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

by Jemar Tisby

Europeans evangelized non-Europeans with the intention not only of teaching them Christianity but also of conforming them to European cultural standards.

One of the most well-known illustrations of how Europeans conflated religion and culture is in the marriage of John Rolfe and Metoaka (or Matoaka), better known as Pocahontas.

Europeans thought Africans, like indigenous peoples, could be “civilized” through cultural conformity and conversion to Christianity.

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.

Instead of highlighting the dignity of all human beings, European missionaries told Africans that Christianity should make them more obedient and loyal to their earthly masters.

“The fierce urgency of now,” to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King Jr., demands a recognition of the ways Christians, from before the founding of the United States, built racial categories into religion.

Attucks symbolizes that bitter combination of freedom and bondage, racism and patriotism, that characterized the Revolutionary era.

While white soldiers and political leaders were declaring their inalienable right to independence, they were also enslaving countless women, men, and children of African descent.

The economic impulse for slavery can never be separated from the racist ideas that typecast enslaved Africans as dangerous and brutish. Whitefield and countless other white Christians imbibed beliefs that encouraged fear and suspicion of African-descended people.

Like these two preachers, many other Christians did not see anything in the Bible that forbade slavery. In fact, the Scriptures seemed to accept slavery as an established reality. Instead, white Christians believed that the Bible merely regulated slavery in order to mitigate its most brutal abuses.

The divide between white and black Christians in America was not generally one of doctrine. Christians across the color line largely agreed on theological teachings such as the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and the importance of personal conversion. More often than not, the issue that divided Christians along racial lines related to the unequal treatment of African-descended people in white church contexts.

Even when black people could not form their own congregations, they often refused to countenance any type of Christianity that sanctioned their enslavement.

persons. Instead, Christians sought to reform slavery and evangelize the enslaved. In the process, they learned to rationalize the continued existence of slavery.

Instead, slavery and the meaning of race became more institutionalized as the country progressed through the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

Although the Constitution outlines the duties and privileges of citizens and the scope and function of the government, who the Constitution applied to remained ambiguous.

Without question, the Constitution had the rights of wealthy, white men in mind while other groups like indigenous peoples, women, and enslaved blacks held a lesser status. These other groups could not always count on the legal protections declared by the Constitution.

The US Constitution does not use the words slave or slavery, yet some scholars argue that it can be vi...

From the beginning, the Constitution ensured that nowhere in America would be safe for an escaped slave.

Keep in mind that the union of the diverse states was not a foregone conclusion. The South had a vested interest in protecting slavery (though the North benefitted as well), and some southern states refused to ratify the Constitution unless they had specific assurances protecting their right to possess human chattel.

In 1808, Congress decided to cease the Atlantic slave trade, but the institution of slavery remained.

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

African American minister and abolitionist James W. C. Pennington spoke of it this way: “The being of slavery, its soul and its body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle: the cart whip, starvation, and nakedness are its inevitable consequences.”

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.

Nat Turner’s rebellion sparked paranoia across the South. In fear and retaliation, white people killed more than 100 enslaved blacks suspected of participating in or sympathizing with the rebellion. The insurrection led to harsher laws governing slave mobility and limiting their ability to assemble. White Christians used this as an opportunity to advocate for slavery reform so that masters did not aggravate enslaved people to the point of violent rebellion, pointing to Turner as an example.

Although groups of white Christians had insisted on evangelizing indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, their efforts never produced a church defined by racial equality. Instead, paternalistic attitudes toward black people defined much of American Christianity.

The first fact, that the war was about slavery, was never in dispute during the conflict. The combatants knew what the stakes were. Even if there were additional disputed issues, such as the extent of federal versus state power, the future of slavery in America was paramount. Only after the war, when southerners and their sympathizers sought to give reasons for the Confederacy’s defeat, was slavery’s relevance to the war partially obscured.

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, even though 150 years have passed since the war.

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.

Since suspected fugitives had no rights in court, many legally free black people could now be captured and enslaved, often without recourse. The Fugitive Slave Act effectively protected and even expanded slavery nationwide.

Taney went on to explain that the Constitution did not have black people in mind when it outlined the rights and duties of citizens. Instead, black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

If anyone today still doubts whether the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery, they need only to read the declarations issued by the Confederate states upon their secession from the Union. With Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven states quickly seceded from the Union with South Carolina leading the way. South Carolina’s leaders clearly explained their reasons for withdrawing: “Those [non-slaveholding] States have assume[d] the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution.”

The three of the most influential denominations at the time—Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians—all divided and fought over whether Christians could own slaves and remain in good standing. Although each group split under slightly different circumstances, ultimately it was the issue of slavery that divided churches.

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.

Dabney not only believed that slavery was morally acceptable; he viewed it as a positive for the African: “Was it nothing, that this [black] race, morally inferior, should be brought into close relations to a nobler race?”19 Dabney accepted the myth of the moral and intellectual inferiority of enslaved blacks, believing that if they were left to their own devices, they would only tend toward “lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, [and] waste.” In Dabney’s theology, it was only through contact with the “nobler race” of white people in a master-slave relationship that there was hope of elevating the ethics of Africans.20

This passage from Genesis not only provided a basis for slavery’s existence, but it was an indication for some that God decreed a specific race of people to be cursed and live their days in bondage. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, remarked in his well-known “Cornerstone Speech” that “the negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”23 And Dabney tentatively advanced a claim that many white Christians held as incontrovertible truth: “It may be that we should find little difficulty in tracing the lineage of the present Africans to Ham.”24 A racial genealogy underlies the racist interpretation of Canaan’s curse. It assumed that the progeny of Shem became the Jewish people, the descendants of Japheth became white people, and these two were the rightful masters of those descended from Ham, the “degraded” black race. In one stroke of dubious demography, slavery became the right and proper place of Africans specifically and exclusively.

