Tag: racism

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.

What We Still Get Wrong About White Flight—And Why It Matters

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

This week I went with my son on a church mission trip to Detroit. After living most of my adult life in segregated black neighborhoods in Chicago and Philadelphia it was more than a little unsettling to approach Detroit from the position of a white short-term mission-tripper from a small town. In Philadelphia I often spoke to short-term mission teams to orient them to the historical and racial context of what they would experience during their week of volunteering in the city. To be on the other side and be spoken to was a healthy blow to my ego.

Our time in Detroit was also a reminder of why it’s so important that we talk accurately about the past. One evening we went to the site where the 1967 Detroit uprising began. Our guide, a white woman in her sixties, said she vividly recalled hearing the news of the riot when she was a child. She told us that police mistreatment of black residents and lack of opportunity were primary causes of the rebellion. So far so good. I was glad she spoke clearly about this. Then she told us that on the eve of the rebellion Detroit was a vibrant and bustling city but that the riot caused a fundamental shift.

“That was when white flight began,” she said.

This historically false claim may have tragically undercut all the good she was trying to communicate to us. I’ll explain first why it’s false and then explain why this particular false statement is so consequential.

By the time of the uprising, Detroit had already been weathering two decades of economic restructuring as postwar industry moved out of central cities. As factories built in urban cores in the early twentieth century became obsolete, companies decentralized their operations, building more modern and automated facilities in spacious suburbs. They looked even further afield to other states in search of more pliant workforces in places where unions held less power. Industry spread out. Capital moved. In the twenty years before the uprising, Detroit lost nearly half its manufacturing jobs! Hundreds of thousands of white residents had already left and the city had entered into an era of sustained population decline that has continued to the present day. Indeed, the very neighborhood where the riot began was nearly all white twenty years before, but flipped to all black during the 1950s.

In short, the 1967 uprising was the exclamation point on two decades of economic restructuring and white flight, not the sudden start of something new. The uprisings of the 1960s only added fuel to fires that had started burning decades earlier. Tom Sugrue made all of this painfully clear over a quarter century ago in The Origins of the Urban Crisis.

Describing the 1967 rebellion as the starting point of white flight has deeply troubling implications. The volunteers who hear this narrative are left with only one logical conclusion: a sensational act of black violence touched off Detroit’s catastrophic decline. This leaves impressionable visitors to the city ill-equipped to interpret the economic devastation they see around them. Faced with this seemingly incomprehensible hollowed-out city, they may resort to well-worn tropes of contempt on the one hand, and pity on the other. The conservative-minded volunteer may blame the people in these places for their poverty. The liberal-minded person may pity them. Both may fail to understand the forces that made these neighborhoods.

They are even less likely to be able to see these oppressed places as sites of ordinary community, where neighbors help neighbors, children play, and, against the odds our society imposes, people build lives for themselves and fulfill their dreams. Here’s how you know you’re operating in the contempt/pity paradigm: you can visit the place for a week but you can’t imagine living there. But really, these places are very livable! The forces of oppression are not total, and people can and do make homes for themselves in the places society has tried to leave behind.

So if the uprisings of the 1960s didn’t cause white flight, what did? The wrenching economic changes of the era were only part of it. The stark fact is that the mere presence of a black family moving into a neighborhood was enough to cause white flight. Banks, realty companies, governments, and churches all conspired to make white flight worse, but we must not evade the simplicity of what happened in the texture of peoples’ daily experience. Millions of white homeowners simply refused to have black neighbors. The white housewives in the infamous Crisis in Levittown documentary spoke for millions when they said things like this:

“If there are too many colored people around here I definitely will get out…”

“Well I just could not live beside them. I don’t feel that they should be oppressed, but I moved here — one of the main reasons was because it was a white community — and that’s the only place I intend to live. If I have to leave Levittown I will do so.”

These women declared their intentions in 1957, years before the uprisings of the 1960s. This intractable white hatred is what hurled American cities into crisis in the twentieth century. The economic restructuring of the postwar world was always going to be difficult. Cities across the western world faced similar changes and periods of decline. But in the United States white racism guaranteed that instead of facing these challenges together we would face them apart and make them worse. And we would offload the costs of the new economy on the very people with the fewest resources. Like millions of European immigrants, black migrants came to northern cities in search of the American Dream. But they were treated differently than any immigrant group. As white businesses and residents fled, they pulled up the ladders of opportunity behind them.

White flight was not a response to black violence. White flight was a riot itself. We’ve got to get this history right so that we at least have a fighting chance of seeing what is right in front of our noses when we go on a “mission trip” to “the inner city”: the people living in these places are utterly ordinary. They are not to be feared, pitied, or romanticized. They are not so different from us in their hopes and dreams for their children, but probably quite a bit more clear-eyed than you and I about the sickness still lurking in America’s soul.

