Tag: civil rights movement

The Bad History in Randall Balmer’s “Bad Faith”

~ Jesse Curtis ~ 1 Comment

On June 24, 2022 the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, and white evangelicals swooned. The Christian Right, founded nearly half a century ago in a groundswell of zeal to protect the unborn, at long last had achieved its ultimate aim. After all, wasn’t this the whole reason the Christian Right emerged in the first place?

Not so fast, says the historian Randall Balmer. In reality, Balmer says, when the court handed down its sweeping Roe decision in 1973 white evangelicals shrugged. They considered abortion a Catholic concern. Balmer argues the real root of the Christian Right was not Roe, but a rather more obscure court case: Green vs Connally, a 1971 district court ruling that declared segregated schools were not entitled to tax exemption. When the IRS later moved to rescind the tax exemption of Bob Jones University, white evangelical elites reacted with alarm. To prove it, Balmer has Christian Right leaders on the record boasting that the tax exemption case was the foundation of their organizing. What Balmer calls the “abortion myth” came later to hide the disturbing truth: the pro-life movement was never really about protecting life; it was about protecting racism.

Balmer’s argument has probably become the most popular academic account of the origins of the Christian Right. He has been telling this story for many years, but the real breakthrough to public awareness came with a widely shared 2014 Politico op-ed. I heard him deliver the same argument in person at a small conference in 2017. Recently, I was surprised to hear my own relatives repeating Balmer’s claims. Now, in Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, Balmer has given his story its most comprehensive treatment yet.

The book is compelling in its simplicity and explanatory power. Alas, it’s so simple that it crumbles upon inspection. Credulously taking self-interested political elites at their word, Balmer’s popular story portrays a world of backroom cunning and strategic masterstrokes that awakened the sleeping giant of the evangelical masses. Yet it fails to adequately explain why the tax exemption case never served as a locus for mass organizing in the way that abortion so obviously and so successfully did. It fails to explain why the 1978 midterm elections demonstrated the electoral dynamite of abortion politics at the grassroots before evangelical elites caught up with the gathering wave. It fails to mention that Bob Jones University was an extreme outlier in evangelical higher education. The vast majority of evangelical colleges had already integrated in the 1960s and were happily in compliance with new federal rules. Indeed, part of the identity of these more mainstream evangelical institutions was precisely that they weren’t like the extremist and fundamentalist Bob Jones.

Balmer’s popular story also glosses over early and obvious signs of white evangelical pushback against Roe. Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of white evangelicalism, immediately blasted Roe as a decision “for paganism, and against Christianity,” and speculated that the court’s reasoning could enable “mass extermination of undesirables.” The editors darkly warned that the court’s turn against “the laws of God” might herald a day when the American state would persecute evangelical Christians. The same issue hinted that the court’s decision could lead conservative Catholics and Protestants to overcome their historic divisions in order to “fight abortion.” This is hardly the shrug of Randall Balmer’s imagination.

And so, while challenging the Christian Right’s founding myths, Balmer’s popular story introduces a new myth of its own. Call it the myth of pro-life insincerity: this myth tells us that one of the most successful activist movements in modern American history is somehow not about what it appears to be about, is really little more than a cover for elite-driven racist reaction. (In an aside toward the end of the book, Balmer alleges that he does not doubt the sincerity of pro-life activists. In response I’ll just note once again that the book is called Bad Faith). This enormous condescension serves no useful purpose. It does not help historians understand the complexity of the past or present. It does not help citizens engage in good faith dialogue or find common ground. It does not even help advocates for reproductive rights, who, after all, would do well to take the true measure of their opponents and understand the forces arrayed against them.

In reality, far from being a nefarious or simple racial reaction, the rise of the Christian Right was overdetermined: a collective outpouring of opposition to dozens of profound changes in American life, from the rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s to the growing push to secularize public space. For opponents and supporters alike, abortion became entangled with broader questions of family, gender, and sexuality. On these questions, many Americans believed Democrats had become hopelessly out of touch. As the cultural critic Christopher Lasch wrote, “Liberalism now meant sexual freedom, women’s rights, gay rights, denunciation of the family as the seat of all oppression, denunciation of the ‘patriarchy’” and on and on. However unfair Lasch’s caricature was, it accurately captured conservative perceptions of a disintegrating moral order. By the 1980s, it was utterly mainstream to assume that morals had declined, that families used to be stronger, that America was in danger of losing a defining Christian character. Politicians who dared to ignore this groundswell did so at their peril.

I am not making a new claim here. Historians such as Robert O. Self and Daniel K. Williams have given us complex narratives that amply demonstrate the multi-causal rise of the Christian Right. That it took some years after the earthquakes of the 60s and 70s for this revolt to gain partisan organization is hardly surprising. Putting this all down to race is the kind of just-so causation story that freshman undergraduates in my history classes are taught to avoid. The simple story flatters the prejudices of those of us who want to believe the worst of the Christian Right. But the past is more complex than that, and the best historical scholarship has already given us better stories.

Balmer’s myth remains important, however, because it is representative of the deeper myths we tend to believe about evangelicalism. Imagine, if you will, a history of the civil rights movement that ignored the black church. Imagine a history of gay rights that ignored gay culture. Imagine a history of the feminist movement that acted as if white feminists were the only voices in the room. Scholars who tell narrow, top-down, elite-driven stories of these movements are unlikely to be taken seriously. But precisely these kinds of stories continue to drive the discussion around evangelicalism. Popular discourse about evangelicalism exhibits an astonishing indifference to the religious and social bases of evangelical identity. Furthermore, despite thick continuities through over two centuries of American evangelicalism, the myth persists that politically mobilized white evangelicalism is a strange new product of the 1970s. Despite the centrality of evangelicalism to American culture, the myth persists that to speak of white evangelicals is, by definition, to speak of political reactionaries. Outside the specialist subfield of the history of evangelicalism—where great work is being done!—simplistic political stories reign supreme as the only stories worth knowing about evangelicals.

