The End of White Christian America, page 15
The Most Segregated Hour in America
What role does religion play in segregation? In theory, a central part of the Christian church’s mission is to challenge its members to think beyond worldly perspectives and divisions. Churches are supposed to be sacred places where the social distinctions that structure politics or the workplace melt away. This ideal permeates the New Testament scriptures; it’s written into the lyrics of popular hymns like “In Christ There Is No East or West.” The words of the hymn extol a vision of racial harmony—“Join hands, disciples of the faith, whate’er your race may be. / All children of the living God are surely kin to me”—and its tune was the first African American music to be used in a white mainline North American hymnal.38 But however deeply the principles of racial equality may be enshrined in theology and liturgy, they have had little impact on the actual racial composition of Christian congregations, past or present.
Nearly a century ago, a leading mainline Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr—brother of Union Seminary’s Reinhold Niebuhr—argued in The Social Sources of Denominationalism that denominational divisions within the American Protestant churches—which fell along racial, ethnic, and class lines—were a glaring ethical failure.39 By Niebuhr’s lights, the churches of his day had abandoned one of the New Testament’s most central themes: the abolition of social distinctions within the walls of religious community. Instead, Niebuhr charged that contemporary churches had accepted “the accommodation of Christianity to the caste-system of human society.” He pulled no punches in the opening pages of the book: “The division of the churches closely follows the division of men into the castes of national, racial, and economic groups. It draws the color line in the church of God.”40 Niebuhr noted that nearly 90 percent of all African American Christians in the 1920s were members of churches affiliated exclusively with black denominations, and nearly all of the remainder were restricted to special conferences within white denominations.41
Just over three decades later, answering questions after a lecture at Western Michigan University in 1963, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously testified to the continued reality and effects of these divisions.
We must face the fact that in America, the church is still the most segregated major institution in America. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing, and “Christ has no East or West,” we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation. This is tragic. Nobody of honesty can overlook this. Now, I’m sure that if the church had taken a stronger stand all along, we wouldn’t have many of the problems that we have. The first way that the church can repent, the first way that it can move out into the arena of social reform, is to remove the yoke of segregation from its own body.42
Over the next few years, King returned to this point frequently. He did so for the last time in a sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1968, just five days before his assassination.43
During the civil rights movement, some demonstrators tried to expose the hypocrisy of southern churches by sponsoring “kneel-ins,” where interracial groups of college students would try to enter large, influential majority-white churches on Sunday mornings, often to find themselves turned away at the door.44 One white pastor, Rev. Ashton Jones, served six months in jail after leading an interracial group of protesters into Atlanta’s First Baptist Church, the largest Protestant church in the city and the twelfth largest in the Southern Baptist Convention. As he stood inside the church’s foyer on the day he was arrested, Jones told entering parishioners, “You’re going into a segregated church; you must be worshiping a segregated God.”45
Few churches continue to have overtly discriminatory policies, and there has been some increased integration over the last decade. But today’s churches continue to be remarkably segregated. Duke University’s National Congregations Study, which has been documenting trends in congregational diversity over the last two decades, found that between 1998 and 2012 the number of churchgoers attending predominantly white congregations with at least some black members increased from 57 percent to 69 percent, and the number of churchgoers attending predominantly white congregations with at least some Hispanic members increased from 54 percent to 62 percent. Few white Christians today, however, have the experience of attending churches with significant numbers of nonwhite members. For example, the survey makes clear that it’s rare to find integration that is more substantive than symbolic. Defining a mono-racial church as one that has more than 80 percent of its membership consisting of a single racial group, nearly nine in ten (86 percent) congregations, which account for 80 percent of churchgoers, remain essentially mono-racial.46
White Christian America and Race
The story of White Christian America and race has its roots in the Civil War, when conflicts over slavery and race opened fissures within white Protestant denominations that persist even today. Nearly all of the major white Protestant groups—Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists—were torn apart by disputes over slavery, forcing interdenominational schisms between North and South, Unionist and Confederate, abolitionist and slave-supporting factions.47 The Episcopalians and Lutherans reunited shortly after the Civil War, as did factions of Presbyterians, while regional divisions lingered among Methodists until 1939.48 To this day, white Baptists remain fractured, with the smaller denomination, American Baptist Churches USA headquartered in the Northeast, and the much larger Southern Baptist Convention anchored in the South and Midwest. In the 1950s, these groups’ divergent reactions to the civil rights movement flowed along familiar channels that had been carved over the course of more than a century by the forces of theology, culture, and politics.