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.

Three Highlights from How to Fight Racism

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

I’m reading Jemar Tisby’s new book, How to Fight Racism. I recommend it. It’s silly to write about the book before I’m quite done with it but I am getting excited and want to share some quick highlights. Here are three things I think Tisby does especially well.

–Moving past the racist/not racist dichotomy. Tisby reminds us we’re all on a journey. I like to tell people I think I’m a little less racist than I used to be. But it is absurd to suppose that I am not at all racist or that my actions are never racially harmful. How could I possibly grow up where and when I did, become socialized into whiteness, and not be racist? Tisby’s framing encourages us neither to despair nor feel self-righteous, but to move forward from whatever point we find ourselves.

Upon meeting me for the first time, a Black teenager once moved up close to me, looked me over, and asked, “Are you racist?” On one level, she was merely a rambunctious kid engaging in some deliberately provocative play. But on a deeper level she was very efficiently finding out crucial information about me. If I responded defensively or with anger, she would know I was not a safe adult and she should stay away. I don’t remember if I gave her “my less racist than I used to be” answer, but I do remember consciously letting go of any impulse to defend myself.

–Rejecting the personal/systemic false choice. A generation ago, there was a whole genre of Christian racial reconciliation books that said relationships were the key to racial progress. All too often, these books and their readers used this relationship focus as a weapon against structural critique. The liberals missed the point, they said. Systemic solutions didn’t deal with the human heart. Only relationships among Christians could create real racial progress.

Tisby rejects this simplistic prioritizing of the personal without losing sight of how important relationships are. He writes, “People need a personal motivation to disrupt the regular patterns of racism in their own lives and in society…It is difficult to pursue effective structural remedies to racism if you have little understanding of the personal experiences of marginalized people.” Instead of the personal and systemic being at odds, Tisby sees personal relationships as a way to galvanize system-level action while keeping that action rooted in the real experiences of ordinary people.

Tisby’s insistence that fighting racism is a both/and matter also carries a challenge for white liberals and leftists. If you’ve seen white liberals speaking the rote language of racial enlightenment, throwing around academic jargon with ideological inflexibility, then you know how important real relationships are. If you’ve seen white liberals imagining their own cities as a white archipelago surrounded by black and brown no-go zones, then you know how important personal action is. (On more than one occasion, people have “misheard” Alicia and I when we tell them where we live. It just doesn’t fit their mental map).

If you’ve seen white liberals speaking the language of pity, then you know how important real connections to black leaders are. Tisby insists that we shouldn’t just vote for people who might change systems. We can reject the narrow range of personal choices our segregated society tries to funnel us into. We can rethink where we send our kids to school, for example.

–Rejecting the politics of church primacy. You’ve heard this one before too: “The church is the only hope for racial progress. Only the gospel can change hearts.” This might be a plausible point of view coming from a radical Anabaptist envisioning an Acts 2 kind of primitive Christianity. But it reeks of excuses when it comes from mainstream American Christians who envision a role for the state in all sorts of important moral matters only to conspicuously assert the singular primacy of the church when it comes to race.

Tisby does not downplay the importance of the church at all. In fact, his chapter on doing reconciliation right is excellent on specific ways churches should take action to pursue racial justice. But he recognizes the rhetorical role defenses of the church can play in justifying inaction at the social and political level. If you think racial progress comes only through the church, you ought to explain how the church will level the racial wealth gap. While you’re at it, do tell how the church will abolish racist policing and end school segregation. Of course, no one actually has such a plan, because these problems extend so far beyond the church’s capacity. Too often, the rhetoric of church primacy is really just another way of saying that racial oppression isn’t a serious problem demanding a systemic response.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that is so invested in the personal and ecclesial battle against racism, yet completely refuses to play the either/or game and give short shrift to systemic change. There is no contradiction between praying for a spiritual awakening for your hard-hearted friend to finally see the reality of racism, and at the same time pressuring institutions to pay reparations. They go hand in hand.

Tisby has a talent, I think, for meeting us where we are–wherever that may be–and challenging us to go a little further. This is a very good book.

What Did I Get Right and Wrong About The Trump Presidency?

~ Jesse Curtis ~ 1 Comment

What did I get right and wrong about the Trump Presidency? The answer cannot be left only to the vagaries of memory, so I recently looked over some of my old blog posts and social media from 2016.

The short answer: I’m pretty sure I thought it was going to be even worse than it was. I’m convinced this was the right way to be wrong. Details below.