Abolitionists advanced several arguments to refute the curse of Ham as justification for the enslavement of black people. First, they pointed out that Noah pronounced the curse on Canaan, not Ham. Canaan’s curse had been fulfilled, they said, when Israel conquered the Canaanite lands. Thus, there was no perpetual curse that still applied in the nineteenth century.

Abolitionists also questioned whether black Africans were the genealogical de...

One of the best biblical cases against American slavery was not to deny that faithful people in the Bible enslaved others but to demonstrate how that form of slavery—the slavery of the ancient Near East—was far different from the slavery practiced in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in the American South. It was impossible to deny that some form of unpaid labor had characterized the economy of virtually every society for thousands of years. Yet enslaved people in these contexts had endured a different type of bondage. In most cases, they could legally marry and own property, and they worked for a specific term, not a lifetime. Slaves in other cultures were not born into servitude. They might offer their labor in order to pay off a debt, or they were captured in war. Slavery was not exclusively a matter of race or ethnicity in other cultures either. Of course, the point of this was not to suggest that slavery was a favorable way to live. Rather, this argument was used to demonstrate that southern theologians gave virtually no consideration to the unique form of slavery that existed in America.

Despite the enduring racial prejudice on both the Union and Confederate sides, black soldiers joined the war and risked their lives for liberty.

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.

One of the heartbreaking but all-too-common activities many black people engaged in after emancipation was the search for friends and family members they had been separated from during slavery.

On January 16, 1865, Union General William T. Sherman handed down Special Field Order No. 15, which reserved a tract of land for black families 30 miles wide and 245 miles long along the east coast extending from Charleston, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. He promised each family a mule to help them work the land. Sherman’s special order gave vitality to the dream of “40 acres and mule”—a hope for a redistribution of the land that would provide those formerly enslaved with a means of economic self-determination.3 Yet the dream was short-lived. The blatantly racist President Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, ordered that the redistributed lands be returned to former enslavers, and many freed people went back to working the land under the sharecropping system.

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.”

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. The Lost Cause mythologized the white, pre–Civil War South as a virtuous, patriotic group of tight-knit Christian communities. 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. Even today, the Lost Cause mythology functions as an alternative history that frequently leads to public disputes over monuments, flags, and the memory surrounding the Civil War, the Confederacy, and slavery.

In the Lost Cause myth, General Lee was the quintessential “crusading Christian Confederate.”

Tellingly, most of these monuments were erected several decades after the Civil War. There was a significant spike in monument construction from 1900 to the 1920s and a second explosion of Confederate flags and iconography from the 1950s to the 1960s.8 These periods coincided with intense seasons of racial conflict in the Jim Crow era. Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian of lynching and the Jim Crow era, writes, “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.”

Supported by most whites in the South, several groups initiated a sustained and violent effort to reclaim the South from white northerners and freed black people. They saw their efforts as a divine mandate for the white man to take his rightful place atop the social hierarchy. They referred to this period as “redemption.”

One of the primary goals of the “redeemers” after the Civil War was to prevent black people from voting. Black voters were an especially formidable power in southern states where black people formed a majority such as South Carolina and Mississippi. To circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment, white officials, often former Confederate soldiers and slaveowners, instituted restrictions on voters like the poll tax. The poll tax charged people money to vote, money that black people and even some poor whites did not have. They also enacted the “grandfather clause,” which permitted people who could vote prior to 1867 and their descendants to vote. Of course, this excluded most black people. White voter registration officials also used “literacy tests” wherein potential voters had to read a portion of the state or national Constitution. Similarly, “understanding tests” asked black voters to answer obscure questions related to the Constitution. White “redeemers” selectively administered these tests to bar black voters from the democratic process. White “redeemers” also introduced a deliberate and systematic reign of terror to prevent black people from voting, obtaining economic independence, and exercising their full humanity as citizens and human beings created in the image and likeness of God. This period of unrestrained abuse toward black people later led W. E. B. Du Bois to lament, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” White “r...

In 1915, filmmaker D.W. Griffith adapted Dixon’s second book, a story about the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, into the nation’s first blockbuster movie, a three-hour silent film called The Birth of a Nation.

Religious themes permeated the ideology of the Klan and frequently appeared in its literature. Author Juan O. Sanchez explains that Klan members encapsulated their beliefs in the concept of “Klankraft—Klan activity in relation to its philosophies.” According to the Grand Dragon of Oklahoma, Klankraft was “the sublime reverence for our Lord and Savior” coupled with “the maintenance of the supremacy of that race of men whose blood is not tainted with the colorful pigments of the universe.”21 The KKK interspersed Christianity with racism to create a nationalistic form of religion that excluded all but American-born, Protestant white men and women. To maintain their concept of a well-ordered society, the KKK utilized lynching, rape, and intimidation to keep undesirable people groups in their place.