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

by Jesse Curtis

The publisher of Our Kind of People, John Knox Press of Atlanta, promoted it as a salve for white evangelical guilt. The back cover of the original paperback edition offered this extraordinary description of the book’s contents: “OUR KIND OF PEOPLE attacks the Christian guilt complex arising from the civil rights movement and puts it to rest with a skillful mixture of scriptural precedent and human psychology. In doing so, Wagner transforms the statement that ‘11 A.M. on Sunday is the most segregated hour in America’ from a millstone around Christian necks into a dynamic tool for assuring Christian growth.” In this framing, Wagner’s defense of homogeneity was important not because of what it did for evangelicals of color but because it helped white evangelicals feel better about their segregated churches.

most of the movement’s influence was concentrated in white churches. McGavran explained that this was because “most devout believing pastors” were white, and as they learned about church growth principles they “naturally” tried to convert “their own kind of people” first. McGavran saw a great future ahead for the movement as it spread to other groups making up the diverse “mosaic” of the United States. “The minorities,” he explained, “are virtually untouched by the church today.” He urged Christians to pray for the “penetration” of all these “untouched” groups. He declared that African Americans and other people of color in the United States were “growing up unchurched” and were effectively “Christo-pagan.”

Evangelical elites, in pursuit of a gospel of personal salvation, were eager to make their movement multiethnic. But an antiracist gospel remained outside of most evangelical imaginations. An evangelicalism in which black evangelicals could participate as black people with distinctly black concerns remained only a distant dream.

While white evangelicals tended to see the 1960s as an age of chaos and moral decline, Pannell remembered “those great years when democracy crept up on this country, led by a black Baptist preacher from the Deep South.”105 Black evangelicals’ claims about a gospel that “has something to do with justice” added to their reputation as troublemakers. Their priorities disrupted the logic of what Clarence Hilliard called theological whiteness. Obvious signs of disunity and growing black evangelical impatience—combined with colorblind Christians’ discomfort with both—would lead to a new movement of “racial reconciliation” in the 1990s. But whether this movement would be any more successful at severing the link between Christian colorblindness and the evangelical investment in whiteness remained to be seen.

politics. Most white Americans believed a firmly colorblind approach to policy and public life—where character rather than skin color counted—would be the surest path to ending racial division.7 If there was more racial tension in the 1990s, the solution was not more racially conscious policies (to reduce inequality), but fewer (to reduce racial consciousness). Americans, skeptical of government solutions in a neoliberal age, looked to churches and other civic institutions to promote racial progress. Much has been made of white evangelicals’ growing power in the Republican Party in these years. This partisan

In John Perkins’s theology, racial reconciliation was much more than friendship across the color line. It was a kind of radical Christianity, a strategy for liberation that was at once spiritual, social, and—most controversially—economic. When Perkins called for racial reconciliation he declared war on the American Dream. He believed Christianity turned the normative aspirations of middle-class Americans on their head. Americans pursued upward mobility; Christians chose solidarity with the poor. Americans valued safety and security; Christians chose to share in the suffering of the marginalized. Americans sought personal success; Christians sacrificed for the good of the community. No wonder this demanding message of racial reconciliation had trouble catching on.

Talk of homogeneous units seemed increasingly out of step with the times; more and more church leaders spoke the language of reconciliation. But they did so not in pursuit of the black evangelical vision of justice and liberation but as the latest innovation designed to defend and grow the evangelical movement.

The CGM’s influence was undeniable; it had effectively won the struggle to define the church’s mission. But by the 1990s, it was inconvenient to admit that such a popular movement had so aggressively portrayed church integration as a threat to church growth. Celebrity pastors trained in CGM principles modified its most controversial features in the 1990s and helped to diffuse its ideas across the evangelical mainstream.

These phenomena—interpersonal racial reconciliation and public racial reaction—were complementary rather than contradictory. Most white evangelicals perceived no conflict between these positions. Private initiative would replace public bureaucracy and personal friendship would substitute for institutional reform. As the Dallas Morning News perceptively noted, “Much of the [racial reconciliation] action is coming from groups that support the [proposed Republican] cuts” to government programs.

When McCartney spoke of racism as a serious problem, he became a subject of suspicion in much the same way black evangelicals had been for decades. And he faced the same criticisms: if he was such a good Christian, why wasn’t he focusing on the gospel? Promise Keepers was a Christian men’s empowerment movement. As the racial reconciliation focus loomed larger and became more explicitly oriented toward white responsibility for racism, it began to threaten the core function of Christian colorblindness: the protection and perpetuation of evangelical whiteness.

Evangelicalism has influenced the contours of race in complicated ways, perhaps mitigating some of its darkest passions while entrenching more subtle inequalities. As some commentators have suggested, a post-Christian American racism may be even more harsh and unyielding in its hatreds.13