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

by Jemar Tisby

As Christians, when we read the Bible, we recognize that events that happened thousands of years ago are still relevant today. We also see that Scripture never hides the ugly parts of history when it comes to the people of God. The Bible reveals David’s adultery, Jonah’s selfishness, and Peter’s failure of faith. Just as we can’t take out the parts of the Bible that we don’t like or that make us uncomfortable, we can’t celebrate the shining moments of the American church’s history and then ignore the shameful aspects of that history. We either fully acknowledge the entire history or dismiss it all. The truth about humanity’s heritage turns a mirror on our souls and pushes us to recognize who we truly are and who we are not.

Why did Jonathan Edwards support slavery? In part, the answer may have to do with his social status. Edwards represented an educated and elite class in New England society. Wealthy and influential people populated his congregation. Slave owning signified status. More deeply, though, the particular brand of evangelicalism developing in America during the Great Awakening made an antislavery stance unlikely for many. Mark Noll explains, “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. Ironically, Edwards’s second son, Jonathan Edwards Jr., more fully grasped the revolutionary applications of his Christianity. A pastor himself, the younger Edwards had grown up around Mahican and Mohawk tribes and spoke their languages better than English as a boy.24 Beginning in the 1770s, Edwards became an outspoken abolitionist. For instance, he wrote an article entitled “Some Observations upon the Slavery of Negroes” and in 1791 preached a sermon called “The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade.” Edwards Jr.’s impact, however, would not come near to his father’s, nor could the son’s outspokenness about slavery drown out his father’s con...

One Sunday in 1792, Richard Allen and fellow black minister Absalom Jones entered St. George’s to worship. Unknowingly, they took seats reserved for white parishioners and thus violated the segregated seating arrangements. They knelt to pray but one of the church’s white trustees soon interrupted them. Allen recounts the episode in his autobiography: We had not been long upon our knees before I heard considerable scuffling and low talking. I raised my head up and saw one of the trustees, H—M—, having hold of the Rev. Absalom Jones, pulling him up off of his knees, and saying, “You must get up—you must not kneel here.” Mr. Jones replied, “wait until prayer is over.” Mr. H—M—said “no, you must get up now, or I will call for aid and I force you away.” Mr. Jones said, “wait until prayer is over, and I will get up and trouble you no more.”29 The white trustees insisted that Jones leave immediately. Another trustee came over to help pull up the black worshipers. The prayer ended, and Allen recalled, “We all went out of the church in a body, and they were no more plagued with us in the church.”30 Allen and his compatriots did not completely cut off contact with St. George’s. They met with an elder from the church who discouraged them from raising money to build their own sanctuary and threatened them with church discipline.

If there is one concept that helps unlock the twisted logic of American slavery better than almost any other, it is the chattel principle. The chattel principle is the social alchemy that transformed a human being made in the image of God into a piece of property. 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.”4 In the book Soul by Soul, Walter Johnson looks at the slave market, the point of sale for human beings, the place that most tangibly illustrates the chattel principle and the way human beings were reduced to the personal property of slave owners. Johnson writes, “The entire economy of the antebellum South was constructed on the idea that the bodies of enslaved people had a measurable monetary value.”5 As property, enslaved people were valued for their physical aptitude and obedient attitudes. Prices increased based on height, skin color, perceived intelligence, and a reputation for following orders. Slaves could be used as collateral for loans and were often sold as part of the estate when an enslaver died.

As historian Mark Noll has written, no single individual characterized the conflict better than Abraham Lincoln.2 When Lincoln was inaugurated for his second and very brief term as president in 1865, a Union victory was on the horizon. Robert E. Lee would formally surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, just a month later. Rather than gloat about his military success, Lincoln’s address struck a somber and reflective tone: “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.”3 The president concisely summarized the theological tension that lay at the center of the conflict. Was God on the side of the Union or the Confederacy? Did the Bible sanction slavery or oppose it? Who were the righteous warriors in this conflagration? The war decisively ended slavery, but the fighting did not end. The bullets of competing biblical interpretations continued to ricochet across the country.

