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by
Jemar Tisby
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January 31 - February 13, 2021
Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians—all divided and fought over whether Christians could own slaves and remain in good standing.
Southern Christians devised increasingly complex theological arguments to argue for the existence of slavery, and in the process, southern Christians moved from viewing slavery as something permitted to something positive.
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
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.
And how could white people definitively trace their lineage to that of Shem or Japheth? One abolitionist challenged proslavery advocates by asking, “Where is the sentence [of Scripture] in which God ever appointed you, the Anglo-Saxon race [over another people], you, the mixture of all races under heaven, you, who can not tell whether the blood of S[h]em, Ham, or Japheth mingles in your veins”?
they were criticized because they were not able to cite a specific passage that explicitly condemned slavery. Instead, they had to argue from broader principles such as “love of neighbor” and the unity of humankind.
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.
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.
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.
So, unfortunately, the most potent biblical antislavery argument—demonstrating the differences between slavery in the ancient Near East and that of the American South—also took the most effort to understand.
southern Christians rejected the call to take firm stances on the so-called “political” issue of slavery.
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.
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.
White people in the North and the South sought to limit the civic and social equality of black people across the country. They devised political and economic schemes to push black people out of mainstream American life. To keep power, white Americans used terror as a tool through lynchings and rape, violently solidifying the place of people of color as second-class citizens.
They romanticized the antebellum South as an age of earnest religion, honorable gentlemen, delicate southern belles, and happy blacks content in their bondage.
Reconstruction could have been the start of a new America where black people enjoyed the full promises of liberty.
March 1865, President Lincoln established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, typically known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Headed by General Oliver O. Howard, the bureau’s capacious responsibilities included providing food and clothing to newly freed slaves, helping them locate family members who had been sold to other plantation owners, assisting the jobless in finding employment, setting up hospitals and schools (including higher education institutions such as Clark Atlanta and Howard University), and partnering with black people as they adjusted to life as free people.
Chronically underfunded and understaffed, the Bureau suffered from corruption and ineffectual administration.
While many whites assumed that black people did not have the moral or mental capacity to participate in a democracy, black leaders quickly proved them wrong. Hiram Revels became the first black US Senator in the nation’s history representing a state as notorious for racism as Mississippi, and P. B. S. Pinchback served for a brief time as the governor of Louisiana, the first black person ever to serve in the highest political office of a state.
Often led by black women, freed people aggressively pursued their education.
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 Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, only applied to a limited number of slaves. It freed enslaved persons in states that had seceded but not in the slaveholding border states that had sided with the Union. Even in the Confederate states, the proclamation did not apply to areas that had already succumbed to Union forces.
To address this, the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, giving all black people in America their full freedom,
The Fourteenth Amendment followed, granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” This did not apply to Native Americans who were still classified as “dependent” nations within a nation.
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
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“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.”
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,
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Ferguson went all the way to the Supreme Court, and on May 18, 1896, the justices of the Supreme Court ruled that Plessy’s rights had not been violated because it was a fallacy to believe that “the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority.”13 The Plessy v. Ferguson decision legalized what soon became standard practice throughout the country for the next sixty years—the “separate but equal” doctrine.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, the man who coordinated the butcher of black and white Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, went on to become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
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.
The well-deserved disgust that is common today at the mention of the KKK can make it tempting for those in the twenty-first century to disregard them as an extreme group with marginal views that did not represent the majority of the American people and certainly not the Protestant church. But the KKK of the 1910s through the 1930s was far from marginal. Their views were quite popular with mainstream white citizens.
“It’s estimated that 40,000 ministers were members of the Klan,
As civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer would later explain, “A black woman’s body was never hers alone.”29
Anyone black—man, woman, or child—could become the next lynching victim at the slightest offense, real or imaginary. Often, the murder followed a spurious accusation of sexual assault. Other misdeeds were more quotidian. For instance, white people lynched Elizabeth Lawrence for telling white children not to throw rocks at black children.
Mary Turner had been vocally protesting the lynching of her husband, and her cries for justice made her a target for a white racist lynch mob. When they caught up to her, they tied her ankles and hung her upside down from a small oak tree. Turner was eight months pregnant at the time, but that fact elicited no mercy from the mob, who applied gasoline and oil to her pregnant body.
The tragic and infuriating lynchings of the Holberts and Mary Turner are just two examples among thousands. Lynchings usually took place because of a perceived crime—the killing of a white person in self-defense, calls for justice by the spouse of a lynching victim, or even for something less. Antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells found that many lynchings were over economic disputes.
generations. While some Christians spoke out and denounced these lynchings (just as some Christians called for abolition), the majority stance of the American church was avoidance, turning a blind eye to the practice. It’s not that members of every white church participated in lynching, but the practice could not have endured without the relative silence, if not outright support, of one of the most significant institutions in America—the Christian church.
“Both Jesus and blacks were ‘strange fruit,’ ” he wrote. “Theologically speaking, Jesus was the ‘first lynchee,’ who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on American soil.”41 Cone goes on to explain, “The cross helped me to deal with the brutal legacy of the lynching tree, and the lynching tree helped me to understand the tragic meaning of the cross.”42 Cone showed that black people could better understand Christ’s suffering by recalling their own sorrow as it related to the lynching tree. At the same time, the cross provided comfort because black people could know for certain that in his
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In 1919, more than twenty-five cities across the nation, usually large urban areas outside of the South, descended into bloody racial conflict. A few of the more well-known riots occurred in Chicago, Washington DC, and Houston.
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.
For example, while avoiding explicitly race-based language, Social Security provisions excluded most base-level agricultural and domestic workers—the vast majority of whom were black women and men.38 This exclusion was not accidental; it was by design.
Laws designed to benefit returning soldiers often did not apply to black veterans. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill, included substantial aid designed to help military veterans reintegrate into civilian life. This welfare program assisted GIs in purchasing homes, paying tuition for college, and gaining health coverage. The GI Bill helped usher in a period of extended and rapid economic prosperity in America, but the privileges extended almost exclusively to white men.
“The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red.”41 Neighborhoods with any black people, even if the residents had stable middle-class incomes, were coded red, and lenders were unlikely to give loans in these areas.
The complex mix of issues—which include race—is a part of the way racism has adapted to changing social conditions in the United States.
segregation. In examining the white flight, Mark Mulder argues that churches actively participated in the racial relocation of whites from the city to other locales. “In many cases, churches not only failed to inhibit white flight but actually became co-conspirators and accomplices in the action.”
Rather than stay and adapt to a new community reality or assist in integrating the neighborhood, many white churches chose to depart the city instead.
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.
“We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”7 Warren was merely making explicit what was quite evident, that black and white facilities—whether schools, hospitals, or housing—were definitely not equal. The
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.”
“God the Original Segregationist,” Daniel went so far as to make a direct comparison between desegregation and the schemes of the devil himself. Conversely, Daniel labeled Jesus the “Original Segregationist.”10 Though he could find no statements from Jesus supporting segregation, he argued that the Savior had never repealed the laws of segregation supposedly espoused in the Old Testament.11