So it is no coincidence that centering the Bob Jones tax case as the supposed origin of the Christian Right makes white evangelicals look like quaint and easily manipulated reactionaries. This is the main reason people want to believe the story! Pundits have been insisting that white evangelicals must occupy this reactionary role ever since the Scopes Trial and the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the 1920s. Unhappily for the apostles of American secularization, white evangelicals keep refusing to play the part assigned to them. Instead of being hapless yokels unable to cope with modern life, the fundamentalists and their white evangelical descendants have consistently proven to be among the most nimble, adept, and pragmatic activists on the American scene. This ought not be surprising. After all, evangelical Protestants were in many ways the establishment in the 19th century, and they have never forgotten that fact. Indeed, they have been trying to take America back for God and reassume their rightful place ever since the Protestant consensus in American life began to splinter over a century ago.

As the historian Matthew Avery Sutton has demonstrated, the idea that white evangelicals ever retreated from the public square is a myth. No sooner had mass consumer culture emerged than white evangelicals were some of its most eager users, employing spectacle, celebrity, sports, radio, and television to advance the gospel and grow their movement. In the decades after the Scopes Trial, while pundits imagined that fundamentalist religion had been consigned to its rightful marginal place, in fact white evangelicals were engaged in a flurry of institution-building, from colleges and missionary societies to evangelistic organizations like Youth for Christ and Campus Crusade to umbrella advocacy groups like the National Association of Evangelicals. From the fusion of evangelical revivalism and cold war politics in the 1950s to the unmooring of social consensus in the 1960s, white evangelicals remained at the center of American life, seeking through private activism and public policy to save souls and restore a Christian nation.

Race and Evangelicalism: A More Complex Story*

So to understand our current moment, we need to tell more complex stories about this evangelical past. Race does matter a great deal to this history, but in a far more interesting and peculiarly evangelical way than the simple story allows. There’s no question that the civil rights movement disrupted and challenged evangelicalism, as it did all of American society. But here, again, the nimbleness and pragmatism of evangelicalism quickly became apparent. During the civil rights era, black evangelicals became much more prominent in the evangelical world. They tried to break through the exclusionary borders of white evangelicalism, and they used the words of scripture as their calling card. After all, didn’t the Bible say that in Christ there was neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free? The black evangelist Howard Jones declared, “The church must demonstrate the truth that as Christians we are one in Christ, regardless of race and nationality, and that all racial barriers lie shattered at the foot of his cross.”

In the context of the overt structures of Jim Crow segregation, black evangelicals’ calls for colorblind inclusion became powerful and effective challenges to the evangelical status quo. In response, white evangelicals gradually discarded theologies of white supremacy and embraced a kind of Christian colorblindness: all our equal and united in Christ and we should focus on our identity in Christ, not race. The gospel was colorblind. This theology emerged not as a partisan political maneuver, but as the result of a nationwide reckoning among evangelicals as they sought to grow their movement and make it appealing to the American mainstream in a rapidly changing racial landscape. To show this spiritual equality in practice, white evangelical institutions became more inclusive. Billy Graham hired Jones as the first black evangelist for his team. White evangelical colleges proactively recruited black students. Churches that had been proudly segregated for decades now threw open their doors. These were big and important changes.

Howard Jones, for one, thought that the new colorblind gospel was a mortal threat to the discrimination he had experienced in white evangelical spaces. But by the late 1960s, a far more ambiguous reality was coming into view. The idea of unity in Christ could be used to press for inclusion, but white evangelicals quickly discovered it was also a potent tool to avoid racial discussion and reform in a new era of official equality. All too often, black and white evangelicals who dared to demand change found the colorblind gospel thrown back at them: if we’re one Christ, why are you talking about these divisive racial things? In the ensuing decades, evangelicals would deploy theologies of racial colorblindness to elevate black voices and to silence them, to press for change and to hold the line, to break down barriers and to rebuild them.

In the face of this complexity, the popular story centered around Bob Jones University imagines reactionaries pining for the good old days of Jim Crow. That gets it exactly backward: it was precisely the declining need to defend a regional system of segregation that enabled evangelicals to unite across historic regional divides and experience explosive growth in their movement. In the decades after the civil rights movement white evangelical churches grew by leaps and bounds. Southern Baptists added over two million people to their member rolls between 1970 and 1985. The Assemblies of God and the Evangelical Free Church tripled their numbers. While overtly racist fundamentalist churches became increasingly marginalized and liberal Protestant denominations declined, white evangelical denominations embraced an ambiguous colorblind gospel that was exceptionally well-tuned to appeal to America’s burgeoning suburbs. Far from being simple reactionaries, white evangelicals became creative religio-racial entrepreneurs who successfully positioned themselves in the mainstream of America in an age of colorblindness.

Undergirding these ostensibly colorblind congregations was a church growth industry that deliberately invested in whiteness in order to spread the gospel. Drawing on missionary theory developed in caste-conscious India in the 1930s, evangelical church growth experts taught that people like to worship with people like themselves. Donald McGavran, the founder of the Church Growth Movement, wrote in 1955 that “It does no good to say that tribal people ought not to have race prejudice. They do have it and are proud of it. It can be understood and should be made an aide to Christianization.” McGavran had in mind an attack on paternalistic western missionary strategies that disrupted indigenous social bonds in the Global South. He did not want people to feel that becoming a Christian meant becoming a western individualist. In places like India, this meant that the invitation to become Christian should not compel people to relinquish their caste identities. Rather than understanding caste as an obstacle to the formation of Christian churches, McGavran believed missionaries had to start seeing castes as pathways for God’s work. Christianity could spread further and faster along caste lines than across them. As McGavran developed these ideas from the 1930s to the 1950s, he was quite explicit that this “peoples” based approach did not apply to the individualistic and modern United States.

