The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era

by Jesse Curtis

As cries of “Black Lives Matter” rang out on the nation’s streets, Warren universalized and sacralized the slogan. “All Lives Matter” was God’s word on America’s raging racial controversy. Warren’s diagnosis of the roots of racism—“SIN” rather than “SKIN”—was a pithy alliteration with a long history going back at least to the civil rights movement.

Warren’s generic invocation of sin effectively hid the reality of American white supremacy from view. His audience could imagine themselves as opponents of racism and as allies of a God-ordained racial order while sidestepping the specificity of black activists’ demands.

Seeking to address racial problems close to home through their churches, colleges, and parachurch ministries, white evangelicals emphasized the spiritual unity of all true believers in Jesus Christ, the power of the gospel to solve racial problems, and the importance of interpersonal relationships to heal the wounds of racism. As black evangelicals sought change in white evangelical institutions, they repeatedly insisted that white evangelicals’ brand of colorblind Christianity failed to eradicate racism. White evangelicals often responded that black evangelicals’ efforts were a divisive threat to the unity of the church. Christian colorblindness fostered communities in which whiteness often remained an invisible investment carried on under the banner of Christian unity and faithfulness to the gospel. The result was a distinctly evangelical form of whiteness.

While professing to desire racial harmony, white evangelicals still balked at black evangelical demands and insisted that preaching a colorblind gospel would solve racial problems. Colorblind claims allowed white evangelicals to adapt to the racial revolution of the civil rights era and became key drivers of evangelical identity. Colorblind Christianity fueled the growth of the evangelical coalition even as it failed to deliver the promised gains to black evangelicals seeking an equal place in the body of Christ.

If celebration of whiteness as sacred was a frequent feature of the Jim Crow racial order, the post-1960s colorblind order immersed in evangelical religiosity took exactly the opposite stance: racial consciousness suggested a lack of Christian maturity. Those who challenged Christian colorblindness arrayed themselves against God. In this sense the colorblind racial order of the late twentieth century retained the classic features of a racial hierarchy pervaded with theological significance.

White evangelicals invested in white supremacy as evangelicals. When they opportunistically used race to grow their churches while denying theological legitimacy to other forms of race consciousness, they gave an evangelical cast to whiteness and shaped the contours of the American racial order.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the outlines of evangelicalism emerged not just in the fact that Christians of numerous denominations or no denomination at all might shop for the same books and listen to the same radio shows. They had come to share a common religio-racial imagination that made diverse groups of conservative Protestants intelligible to each other. They knew that God was colorblind and Christians were one body in Christ. They knew that racism was sinful and that mature Christians did not care much about their racial identities. They knew that the solution to America’s racial ills was spiritual rebirth and interpersonal kindness. As they acted on these intuitions, they solidified the borders of evangelicalism and made whiteness one of its key markers.

Jones’s conviction that a colorblind gospel could transform Americans from racial antagonists to brothers and sisters in Christ united growing numbers of evangelicals in the 1960s. But in practice the exact meaning of unity in Christ proved difficult to pin down. A black evangelical might invoke Christian unity to claim spiritual and social equality. A white evangelical might invoke the same principle to tell black evangelicals to receive their spiritual inheritance while remaining content with their segregated earthly lot.

by 1963, when the National Council of Churches leapt into the civil rights struggle with money, organizational heft, and a sense of theological urgency, most white evangelicals were only beginning to talk about the problem.

Reading their own experience into both the Old and New Testaments, many white evangelicals understood Ancient Near Eastern identities as directly analogous to the modern category of race. Had not God separated humanity at the tower of Babel? Then, God called Israel out as a special people and forbade them from intermarrying with the nations around them. Many white evangelicals believed the New Testament confirmed segregation as God’s divine plan. Even the Apostle Paul declared that God had made all the nations and determined “the bounds of their habitation.”24 In watered-down form, the segregationist narrative of scripture held some credibility even at the center of the elite white evangelical movement.