On March 2, 2016, while Trump was battling for the Republican nomination, I wrote this:

In my judgment, all of this more or less came to pass. I offered no hard benchmarks here but my impression is that I envisioned an even more extreme degradation of our civic fabric than the one we’ve seen. I thought there would be more violence. The day before the election, I wrote this:

I feel very comfortable standing by these words. From Charlottesville to El Paso, we saw the consequences of the hateful climate Trump stirred up. Immediately after the 2016 election, I wrote a post on “What To Expect From A Trump Presidency.” Here’s a key bit:

In contrast to every other modern American president, Trump’s basic instincts are authoritarian. He does not believe in liberal democracy. He is a demagogue willing to stoke the most dangerous fault lines in our society in order to gain power for himself. We now must hope that his foolishness creates a presidency marked more by simple bungling than by a coherent plan of oppression….

So what should we expect from a Trump presidency? Start by assuming that Trump has generally been sincere and will try to govern roughly as he campaigned. He will continue to lie with impunity, and will seek to silence and bully the press to make his lies seem normal. He will continue to create a climate of hostility against nearly everyone who isn’t Christian, White, heterosexual, and male. Muslims and immigrants are likely to be targeted with special harshness.

Expect some moments of calm. Expect the media to tell us about Trump’s surprising moderation. But four years is a long time. If Trump doesn’t launch a proactive campaign of oppression beginning January 20, it is likely to be only a matter of time. It’s not that Trump will have a coherent plan to subdue the Republic. Indeed, probably his only clear plan so far is to arrange his affairs to allow maximum corruption and profiteering. This he has already begun to do. If nothing else, he and and his children intend to become very rich. But recall, again, that Trump’s instincts are authoritarian and demagogic. There are going to be crises, both foreign and domestic, during the next four years. Trump will not respond well to any of them. Trump’s mercurial and vindictive character will come through. And the thought of men like Bannon and Sessions whispering in Trump’s ear is not comforting.

It is possible things will somehow turn out more or less alright. But the more likely scenario is that we are entering a very dangerous time….

After all we’ve seen, it now seems quaint that I was so worried about Bannon and Sessions, but I think much of this has stood the test of time. I remember sitting at the dinner table before the inauguration shaking my head and saying, “People are going to die. People are going to die.” It felt surreal to know it was coming and to have so little power to alter events. If Trump never in four years found his way to a coherent plan to end American democracy, he did in the end try to do just that.

Combining my faulty memory with facebook posts from the time and these blog entries, it seems I imagined a presidency even more disastrous than the one we got. Specifically, I thought crackdowns on Muslims, immigrants, and BLM protests would be more deadly than they turned out to be. I thought that at some point Trump would start a war abroad to boost his standing at home. I also thought there was a high possibility of economic disaster. In short, I was an alarmist.

I’m glad I was. This was a much better way to be wrong than those who were constantly caught flatfooted throughout these crazy years, surprised by the latest thing Trump had done, or naive about how racist and anti-democratic his movement truly was. I’m glad I wrote posts like this one throughout these past four years, refusing to mince words about Trump’s violence and the threat of white racism. As powerful political forces attempted to destroy our ability to imagine a common morality and a common connectedness as beloved children of God, many of us looked evil in the eye and kept our integrity. I am grateful.

To be sure, alarmism can go too far. It must remain flexible, and above all tethered to reality. We can probably all think of people whose opposition to Trump seems to have become an unwitting instrument of self-degradation.

My alarmism is why I woke the morning of January 6th wondering how many people were going to die in Washington D.C. that day. I didn’t have any special insight. I just wasn’t trying to deny what’s been right in front of us all along.

Being somewhat wrong as an alarmist is preferable to the alternative not just because it gave me a better read on events. I argue we alarmists constrained this presidency. We knew how bad it could be, so we acted to stop it. Our activism was one of the factors that prevented the worst from coming true.

From the first week of the Trump presidency we were on the streets. We showed up at airports in massive numbers to protest the Muslim ban. That set a tone. The Women’s March set a tone too. Then we were on the streets in 2017 and 2018 to defend health care for the sick and to protect immigrants at the border. We voted in huge numbers in 2018 and gained the House. In 2020 we marched for BLM and overwhelmed the racist forces with the highest voter turnout in over a century.

The Trump administration tried to create a culture of impunity. We didn’t allow it. Words and character matter. The Constitution is worth preserving. These fundamentally conservative intuitions became the stuff of liberal resistance in the Trump era.

The most important thing I got more wrong than right is captured in my 2016 preview of the Trump presidency:

We must engage Trump supporters with undiminished love and decency. Love is resistance. We must be open-hearted, lacking bitterness or animosity. We cannot rely on the usual norms of respectability that help us be kind to each other. We must love not because Trumpism is reasonable, but because the people who have put their faith in it are human beings made by God, and are infinitely valuable. And so, too, are all the people Trumpism will hurt. In the dark era we are entering, affirming the sacred worth of every person we encounter is an act of resistance.

