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by
Jemar Tisby
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February 4 - February 15, 2021
A racial genealogy underlies the racist interpretation of Canaan’s curse.
Proslavery advocates grew confident in the Confederate cause because it seemed like the proslavery theological arguments respected the Bible’s authority and employed a straightforward method of scriptural interpretation.
Historically, the doctrine of the spirituality of the church tends to be most strenuously invoked when Christians speak out against white supremacy and racism.
Despite the enduring racial prejudice on both the Union and Confederate sides, black soldiers joined the war and risked their lives for liberty.
No other period of American history held as much hope for black equality as the time of Reconstruction following the Civil War.
White Radical Republicans such as Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and James Ashley fought against the racist policies of President Andrew Johnson and his supporters.
The wording of one particular clause—“except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”—would later prove devastating to black people.
heavily Protestant city of Nashville
The next movement of the Ku Klux Klan was in the early twentieth century. It did not focus on opposing Reconstruction, since Reconstruction had already failed. Instead, it fused Christianity, nationalism, and white supremacy into a toxic ideology of hate.
Christian complicity with racism, as a generational trait, had now entered the White House in the person of Woodrow Wilson.
The KKK interspersed Christianity with racism to create a nationalistic form of religion
“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.”
In a stark demonstration of the hypocrisy and illogical nature of racism, Jim Crow advocates almost never mentioned the long-standing and more common pattern of powerful white men raping vulnerable black women.
As word of the atrocity spread, the NAACP dispatched an investigator named Rosa Parks,
Black Christians struggled to make sense of lynching from within their Christian faith.
Popular imagination has cast the South as racially backward while the North, although not perfect, has been characterized as more open-minded and accepting, a land of tolerance and freedom for black people. This notion harmfully depicts racism as primarily a southern problem while exonerating white people in the North of racism.
More than 350,000 black people served in the US armed forces during World War I, but they remained largely confined to menial jobs.
W. E. B. Du Bois captured the spirit of their resistance in an essay titled “Returning Soldiers.” He declared, “We return fighting. Make way for democracy! We saved it in France, and by the great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.”
the heels of the Great Migration, the Great Depression further exacerbated interracial tensions when it began in 1929,
The GI Bill helped usher in a period of extended and rapid economic prosperity in America, but the privileges extended almost exclusively to white men.
over the next several years, white residents in Detroit initiated more than two hundred instances of opposition to black integration, including “harassment, mass demonstrations, picketing, effigy burning, window breaking, arson, vandalism, and physical attacks.”48 Detroit illustrates a pattern that played out across the country.
Salespeople used racial fears for financial profit: “Through blockbusting, brokers intentionally stoked fears of racial integration and declining property values in order to push white homeowners to sell at a loss.”
The South has often been used as the foil for the rest of America.
While the civil rights movement has a well-earned reputation as a faith-based movement led by Christian pastors and lay people, our collective memory of the proportion of Christians involved may be somewhat skewed. In reality, precious few Christians publicly aligned themselves with the struggle for black freedom in the 1950s and 1960s.
Daniel went so far as to make a direct comparison between desegregation and the schemes of the devil himself.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” has since proven to be one of the greatest works of Christian political theology ever produced by an American.
These Christians were not denying that blacks were discriminated against or that conditions in the inner city were troublesome. But they believed the solution to the problem was to trust the system.
As one biographer explains, “The cartoon awakened [Ali], and he realized that he hadn’t chosen Christianity. He hadn’t chosen the name Cassius Clay.
Ali and many other black people still saw Christianity as the religion of the enslavers, the belief system of those who oppressed black people.
Today, even more than fifty years later, many of these communities remain almost as racially segregated now as they were then.38
Protestant churches in most cities have participated and often led the private school movement during desegregation.”
reinforced the idea that Jesus Christ was a European-looking white man, and many added to that the assumption that he was a free-market, capitalist-supporting American as well.
the more “radical” elements of King’s message—which included democratic socialism, ending the war in Vietnam, nuclear de-escalation, a Poor People’s Campaign to force the federal government to address systemic poverty, and support of a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis when he was killed—have largely been omitted from popular American memory.
As he sat in his room he could hear his white peers down the hall, laughing. Then came the awful news that King was dead. As soon as commentators reported this news, the young black man “could hear white voices down the hall let out a cheer.”
The Bible says, “A prophet has no honor in his own country” (John 4:44). We might extend it: A prophet (or truth-teller) has no honor in his or her own time.
enough went along with the Jim Crow consensus for those like Martin Luther King Jr. to abandon the hope that they would find many allies among their white brothers and sisters in Christ in their struggle for black freedom.
practitioners can claim they “don’t see color.” As a result, people can hold positions on social and political issues that disproportionately and adversely harm racial and ethnic minorities, but they can still proclaim their own racial innocence.
American evangelicalism became virtually synonymous with the GOP and whiteness.
Evangelicalism in America exploded during the 1970s and 1980s.
Newsweek magazine dubbed 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical.”
you cannot erase four hundred years of race-based oppression by passing a few laws.
Nixon, of course, decided to enter the presidential race and won the election with 68 percent of the evangelical vote. When he ran for reelection four years later, he boosted his share of the evangelical vote to 84 percent.
Nixon was pointing to the civil rights movement and its nonviolent direct action, not as the endeavor to secure long-denied justice to black Americans but as the tarmac to tyranny and disregard for the law.
Indeed, rather than being confined to a particular region of the country, the Sunbelt ideology was a suburban value system.22 These were men and women who believed in free-market capitalism, meritocratic individualism, local control of communities, and the idea that America had been founded as a “Christian Nation.”
only 4 percent of black Protestants voted for Nixon in his first presidential victory.
Like no other issue, the rejection of legalized abortion has come to define the Religious Right.
Initially, the Christian response to Roe v. Wade was mixed.32 Instead, conservative voters coalesced around the issue of racial integration in schools.
In 1969, when the federal government began more aggressively enforcing desegregation, white attendance in public schools in the area plummeted from 771 to 28. The following year, exactly zero white students remained in the local public schools.
For those unfamiliar with the differences between fundamentalists and evangelicals, it is worth noting that while there are many similarities, the two are not identical.
Similar to what some proponents of slavery had argued in the Civil War era, segregationists in the twentieth century considered it a “right” to separate people based on race. It was a religious belief with which the government had no right to interfere.