But the events of the 1960s transformed the evangelistic calculus. In the wake of black power and the revival of white ethnic identities, McGavran and his disciples concluded that Americans, too, had deep-seated bonds of race, language, and belonging that could be harnessed to spread the gospel. Defining whiteness as merely another part of the American mosaic, evangelical church growth experts updated McGavran’s “peoples” approach and applied it to the United States. They declared that the “homogeneous unit principle” taught that American churches would grow fastest if people did not have to cross barriers of race, class, or language. By the middle of the 1970s, this approach had become the hottest trend in evangelical church startups. Spread through ubiquitous pastoral seminars and influential institutions like Fuller Seminary, the ideas of the Church Growth Movement became commonsense in the white evangelical mainstream. This was pragmatism on steroids in pursuit of the ultimate goal: salvation of souls. And here we must pause and take seriously the ideas animating evangelical activists. McGavran knew that all human beings faced an eternal destiny, and only the good news of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection could save them. It was incumbent upon evangelicals to use the best possible methods to bring the greatest numbers of people into the Christian fold. What could be more important than that?

The homogeneous unit principle even enabled Southern Baptists and other evangelical denominations to launch thousands of new Hispanic, Asian, and black congregations during the 1980s and 1990s, proving more successful than most liberal churches in actually including people of color within their denominations. Yet whether this was healthy pluralism or an updated form of segregation remained an open question. In any case, church growth experts taught that questions of social justice were of secondary concern next to the overriding importance of growing churches. And so in an age of white flight, most white evangelical pastors and church planters focused on a target demographic that almost guaranteed church growth: the white middle class in growing suburbs. One of the most famous and influential of these pastors, Rick Warren, trained under the leading church growth thinkers of the era and cited McGavran as one of his main influences. He founded his Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, precisely because it was a booming region full of his target demo. Warren and his leadership team created a composite character to focus attention on the precise kind of person they wanted their church to reach: “Saddleback Sam” was a wealthy white man.

Black evangelicals were quick to point out the irony of these race-conscious church growth strategies. While white evangelicals were in fact making a racial bet and investing in whiteness in the name of spreading the gospel, on the ground in local homogeneous churches race seemed to all but disappear. What was left was a privatized faith where white identity could all too easily blur with Christian identity. Black evangelical pastors such as Clarence Hilliard warned that “Specialists in getting quick, easy decisions for a strange, mystical, theologically white Christ are rapidly increasing.” In his view the church growth craze failed to challenge believers to take up their cross and confront the racist structures of American society. Instead, American Christians got a comfortable Jesus and a ticket to heaven. The Black evangelical activist and community organizer John Perkins took in the same scene and called white evangelicalism “the most segregated, racist institution in America.” Perkins wasn’t taking issue with the Christian Right. He was talking about more fundamental structures of evangelical life and thought. While white evangelicals treated their movement’s success as a sign of God’s blessing and their own devotion to the gospel, Perkins declared that a gospel that didn’t confront American racism was “no gospel at all.”

But Perkins found it was hard to argue with success. By the 1980s, white evangelicals were beginning to get a heady sense of their own power. The simple story tells us this was the age of Falwell’s Moral Majority and the Reagan Revolution. The more important story tells of burgeoning member rolls in local churches as pastors paired a colorblind gospel message with targeted appeals to the white middle class. Self-assured in their ownership of the gospel and their theological rigor, white evangelicals felt emboldened to expand their influence by any means necessary. They had proven themselves eager adopters—as they had been for two centuries!—of the latest technological tools and cultural trends in a bid to grow their movement and take America back for God. As they faced the new millennium, white evangelicals nursed intoxicating dreams of a third Great Awakening and an America restored in a new age of revival.

Two decades of rapid change have dealt a severe blow to this evangelical confidence. Sweeping cultural transformations from gay marriage to the rising salience of transgender rights made many white evangelicals feel like strangers in their own country. Church growth abated as the number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation surged. Declining church membership and lost cultural authority were nothing less than a crisis for a movement that had imagined revival just around the corner. As white evangelical ascendance turned to decline, confidence morphed into fear. In this context, many evangelicals saw the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe as one of the few bright spots on a dark horizon.

Being pro-life had become a key marker of evangelical identity and belonging, yet in their self-imposed isolation from black Christians, white evangelicals had crafted an exceptionally individualistic and narrow conception of a pro-life ethic. And they insisted that this peculiar ethic was God’s law that must govern the country. The possibility of an interracial and bipartisan pro-life coalition that concerned itself with gun violence and health care and poverty as well as abortion foundered on the refusal of white evangelicals to take seriously the black evangelical voices in their midst. White evangelicals had not come to know how one might be a faithful Christian without power, how one might seek the public good even in the face of public hostility. In short, white evangelicals did not learn what they might have from the black church: how to live in a hostile world without fear and without the need to dominate others. If evangelicalism could not with its own resources make America a Christian nation, white evangelicals would look to harness the power of government to compel Americans toward righteousness. For black evangelicals, this lunge for power was familiar. They had already seen white evangelicalism’s ruthless pragmatism up close. Now the rest of the country became aware of it through the movement’s deathlike embrace of Donald Trump’s anti-democracy movement.  

White evangelicalism is a tradition haunted by loss: the loss of influence, the loss of a prior moral order, the loss of an imagined Christian nation. The white evangelicals who have coalesced around Trump are not pining for a new Jim Crow, as a narrative of simple racist reaction might imply. Instead, they seek a new Christian order, even if its form is authoritarian. It is this Christian nation, not a pluralist democratic one, that most white evangelicals seek to create. And that’s why the crisis of evangelicalism is a crisis of American democracy.   

*This section is drawn from my book.

The Bible Told Them So: A Conversation with J. Russell Hawkins

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

J. Russell Hawkins is Professor in the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University and author of the new book, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought To Preserve White Supremacy.

What question(s) led you to write this book?

Honestly, answering this could easily turn into a book itself, so I’ll try to keep it brief.  I wrote this book, in part, to answer questions about my own history.  I grew up very much a part of the white evangelical subculture in the 1980s and 90s. I was in church twice on Sundays and every Wednesday night.  I sang along with Psalty and listened to the Music Machine on vinyl. I wore witness wear, subscribed to Focus on the Family’s Breakaway magazine and saw my fellow Christian high school students at the pole each September.  But this evangelical world was only part of my formation.  I also grew up in a racially diverse neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas, attended racially diverse public schools from K-12, and grew up playing on racially diverse sports teams.  The racial diversity of a good part of the rest of my lived experiences stood in stark contrast to the homogeneity of my church on Sundays and Wednesdays.  And as I grew older, I began to be struck by how attitudes and conversations about race in my church were much different than in other areas of my upbringing.  Conversations about race with white Christians were often met with defensiveness, or hostility, or hushed tones.  They were usually short, with the implied message that it was better not to talk about such things. Occasionally, I even heard explicitly racist comments or jokes at church.  Now, to clarify, these things didn’t register with me as they were happening.  It wasn’t until later while I was in the midst of my graduate studies and started wrestling more seriously with questions about race and religion in American history that I found myself wanting to make sense of why so many white evangelicals seemed so weird about race compared to people I knew who weren’t part of that evangelical world.  I decided that if I was going to figure this out I would need to find a period of history when white evangelicals were talking about race and figured the civil rights era held promise for southern white evangelicals going on the record about their racial beliefs.  And it turns out, it did.  So while I’m not a direct descendant of the southern white evangelicals I cover in my book, I do believe a lot of the tendencies I have experienced in evangelicalism around race have roots in the civil rights period.

What is the argument of The Bible Told Them So?

I’m essentially putting forward two big arguments in the book. The first is that a critical mass of southern evangelicals were motivated to resist the civil rights movement because of their religious beliefs. These Christians read the Bible to say that God had designed the segregation of the races and doing away with Jim Crow violated God’s plan. I show in the book how such ideas were derived through a particular reading of the Bible and how the subsequent segregationist theology that arose from this hermeneutic was articulated, defended, and deployed throughout the classical period of the civil rights movement (1954-1965). The second argument is that this theological system wasn’t abandoned after 1965, rather in morphed into new forms to maintain segregation. As southern society was forced to change around them, these southern evangelicals who adhered to a theology of segregation had to change the way they articulated such commitments. I argue that they began using rhetoric of colorblindness and a defense of the family as tools to maintain segregation by the 1970s.

I especially want to zero in on that colorblindness angle. The idea that colorblindness follows hard on the heels of the civil rights movement is not new. But you draw a direct link between the rhetoric of segregation and the rhetoric of colorblindness in a way that seemed fresh and new to me. Can you explain the significance of that?

Yes, usually we think of colorblindness as emerging after Jim Crow’s defeat, or as you say, colorblindness follows hard on the heels of segregation as white folks are trying to make sense of their new post-segregation reality.  But what I found in my research were Christians who adopted the language and tools of colorblindness as a strategy of maintaining segregation rather than a response to integration.  Colorblindness for these white Christians wasn’t so much about making sense of a new reality.  Instead, it was using a particular kind of rhetorical device to maintain the segregation they had been practicing in their institutions all along (or since emancipation in the case of churches).  So as some Christian institutions and denominations started to make halting moves toward integration in the mid to late 1960s, there were white Christians who started saying that all this attention to race was problematic and the church and religious institutions would be better off if they just ignored the issue of race altogether.  But, these were the same people who had said a decade earlier that God made the races distinct and declared in Scripture that they should be segregated.  So it was almost as if these folks could see the writing on the wall and colorblindness for them became the final defense of a segregated system they believed God desired.   

In chapter 4 you detail the rise of colorblindness during the integration battle in the Methodist Church. I’m wondering how you think about the relationship between colorblindness in American politics at that time (with all the energy around affirmative action and busing) and colorblindness in the church. Were white Christians simply seizing on this concept that was out there in politics? Or were they developing a distinctive brand of colorblindness? In other words, do you think there was something Methodist about this colorblindness?

I do think the colorblind defense I highlight in chapter 4 was a parroting of some of the rhetoric found increasingly in American politics at that time.  But, again, I think it’s important to keep in mind that the white Methodists I cover were using this colorblind argument for the explicit purpose of avoiding the integration of their denomination, which had been segregated since 1939.  The reason I think it’s so important to emphasize the linkage between early uses of colorblindness and the defense of segregation in the church is because of how ubiquitous the language of colorblindness would become among evangelicals within a generation after 1970. (Can’t wait for your book to tell this story.)  As you know, white evangelicals today are especially fond of the language of colorblindness when it comes to matters of race.  And while there are ample critiques of colorblindness, I think one of the most powerful indictments we can make against colorblind rhetoric is to show that in its earliest iteration it was wielded by white Christians who wished to maintain Jim Crow-style segregation in their churches and religious institutions.  So we shouldn’t be surprised that a white evangelical subculture who embraced the language of colorblindness remains hyper-segregated along racial lines.  Colorblindness has helped in part maintain the very segregation it’s early adopters had hoped and prayed for.    

Why does this history matter now?

