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

by Jemar Tisby

But it is the very reasonableness of the letter that reveals the underlying problem of complicity with racism. This letter from white Christian moderates illustrates the broader failure of the white church, a failure to recognize the daily indignity of American racism and the urgency the situation demanded. These clergymen likely had good intentions, but they did not realize that the talking and negotiating for which they advocated had been attempted and had yielded little to no progress.

They denounced the violence that direct action would supposedly incite, but they did relatively little about the countless lynchings, church bombings, and beatings black people across the nation suffered at the hands of segregationists.

black journalist reflecting on Graham’s position on legislation like the Civil Rights Act remarked that Graham did not “walk with protestors or call for open housing or desegregated churches” because “he’s too busy praying.”

Christian moderates may not have objected to the broader principles of racial equality, but they offered tepid support and at times outright skepticism.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “I think we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”27 By contrast, in a sermon entitled “Rioting or Righteousness,” Billy Graham stated, “There is no doubt that the rioting, looting, and crime in America have reached a point of anarchy.”

These Christians were not denying that blacks were discriminated against or that conditions in the inner city were troublesome. But they believed the solution to the problem was to trust the system.

King understood that the chaos of Watts did not emerge from a single incident. While not excusing the violence or the indiscriminate lawlessness, he also knew that the black residents of Watts had witnessed the nearly all-white police force repeatedly brutalizing their neighbors. The people living in this South Central Los Angeles neighborhood felt trapped by the forces of poverty, incarceration, failing schools, and racism. Though activists had been working for change over the course of many years, the cries of the people went largely unheard. As an alternative to gradual change through the system, which was frequently ineffective and ignored, they used the riots to call attention to their plight.

Many Christian moderates failed to incorporate the larger context of the years of systemic racism into their understanding of the civil rights movement.

many other black people still saw Christianity as the religion of the enslavers,

Tyson enlisted churches in the task of racial reformation. “Our churches ought to open their doors to every person for whom Jesus Christ died and thus become the headlights of our community rather than the tail-lights.”

demonstrate how images of Jesus created or printed during this time betray the racial assumptions of the culture.

Along with the unpopular elements of King’s and the civil rights movement’s platform, people have also forgotten how strongly many moderate Christians opposed him.

Some Christians opposed King’s activism because they considered race relations a purely social issue, not a spiritual one.

During his lifetime and at the height of the civil rights movement, a large segment of the American church derided King and other activists and even resisted the efforts of the civil rights movement.

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

From the late 1960s through the 1980s, conservative Christians coalesced into a political force that every major Republican politician had to court if they hoped to have lasting success. But there was also a cost to this influence; it meant that American evangelicalism became virtually synonymous with the GOP and whiteness.

In 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into the law. The next year, the Voting Rights Act passed, and in 1968 the Fair Housing Act became law. Legalized segregation in the form of Jim Crow was now officially banned. Given these shifts, one might be tempted to declare that systemic or legal racism in America had ended, and that aside from a few backwards thinking people—the real racists—the progress of the civil rights movement indicated that the nation had largely overcome its racist past. Such an optimistic assessment would be wrong. Though it was necessary to enact civil rights legislation, you cannot erase four hundred years of race-based oppression by passing a few laws. From the earliest years of slavery in the 1600s, through the legal end of Jim Crow in 1954, and in the numerous and varied ways in which racism is still enacted in law and culture today, the United States has had more than 300 years of race-based discrimination. A few short decades of legal freedom have not corrected the damage done by centuries of racism.

communities. In 2010, the chairman of the Republican Nation Convention, Michael Steele, who is black, admitted this: “For the last 40 plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.”

law-and-order rhetoric “had become a surrogate expression for concern about the civil rights movement.”

Nixon’s closest advisers, H. R. Haldeman, said, “[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

Nowadays, all the American church needs to do in terms of compromise is cooperate with already established and racially unequal social systems. RACIAL

But in the early 1970s, abortion was not the primary issue that catalyzed the Religious Right, as it would in later years. Initially, the Christian response to Roe v. Wade was mixed.32 Instead, conservative voters coalesced around the issue of racial integration in schools.

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.”

The Civil Rights Act and the IRS’s newly adopted policies meant that Bob Jones University’s stance on interracial dating placed it in violation of racial discrimination laws. The IRS revoked the school’s tax-exempt status in 1976, but these financial penalties did not deter university officials.

“What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the [Equal Rights Amendment]. . . . What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”47 While it would be wrong to suggest that racist resistance to integration was the single issue that held the Religious Right together in these years, it clearly provided an initial charge that electrified the movement.

The era’s most prominent Christian political organization—the Moral Majority—provides clear evidence that the new Christian Right tended to promote laws, practices, and ideas that limited or even sought to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement.