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

by Jemar Tisby

Examining the civil rights movement through the actions of Martin Luther King Jr. and another behemoth in American religious history—Billy Graham—provides two vastly different perspectives of the civil rights movement. King and Graham each had large grassroots followings and reached countless people in the United States and beyond through their speeches, sermons, and writings. Both show up frequently in the examples below because their views, while not universal, represent two approaches to religion and justice—moderation and activism. This chapter focuses on the Christian moderates—mostly white and evangelical but also some black churches and ministers—who played it safe, refusing to get involved in the civil rights movement. These people of faith may not have given their full support to the most extreme racists, but neither did they oppose racists outright or openly disagree with racist objectives. 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. Those who did participate faced backlash from their families, friends, and fellow Christians. At a key moment in the life of our nation, one that called for moral courage, the American church responded to much of the civil rights movement with ...