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

by Jemar Tisby

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.

Through reading this book, we realize that if we built the walls on purpose, we need to tear down the walls on purpose. This demands political, social, and personal action that cuts through theological and political lines. It requires us to hold our Bibles with clarity and strength while correcting our country’s broken systems, such as mass incarceration and police brutality.

The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow. The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.

Beverly Daniel Tatum provides a shorthand definition: racism is a system of oppression based on race.

Whether society is stratified according to class, gender, religion, or tribe, communities tend to put power in the hands of a few to the detriment of many. In the United States, power runs along color lines, and white people have the most influence.

Complicity connotes a degree of passivity—as if Christianity were merely a boat languidly floating down the river of racism. In reality, white Christians have often been the current, whipping racism into waves of conflict that rock and divide the people of God.

One notable theme is that white supremacy in the nation and the church was not inevitable. Things could have been different. At several points in American history—the colonial era, Reconstruction, the demise of Jim Crow—Christians could have confronted racism instead of compromising.

The malleability and impermanence of racial categories help explain how the American church’s compromise with racism has become subtler over time.

Critics will assert that the ideas in The Color of Compromise should be disregarded because they are too “liberal.” They will claim that a Marxist Communist ideology underlies all the talk about racial equality. They will contend that such an extended discussion of racism reduces black people to a state of helplessness and a “victim mentality.” They will try to point to counterexamples and say that racists do not represent the “real” American church.

They will charge that this discussion of race is somehow “abandoning the gospel” and replacing it with problematic calls for “social justice.”

European colonists brought with them ideas of white superiority and paternalism toward darker-skinned people. On this sandy foundation, they erected a society and a version of religion that could only survive through the subjugation of people of color.

Minor repairs by the weekend-warrior racial reconcilers won’t fix a flawed foundation. The church needs the Carpenter from Nazareth to deconstruct the house that racism built and remake it into a house for all nations. By surveying the church’s racist past,

To grasp how American Christians constructed and cooperated with racism, one has to realize that nothing about American racism was inevitable. There was a period, from about 1500 to 1700, when race did not predetermine one’s station and worth in society. This is not to say that racism did not exist; it surely did. But during the initial stages of European settlement in North America, the colonists had not yet cemented skin color as an essential feature of life in their communities. Race was still being made.

Centuries earlier the Scandinavians made landfall on the northern Atlantic coast in a failed colonization project.

Europeans failed to acknowledge the longstanding, well-developed religious beliefs and practices of the people they met. Instead, they viewed indigenous men and women as blank slates on which Christian missionaries could write the gospel. This paternalistic view of evangelism permeates American church history.

Instead of abandoning Christianity, though, black people went directly to teachings of Jesus and challenged white people to demonstrate integrity.

American history could have happened another way. Instead, racist attitudes and the pursuit of wealth increasingly relegated black people to a position of perpetual servitude and exploitation.

Europeans preferred Africans as laborers over other Europeans or the indigenous Americans.

Africans, divorced from their homeland and potential allies, emerged as more vulnerable targets of enslavement.

Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) had alerted the Virginia gentry to the ongoing threat of a disgruntled population of white indentured servants and African laborers.

By the mid-seventeenth century, colonies began developing “slave codes” to police African bondage. The codes determined that a child was born slave or free based solely on the mother’s status. They mandated slavery for life with no hope of emancipation. The codes deprived the enslaved of legal rights, required permission for slaves to leave their master’s property, forbade marriage between enslaved people, and prohibited them from carrying arms.

The slave codes also defined enslaved Africans not as human beings but as chattel—private property on the same level as livestock.

Hereditary heathenism tethered race to religion.

“monogenesis” theory of humankind, meaning they believed that all people descended from Adam as described in Genesis.

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.

indigenous people did not see it this way. European missionaries made few converts because converting to Christianity included European cultural assimilation and the loss of tribal identity.

Europeans did not introduce Christianity to Africans. Christianity had arrived in Africa through Egypt and Ethiopia in the third and fourth centuries. Christian luminaries like Augustine, Tertullian, and Athanasius helped develop Trinitarian theology and defended the deity of Christ long before Western Europeans presumed to “take” Christianity to Africans.

They truncated the gospel message by failing to confront slavery, and in doing so they reinforced its grip on society.

SPG, like many European missionary endeavors in North America, preached a message that said Christianity could save one’s soul but not break one’s chains.

“You declare in the presence of God and before this congregation that you do not ask for holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the Duty and Obedience you owe to your master while you live, but merely for the good of your soul and to partake of the Grace and Blessings promised to the Members of the Church of Jesus Christ.”30

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.

Christianity became identified with the emerging concept of “whiteness” while people of color, including indigenous peoples and Africans, became identified with unbelief.

Christianity served as a force to help construct racial categories in the colonial period.

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.

“As a revival movement . . . evangelicalism transformed people within their inherited social setting, but worked only partial and selective transformation on the social settings themselves.”

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.

Thus Baptists in Virginia declared slavery to be a civil issue outside of the scope of the church. Slave ownership became an accepted practice in most Baptist congregations, and whenever someone raised objections, leaders could demur and insist that the topic was an issue for the state, not the church. Black Christians, however, refused to leave the issues of slavery and racism outside the church doors.

there would be no black church without racism in the white church.

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

“They are socially degraded, and are not regarded as proper associates for the class of person who attend our Convention.”

The committee members assured the convention that their objections had nothing to do with race. “We object not to the color of the skin, but we question their possession of those qualities which would render their intercourse with the members of a Church Convention useful.”

Despite the racism black Christians experienced, they did not abandon the faith. In fact, the decades before the Civil War served as an incubator for a newborn black American Christianity. Black Christians began developing distinctive practices that would come to characterize the historic black church tradition. Black Christianity in the United States grew alongside the explosive expansion of slavery and the hardening of racial boundaries in the United States. The faith of black Christians helped them endure and even inspired some believers to resist oppression.

The nation’s political leaders used black lives as bargaining chips to preserve the union of states and to gain leverage for other policy issues.

The suffering of black women was especially acute under the institution of slavery because women were valued both for their productive ability and their reproductive ability.

“Sunday morning only became the most segregated time of the week after the Civil War. Before emancipation, black and white evangelicals typically prayed, sang, and worshiped together.”13 Yet this interracial interaction did not come from the egalitarian aspirations of white Christians; rather, interracial congregations were an expression of paternalism

A majority of white Christians refused to take a definitive stand against race-based chattel slavery, and this complicity plagued the church and created stark contradictions.

This belief led to a fixation on individual conversion without a corresponding focus on transforming the racist policies and practices of institutions, a stance that has remained a constant feature of American evangelicalism and has furthered the American church’s easy compromise with slavery and racism.

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

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.”

Decades before the nation split into Union and Confederate sides, the dilemma of slavery had already frayed the unity of the American church.