.”11 And antistructuralism refers to the belief that “invoking social structures shifts guilt away from its root source—the accountable individual.”12 In other words, systems, structures, and policies are not to blame for the problems in America; instead, the problems come from the harmful choices of individuals. “Absent from their accounts is the idea that poor relationships might be shaped by social structures, such as laws, the ways institutions operate, or forms of segregation. . . . They often find structural explanations irrelevant or even wrongheaded,” Emerson and Smith explain.13 While black and white citizens in general exhibit vastly divergent views of American life an...