I don’t think there have been very many days that have gone by in the past six months (Past year? Past four years?) when the importance of this history hasn’t been abundantly clear. I think especially with the unrelenting focus on CRT in American society in general and the backlash to “wokeness” among many white evangelicals in particular, the issue of race continues to hold immense salience. I’m hopeful my book can provide some additional light on how we got here.

Southern Baptist Elites Are Dusting Off A Very Old Racist Rhetorical Strategy

~ Jesse Curtis ~ 2 Comments
https://www.baptistpress.com/wp-content/uploads/images/abf59224-88a8-43bb-b435-90663486cce6-Brooks-Hays-with-gavel.jpg
Brooks Hays, Arkansas Congressman and President of the Southern Baptist Convention.

This week Southern Baptist seminaries announced:

we stand together on historic Southern Baptist condemnations of racism in any form and we also declare that affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and any version of Critical Theory is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message.

Read Jemar Tisby to understand the racial message this is sending in 2020. I want to focus here on the rhetorical tradition in which this statement operates.

Many Southern Baptists are likely to imagine that this statement is a good case of level-headed moderation. They may not realize that it bears striking resemblance to a very old pattern of racist rhetoric within and without the convention.

The basic rhetorical move is over a century old, and elites who desired respectability and mainstream support for their racist goals came to rely upon it. It combines a vague condemnation of racism in abstract terms with a reactionary posture to the specific racial matter at hand. We condemn racism in general, and we also unequivocally condemn the tools anti-racists have developed to confront racism.

During Jim Crow: of course we don’t want to go back to the bad old days of slavery. I’m glad it’s gone. But let me tell you why social equality won’t work.

During battles over anti-lynching bills: of course I’m against vigilantism in any form, but let me tell you why a federal anti-lynching bill will do more harm than good.

During debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964: “Rights…belong to all of us regardless of color…” and let me tell you why this bill would actually make racism worse.

Today: of course black lives matter, but let me tell you why police reform hurts the people it purports to help.

But you really want to see this pattern within the SBC, right? Ok, let me show you with one suggestive example.

After the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision in 1954, Southern white elites came under intense pressure from the grassroots to resist school integration. The same dynamic played out within the SBC as numerous regional associations in the South passed resolutions declaring their unalterable commitment to segregation and criticizing convention bodies such as the Christian Life Commission and the Sunday School Board for their moderate racial statements.

What were SBC elites to do? On the one hand was the Christian principle of love without regard to color. On the other was the inflammatory political question of school integration. The general and the specific were colliding. Probably no one in the SBC faced these issues more directly than Brooks Hays.

Hays found himself playing key roles in both the politics of the South and the Southern Baptist Convention. A Congressman from Arkansas, Hays was known as a relative moderate on racial questions, but what moderation meant in that moment needs clarification. Hays signed the 1956 “Southern Manifesto” declaring opposition to Brown v Board and encouraging states to “resist forced integration by any lawful means.” Yet during the Little Rock Crisis, Hays advocated compromise and became a target for segregationist criticism.

The Southern Manifesto, widely seen as reactionary outside the South, was the bare minimum politicians within the South had to support to maintain credibility. Hays was rewarded for his painful balancing act. Southern Baptists elected him to the presidency of the convention in 1957. From that position Hays continued to remind his constituents that he had gone on the record against “forced integration.” At the same time, he declared that he was “trying to follow New Testament principles, particularly the injunction of Paul to ‘speak the truth in love.'”1

Hays and other SBC elites tended to see themselves as standing between the “extremes” of the White Citizens’ Councils on the one hand and the NAACP on the other. While advocating Christian love and deploring “hatred” of all kinds, they accused the people who were actually resisting racism of promoting “anarchy.” At every turn, the non-negotiable element of their racial rhetoric was not black freedom, but the unity of the SBC. As Hays put it,

Our principle interest right now is to hold our scattered congregations together. Our people entertain differences on the race question, but I am trying to steer a course that will put no strains upon us and enable us to differ in love.2

This remains the principle interest of SBC elites in 2020. Instead of standing for racial justice come what may, they offer the same sorts of platitudes their ancestors did, while once again condemning anti-racism as it actually exists. It is a curious set of commitments. The convention, for all its flaws, must be held together at nearly any cost. But anti-racist movements and organizations must be examined with a fine-tooth comb and rejected if they fall short in any way.

The narrative within the SBC is that there have been drastic changes since the deplorable days of Southern Baptists’ support for segregation. But their own rhetoric shows how empty these claims are. Opposing racism in theory while accommodating it in fact is a very old strategy, and today’s SBC elites are giving it new life.

1 Brooks Hays to Mrs. R.C. McLeod Nov 6 1957, Brooks Hays Papers, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives.

2 Brooks Hays to Mr. D.K. Martin, January 15, 1958, Brooks Hays Papers, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives.

*For a much more sympathetic account of Hays’ actions see David Roach.

Keep the Focus on George Floyd

~ Jesse Curtis ~ 2 Comments
Jerry Holt/Star Tribune

The police killed George Floyd and are not being held accountable for their actions. The core fact from which all events flow is George Floyd’s precious life senselessly snuffed out on the pavement. It is a galling and egregious example of the world African Americans live in every day under the suspicion of the militarized state. Black communities face a policing system utterly unlike the one most white Americans experience. It is punitive, intrusive, and harsh; yet for all that, does not protect.

The death of George Floyd once again raises in the national consciousness the urgency of black liberation and the need for wholesale policing reform. The abolitionists, too, must be heard. They expand our imaginations and help us think anew about the restorative communities and systems we might build together.

But now we’re in a cycle we’ve seen many times before. Police violence, with almost inexorable logic, produces a community response. When that white moderate slips into our newsfeed and says, “Sadly, all this rioting and looting is undercutting the legitimate concerns people have,” what should we do?

