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

by Jemar Tisby

On the kidnapping of unsuspecting Africans and their separation from family, Equiano asked, “O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you?”11 Black people immediately detected the hypocrisy of American-style slavery. They knew the inconsistencies of the faith from the rank odors, the chains, the blood, and the misery that accompanied their life of bondage. Instead of abandoning Christianity, though, black people went directly to teachings of Jesus and challenged white people to demonstrate integrity.

So from the beginning of American colonization, Europeans crafted a Christianity that would allow them to spread the faith without confronting the exploitative economic system of slavery and the emerging social inequality based on color.

“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.

Racial segregation in Christian churches occurred in the eighteenth century in large part because white believers did not oppose the enslavement of African persons. Instead, Christians sought to reform slavery and evangelize the enslaved. In the process, they learned to rationalize the continued existence of slavery. Many white Christians comforted themselves with the myth that slavery allowed them to more adequately care for the material and spiritual needs of enslaved Africans.

The faith of black Christians helped them endure and even inspired some believers to resist oppression.

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.

The chattel principle is the social alchemy that transformed a human being made in the image of God into a piece of property.

Christianity, in fact, became a source of strength and survival, bringing hope to thousands of enslaved people.

“Both [Union and Confederacy] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.”

The second 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,

The nation, which emphasized liberty as a natural right, made repeated concessions to allow for slavery. The church, which prioritizes the love of God and love of neighbor, capitulated to the status quo by permitting the lifetime bondage of human persons based on skin color. A house divided against itself—with conflicting ideals at its foundation—cannot stand. The antebellum way of life had to fall, and the Civil War was the sledgehammer that knocked it down.

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,”

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.

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. This is not to suggest that the South had a monopoly on racism, but we cannot ignore that its leaders took the step of seceding from the United States in order to protect an economic system based on the enslavement of human beings. From then on, the Confederacy would always and irrevocably be associated with slavery. 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.

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.

They romanticized the antebellum South as an age of earnest religion, honorable gentlemen, delicate southern belles, and happy blacks content in their bondage. They also constructed a new social order, what we refer to as Jim Crow—a system of formal laws and informal customs designed to reinforce the inferiority of black people in America.

The president claimed that using federal interventions to ensure black civil rights “violated ‘all our experience as a people’ and constituted a ‘stride towards centralization, and the concentration of all legislative power in the national Government.’ ” Johnson also made claims that interceding for black people actually discriminated against white people. “The distinction of race and color is, by the bill, made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.”4 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.

Sounds similar to the arguments put forward today under the banner of 'socialism'

“The installation of the 1,000-plus memorials across the US was the result of the orchestrated efforts of white Southerners and a few northerners with clear political objectives: They tended to be erected at times when the South was fighting to resist political rights for black citizens.”9 These monuments not only memorialized Confederate soldiers, but they also inscribed white supremacy into the landscape of public spaces across the North and the South.

The Klan capitalized on white fears of just about anyone they defined as nonwhite, non-American, and non-Protestant. For example, Klan members successfully lobbied for the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited immigration from select countries.

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. 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.

At the same time, the cross provided comfort because black people could know for certain that in his life and death, Christ identified with the oppressed.

“The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war.”43

the church’s complicity with racism was not just a southern problem but an American one.

“To those who are crying for equality and opportunity and improved material conditions,” he admonished, “the Church repeats the divine message, ‘Ye must be born again.’ ”17 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.18

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.18

Is that wrong?

Schools such as Pepperdine indoctrinated a new generation of white Christians with ideas that would lend educational and ideological support to an individualistic approach to race relations and that would lead to an aversion to government initiatives designed to promote and protect civil rights.

Owning a home in the neighborhood one chooses has often been seen as a decision based on hard work, individual effort, and free choice. Consequently, patterns of racial segregation appear to be the innocuous and unavoidable coincidence of individual preference, devoid of any major racist component. Views like these belie the deliberate and intentional nature of residential segregation. Through a series of rules and customs, government employees and real estate agents have actively engineered neighborhoods and communities to maintain racial segregation.

Compromised Christianity transcends regions. 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.

An honest assessment of racism should acknowledge that racism never fully goes away; it just adapts to changing times and contexts.

Given these shifts, one might be tempted to declare that systemic or legal racism in America had ended, and that aside from a few backwards thinking people—the real racists—the progress of the civil rights movement indicated that the nation had largely overcome its racist past. Such an optimistic assessment would be wrong.

Furthermore, Christian conservatives carefully coded any change, especially those related to race, as “liberal,” and they perceived themselves as constantly under attack by liberal operatives in the media and politics.

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

This

This is not to suggest that evangelicals have not responded to present-day racism but that the national presence and influence of Black Lives Matter, as both an organization and a concept, should prompt critical engagement rather than a reflexive rejection.

in particular it spoke to black people who sensed those words addressing a deep and painful longing—the longing for others to recognize their full, unqualified humanity. Sadly, many white Christians did not realize this, and they responded with opposition.

Because their religious beliefs reinforce accountable individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism, many white Christians wrongly assume that racism only includes overt acts, such as calling someone the “n-word” or expressly excluding black people from groups or organizations. It is good that black and white people generally can agree that racism of this type is wrong, and it usually elicits swift and unequivocal condemnation in public discourse. But the longer arc of American history reveals that Christian complicity with racism does not always require specific acts of bigotry. Being complicit only requires a muted response in the face of injustice or uncritical support of the status quo.

In a summary of the survey’s findings, researchers concluded, “If you’re a white evangelical Republican, you are less likely to think race is a problem, but more likely to think you are victim of reverse racism.” They further contended, “You are also less convinced that people of color are socially disadvantaged.” Citing the importance evangelicals attribute to the church in racial reconciliation, the researchers said, “This dilemma demonstrates that those supposedly most equipped for reconciliation do not see the need for it.”29

There should be efforts to critically engage rather than reflexively dismiss, and Christians should consider that the best way to start is to start local.

The only wrong action is inaction.

Trump tapped into the latent sense among some evangelicals that they were losing their influence in American culture and politics. Increasingly, evangelicals believe they are the ones experiencing persecution. That gay marriage is now the law of the land, the lasting effects of Roe v. Wade, the controversy over whether Christians can refuse certain services to gay and lesbian customers, and the general trend toward liberalism make some evangelicals feel like people without a home in the American political landscape.

For example, the American church can learn from the black church what it means to lament. Many church traditions have allowed triumphalism to creep into the pulpit and the pews. Just as citizens can sometimes presume the ascendancy and inevitability of American economic and global power, so the church can presume its own favor and privilege by imagining itself as God’s chosen nation and people. Soong-Chan Rah studied popular Christians songs and found that most of them focus on victory and joy.15 This canon of sacred songs, however, exhibits a dearth of lament and sorrow. Much of Christian history has been characterized by persecution and rejection, and black Christians intimately and experientially know the reality of ongoing suffering that comes from the bigotry of others and by no fault of their own. In the midst of marginalization, they have learned how to dwell with sadness and transform it into strength.

Black people have somehow found a way to flourish because of faith. It is a faith that is vibrant and still inspires black Christians to endure and struggle against present-day forms of racism. The entire church can learn from believers who have suffered yet still hold onto God’s unchanging hand.