Though sacred whiteness could justify social discrimination, it was even more concerned with the question of spiritual authority. In American society, one might hear whiteness associated with entitlement to political rule. In evangelicalism, whiteness was often associated with doctrinal purity and theological authority. Many white evangelicals were skeptical of African American Christians exercising spiritual authority over white Christians. They were much more comfortable ministering to African Americans or training them for separate black ministry.

In this uplifting tale of regeneration, the removal of Tomah’s “badness” becomes inseparable from the washing of his “blackness.” The evidence of his conversion is clear for all to see, for Tomah immediately goes back down the path to collect firewood, and this time he brings back an excellent bundle of wood for his white teacher.

and he acts as a servant to the white teacher

The story of Tomah’s conversion offered a very different moral than the vision of Christian colorblindness that would gain popularity in the coming years. In Tomah’s story, the power of the gospel is demonstrated not in its colorblind transcendence of human boundaries, but in its capacity to bring even incorrigible blackness into the fold of sacred whiteness. Such stories were not unconscious expressions of racial paternalism of the sort one might expect in an era of colorblindness; they were celebrations of religio-racial superiority, tributes to sacred whiteness. In this context, when black evangelicals such as C. Herbert Oliver took to the pages of evangelical magazines and declared that, in Christ, everyone regardless of color was “entitled to all the benefits of Christ’s redemption, both on earth” and in heaven, it was a bold rebuke of white evangelical attitudes.

Reaching out to African Americans during his New York crusade was an expression of the growing belief that there should be no color line in the body of Christ. It also happened to be evangelistically useful. Such a conviction did not mean that Graham was a racial liberal. He wanted African Americans on his team both to reach black and African audiences and to carefully challenge white audiences with a message of unity in Christ. Above all, he wanted black evangelicals who agreed with him that the race problem and its solution were spiritual.

All of these roles carried considerable ambiguity for a black evangelist preaching a colorblind gospel. Jones took the positive view—that his blackness opened doors for him—rather than the more cynical interpretation that his blackness typecast him into certain channels of ministry. But when he later looked back on joining the Graham team from the vantage of nearly half a century, he was remarkably unsentimental about the role he believed he had played in the organization. Graham was looking for “someone who could transcend racial boundaries; someone whose theology was sound and whose approach was nonthreatening; someone who understood the subtle intricacies, the manner and vernacular of white evangelical culture. In short, someone who was safe.”45 Jones was hitting all the right notes.

In the summer of 1963, while the National Council of Churches threw its support behind the civil rights bill, evangelicalism’s leading light sounded the alarm about the dangers of civil rights activism. In August, Billy Graham embarked on a month-long crusade in Los Angeles. On the evening of August 27, as he looked out on a crowd of 37,000 people, he spoke about the racial crisis gripping the nation. It was the day before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In contrast to later nostalgic memories of a peaceful march, dread stalked the nation’s capital. Many white Americans expected violence. One white evangelical observer predicted that there would “possibly be the worst race riot in the history of the country in our capital.” Amid this climate of anxious anticipation, Graham’s words were bound to resonate. His voice boomed across the stadium: “I am convinced that some extremists are going too far too fast,” he declared. “Forced integration will never work.” The racial crisis would “not be settled in the streets but it could be settled in the hearts of man.”75 At this decisive inflection point, Graham could have embraced civil rights activists and linked his colorblind gospel with the demands coming from the streets. Instead, he borrowed language from segregationists and framed the gospel as an alternative to black aspirations for freedom.

The day after Graham’s warning against “forced integration,” the March on Washington went forward without support from white evangelical leaders.