Don’t get upset with them or get sucked into a big argument. If you’re debating the merits of rioting, you’re losing.

Instead, shift the focus to George Floyd’s invaluable life and the injustice his death exposes. The state started this, and only the state can stop it. Indeed, the DA has it within his power to deescalate the situation whenever he chooses. He only needs to do the right thing and arrest the officers. But even if and when that happens, we will see the same cycles of violence play out in the future unless this country gets serious about changing its whole idea of policing. This is urgent.

If you’re a black resident of Minneapolis and you want to burn some shit down—especially a police station!—I’m not here to quibble with you. But if, like me, you’re a random white person watching events unfold from the comfort of your living room, I implore you to resist the urge to treat the life and death struggle of black liberation as an abstract moral debate. We need to speak and act strategically. This uprising is not here to serve your emotional catharsis or sense of moral superiority.

I’m seeing lots of people on social media resorting to this familiar brand of commentary: “If you’re more concerned about looting of property than the murder of a person then…” This line of argument is obviously correct. It rightly points out the racism, dehumanization, double standards, and hypocrisy in American ideas of violence, national myth, capitalism, and so on. But here’s the thing: if you’re debating the merits of rioting you’re losing.

You’ve no doubt also seen the famous Dr. King quote about riots being the language of the unheard. Even more provocatively, Dr. King said on another occasion that he was “not sad that black Americans are rebelling.” Why, then, did he work so tirelessly to prevent riots? Why did he meet with gang leaders, coerce and cajole and constantly seek to defuse violence? Because he understood that the uprisings harmed the cause more than they helped.

During the civil rights movement, the side perceived as being more violent was invariably losing. This was such common knowledge that it was bedrock strategy for the movement. Why did smart racists, from police chief Pritchett in Albany to Mayor Daley in Chicago, seek to hide the violence of white supremacy? Because they well understood the same calculus.

Anyone who has read movement speeches and writings knows that activists were constantly exposing the double standards of American life, including around questions of violence. But most of them also possessed a hard-headed sense of strategic purpose. Unless your plan was a pie in the sky vision of an armed revolution and black separatist republic, you needed to take actions that enhanced your movement’s political power, not weakened it.

The urgent necessity today is black liberation. What if, in fact, violent uprisings are harmful to that cause? There is strong evidence that they are. The self-satisfaction of being in the right and knowing white Americans are hypocrites is little consolation then. Omar Wasow has done important work showing that in the 1960s, nonviolent protest activity was associated with increases in Democratic vote share, while violent protest activity correlated with increasing support for law and order politics.

One way white people can be productive on social media in these days is to resist the urge to follow every rabbit trail in the predictable cycle of argument and recrimination that follows in the wake of state violence. We want justice for George Floyd. We want to change American policing. We want black freedom. That’s the message to hammer home again and again.

God with Us: A Conversation with Ansley Quiros

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

Ansley L. Quiros is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Alabama. Her new book, God with Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942-1976, is available now.

Curtis: What is the main argument of God with Us?

Quiros: The struggle over civil rights was not, for many, just about lunch counters and waiting rooms or even access to the vote; it was also about Christian orthodoxy. God with Us examines this theological struggle through the story of one southern town–Americus, Georgia–where ordinary Americans both sought and confronted racial change in the twentieth century.

Curtis: What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?

Quiros: For me, the most challenging aspect of actually writing the book was balancing the narrative and the historical argument. I found myself, at moments, getting swept up in the story and momentarily abandoning the analysis, and then at others interrupting the sweep of events with more abstract historical musings. Balancing those impulses– presenting a swift narrative while also making a real argument—proved difficult but I’m thankful to great editors and readers who helped smooth the whole thing out. One thing that was delightful to realize was how even one careful word can hold the thread of analysis, one name drop can keep a story in mind.

Curtis: Your book is very theological and it wears that on its sleeve. Did you get pushback from other historians? It seems to me that historians, theologians, and religious studies scholars are often talking past each other even if we’re writing about similar things. Was it difficult for you to situate your book disciplinarily?

Quiros: It was, but just a bit. After an initial explainer of my choice to foreground theology, I found most historians to be quite supportive. Most know instinctively that historical research has tended to diminish the role of faith in people’s lives, not the institutions so much, but the content and effects of belief in the past. This is partly because these things are obviously difficult to get at, but also because the academy can skew secular. The religious studies/theology folks I spoke to occasionally wanted more theologizing, but most understood this was primarily a history book and appreciated the effort to bring lived theology into the conversation.

Curtis: You make a point of showing that white southern Protestants had theologies of segregation that were robust, sincerely held, and internally consistent. In doing so, I think you make a convincing argument against the cultural captivity thesis. Was that something you knew early on in the project you wanted to do, or did it take shape as your research developed?

Quiros: This actually developed as I read David Chappell’s work and the responses from Charles Marsh and Jane Dailey in particular. Truly, this question of theology and culture/politics —the chicken and the egg in some senses—is a perplexing one. On different days, especially in our current political moment, I find myself wondering about it. (I did so here, in fact!)

Curtis: Where do you see the field going from here? What is next for you?

Quiros: I don’t know where the field will go from here, but I think broad evangelical support for the Trump Administration and what I see as consistently racist policies will provide a lot of fodder! As for me, I have two projects in the works. One is an exploration of the Atlanta street party known as Freaknik. It’s a wild story, but one that reveals much about the city of Atlanta, the rise of the black new South, and the limits of black governance in the multicultural 1990s. The other project is spiritual biography of Charles and Shirley Sherrod, racial justice activists who have spent their lives in Southwest Georgia. I guess I’m not done with Georgia yet!

