by Jemar Tisby
The goal of this book is not guilt. The purpose of tracing Christian complicity with racism is not to show white believers how bad they are. It is simply a fact of American history that white leaders and laity made decisions to maintain the racist status quo. Even though the purpose of this work is not to call out any particular racial group, these words may cause some grief, but grief can be good. In 2 Corinthians 7:10, Paul says, “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret” (ESV). This kind of grief is a natural response to the suffering of others. It indicates empathy with the pain that racism has caused black people. The ability to weep with those who weep is necessary for true healing.
Though the work of racial justice is difficult and will never truly end in this life, God has provided a colorful portrait of the goal. In a cosmic case of beginning with the end in mind, God pulls back the curtain of eternity to provide a glimpse of future glory. Revelation 7:9 says, “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” In that heavenly congregation, we will finally see the culmination of God’s gathering a diverse people unified by faith in Christ. We will not all be white; we will not all be black. We will surround the throne of the Lamb as a redeemed picture of all the ethnic and cultural diversity God created. Our skin color will no longer be a source of pain or arrogant pride but will serve as a multihued reflection of God’s image. We will no longer be alienated by our earthly economic or social position. We will not clamor for power over one another. Our single focus will be worshiping God for eternity in sublime fellowship with each other and our Creator.
This picture of perfection has been bequeathed to believers not as a distant reality that we can merely long for. Instead, the revelation of the heavenly congregation provides a blueprint and a motivation to seek unity right now. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). Christians have been mandated to pray that the racial and ethnic unity of the church would be manifest, even if imperfectly, in the present. Christ himself brought down “the dividing wall of hostility” that separated humanity from one another and from God (Eph. 2:14). Indeed, reconciliation across racial and ethnic lines is not something Christians must achieve but a reality we must receive. On the cross when Christ said, “It is finished,” he meant it (John 19:30). If peace has been achieved between God and human beings, surely we can have greater peace between people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
THE IMPERATIVE FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION
Although our eternal peace is secure, a diverse but unified body of Christ will only come through struggle in this life. A survey of the history of racism and the church shows that the story is worse than most imagine. Christianity in America has been tied to the fallacy of white supremacy for hundreds of years. European colonists brought with them ideas of white superiority and paternalism toward darker-skinned people. On this sandy foundation, they erected a society and a version of religion that could only survive through the subjugation of people of color. Minor repairs by the weekend-warrior racial reconcilers won’t fix a flawed foundation. The church needs the Carpenter from Nazareth to deconstruct the house that racism built and remake it into a house for all nations.
By surveying the church’s racist past, American Christians may feel the weight of their collective failure to consistently confront racism in the church. This should lead to immediate, fierce action to confess this truth and work for justice. Then, perhaps, Paul’s words to the Corinthians might ring true for today’s church: “As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting” (2 Cor. 7:9 ESV).
Progress is possible, but we must learn to discern the difference between complicit Christianity and courageous Christianity. Complicit Christianity forfeits its moral authority by devaluing the image of God in people of color. Like a ship that has a cracked hull and is taking on water, Christianity has run aground on the rocks of racism and threatens to capsize—it has lost its integrity. By contrast, courageous Christianity embraces racial and ethnic diversity. It stands against any person, policy, or practice that would dim the glory of God reflected in the life of human beings from every tribe and tongue. These words are a call to abandon complicit Christianity and move toward courageous Christianity.
CHAPTER
2
MAKING RACE IN THE COLONIAL ERA
The colonial museum in Williamsburg, Virginia, features exhibits detailing the earliest English settlements in North America. Plaques explaining the conditions for Africans in colonial Virginia hang on the walls. One display explains the process by which those Africans became slaves for life. The heading reads, “Key Slavery Statutes of the Virginia General Assembly,” and cites a law enacted in September 1667.
On the question of whether baptism would render slaves free, the Virginia General Assembly decided, “It is enacted and declared by this Grand Assembly, and the authority thereof, that the conferring of baptism does not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom.” This statute encouraged white enslavers to evangelize their human chattel since baptized slaves would not be freed. In the words of the assembly, “Masters, freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity by permitting children, though slaves, or those of greater growth if capable, to be admitted to that sacrament.”
The Virginia General Assembly, made up of Anglican men, had been compelled by public pressure to address whether baptism rendered slaves free. It had been longstanding custom in England that Christians, being spiritual brothers and sisters, could not enslave one another. Yet the economy of the European colonies in North America depended more and more on slave labor. So plantation owners discouraged the enslaved from hearing the Christian gospel and receiving the sacrament of baptism. They did not want to lose their unpaid labor and diminish their profits. At the same time, missionaries exerted pressure on the slave owners to evangelize their slaves.