King articulated the ur-text of colorblind America. Though he might have deplored the uses that would be made of this phrase in later decades, the sincerity of his hope was not in doubt.79 It was a hope infused with eschatological longing. To imagine black and white children walking hand in hand in Alabama was “Thy kingdom come” translated into the American vernacular. While many white evangelicals put their hopes in a heavenly tomorrow, black activists insisted Christian unity could be made tangible today. As the Reverend James Lawson said, “The Christian favors the breaking down of racial barriers because the redeemed community of which he is already a citizen recognizes no barriers dividing humanity.”80

Christianity Today admitted in the days after the March on Washington. “Our folks are sympathetic with solving the race problem,” one leader was quick to say, “but we feel that this wasn’t the way to go about it.” The editorial plaintively asked, “But what is the way?”81 Exhibiting a profound uneasiness, many white evangelicals could not bring themselves to proactively support the movement, yet they also worried that the evangelical church was somehow failing in its responsibility.

Though black evangelicals could lapse into vague platitudes as easily as white evangelicals, there was a nuance to their views often lacking among their white counterparts. Brown portrayed black evangelicals as a people caught between the liberal civil rights movement, which had positive social concern but lacked proper doctrine, and white evangelicalism, which had correct doctrine but was disastrously deficient in social concern. While black evangelicals often advocated unity in Christ as the foundation of social equality, white evangelicals often described unity in Christ as a substitute for equality.

explained, “The NAE has a policy of not becoming involved in political or sociological affairs that do not affect the function of the church or those involved in the propagation of the gospel.”111 This was false. In fact, the NAE was not just an umbrella group for white evangelical denominations, it was a lobbying arm with a history of political entanglements.112 But in the face of the most grotesque and deadly forms of racism, the nation’s leading body of white evangelicals declared its neutrality. If such a stance alienated some black evangelicals, it effectively maintained the unity of the NAE’s white constituencies.

The following week Graham himself followed up: “I am not sure that it would be wise for you to come to Montgomery just now.”115 Jones’s exclusion from the Montgomery crusade was a plain and simple effort to appease white supremacist opinion. The presence of a black evangelist would indeed have raised tensions. Graham believed it would be worthwhile to preach the gospel without such controversy. The evangelistic calculus was changing, but in Montgomery, Alabama, in the spring of 1965, Christian colorblindness was still a bridge too far. Sacred whiteness still held sway there and could still be placated. The incident had the shape of a parable outlining the future of Christian colorblindness. Jones was the black supplicant seeking inclusion, and Graham was the white evangelical power broker gauging the comfort level of the white majority and the imperatives of evangelization to determine the terms and pace of that inclusion.

It was because of sex, more than anything else, that many white evangelical colleges that enrolled black students here or there before the 1960s often saddled them with discriminatory policies. Besides bans or counseling against interracial dating, black students might be forced to live off campus or be encouraged to attend evening classes distinct from the daytime courses of white students living on campus.

Evangelical media broadcast the news that Wheaton College had hosted a memorial service for Dr. King, and dozens of letters poured in from confused and angry white evangelicals. Timothy LaHaye, a San Diego pastor who would gain fame as the coauthor of the apocalyptic fiction series Left Behind, found it “incredible that a Christian college could participate in honoring an out-right theological liberal heretic whose ‘non-violent’ demonstrations resulted in the deaths of seventeen people.” He went on to hint that this episode could affect his ability to recommend Wheaton College to his congregation in the future.24

Most white evangelicals objected to King’s civil disobedience as an affront to law and order, and a denial of the sufficiency of the gospel. President Armerding quickly disavowed any support for King’s methods and noted that the college had not sponsored the memorial service but merely allowed the community to use its chapel.27 Even as white evangelical colleges launched a new era of black recruitment, expressing sympathy with black aspirations risked alienating their white constituency.

White evangelicals often insisted that unity in Christ was already a reality and that black Christians attacked such unity when they raised questions of systemic reform on the Christian campus.

In some cases, administrators deliberately pulled the plug on recruitment programs when it became obvious their institutions were ill-prepared for black students. A common struggle at all institutions was the indifference or hostility of most of the student body. As one white student declared, “I am tired of being made to feel guilty about minority students. They’re cramming this minority business down our throats!”

