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

by Jesse Curtis

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.