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

by Jesse Curtis

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...