Even when college leaders pushed for change they often faced pushback from faculty jealous of their prerogatives. When Armerding urged Wheaton professors to incorporate a more multicultural focus into their classes, one responded that the “contributions of the more ‘primitive’ cultures” should certainly be included, but “not to the point of over-reacting with making superficial connections.”86

one Wheaton administrator confessed, “if you think that you do not consider white culture superior to black culture, yet you continue to know nothing about their culture, then you may be a member of a racist community.”88 For most white evangelical students and administrators, the presence of black students proved far more difficult than they had imagined, in part because it forced them to encounter their own whiteness. Thinking about whiteness was theologically disturbing for many evangelicals, for it raised the possibility that their faith was not unmediated divine truth but was instead a culturally and racially conditioned religiosity.

One essay discouraged black students from spending too much energy trying to educate white students. The most likely outcome was emotional exhaustion for the black student and little change on the part of white students.

As the CGM’s founder, Donald McGavran, declared, “Men like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers.”3 “Show me a growing church,” Professor C. Peter Wagner wrote in 1974, “and I’ll show you a homogeneous . . . church.”4 Critics worried that this was just another way of justifying segregation. The black evangelical activist John Perkins wrote that it seemed awfully “convenient” for white evangelicals to suddenly discover after the civil rights movement that “homogenous [sic] churches grow fastest!”5 Church growth theorists insisted their ideas did not offer any support for American segregation. After all, the origins of their movement were not to be found in the struggles of the civil rights–era American South, but in Donald McGavran’s work on the mission field of central India in the 1930s.

this fits with Kendi's idea that justifucation follows need

In a post–civil rights movement age when colorblind Christians dared not defend segregation outright and, indeed, no longer wanted to do so, the CGM enabled white evangelicals to recast their segregated churches and ongoing appeals to white identity as faithful evangelism rather than racism.

With his focus set on foreign missions, McGavran believed that these evangelistic strategies were not relevant to the “modern” societies of Western Europe and the United States.30 As American elites declared opportunity for all as a national creed and imagined a consensus in American life on everything from labor and capital to religion and patriotism, it was easy for McGavran to assume the United States had moved beyond the intense communal bonds and prejudices of so-called premodern peoples.

People didn’t want to be “oddballs” by going to an integrated church, and they didn’t want their kids to develop interracial romances. McGavran hinted at this last possibility rather than stating it outright. He also understood that, all too often, integrated worship in the era of white flight was a temporary phenomenon signaling a neighborhood in transition from white to black. He described “the irresistible march of Negroes to take over white residential areas,” as if black homebuyers were a force of nature reshaping the metropolitan landscape. “Integrated worship,” McGavran observed, “often occurs in churches lying in the path of Negro steamrollers.” It was a revealing metaphor. Steamrollers flatten and crush, overwhelming whatever is in their path, leaving an empty surface in their wake. McGavran’s metaphor seemed to display an assumption of white Christian entitlement in the American city.52

Arn warned against a church mismatching a pastor and its congregation. “People want their pastor to be ‘like’ them,” he explained. Those desiring a “successful ministry” ought to make sure the “pastor and church fit the same basic homogeneous unit.”94 Though church growth theorists insisted they opposed segregation and racism, these instructions were all but explicit warnings against the danger of integration and cultural pluralism in a local church. When Wagner taught a church growth seminar at Wheaton Graduate School in the summer of 1972, his final exam included this question: “How could an integrated church in a segregated society retard evangelism?”95 For students steeped in the idea that effective evangelism was priority number one, the message was clear.