I was right to try to live up to this code; wrong in how often I failed. All too often, I was more invested in my self-righteousness than in practical efforts to help people Trump was hurting. Christians are called to love our enemies, not obsess over them! Too often, I was obsessed over my posture toward Trump supporters rather than focusing on being in solidarity with oppressed people. I was often closed-hearted and bitter, preoccupied with being right, leaving very little room left for love or practical action.

Awareness is wasted without action. Indeed, “It is a sin when someone knows the right thing to do and doesn’t do it.” Too often, as I sat in self-absorption, this biblical rebuke could be leveled right at me.

But we can also be gentle with ourselves. My fellow alarmists, don’t be sheepish. Don’t doubt what you experienced and the pain it caused you. To live through moments of crisis is to be more fully aware of the frailty of the individual in the sweep of history. So often the public action I took was the leftovers—after the papers were written, the classes taught, the dinners made, the children put to bed. The biggest challenges of the era were not, after all, public. They were inside my own head and home.

I return again to one of my favorite apocryphal anecdotes. The little boy is learning about the civil rights struggle and asks, “Grandpa, were you in the Klan or the FBI?” (The boy didn’t have a clear grasp of who the good guys were but we’ll leave that to the side).

“Son,” his grandpa drawls, “I was just in Georgia.”

There is a welcome humility in recognizing that during this era of crisis, “I was just in Georgia.” And there’s a more positive spin we might put on this anecdote. The point of liberal democracy is precisely so that more of us can be “just in Georgia,” living simple lives at peace with ourselves and our neighbors, unburdened by the fear that our actions may be of great historical consequence.

When I think back on this era I will be glad for the times I was on the street marching with others, doing what little I could to link my fate with my neighbors. I will be glad for the small practical things I tried to do here and there. I won’t miss, and I regret, the time I wasted doomscrolling on twitter.

We’ve come through a dark time, and none of us can know with certainty whether the dawn or still greater darkness lies just ahead.

Lord, have mercy, and teach us to love with action.

African American Missionaries To Africa in the Age of Jim Crow: A Conversation with Kimberly D. Hill

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

I recently asked Kimberly D. Hill a few questions about her new book, A Higher Mission: The Careers of Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston in Central Africa.

What’s the argument of A Higher Mission?

My book argues that alumni of historically black colleges and universities transformed their academic preparation into innovative ministry strategies in central Africa. I trace several of these strategies to these American ministers’ interactions with local African villagers, church members, and students. These neighbors motivated missionaries to adjust their own plans to fit local interests and conditions.  The book focuses on a Fisk University graduate named Althea Brown and a Stillman seminary graduate named Alonzo Edmiston. They met in 1904 and married while serving with the American Presbyterian Congo Mission.

Most of the Edmistons’ three decades of joint ministry involved cooperation with a rare team of fellow African American Presbyterian missionaries. Only one of those missionaries has been the main subject of previous scholarly books: the Reverend William Henry Sheppard. The strategies of African American ministers were often overlooked or cut short due to overlapping pressures during colonization, the Jim Crow era, and the Great Depression. But those pressures did not extinguish these ministers’ goals, and evidence of their work remained apparent even after their lifetimes.

Could you talk more about those “overlapping pressures” you mentioned? To what extent do you see the Edmiston’s explicitly grappling with the in-betweenness of being African American missionaries in Africa in an age of white supremacy? Did they feel like they were walking a tightrope? Did they engage with the ideological currents of the time, such as Garveyism and pan-Africanism, or were these things far outside their orbit?

The specific history of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission inspired church members and observers to pay special attention to race relations among this group of Southern Presbyterians. After its 1891 founding by Sheppard and his white colleague, Samuel Lapsley, the Congo Mission staff included eleven African Americans by 1908. Robert Benedetto’s introduction to Presbyterian Reformers in Central Africa includes a section about the use of honorary titles and other signs of perceived racial integration among the missionaries, but Benedetto also details some of the lingering issues. Because Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston served the Congo Mission through the late 1930s, they observed major shifts in the ways that African American leaders were addressed by the Presbyterian Church in the United States and by European colonial governments. The Edmistons navigated shifting race-based travel restrictions that threatened to bar them from the trains and British ships that were part of typical travel between the US and the Congo. The Edmistons watched as most of their black colleagues were dismissed from missions service based on complaints about their actions, their demeanor, or their abilities. The Edmistons adjusted their own professional duties in order to avoid further accusations that their degrees from historically black academic institutions were insufficient.