Two facts about the Civil War are especially pertinent to our examination of race and Christianity in America: that the Civil War was fought over slavery and that countless devout Christians fought and died to preserve it as an institution.

Three years after the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed, the Supreme Court considered the case of a man named Dred Scott. Scott thought he had a good legal case when he sued for his freedom. Born into slavery in Virginia in 1795, Scott had labored for his master in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin. Scott sued when his mistress refused to let him buy his own freedom and that of his wife and daughter. He took the case all the way to the Supreme Court where the justices ruled seven to two against him. Writing the majority opinion, Judge Roger Taney stated that black people were of “an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race.” 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.”6 This decision effectively closed courts to enslaved blacks. They could not sue for their freedom or pursue justice through the court system, and once again the American legal system had declared black people to be something less than fully human. The Dred Scott decision left no question in the minds of antislavery activists that the federal government, especially under the leadership of President James Buchanan, planned to extend and protect slavery across the growing nation.

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.” South Carolina and the other states that withdrew from the United States considered slavery a matter of personal property ownership, and citing Article IV, they saw slavery as an institution explicitly protected by the Constitution. Yet slavery was more than simply a legal issue; it was a moral and spiritual concern for the South as well. South Carolina’s leaders lamented that northern states “denounced as sinful the institution of slavery.”9 Mississippi was the second state to separate from the Union, and they made their position on slavery even more explicit. The legislators explained, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.” Yet again, the chattel principle came into play as Mississippi’s leaders used financial arguments to support slavery. In addition, they posited that the biology of bl...

James Andrew’s status as both an enslaver of human beings and a bishop in the church became the focus of the 1844 General Conference. Split largely along sectional lines, the antislavery advocates held the ecclesiastical advantage, and in a 110–69 vote, they resolved to censure the bishop as long as he continued to hold slaves. Refusing to give up his church duties, Andrew and his allies split from the MEC to form the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS), and they allowed their clergy to practice slavery.

Genesis 9:18–29, sometimes referred to as the curse of Ham, is one of the most cryptic stories in the Old Testament. Subject to a multitude of interpretations, this passage has been widely deployed as the biblical basis for race-based chattel slavery. In the story, Noah gets drunk and falls asleep naked in his tent. His son Ham walks in on his sleeping father and sees his father naked. Ham leaves to tell his two brothers, Shem and Japheth, yet they respond differently. Instead of gazing upon their father’s unclothed body, they quickly grab a blanket and walk backwards into his tent to cover him. When Noah wakes up and discovers what Ham has done, Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan. Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers. (Gen. 9:25) Conversely, Noah blesses his other sons and consigns Canaan to serve them: Praise be to the LORD, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. (9:26) Noah concludes with a final pronouncement: “May Canaan be the slave of Japheth” (9:27). Proslavery advocates used these verses to make a biblical case that black people—as descendants of Ham—belonged in a state of slavery. For some, Ham’s transgression provided an understanding of the origin of slavery and where it fit in the Bible’s grand narrative. “It was in consequence of sin . . . that the first slave sentence of which we have any record was pronounced by Noah upon Canaan and his descendants,” wrote Presbyterian minister George D. Armstrong.22 Proslavery theologians ...

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.

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.

The Ku Klux Klan (or KKK) has had three major iterations as an organization. The first came immediately after the Civil War. Six men in Pulaski, Tennessee, organized a “hilarious social” club to “have fun, make mischief, and play pranks on the public,” calling themselves the Klan.15 Within a few months the Klan turned violent, and their objective shifted to keeping whites in power by resisting Reconstruction efforts. In April 1871, the vigilante violence had become so unruly that Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, fining or imprisoning anyone who “shall conspire together, or go in disguise upon the public highway or upon the premises of another for the purpose of . . . depriving any person or any class of persons of the equal protection of the laws.”16 Forrest sat for a Congressional hearing about his involvement with the KKK, and he apparently told a reporter, “I lied like a gentleman.”17 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. In The Gospel According to the Klan, Kelly Baker argues that the Klan cannot be understood apart from its unique interpretation of Protestantism. The Klan of the early twentieth century “was not just an order to defend America but also a campaign to protect and celebrate Protestantism. It was a religious order.”18 Facing rising waves...