C. Peter Wagner’s 1976 book, Your Church Can Grow, devoted a chapter to an “autopsy of a dead church.” Zion Evangelical Free Church, a white congregation of several hundred in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, closed in the summer of 1969. It had appeared healthy just a few years before. What went wrong? Wagner declared that he had examined the “corpse” and had the “diagnosis” in hand. Zion Free Church came to a sorry end because of a terminal case of “ethnikitis.” Church leaders had failed to “understand and apply the homogeneous unit principle” before it was too late. As a result, the church became a “victim” of the changing racial demographics of the Austin neighborhood. As white residents moved out, the church’s attendance rapidly dwindled from 350 to 30. In a desperate bid to save itself, Zion partnered with Circle Church, a new multiracial church in the neighborhood. This effort was doomed, Wagner informed his readers, because it involved a mixing of homogeneous units. Trying to merge a young, hip, multicultural church and a staid, traditional, white church produced “symptoms” of disease “almost as inevitably” as a blood transfusion mixing type A and B. A worship leader with sideburns showed up at Zion, causing offense. Some young women from Circle Church arrived in miniskirts, causing an uproar. And “the heaviest donor in the church left as soon as he heard that blacks would be welcome.”96 Wagner grouped all these phenomena together as examples of cultural incompa...

20 years later the remains of Circle church became Rock of Our Salvation EV Fee Church and th pastor would leave 10 years later to lead Promise Keepers racial reconciliation focus

Yoder also directly tackled the racial and theological implications of the Homogeneous Unit Principle. “Building the church in a racist culture in southern Mississippi, you can only win people if you accept racism,” he argued. But “if you have accepted the institution of racism as the condition of your operating,” was such a church even Christian?100 Yoder argued that the message of the New Testament was that God broke down the wall of division between Jews and Gentiles. This was not a singular historical event; it was the essential ongoing ethical and theological principle of Christianity. “The breaking down of the wall between two ethnic groups,” Yoder argued, “is the gospel.

The managerial ethos, the relentless drive for numerical growth, the accommodation of visitors’ comfort—all these made some white evangelicals nervous. Yet in ways that even many critics of the CGM often didn’t realize, these concerns had racial implications. Black evangelicals such as the community organizer and “racial reconciliation” activist John Perkins were particularly concerned about how the pursuit of success in a racist society came at great cost to black people.104 What did it mean for a church to be successful in a moment in which the white middle class was willing to sell their houses, start new private schools, and build new churches to maintain their advantages over—and distance from—African Americans?

McGavran’s pragmatic efforts to defend the priority of evangelism in the 1970s took him into some dark waters. In a forum debating the Homogeneous Unit Principle, he imagined that “if all the whites in Tennessee were pagan and all the blacks were Christian, and if ‘becoming Christian’ meant joining a black Church and giving up white culture, whites would become Christians very slowly, if at all.” The principle of this unsettling hypothetical scenario was that “all men should be able to become Christians without feeling they are betraying their race.” McGavran drove the point home further, clarifying that he was thinking specifically of white Americans’ investments in their racial identities. “We do not want white men to feel that the only way they can follow Christ is in multi-racial and multi-language congregations.” He warned that “people movements all around the world languish and often die” because mixing homogeneous units created “mongrel” congregations. In contrast, a homogeneous unit church “liberates its own people without raising difficult questions of cross-race dining, marriage and the like.”107 McGavran’s evocative use of the word “mongrel” aligned with long-standing white supremacist rhetoric about the dangers of racial mixing and interracial marriage.108 In the white supremacist imagination these practices spoiled so-called racial purity and invited communist infiltration or a one-world government. In McGavran’s imagination, these practices were mortal danger...