In White Evangelical Attitudes Toward Politics, Echoes of the Civil Rights Era

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

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Earl Stallings, Pastor of First Baptist Church of Birmingham, shakes hands with black worshipers on Easter Sunday, 1963. Stallings was one of the “white moderates” who called for an end to civil rights protests and whom King wrote against in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. After this picture was published nationwide, Stallings received many appreciative letters from white Christians praising him for his courage in welcoming black activists to his church.

During the 1950s some Southern Baptist leaders worried that the “race problem” had the potential to split the Southern Baptist Convention. They worked very hard to make sure that didn’t happen. The way they thought about the problem and their responsibility for it is instructive in our own era of political controversy.

The “race problem” was a problem because it created heightened social tensions and threatened Christian unity. Most Southern Baptist leaders seemed to think of their responsibilities in this order:

1. Maintain unity with fellow Southern Baptists

2. Calm tensions

3. Gradually improve the situation for “Negroes”

To implement this agenda, Southern Baptist leaders invoked the principles of Christian love and spiritual equality. They reminded Southern Baptists that each individual was created in the image of God and that Christ died for all. They also urged respect for the law of the land and the Supreme Court, however distasteful its decisions might be. While denying support for “forced” integration, they positioned themselves squarely in the moderate middle and denounced the “extremists” on both sides.

This rhetoric positioned these Southern Baptist leaders ahead of their constituents, nudging them toward gradual change. If the non-negotiable goal was to maintain the unity of the Southern Baptist Convention, these moderate leaders pursued a smart strategy.

But there are other ways of looking at it. It seems clear that it was more important to Southern Baptist leaders to stay unified with white racists than to act in solidarity with black Christians. In a moment in which unity and justice seemed incompatible, unity was more highly prized. I am not aware of a single case in which a Southern Baptist church openly preaching white supremacy during the civil rights era was disfellowshipped.* What I’ve seen, instead, are polite letters exchanged between Southern Baptist leaders and brazenly heretical pastors.

And when Southern Baptist leaders denounced extremists, they were talking about the NAACP on the one hand, and the Klan and Citizens’ Councils on the other. In this world of white Christian moderation, those advocating equal treatment immediately and those advocating white supremacy forever (backed up by violence and economic reprisal) were dismissed alike as extreme. There are lots of words we could use to describe this posture, but I don’t want Christian to be one of them.

It is difficult for us to step into the shoes of those leaders, to be able to feel how murky it all seemed, how hard it was for them to imagine black freedom, how much courage even pitifully inadequate statements required. Pastors who spoke boldly tended to lose their jobs. Churches that integrated often lost key members, or split entirely in an angry divorce. When Southern Baptist leaders worried that unity was at stake, they weren’t wrong.

But I submit that they were wrong to think that unity was the highest value. They were wrong to think that heightened tensions were the problem rather than a symptom. They were wrong to tell black people to wait for their freedom. They were wrong to try to stay unified with Christians who hated the commands of Christ.

Now in our own time of heightened political and social tensions, with an election just days away, many Christians want to prioritize unity. We don’t want politics to divide us. This sentiment isn’t wrong, but it does need to be contextualized. What is political does not come down to us from on high; it is negotiated and imagined. It is made up. And that ought to give us pause.

We are familiar with the partisan Christian who has made an idol out of politics. This is the person who will always find a way to toe the party line and make the scriptures line up to it. We are less familiar with the idea that Christians who espouse unity and political toleration can also make an idol out of politics. This is the person who defines “the political” so capaciously that vast areas of the Christian life are reduced to “let’s agree to disagree.” This person finds a way to stay in the moderate middle by framing important questions of Christian discipleship as merely political.

It is sobering to understand that millions of sincere Christians imagined the life and death struggles of African Americans as “politics.” They were wrong to think that way. Now, as the President and his party promote racism and hatred in the vilest terms, Christians who thrill to that message are turning away from Jesus. And Christians who insist that these “political” opinions should not affect Christian unity are profoundly mistaken. Christian ethics must guide us in all aspects of our lives. When we make an exception for politics, we only reveal what our god really is.

* Earlier this year a church was disfellowshipped for its racism. I want to research this more. Please let me know if you are aware of cases of disfellowshipping over racism during the 1950s-1970s.

Civility Is A Strange Hill To Die On

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

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John Stennis, one of the most civil white supremacists you’ll ever see.

A restaurant owner asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave and suddenly we’re all debating the future of the republic. Civility or else! We’ve been here before. In my article on the colorblind consensus in the 1990s, I show how the idea of civility was integral to the memorialization of white supremacists in mainstream media. Here’s what I had to say about Mississippi Senator John Stennis:

Stennis had long embodied a particular kind of civility—what William H. Chafe in his classic study of the black freedom movement and white establishment in Greensboro called “a way of dealing with people and problems that made good manners more important than substantial action.” As the memorialization of Stennis would reveal, this sense of civility still held considerable purchase in the white American imagination. As the nation remembered the career of one of its longest-serving senators, Stennis’s civility loomed larger than his policy aims. Many memorializers held up civility as an ultimate good, without scrutinizing the limitations of Stennis’s brand of civility or the white supremacist purposes for which he deployed it.

To be historically minded is to understand that civility has often been used as a deliberate strategy to oppress people. This fact does not in itself mean that we should be actively uncivil. But it should give us pause and remind us that there are higher values–love, justice, peace—which are far more sturdy and uncomfortable and disruptive to the status quo than the concept of civility.

Was The Country Ready For Obama?

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Was the country ready for a black president? If Obama advisor Ben Rhodes is to be believed, Obama himself privately wrestled with this question after the 2016 election. Peter Baker reports on Rhodes’ new memoir:

Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory.

“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.

He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.