The name “Jim Crow” comes from a minstrel character played by Thomas D. Rice in the 1830s and 1840s. Even though it is easy to characterize the worst forms of racism as an exclusively southern phenomenon, Rice actually hailed from Manhattan. Although he was not the first white actor to utilize “blackface,” his career skyrocketed when he began painting his face black and playing the role of a likable trickster named Jim Crow. The plays portrayed stereotypes about black intelligence, sexual appetites, contentment under slavery, and obeisance to white people. In the years following the Civil War, as white people scrambled to recover a semblance of the racial order they once knew, they reached back to Rice’s plays and saw them as an apt description of the social conditions of the late nineteenth century.

The decades after the Civil War proved that racism never goes away, it just adapts. Although the Union had won the military victory, the ideology of the Confederate South battled on. Attorney Bryan Stevenson put it this way: “The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war.”43

For the first ten years of its existence, Pepperdine admitted black students but did not permit them to live on campus. Perhaps even more subtly, the free market became a form of economic gospel truth for Pepperdine. Spurred by the open-market business philosophy of its founder and a growing number of Christian entrepreneurs, the school taught its students to distrust unionism and federal intervention, specifically in the form of welfare programs geared toward the poor.36 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.

In 1954, clergymen in the conservative and mostly southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) gathered for their regular regional meeting of churches, and this assembly of pastors heard a message from G. T. Gillespie, the president emeritus of a Christian school, Belhaven College, in Jackson, Mississippi. In a carefully argued speech to the pastors in attendance, Gillespie outlined a “Christian View of Segregation.” His argument reveals some of the specific ways Christians compromised with racism during the civil rights era. Although Gillespie utilized various biblical passages to argue for segregation, he acknowledged, “The Bible contains no clear mandate for or against segregation as between the white and negro races.” Segregationists like Gillespie resorted to so-called “natural law” arguments to bolster their case for racial segregation. In a section titled “Segregation Is One of Nature’s Universal Laws,” he stated, “There are many varieties of the bird family, but under natural conditions, so far as known, bluebirds never mate with redbirds, doves never mate with blackbirds, nor mockingbirds with jays.”8 This analogy invokes the specter of interracial sex to frighten segregationists about the possibility of black men sleeping with white women. It also refers to color—the white dove and the blackbird, the redbird and the bluebird—as an allusion to the racial issue at hand.

Before his untimely death from a brain tumor in 1991, Atwater had laid bare the racially coded appeals used by some Republicans to recruit voters: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.” He said all of this in an interview recorded in 1981.3 “Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites,” he continued. “ ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ ”4

Perhaps some will be surprised to learn that abortion has not always been the defining issue for evangelicals. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, passed a resolution on abortion that called upon Southern Baptists “to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”33 No less than W. A. Criswell, pastor of the largest SBC congregation, stated after the Roe v. Wade decision that “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had life separate from its mother . . . that it became an individual person.” He further explained, “It has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”34 A poll in 1970 discovered that 70 percent of Southern Baptist pastors “supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the mother, 64 percent supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity and 71 percent in cases of rape.”35 Like the Southern Baptists, many other conservative Christians were not uniformly against abortion in the early 1970s.

The words black lives matter also function as a cry of lament. Theologian Soong-Chan Rah explains in his book Prophetic Lament that in the Bible lament is “a liturgical response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and suffering.”20 He goes on to say that it is a way “to express indignation and even outrage about the experience of suffering.”21 Racism has inflicted incalculable suffering on black people throughout the history of the United States, and in such a context, lament is not only understandable but necessary. Black lives matter presents Christians with an opportunity to mourn with those who mourn and to help bear the burdens that racism has heaped on black people (Rom. 12:15).