In the decades after the civil rights movement, as white evangelicals turned to the new “science” of church growth, they were dealing in race whether they knew it or not. The church growth theorists mistakenly believed it was possible to capitalize on white identity apart from racial hierarchy. While whiteness as a benign piece of the American mosaic sounded appealing to some, it was an obtuse reading of the very meaning of whiteness in a society so long structured on white supremacy. Amid national backlash to the gains of the black freedom struggle, white evangelicals described their pursuit of church growth as an expression of their faith in the power of the gospel. It was also a solid investment in the enduring advantages of whiteness. But even as the CGM catalyzed white evangelicalism’s suburbanization, there were other evangelicals who believed God had called them to go to the American city. Their efforts to deal with urban problems in the 1960s and 1970s marked the next phase in the struggle to define Christian colorblindness. 4

Though the brochure likely appealed to some of Messiah’s white evangelical constituency, it fell far short of the tone Sider wished to convey. Rather than challenging colorblind Christians to learn from black perspectives, the brochure seemed to invite white evangelicals to minister across the color line in a way that reaffirmed white leadership in evangelical spaces.

Winter appeared to be unable or unwilling to explain how his vision of churches deliberately seeking “a certain social level” differed substantially from segregationist stances of old. Predictably, some of the white South African delegation at Lausanne appropriated Winter’s speech as an endorsement of apartheid. Winter claimed he was appalled, but he had little reason to be surprised.27 At a time when many evangelical churches remained functionally closed to African Americans, church growth theorists did not explain how their vision was meaningfully distinct from the long-standing theological logic of evangelical segregationists.

Lausanne, Hilliard helped lead a workshop, “Urban Evangelization among the Poor,” in which he joined other participants in urging evangelicals to develop systemic solutions to social problems.30 Hilliard was among some 500 delegates who formed a Theology and Radical Discipleship Group to advocate a more socially conscious gospel.

Clarence Hilliard was among the radicals who declined to sign the Lausanne Covenant. Despite the unexpectedly strong social justice plank, he could not in good conscience endorse the document.

Hilliard understood it as a theological mandate for every Christian in America, regardless of their phenotype. Theological blackness was a choice, not a birthright. One became black by following Jesus. One became white by pursuing success and turning away from the poor. All Christians had a responsibility to resist “the siren call of the system to move up the social ladder.” A status quo–affirming, success-oriented way of life was the “theological whiteness”

When Jesus said “deny thyself and follow me,” the message translated to white Americans was “deny their theological whiteness.”48 A church “true to their Lord” would “so identify with oppressed blacks that they would, in the eyes of the system, cease to be white.”49 Hilliard’s casting of Jesus as black drew on a long African American tradition that associated black suffering with the sufferings of Christ, that linked the Roman cross to the American lynching tree.

In Hilliard’s version, crucially, the story is racialized. The wealthy man becomes white, and to find salvation he must divest from his racial entitlement in addition to his wealth. While Hilliard remained within the evangelical camp and insisted on the necessity of conversion through faith in Jesus Christ, he believed white evangelicals were cheapening its meaning, turning it into a selfish personal transaction between the individual and God.

This sensibility was most clear in McGavran’s remarkable paper, in which he argued that white solidarities in the United States were every bit as ethically legitimate as black solidarities. This was the conference at which he warned against “mongrel” congregations and advocated homogeneous congregations so Christians could worship “without raising difficult questions of cross-race dining, marriage and the like” (see chapter 3).63 His description of “cross-race dining” as something to avoid was surprising. As all the consultation participants knew, the New Testament described the sharing of meals between Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus as a major point of contention in the early church. When Peter refused to eat with Gentiles, Paul famously rebuked his actions as contrary to the Gospel.64 McGavran appeared to believe Peter was in the right after all.

The critics faulted the Fuller team for turning the sociological fact of group affiliation into an ironclad prescription for church growth. When Fuller professor Charles Kraft wrote that “homogeneity is, to my way of thinking, a fact,” John Stott drily noted, “So is sin!”66

In two brutal sentences Ramseyer cut to the heart of church growth activists’ paradoxical claims. “Our friends from Fuller speak a great deal about those who would reduce the church to a drab cultural sameness and uniformity. Yet it is precisely this school of thought which seems unable to think of the congregation except in terms of cultural sameness—homogeneity.”67