White Evangelical Protestants: From Segregation to Racial Reconciliation
In 1956, the fiery Baptist preacher Rev. W. A. Criswell—pastor of Dallas’s First Baptist Church, the largest Baptist church in the world at the time—accepted an invitation from South Carolina State Senator Strom Thurmond to speak on February 22, 1956, to the General Assembly of the South Carolina legislature about the issue of the day: segregation. In his rambling extemporaneous remarks, Criswell defended social segregation within the church and in society at large. Marshaling an argument that has long served as a justification for slavery and segregation, Criswell explained that because each race has different physical traits and psychological aptitudes, they flourish best in separate environments. For example, he noted that while his white congregation couldn’t sing spirituals, “they can over there at the colored folks church.” He had particularly strong words for outsiders who were upsetting what he argued was a mutually beneficial arrangement—those “scantling good-for-nothing fellows who are trying to upset all the things that we love as good old Southern people and good old Southern Baptists.” He concluded his remarks by saying: “Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision . . . to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. . . . Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends.”49
No segment of White Christian America has been more complicit in the nation’s fraught racial history than white evangelical Protestants. And no group of white evangelical Protestants bears more responsibility than Southern Baptists, who comprise the overwhelming majority of white evangelicals, particularly in the states of the former Confederacy. As the largest Protestant denomination in the country, and the white Christian denomination most concentrated in the South, the SBC is an important bellwether for White Christian America’s progress on race relations. The SBC was, after all, created in the years before the Civil War as a haven for pro-slavery Southern Christians.50 In 1845, when the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society declared that any slave owner would be disqualified from consideration for missionary service, Baptist churches in the South seceded and formed the Southern Baptist Convention so that members would not have to choose between their slaves and their calling to be missionaries.
Following the Civil War, Southern Baptists stood by the southern status quo of segregation. Nearly a century after the Confederacy’s surrender, they were generally wary or outright hostile to the civil rights movement. In their sweeping Baptists in America: A History, historians Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins summarized Baptists’ relationship to the civil rights movement this way: “Typical white Baptists in the South viewed civil rights as at best irrelevant to the Christian faith and at worst a threat to their culture.”51
The Southern Baptist Convention—known for passing resolutions on even minor matters of concern—largely ignored the early civil rights movement. Their only official race relations resolution during the entire decade of the 1950s—which witnessed the Supreme Court’s desegregation of public schools, Rosa Parks and bus boycotts in Alabama, Emmett Till’s murder in Mississippi, church bombings in Alabama, and the governor blocking the integration of Little Rock High School in Arkansas—was a resolution issued in 1950 recommending that the denomination officially invite “Negro churches” to participate in simultaneous (but separate) revival meetings.52 Following the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the SBC did urge Baptists to accept the ruling “in harmony with the constitutional guarantee for equal freedom to all citizens, and with the Christian principles of equal justice and love for all men.”53 The report may have landed on the right side of history, but its main appeal was based not on repudiating racism and segregation but on respecting law and order once the matter had been decided.
Criswell’s speech to the South Carolina General Assembly was a potent example of the overtly segregationist faction within the Southern Baptist Convention during the civil rights era. Not all of their leaders were so forthright. Others within the SBC were more circumspect, but no less emphatic, in their advocacy for the maintenance of the segregated status quo. In his popular weekly sermons, the Reverend Douglas Hudgins—who presided as pastor of the powerful First Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, from 1946 to 1969—regularly told listeners that Christian faith was exclusively focused on the salvation of individual souls and had nothing to say on political matters. With Sunday services broadcast statewide and a large number of prominent political leaders—such as segregationist governor Ross Barnett—participating in its lay leadership, the church set the tone both within the denomination and in the halls of the Mississippi state capitol just a few blocks away.54
Hudgins strenuously avoided the racial tensions roiling all around him, even when the Ku Klux Klan targeted a friend and local rabbi, Perry Nussbaum. In retribution for Nussbaum’s outspokenness on civil rights, the KKK bombed first his synagogue and then his home. An exasperated Nussbaum accused Hudgins, on national television, of complicity through his silence. When Hudgins mounted the pulpit the following Sunday, he mentioned the bombing only in passing. As he turned to preach from a text that had nothing to do with racism, he added, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”55
Hudgins was certainly not alone in his theological justification of political disengagement on civil rights issues. In the South of the 1950s and 1960s, the widely held gospel of the status quo—what historian John Lee Eighmy described as the “cultural captivity” of southern churches—discouraged a robust Christian voice for racial equality.56 In 1964, for example, in response to the mobilization of black clergy and churches that drove the civil rights movement, independent Baptist leader Jerry Falwell delivered a famous sermon called “Ministers and Marches,” where he justified white clergy inaction on civil rights issues, declaring, “Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners.”57