Beyond their ministry tasks, the couple also felt compelled to suspend personal interests like their subscription to the Chicago Defender and their habit of following civil rights news updates. The Belgian government flagged the black press as a source of potential radicalism and occasional support for Marcus Garvey. This potential for surveillance was one reason that Alonzo Edmiston felt that it had become difficult by the mid-1930s to fulfill his ministerial purpose while maintaining his social and cultural connections within the United States.

What were the thorniest questions you had to figure out while writing this book?

Travel logistics posed the first hurdle for my research. Due to political complications abroad, I opted out of traveling to the Democratic Republic of the Congo before completing A Higher Mission. That decision motivated me to visit additional archives in the U.S. South and investigate how historical developments in that region influenced African American missionaries living abroad. That shift in direction enriched my work for this book as well as my next project. 

Other significant questions were posed by the format of my archival sources. I wanted to represent the perspectives of the Edmistons’ African neighbors without relying exclusively on journals, letters, and articles written by Americans. I addressed this question by incorporating some of the significant texts in African theology. For my introduction to these texts, I must thank my colleagues in the Yale-Edinburgh Group on World Christianity and the History of Mission.  The book is dedicated to one of the group’s co-founders, Dr. Lamin Sanneh.

Why does this history matter now?

I’ll answer this question by referencing an article by my former Southern Oral History Program supervisor, Dr. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (UNC-Chapel Hill). In her March 2005 article, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Hall argues that we must expand the perceived boundaries of when, where, and how the movement flourished. This expansion holds the key to recognition that reform remains possible in our lifetimes.

I see the potential for an expanded understanding of community responsibility through the study of early twentieth century African American missionaries, their academic institutions, and their domestic and international neighbors. Many of the people featured in my book helped each other survive famine, dire poverty, racial violence, political oppression, and the 1918 pandemic. I benefited from learning how they supported one another through difficult circumstances and why they taught younger generations to do likewise. Seeing how the benefits of that community support are still flourishing for some of the communities featured in A Higher Mission was especially inspiring.

Beware the Age of Symbolic Anti-Racism

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment
All are welcome here! (Terms and conditions apply. Please don’t change the restrictive zoning that keeps poor people out of our neighborhoods).

Earlier this year the city council of the picturesque town of Golden, Colorado, passed resolutions committing to “listening, learning, and acting to advance racial equity and improve the quality of life and health for all,” as well as the erection of a prominent banner in town declaring, “Golden Stands with Black Lives.” Notably absent from the agenda of this middle class Denver suburb was any practical plan to expand housing access so that more poor people (disproportionally people of color) might enjoy the benefits of this progressive city. But by golly Golden sure did “stand with” the 1.8% of its residents who are black. What a wonderful display of good intentions.

I picked Golden at random. One might tell a similar story of dozens of other towns and cities. Or take corporations for example. Amazon is the giant of the moment. Many of us rely upon it in the midst of the pandemic. And look how anti-racist it is! Don’t take my word for it: “We foster diversity and inclusion globally and look for ways to amplify underrepresented voices and empower diverse communities.” And they donated 10 million dollars! And they said this: “Black lives matter. We stand in solidarity with our Black employees, customers, and partners, and are committed to helping build a country and a world where everyone can live with dignity and free from fear.”

All of this solidarity and inclusion helps to explain why Amazon is at the forefront of promoting worker unionization. Just kidding. Amazon relentlessly crushes efforts to empower ordinary people and change the material circumstances of our lives.

Or take Coke and Nike. Black Lives Matter but structural genocide and settler colonialism have to be tolerated because we don’t want to mess with our global supply chains.

Welcome to the world of symbolic anti-racism. It’s not just towns and corporations playing this symbolic game. We as individuals risk playing it too. We need to recognize the game for what it is and insist on something more.

We’re living in an age of renewed anti-racist activism. We must press this activism with all the vigor we can. Yet we’re also living in an era of symbolic anti-racism. Symbolic anti-racism focuses on thoughts, intentions, words, and representation, while de-emphasizing practical steps that would improve the material circumstances of ordinary peoples’ lives. White people especially must resist the pull to make anti-racism a statement of who we are rather than a program of practical action to liberate others.

My thoughts turned in this direction after reading Adolph Reed’s recent piece this morning. For decades, Reed has been critiquing, from the left, the black political establishment. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement, African Americans got elite representation, taking mayor’s offices in major cities and ultimately the presidency itself, but too often they seemed to be merely new faces doing the bidding of the same old power structures. Reed stands for a kind of politics that is more focused on the material needs of the working class.

The limits of representation were on vivid display just this week as we found out Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration had tried to keep a video of police abuse from reaching the public. It unmistakably recalled Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s attempts to cover up Laquan McDonald’s murder. Chicago now has a black mayor, but how much difference will it make for ordinary black Chicagoans? (To be fair to Lightfoot, she says she was not aware city lawyers tried to suppress the video. We’ll see if another shoe drops in this story).

Representation matters, but the point of getting on the field is to play and win the game. Our relentless enthusiasm for black “firsts” in positions of power is a little too much like celebrating before the kickoff.

Symbolic anti-racists have learned the lingo. They know that they should invoke systemic racism and gentrification and mass incarceration. But the moralizing and posturing that is so evident in our time actually takes us back to the same old pathologies of white racial blindness. We look inward for unconscious bias, we put up outward displays of allyship, we say all the right things, and somehow this ends up being little different from the old saw that racial progress is a matter of changing our hearts and cleansing ourselves of personal prejudice.

In this respect it is telling that gentrification, a localized symptom of much more widespread and systemic housing exclusion, seems to take up as much “anti-racist” oxygen as the systemic exclusion itself.

You really can put a BLM sign on your lawn and oppose the low-income housing development down the street. You really can march for black lives and dismiss out of hand the possibility of sending your kids to a low-income public school. You really can post a lot on social media and never get around to donating a substantial portion of your income to black-led organizations. You really can mistake your anger at white racists for practical concern for black lives. You really can go on an ego trip and call it social justice activism. Believe me, I ought to know.

Look, I’m not saying symbols and words and representation don’t matter. They do matter, a lot. But the fact that the most powerful institutions in our society would rather hold an anti-racism seminar than a workers’ rights information meeting ought to give us a clue! Symbolic anti-racism is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We must not only be passionate, but analytical; not only well-intentioned, but practical. We must demand concrete results for ordinary people. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Black Southern Baptists Respond to the Critical Race Theory Hysteria

~ Jesse Curtis ~ 1 Comment

The fallout continues after Southern Baptist seminaries turned opposition to critical race theory into a matter of Southern Baptist orthodoxy. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, these white SBC elites are deploying an old racist playbook.

Dwight McKissic, Senior Pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, puts recent events in personal and historical context:

The seminary presidents’ statement represents a broken promise to the SBC, and especially to the African Americans in the SBC. In 1995, the SBC approved the following in a resolution:

Be it further RESOLVED, That we apologize to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime; and we genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously (Psalm 19:13) or unconsciously (Leviticus 4:27); and

Be it further RESOLVED, That we ask forgiveness from our African-American brothers and sisters, acknowledging that our own healing is at stake

The centerpiece of CRT is the existence of systemic racism and injustice, or the lingering repercussion and effects of the Jim Crow era. By denouncing CRT in totality, the seminary presidents have contradicted and taken back the words of the SBC in 1995. This is painful to watch. It is understandable why hundreds of African American Southern Baptists are reassessing their relationship to the SBC….

When I planted the church I currently pastor at age 27 through a partnership with Tate Springs Church, Tarrant Baptist Association, and the Baptist General Convention of Texas, they provided our congregation over $200,000 during the first three-four years of our existence. That included pastoral funding, building payments and general budget expenditures. This was from 1983-1986. I was told at the time that our funding exceeded most White church plants. They wanted to use me as a test case to determine the potential of an adequately funded Black church plant. By God’s grace, we passed the test! I am grateful!

I have really been blessed with wonderful experiences being a Southern Baptist. I have had an opportunity to preach on many platforms all over Texas and America. In some instances, this was directly connected to my SBC affiliation. I am grateful!….

For many years, I looked at the SBC through the eyes of a boy; and I really saw a very beautiful picture. But as Paul said, when I was a child, I thought like a child; I reasoned like a child. [But] when I became a man, I put aside childish things.” (I Corinthians 13:11).

As a man, I have sat at SBC tables and watched White churches pay 0% interest on small church loans, while Hispanic and Black churches had to pay 6%.
As a man, while touring the SBC Nashville headquarters and requesting information concerning the highest-ranking person in the seven-story facility, I was introduced to the head custodian….

I know what it is like to participate and benefit from the SBC as a boy. I also know what it is like, as a man, to have contributed financially to the SBC far, far more than they gave our church in those early years.

I have been a boy in the SBC, and like most Blacks, I have sat at the kid’s table. Blacks have systemically been excluded from entity head positions in SBC life. In 70 years, the SBC has never seen it fit to appoint a qualified Asian, Hispanic or African American to serve as an entity head.

But on this issue and Resolution 9, we will not take this like a boy. We are going to fight back, like a man.

The reason I have not and will not leave the SBC is because I would rather fight than switch. This is my Convention too!

Marshall Ausberry, President of the National African American Fellowship of the SBC, released a careful statement:

We affirm that systemic racism exists, and like all Southern Baptists we oppose racism in all its forms. We do realize that there are theories and constructs that help us to see and discover otherwise undetected, systemic racism in institutions and in ourselves.

I have been in conversations with SBC leadership and with the leadership of the Council of Seminary Presidents of the SBC. We will be meeting in the near future to further discuss our concerns that affect all ethnic groups in the SBC about the breadth and depth of their recent statement and published comments. As brothers in Christ, we of all people should be able to dialogue and resolve all of our concerns.

Ausberry asks Southern Baptists to avoid condemning each other on social media and commit to dialogue instead. But Ralph West, Pastor of the Church Without Walls in Houston, is more direct:

My dear brothers’ bias is apparent to all of us. Instead of reaching out to fellow brothers and sisters who have lived with the reality of racism in formulating their view, these six men took it upon themselves to dictate how we should think about racism.

Saying they condemn all racism makes them, in effect, no different than the Supreme Court that ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that all are equal while still being separate. You cannot claim to uphold equality without attacking the very systems undermining it. The Supreme Court also thought they believed in fairness and justice.

A general condemnation of racism is insufficient in a time when there are specific instances of it that go unaddressed. These men have covered their eyes and ears from seeing the faces and hearing the voices of those who know the truth of it. And thus, these men have given away their authority to speak on these matters.

I am their colleague and a member of the Southern Baptist family. While spending many years in affiliation with and in service of Baylor University, I still have maintained a strong connection to the SBC. I even recently returned to Southwestern to pursue a Ph.D. because of my desire to see Southwestern expand and return to its former state.

When I came back “home” to Southwestern, I even encouraged other ministers to do the same. I took President Adam Greenway’s invitation to return as a statement of good faith, that the seminary wanted to welcome me and many other Black ministers to contribute to its legacy.

The statement on critical race theory and intersectionality has soiled that good faith. I cannot maintain my affiliation any longer and therefore am withdrawing from Southwestern Seminary. Nor will I associate with the SBC any longer.

In the future, my primary seminary affiliation will be with Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary. There, I have been an affiliated faculty member since 2008.

Truett Seminary courageously continues to diversify. Truett boldly engages with the crucial issues concerning students and faculty of color in their community. This is what the body of Christ needs right now.

What the SBC seminary presidents have done has brought division and confusion to the body of Christ. They must repent and seek reconciliation with those who can properly inform them of the wrong they have done. They must ask the Lord to open their hearts to hear the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and how Jesus’ reign truly should impact our society.

These seem like significant repercussions. As an outsider to the SBC, my questions are not rhetorical; I do not claim to understand the ins and outs of this.

Did the seminary presidents anticipate this blowback? If not, how not? If so, did they deem the cost acceptable?

Is the SBC really willing to see decades of church planting and work with Black Baptists undone to shore up the loyalty of a shrinking population of conservative whites?

What has changed between 1995 and 2020? The 1995 apology, complete with the phrase systemic racism, generated effectively zero organized opposition. In contrast, today’s push from the right is organized, vocal, and militant. It is easy to say the political climate is different in the age of Trump, but this is more of a truism than an explanation. Why did the medicine of racial moderation go down so easily in 1995? Radicalized Republicans had swept into congress in 1994, Rush Limbaugh was all the rage, racialized controversies over welfare reform and affirmative action were intense, and I haven’t even mentioned OJ Simpson. It is not obvious that the mid-1990s were an auspicious moment for the SBC to appeal to African Americans without generating white backlash. But they did.

Has the SBC regressed since the 1990s? Sometimes we like to suggest that the Trump era has revealed what was always there. This might be so. But thinking historically requires us to reject inevitable stasis or progress. We must deal instead with the complexities of jagged ups and downs, including the possibility of regression. I sometimes wonder if the state of white evangelicalism circa 2020 is less a revelation than a devolution.

Let’s zoom out some more: can the center hold in evangelicalism? Or is this a high-profile example of a splintering movement?

Questions about Teaching the History of Race to White Students

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

At Temple University, one of the standard questions on student feedback forms is how the professor handled diversity in the classroom. In all my years at Temple, as far as I can recall, I’ve received one negative comment on this question. A student wrote that I did not challenge anti-white statements in the classroom. That was news to me! But it did cause me to reflect on my teaching.

On another occasion, during a discussion of US atrocities in the Philippines and American attitudes toward Filipinos a white student raised his hand and said, “But they didn’t do these horrible things because they were white.” This statement managed to be true, false, and missing the point all at the same time. How could I explain that in the moment, especially given the manifestly personal place from which the statement came?

On still another occasion, a white student wrote that systemic racism doesn’t exist and though the US had a problem with racism a long time ago, the problem has been resolved and is no longer an issue.

Another time a white student said it seems like it’s seen as acceptable to make fun of white people but you can’t say similar things about any other group, especially on social media.

If there is a problem here, it might be easy to locate it in the students themselves. Look at those reactionary white kids! This would be a grave mistake. To do so absolves me of needing to reflect on my teaching practices. It also forecloses the opportunity these exchanges give me to dialogue about how race might be changing now and how young white people are experiencing it.

The youngest generation is in some ways the most diverse in American history. More young white people are growing up feeling like they’re just one group among many rather than the dominant norm. I think most young white people experience this as a positive, but some struggle with it. In any case, it would be foolish to suppose that this context won’t affect how our white students experience the history of race in the classroom.

For those of us who are steeped in the history of racism and are constantly seeing connections between past and present (gee the appeal of the white Christian nationalism of the 1920s Klan seems awfully similar to the appeal of Trumpism a hundred years later) it can take a leap of imagination to remember that some of our white students may see the history of white racism as deeply disconnected from their own experience. Superficial narratives of innocence and progress may seem naive to us, but they make sense of the world as many white students understand it.

What are white students supposed to do? It doesn’t make sense to take pride in whiteness, because it was literally created as a technology of domination. Yet if a student disassociates from whiteness (I’m Italian; my ancestors didn’t own slaves; and so on) it is widely understood as a dodge. I think we ought to understand that our students may find it genuinely confusing to be identified as white in 2020. What does it mean? Does it really matter? What responsibilities does it entail? Am I allowed to be proud of it? Should I feel guilty? I think our students are wrestling with these questions.

I need to ask myself if my teaching is unwittingly abetting the white racism and racial grievance so evident in the politics of Trumpism today. This point requires some careful elaboration. My goal should never be the comfort, as such, of white students. Nor should I hesitate to explain why statements like “There’s no systemic racism” are false. But I am responsible if my own teaching failures, my own lack of clarity and precision, contribute to white students’ defensiveness, confusion, or anger.

Yet it would be profoundly unethical (racist actually!) for me to elevate the unique confusions of white students above the learning needs of other students in the classroom. (Yes I see the meta-irony here as this is a post about white students). The good news is that there is a win-win.

Showing students that race is constructed inside history, that it is contingent and arbitrary, is not just good history. Analytical clarity on this point, delivered through clear and specific historical examples, is vital if I am to have any hope of creating an anti-racist classroom. And it comes as a relief to students of all backgrounds. It is the foundation for understanding why whiteness and blackness are different, why we can critique race as a system of power without condemning the individuals in that system, why students can have confidence in their ability to shape the future, why identity is not destiny, and so on.

Truly understanding the history of race frees white students to divest from whiteness as core identity, while accepting their social location and the responsibilities it brings. It frees them to celebrate their Italianness, or whatever, in ways that do not protect investments in whiteness. If I just catalogue a long history of racial oppression and resistance without carefully denaturalizing race, students of all backgrounds can find it deeply uncomfortable. Careful teaching drives home that we are learning history. It shapes our present but it need not be our future.

The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland: James H. Madison On Why the History of the Klan Matters Now

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

James H. Madison is Emeritus Professor of History, Indiana University Bloomington, and author of The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland. I recently asked him a few questions about his important new book.

What’s the argument of The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland?

The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland places the hooded order of the 1920s squarely in the mainstream of American history. Klan members were neither marginal nor weird but mostly ordinary Americans, middle-class, white, and native-born. They saw themselves as the “good” people and as superior to immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and African Americans, those “others” who were causing the downfall of the nation.

What were the thorniest questions you had to figure out while writing this book?

Of course, I abhor the Klan’s ideals, but I also wanted to be fair to those who joined the Klan. I walked a tight line to avoid a simple condemnation and to avoid defending them.

As you mention in the book, in the newspapers of the 1920s there are numerous reports of robed Klansmen silently interrupting church services to present a donation. Can you talk more about how you interpret those events? What do you think was their significance in a local community?

Religious belief and organization were central. The Klan joined with Protestant churches and church members in a tight alliance. Klansmen interrupting a Sunday service was one of many illustrations of the alliance.

Why does this history matter now?

Klan voices ring into the twenty-first century even if the tones have changed. More than any other part of our history, Klan-like beliefs connect our past and present with a venomous tenacity. Today’s heirs don’t appear in robes and hoods and their words are more coded, but the message of us/them, of exclusion, of white racial superiority is clear.

Madison is also the author of the definitive account of the story behind one of the most infamous lynching images in American history. See that book here.