In the weeks after Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Obama went through multiple emotional stages, according to a new book by his longtime adviser Benjamin J. Rhodes. At times, the departing president took the long view, at other points, he flashed anger. He called Mr. Trump a “cartoon” figure who cared more about his crowd sizes than any particular policy. And he expressed rare self-doubt, wondering whether he had misjudged his own influence on American history.

This is a fascinating window into President Obama’s state of mind after the election. A few thoughts:

1. What does it mean to be “too early”? If the timing of progress is measured by the scale of the backlash to it, then the civil rights movement was too early, and by a lot more than a decade or two. Would it have been better to listen to the white moderates in the 50s and slow down? This isn’t even a question most people consider because it seems obviously wrong. When freedom is not demanded, it is not granted. If we’re thinking about backlash, emancipation was about a century too early! Justice can’t wait for oppressors to change their mind.

In the immediate shock of the backlash I understand why Obama would feel as he did, but this is what change usually looks like. Only after the fact, with the passage of time, do we craft tales of progress out of the chaos and uncertainty through which people actually lived.

2. Still, I continue to be astonished by the preternatural restraint Obama showed throughout his presidency. In the face of the Republican Party’s descent into outright racism and conspiracy theory, how could Obama not wonder, on an emotional level, every single day of his presidency, whether he had arrived too soon? I had profound moral disagreements with President Obama, but he demonstrated a decency and strength of character that is sorely missed.

In this respect I am a staunch social conservative. I have an old-fashioned belief that the moral standards of our entertainers and leaders really matter, not only for their jobs, but for setting an agenda and tone for the entire country. I hate that our popular culture is a cesspool of sex and violence. I hate that pornography is mainstream and acceptable. I hate that our President is an evil man who embodies all these things. I miss President Obama!

3. Obama probably did misjudge his influence on American history, and would have been well-served by more self-doubt throughout his presidency. This was one of his weaknesses.

4. A lot of this isn’t about Obama. We’ve probably underestimated the degree to which sexism played a role in the 2016 election. All else being equal, it seems there are a significant number of Americans who would rather be led by stupid men than competent women.

“Will the Jungle Take Over?”

~ Jesse Curtis ~ 5 Comments

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National Review, 1961

My new article, “‘Will the Jungle Take Over?” National Review and the Defense of Western Civilization in the Era of Civil Rights and African Decolonization,” is now available online from the Journal of American Studies. If you don’t have access through your institution I’m happy to email you a copy. Here’s a taste:

In the fall of 1962, William F. Buckley, Jr., intellectual dynamo of the new American right and founder of National Review magazine, was in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. As Buckley would later relate, in the town of Laurenco Marques he had to cross a river “full of crocodiles and hippos” without the benefit of a bridge. Instead, “in a spirit of easy-going chaos,” four Africans pushed a small ferry across the river using “bamboo poles.” The entire operation consumed forty-five minutes. Buckley, while emphasizing his own ineptitude in manual labor, informed his readers that he could have readily reduced the voyage to half an hour using the same tools as the four black men. Still these men persisted, day after day, in pushing their little ferry across the river in the same chaotic manner. “They simply do not use their minds,” Buckley wrote, “and do not change their ways.” For Buckley, the moral of the river-crossing tale was clear: African backwardness justified European rule on the continent. Yet much of the “West,” enthralled by abstract notions of equality, had set itself on a “suicidal” course of decolonization. Portugal, with hard-headed good sense, did not give in to this idealistic egalitarianism. Instead, it dealt with Africans “as you would treat grown-up children,” Buckley noted with satisfaction.[1]

What does this have to do with the civil rights movement? How were conservative intellectuals’ views of African decolonization and the American civil rights movement linked? When and why did National Review begin to promote scientific racism? You’ll have to read the rest to find out!

[1] William F. Buckley, “Must We Hate Portugal?” National Review, 18 Dec. 1962, 468.

 

Another White Evangelical Self-Critique, And Its Limits

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

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The crushed body of Reverend Bruce Klunder lies in the mud, April 1964

It is common to make distinctions between northern and southern white evangelicals during the civil rights era. Northerners are cast as more moderate, while southerners are assumed to be more reactionary. Even if this interpretation captures a truth about the overall posture of these regional groupings, it definitely undersells the extent to which segregationist theology had made inroads among white evangelicals nationwide.

In June, 1964, an editorial in Eternity critiqued white evangelicals as a group with little regional distinctiveness:

Let’s face it. Most evangelicals, whether they are from the North, South, East or West, are supporters of the status quo, and consequently tend to be segregationists. They would rather not discuss the matter at all, but if you press them, they will spout almost the same defensive arguments as the most reactionary Southerner, whose white-dominated world really is threatened. They speak bitterly against the liberals who, they say, substitute social action for the gospel of redemption.”

This is another remarkable critique of white evangelicals from white evangelicals. I find these sorts of documents fascinating in part because it helps us to see how the intra-evangelical debates of today are very old. We’ve seen this movie before. In the age of black lives matter and Donald Trump, the claims and counterclaims and misunderstanding among fellow evangelicals feels very, very familiar.

In that same 1964 editorial, the authors described themselves as “editors of an evangelical magazine that has suffered for taking a position on the racial issue.” Perhaps a dig at the wishy-washy cowardice of Christianity Today is implied there.

Yet even Eternity placed sharp limits on its support for black aspirations. The moment protestors turned to violence the editors were prepared to condemn their behavior with particular venom. After a civil rights protest in Cleveland left a white pastor dead and black protestors attacked the driver of the bulldozer who had inadvertently crushed the man, Eternity described the “animal-like fury” of their assault and condemned “demonic” efforts to “whip up the passions of the crowd.” These descriptions betray a visceral horror lacking in their criticisms of white violence of the same period.