To be sure, a vocal minority of Southern Baptists were advocating for civil rights.58 But in the 1950s and 1960s, the lethal cocktail of resistance and inaction represented by Criswell and Hudgins filled the cup from which most Baptists were drinking. Articles in the leading evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, encouraged Christians to root out racism in their own lives, but also criticized integration.59 Separating people of different races through law was not portrayed as a moral evil—in fact, some argued that it was necessary to maintain peace in the South. One author declared that supporters of integration were espousing a kind of “Christian communism.” In sharp contrast to the mainline-oriented Christian Century, Martin Luther King, Jr. was barely mentioned in Christianity Today’s pages. In January 1964, the editors noted—in two lines—that he had been selected as Time magazine’s “Man of the Year”; later that year, they mentioned in one sentence that he had won the Nobel Prize.60
There is evidence that resistance to racial integration helped rouse Christian conservatives around a political agenda in the late 1970s. The historian Randall Balmer contends that evangelicals were generally reluctant to take up the cause of abortion—which remained primarily a Catholic issue well into the 1970s—until it was linked to a broader conservative agenda, one that revolved around resisting the federal government’s crackdown on Christian schools that banned interracial dating, like Bob Jones University. Balmer quotes Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Christian Right, reflecting on activist strategy in the early years of the movement. “I was trying to get people interested in [abortion, school prayer, or the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution] and I utterly failed,” Weyrich said. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation. . . . It was not the other things.”61
By the 1980s, outright public resistance to desegregation had fallen out of favor. But the individualist flavor of Baptist theology, with its tendency to reduce racial problems to individual sin rather than systematic social discrimination, remained, ensuring that most responses to the race problem by groups like the Southern Baptist Convention were fairly shallow. Not until its annual meeting in June 1995 did the SBC adopt a resolution that broke this mold. A month before the convention—which marked the 150th anniversary of the SBC’s founding—a group of eight white and eight black leaders drafted a sober apology to African Americans for the role slavery played in the convention’s founding and for its consistent failure to support civil rights. Earlier resolutions had gone out of their way to minimize Baptists’ complicity in white racism and often simultaneously denounced civil disobedience or destruction of property as legitimate ways to enact social change. But this statement, which the convention-goers adopted, was unambiguous and direct: “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.”62
Given the SBC’s racist and segregationist past, this statement was unimaginable even a generation ago. Not surprisingly, however, the sins of the fathers continue to haunt the SBC’s attempts to deal with race today as they attempt to move from apology to reconciliation. This struggle was exemplified in the final chapter of the career of Richard Land, the head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Land first came to prominence during the 1980s. As ultraconservatives systematically took control of the SBC, Land was rewarded for his part in the takeover with a position at the head of the agency’s lobbying arm. During his early tenure, Land was instrumental in solidifying the SBC’s rightward turn and making sure it found expression in the SBC’s voice on Capitol Hill and in the media. Although he was best known for his outspoken opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, Land was also instrumental in organizing and backing the 1995 resolution on racial injustice. But Land was also single-handedly responsible for tainting the most visible signal that the SBC was changing its tune on race issues: the unanimous 2012 election of Rev. Fred Luter as the first black president of the mostly white denomination.63
Just months before Luter was slated to take office—and just weeks after the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida, an unarmed teenager who was fatally shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer—Land declared on his nationally broadcast radio show that black leaders were exploiting Martin’s case for political gain. When President Obama remarked that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin, Land accused Obama of “pour[ing] gasoline on the racialist [sic] fires.” He called black leaders “racial ambulance chasers,” asserting that they were using the tragedy “to gin up the black vote for an African-American president who is in deep, deep, deep trouble for re-election.”64 Land also defended George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch vigilante who killed the unarmed black teenager. Despite strong criticism from both within and without the SBC—including public remarks from Luter, who said that Land’s comments had hurt efforts to attract nonwhite members—Land stubbornly stood by his words for two weeks, even adding in defense of his remarks that a black man is “statistically more likely to do you harm than a white man.”65
Land only issued an apology after a graduate student at Baylor University posted evidence on his blog that the bulk of Land’s radio show comments—in addition to the insensitivity of their content—were plagiarized from a Washington Times editorial. Following that revelation, Land was called to a five-hour meeting with SBC leaders, including several African American pastors. After the meeting Land issued an apology for his “insensitivity,” but by then the die had been cast. The SBC canceled his radio show and publicly rebuked his remarks as “hurtful, irresponsible, insensitive, and racially charged.”66 Just five weeks after Luter’s historic election, Land announced his retirement.67
Land’s replacement, Russell Moore, a former professor of Christian theology and ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has struck a decidedly different tone. While Land openly referred to himself as a soldier in the “culture wars” and seemed to relish controversy, Moore has been more circumspect. As we saw in Chapter 4, Moore’s position on LGBT rights differs from Land’s more in tone than substance, but on the issue of racial equality, Moore is clearly breaking from the past. After a jury declined to indict police in the killing of Eric Garner, Moore released a podcast and the following statement, a striking contrast to Land’s remarks:
