The Bible Told Them So Quotes

“The evangelical world these Christians inhabit has been shaped in part by a segregationist Christianity whose influence lingers on unrecognized today.”
― J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy

“White evangelicals who champion racial justice through individual heart changes, or reconciled relationships, or appeals to colorblindness are using the tools fashioned and utilized by their segregationist forebears precisely to avoid the racial justice their descendants now seek.”
― J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy

“As Jim Crow crumbled around southern churches in the 1960s, these churches remained starkly segregated, protected by the First Amendment’s guaranteed religious liberty from governmental intervention.”
― J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy

“The crowds howling outside Central High School for the heads of the nine black students inside, the mobs at bus depots in Alabama waiting to attack the freedom riders on their arrival, the state troopers beating back peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge—Christians could be counted among them all. At lunch counters in Nashville, in schoolhouse doors in Tuscaloosa, and in the streets of Birmingham, white Christians were there, fighting to maintain segregation, confident of God's blessing.”
― J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy

“The response to the Brown decision began a pattern that segregationist Christians repeated over the subsequent decade with the advancement of civil rights. When black Americans procured their constitutional freedoms, white Christians reacted by writing their elected officials to remind them that these changes violated God's plan for humanity.”
― J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy

“The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education was the first event that caused widespread petitioning of elected officials by segregationist Christians.”
― J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy

“As the push for civil rights began in earnest throughout the South in the 1950s, white Christians—both clergy and laity alike—turned to their faith to mount a defense. These white Christians preached sermons, published pamphlets, and authored articles and books that mined both nature and scripture for supposed evidence of God's support of Jim Crow segregation. Taken together, these sources constitute a theology of segregation that helped shape the Christian imaginations of white southerners and served as the foundation for Christian resistance to racial equality in the middle decades of the 20th century.”
― J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy

“Asking white southerners to ignore their religious beliefs in pursuit of racial equality was seemingly asking the impossible. These white southerners did not undertake their resistance to black equality in spite of their religious convictions, but their faith drove their support of Jim Crow segregation. Central to the drama for racial justice that unfolded during America’s civil rights years lay an indisputable religious conflict between black Christian activists and their white Christian antagonists both of whom confidently, proudly, and often joyously claimed God's favor for their political stance.”
― j. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy