Black and White and Red All Over: Why Racial Justice Is a Gospel Issue
— Tuesday, June 12th, 2012 —
As I write this, news reports tell us that we just might see, by the time you read this, the election of the first African-American president of the Southern Baptist Convention. This is significant for all sorts of reasons: one being, of course, that the SBC was founded, partly, to protect the “right” of slaveholders to be missionaries. It’s important also because it’s a test for whether the SBC will go forward with the gospel and mission we say we believe.
One of my earliest memories is of a substitute Sunday school teacher in my Southern Baptist church chastening me for putting a coin in my mouth. “That’s filthy,” she said. “Why, you don’t know if a colored man might have held that.” It might just be my imagination playing tricks on me, but it seems as though she immediately followed this up with, “Alright children, let’s sing ‘Jesus Loves the Little Children, All the Children of the World.’”
Now, this lady probably didn’t consciously think of herself as a white supremacist. She almost certainly didn’t think of herself as subversive of the gospel itself. She never thought about the hypocrisy of holding the two contradictory worldviews together in her mind. She probably didn’t see how her dehumanizing of African-Americans was a twisted form of Darwinism rather than biblical Christianity.
She wasn’t alone.
On the question of civil rights in the American Christian context, there is little question that, with few exceptions, the “progressives” were right, often heroically right, and the “conservatives” were wrong, often satanically wrong. In the narrative of the dismantling of Jim Crow, conservatives were often the villains and progressives were most often on the side of the angels, indeed on the side of Jesus.
The question is not whether the progressives won the argument or whether they should have won the argument; the question is why they were persuasive, ultimately, on this point (and almost no other) to their more conservative brothers and sisters. The turnaround is striking, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in my denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), where a generation ago most conservative leaders were segregationists.
Some, of course, will claim cynically that conservative evangelical leaders, like some national politicians, don’t play with racial demagogy anymore because such appeals don’t “work” anymore in 21st century America. Nobody wants to be seen as a racist. Well, okay, but, even if one accepts that argument, why is it true that a segregationist would be barred (and rightly so) from speaking at the SBC Pastors’ Conference of 2010 and wouldn’t be at the SBC Pastors’ Conference of 1950? Isn’t it because the people wouldn’t tolerate it? Well, why the change? It must be more than just changing American culture since conservative evangelicals have been in the throes of a much-hyped “culture war” on all sorts of issues since the 1960s?
Why is civil rights no longer a “culture war” issue? Why were the voices of the civil rights pioneers persuasive, not only to mainstream America but to conservative Christians as well? Some might argue it is because the culture has changed. But the culture has changed just as much (if not more so) on the question of gender and sexual issues, after three waves of feminism and a sexual revolution, but not so for traditionalist Catholics and confessional Protestants.
The reason SBC progressives, and the larger civil rights movement, were persuasive was because of the mode of their argument. The progressives, as scholar David Chappell shows in his book Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, appealed to biblical orthodoxy and missionary zeal, in their arguments, not simply to the arc of historical progress.
This is true at the macro level (think of the King James Version of the Bible woven so intricately into the themes of Martin Luther King’s speeches and sermons). It is also true at the micro level. SBC civil rights advocates–from Foy Valentine to T.B. Maston to Henlee Barnette–argued from decidedly conservative biblical concepts.
The civil rights movement struggled on multiple fronts. In the political sphere, leaders such as King pointed out how the American system was inconsistent with Jeffersonian principles of the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Politically, Americans had to choose: be American (as defined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) or be white supremacist; you can’t be both. King and his compatriots were right.
But the civil rights movement was, at core, also an ecclesial movement. King was, after all, “Rev. King” and many of those marching with him, singing before him, listening to him, were Christian clergy and laity. To the churches, especially the churches of the South, the civil rights pioneers sent a similar message to the one they sent to the governmental powers. You have to choose: be a Christian (as defined by the Scripture and the small “c” catholic apostolic tradition) or be a white supremacist; you can’t be both. They were right here too.
How can white supremacy be true, they would argue, if humanity is made from “one blood” in the creation of Adam? How can one segregate evangelistic crusades if the cross of Christ atones for all people, both white and black? If God personally regenerates repentant sinners, both white and black, how can we see people in terms of “race” rather than in terms of the person? If we send missionaries across the seas to evangelize Africa, how is it not hypocrisy not to admit African-Americans into church membership?
The biblical power of the argument is true, regardless of whether all the civil rights pioneers, in the SBC and out of it, believed in biblical orthodoxy.
Many did. See the faithful heroine Fannie Lou Hamer of Sunflower County, Mississippi, for example. If Baptists had a means of canonization, I’d support it for her. But regardless of personal faith, the civil rights heroes indicted conservative hypocrites, prophetically, with the conservatives’ own convictional claims. And, as Jesus promised, “My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.”
The arguments for racial reconciliation were persuasive, ultimately, to orthodox Christians because they appealed to a higher authority than the cultural captivity of white supremacy. These arguments appealed to the authority of Scripture and the historic Christian tradition.
This authority couldn’t easily be muted by a claim to a “different interpretation” because racial equality was built on premises conservatives already heartily endorsed: the universal love of God, the unity of the race in Adam, the Great Commission and the church as the household of God.
With this the case, the legitimacy of segregation crumbled just as the legitimacy of slavery had in the century before, and for precisely the same reasons. Segregation, like slavery, was shown to be what all human consciences already knew it to be: not just a political injustice or a social inequity (although certainly that) but also a sin against God and neighbor and a repudiation of the gospel. Regenerate hearts ultimately melted before such arguments because in them they heard the voice of their Christ, a voice they’d heard in the Scriptures themselves.
Conservative Christians, and especially Southern Baptists, must be careful to remember the ways in which our cultural anthropology perverted our soteriology and ecclesiology. It is to our shame that we ignored our own doctrines to advance something as clearly demonic as racial pride. And it is a shame that sometimes it took theological liberals to remind us of what we claimed to believe in an inerrant Bible, what we claimed to be doing in a Great Commission.
I’m thrilled about where God might be taking the SBC. A denomination formed to protect slavery led by a descendant of slaves, that’s just the kind of providential irony our God loves. Maybe it will prompt our denomination to stop seeing non-white people as opportunities for “ethnic ministry,” and prompt us to see there opportunities to find our leaders. Maybe seeing a non-white face with the gavel of the SBC might remind us that the Man we’ll see on the Judgment Seat, well, he isn’t a white guy either.
Note: This article originally appeared in the Summer issue of Southern Seminary Magazine. The full issue can be accessed here.
36 Responses to “Black and White and Red All Over: Why Racial Justice Is a Gospel Issue”
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The church I attended (with my parents) in my youth voted in the 1970’s to remain segregated.
I’m encouraged by how far the SBC has come since then.
@Stan McCullars,
I was a Sunday school teacher in the 70’s. There was a lovely Black woman in my class who happened to be pretty smart about Scripture. Soooo, when I had to be away one Sunday, I asked this Black lady to teach the class, and she did. Later, one of the women in the class, who was White, approached me, reproached me, by telling me that our church was a member of the SOUTHERN Baptist Convention. You get the drift. Anyway, my pastor backed me up.
Great word, Russ! May God drive our churches and our convention to look more like the foot of His throne!
The story of the Sunday School teacher brought to mind more of a need for a paradigm shift rather than it being true racism. That is not to say that the essence of the comment is not racist, it is to say that the lady had been trained up to see a black man in a certain light. It is what was infused into her paradigm from birth.
Paradigm - describes distinct concepts or thought patterns in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context.
We can have a concept in our mind and read scripture that speaks opposite of what we believe and never see the truth. Someone along the way had described to an eager mind a different thought and it was imprinted in the mind that way. Nothing can easily change it. It is difficult for some to see the Trinity and One God as the same entity. Same goes for election and personal responsibility or the need to pray and God knowing what we need before we pray. I believe there is a spiritual concept and fleshly concept of approaching racism. Spiritually, we do not need to prove anything about racism to the world because they are just skeptics anyway. We do have something to prove (Rom. 12:1,2). It is “why” we want to elect Fred Luter; because it is God’s will to elect him.
@Bruce H., i agree with you about the need for a paradigm shift, but what do you think ‘true’ racism is? is it only that sliver of prejudice or injustice that comes apart from our training and the social setting from which we take our cues? it seems to me that true racism is a problem, in part, BECAUSE it is passed on and reinforced in demonic, unjust social structures and practices.
…”the question is why they [progressives] were persuasive, ultimately, on this point (and almost no other) to their more conservative brothers and sisters”. I’d say simply because they were right on this point and almost no other. Even a broken clock is right twice each day.
@Ed Saadi, “even a broken clock is right twice each day.” perhaps. but are conservatives (and i count myself one) unwilling to graciously acknowledge that the progressives were right about God’s heart and his will, and that, for all of our commitment to the bible as the Word of God, we were wrong? a broken clock doesn’t choose to be right or wrong; people must. a healthy dose of contrite repentance doesn’t hurt us at all. in fact, it’s just what the Doctor ordered.
Let’s not forget the irreducible fact that Jesus was Caucasian!
@Fred, I’m praying this is an ironic statement.
@Fred,
Not to start an argument, Fred, but Jesus is actual God - who is a spirit and has no body like a man. But he took up residence in a Middle Eastern body, if you want to get technical about it, and most Middle Easterners might quibble about you lumping them in with Caucasians. (Most Caucasians might too, for that matter!)
@Kim,
Thanks for your insight Kim. Gently, what you stated is not traditionally the way Christians have viewed Jesus. Chrisitans believe that Jesus is the eternal Son of God, second person of the Trinity, but at the same time incarnated as a full human being. Human in all ways that we are human, but without sin.
If he was less than a full human, same “amount” of human like you and me, then he could not redeem humanity’s curse of sin and death.
Early Christian heresies said that Jesus was less than fully human, and we see this in the New Testament books of 1-3 John.
Have a great day,
Mark.
The main problem with Luter is his playing of the race card with respect to Barack Obama. He joins the crowd that apparently cannot tell the difference between opposition to his policy positions and opposition to his race. Most of the former are categorized as being part of the latter. That is most unfortunate.
Quote from PBS website:
REV. FRED LUTER: No, you wouldn’t have thought that when President Obama was elected as president of the United States of America, you would have thought that that would have ended the racial divide in our country. But unfortunately what it has shown is that in some cases it’s widened the racism in our country. There are a lot of situations just happened here not too long ago here in the Louisiana area of, there was an art project at a local school, and they have these pictures of hunting season, and there was a duck on one side, I think a deer on one side, and in the middle was a picture of President Obama with a hole in his head. And that was in a local high school. And stuff like that just shouldn’t happen. And you know I don’t agree with all the president’s politics, I don’t agree with all the decisions that he made, but one of the things that bothers me as Americans is that the disrespect that this president has had to deal with. It should not be. It should not be. You know, we’ve had presidents, you know, from Reagan to Clinton to Bush Sr. to Bush Jr., to Clinton, we don’t always agree with them. I mean, that’s just a given. But there has always been a respect for the office. This is the first time that I can remember a president was giving a speech, State of the Union speech, and someone shouts out from the gallery “you lie!” That has never happened, never with all the presidents, with all the lies that all of them have told. That has never happened. But it’s happened with this president, and so things like that reminds me that, you know, we’ve come a long way as a nation where there’s a racial issue, but we still have a long, long, long way to go. A lot of the things that this president has faced has not necessarily been because of his politics or his decisions, but unfortunately it’s just only been because of the color of his skin, and that’s what lets me know that we have a long, long way to go in America as far as racial reconciliation.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/by-topic/rev-fred-luter-on-race-in-america/10754/
@David R. Block, thanks. A very unfortunate and problematic quote. Like many blacks in the Church, Luter is dangerously naive on this issue, and a little bit insulting too. If Obama were a good man who told the truth and ruled honestly, I wouldn’t give a (er) darn whether he was white, black, or anything in between. So which side is really allowing itself to be blinded by racism?
