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

by Jemar Tisby

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.