@David R. Block, thanks for your comments. I myself do not agree with President Obamas policies, but I do not think Luther is playing the race card. He is making the point of a lack of respect for the President and shared some examples. Even Luther said, “And you know I don’t agree with all the president’s politics, I don’t agree with all the decisions that he made, but one of the things that bothers me as Americans is that the disrespect that this president has had to deal with….But there has always been a respect for the office.” Now it is true that not all people are racist who object to the Presidents policies, and we have the right to object, but we must also remeber that while we can object we must respect those who are in authority by our actions and our words. What if we “joined the crowd” that can object with passion but can also pray for the President and speak up when others are being disrespectful as Luther is stating in his quote.
@David R. Block,
“The main problem with Luter is his playing of the race card with respect to Barack Obama. He joins the crowd that apparently cannot tell the difference between opposition to his policy positions and opposition to his race.”
Are you therefore making the blanket statement that Luter is not entitled to believe that some of the opposition that Obama has faced is due to the color of his skin? What facts are you using to assume this?
Opposition to policy is one thing, and you are right to state your concerns. However, the point Luter is making is that this has never happened in recent history (blatant interruption of a sitting president while delivering a SOTU). While none of us can prove that the person who interrupted did so because of Obama’s color, it does cause one to question why it happened shortly after America elected it’s first black president. If you can’t follow that logical conclusion (right or wrong) without honestly considering that Luter may have a point then I think you may be turning a blind eye to reality.
Let’s just admit that there are people who solely dislike Obama’s policies, and some that dislike his policies and his race. That’s probably the most honest “Christian” answer to a complex problem like race relations in America.
“The arguments for racial reconciliation were persuasive, ultimately, to orthodox Christians because they appealed to a higher authority than the cultural captivity of white supremacy. ” Well said, Dr. Moore.
“She probably didn’t see how her dehumanizing of African-Americans was a twisted form of Darwinism rather than biblical Christianity.”
What? You do realise that the vast majority of the slave trade in America took place before 1859 when Darwin’s book was published, right? It was published only two years prior to the American Civil War!
Such revisionism is unbecoming, and does you no favours.
@Phil Price, I’m sure Dr. Moore doesn’t need me to defend him , but the way I read it, this was a story from Moore’s own life. I believe he was saying that this woman was doing the de-humanizing. I don’t think he was commenting on the slave trade in this instance.
Matthew, I disagree. Luter was very clearly bringing race to the forefront and making it a key factor, when honestly the biggest factor race has played is in creating bias on the Democrat side. Also, it’s not “disrespectful” to call out the President when he really is lying, as the one gentleman did. In reality, it is the conservatives who are trying to stay focused on Obama’s policy issues and the liberals who are constantly dragging it back to a question of race. But because white people have a guilt complex, they feel duty-bound to acknowledge that there’s something special about Obama just because he happens to be black. If we took seriously Martin Luther King Jr.’s words about judging a man by his skin color rather than his character, that wouldn’t happen.
@yankeegospelgirl,
You are attempting to revise history without using facts. The argument you make above is historically unsound and intellectually dishonest.
Name one president out of the last 5 that has been interrupted during a SOTU address because a congressman or Senator or Supreme Court judge stood in disagreement with their point of view?
Also, stating that 30 and below young whites supported Obama because they have a race-guilt conscious is historically and statistically wrong. Obama overwhelmingly dominated the young white vote in the last election and that generation (generation Y and X) have very little race-based guilt. Your argument may hold more water if it were baby-boomers and their parents that were primarily responsible for Obama’s election.
Blacks should be able to make mention of race-based issues without being labeled with the race card, just as people of any other race should be allowed. Your post above is a classic example of the abuse of terminology that often takes place in Western culture. There was know factual with which one could assume that Luter was attempting to play the race card. That’s your own creation, as viewed through own personal prism. You should state it as such rather than making blanket statements unfounded with facts.
@yankeegospelgirl,
Is this really true in light of who actually voted Obama into office? If you look at the demographics (voter breakdown) is speaks the opposite of the conclusion that you draw.
Thanks Dr. Moore! This is excellent!
Such a powerful blog article!!