The Virginia Assembly took the initiative to enact a new law. Despite the established tradition, the assembly decided that baptism would not confer freedom upon their laborers. Instead, these Africans would remain in physical bondage even after their conversion. Missionaries, ministers, and slaveowners encouraged African Christians in America to be content with their spiritual liberation and to obey their earthly masters.
The assembly enacted its law concerning enslaved persons and baptism in the seventeenth century. The law predated the existence of the political entity now known as the United States of America. It was enacted more than 100 years before the Declaration of Independence and more than 120 years before the “founding fathers” drafted and ratified the Constitution. Looking at the history of colonial Virginia uncovers the reality that racism in the church has been a problem from the very first moments of European contact in North America.
To grasp how American Christians constructed and cooperated with racism, one has to realize that nothing about American racism was inevitable. There was a period, from about 1500 to 1700, when race did not predetermine one’s station and worth in society. This is not to say that racism did not exist; it surely did. But during the initial stages of European settlement in North America, the colonists had not yet cemented skin color as an essential feature of life in their communities. Race was still being made.
This chapter outlines the early days of European contact with indigenous peoples and the first days of African slavery in North America.1 It shows how individuals and groups who had power chose dividends over dignity and made America a place where darker-skinned people occupied a limited and inferior role in society. Through a series of immoral choices, the foundations were laid for race-based stratification. Yet if people made deliberate decisions to enact inequality, it is possible that a series of better decisions could begin to change this reality.
EUROPEAN CON
TACT WITH NORTH AMERICA
After about two months of sailing, Columbus and his bedraggled crew stumbled onto the shores of the Americas in 1492. Of course, Columbus and his men did not walk onto uninhabited land. When they arrived, they found a place vibrant with flora and fauna as well as sophisticated communities of indigenous people who had dwelled there since before written memory. Columbus’s band was not even among the first Europeans in North America. Centuries earlier the Scandinavians made landfall on the northern Atlantic coast in a failed colonization project.2 Instead, Columbus’s arrival represented the beginning of an era of European colonization, motivated by profit and predicated on unpaid labor.
Race has been so inscribed into American society that nowadays it is hard to imagine another reality. But in the early decades of European contact with North America, the racial caste system had not yet been developed. Race is a social construct. There is no biological basis for the superiority or inferiority of any human being based on the amount of melanin in her or his skin. The development of the idea of race required the intentional actions of people in the social, political, and religious spheres to decide that skin color determined who would be enslaved and who would be free. Over time Europeans, including Christians, wrote the laws and formed the habits that concentrated power in the hands of those they considered “white” while withholding equality from those they considered “black.”
The racial attitudes that underlay these ideas formed over time. From the colonial through the Revolutionary eras, the racial caste system remained malleable and uneven. European contact with the indigenous peoples of North America and the importation of Africans to the continent posed questions about how to organize society, and no one had preestablished answers.
Yet while the contours of American society after European contact had not yet been decided, the explorers still arrived with preformed ideas about the inherent superiority of lighter-skinned (that is, more European-looking) people. One of Columbus’s early letters back to Spain compared indigenous and European physical features. “As regards beauty, the Christians [Europeans] said there was no comparison, both men and women, and that their skins are whiter than the other [indigenous people]. They saw two girls whose skins were as white as any that could be seen in Spain.”3 Europeans evaluated the people they encountered in North America based on how similar they were to themselves. This is a common human response when interacting with other groups, but the description in Columbus’s letter reveals that colonists equated lighter skin with beauty and desirability long before chattel slavery became the norm.
Early reports of European contact with indigenous people demonstrate that the Europeans had missionary ends in mind, but their means and motivations were questionable. During his first voyage Columbus wrote, “[The indigenous inhabitants] should be good servants and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion.”4 To Columbus and his followers, the people they encountered would make “good servants.” Indigenous people were not considered intellectual or social equals but were valued based on their ability to do the will of Europeans.
Further, in the mind of Columbus and others, indigenous people did not have the sophistication to develop their own religious beliefs. Europeans failed to acknowledge the longstanding, well-developed religious beliefs and practices of the people they met. Instead, they viewed indigenous men and women as blank slates on which Christian missionaries could write the gospel. This paternalistic view of evangelism permeates American church history.
For the next century and a half, European colonists struggled to establish settlements in North America. They faced new climates, diseases, starvation, and a short supply of people. For a while, European hegemony over the land’s original inhabitants was far from a foregone conclusion. For instance, historian Richard White refers to the “middle ground” between cultures when “whites could neither dictate to Indians nor ignore them.”5 Native Americans often resisted encroachment upon their lands through diplomacy and warfare. But vulnerability to European pathogens, frequent betrayal, and constant warfare decimated the indigenous American population. Slowly Europeans established towns and cities. They began raising crops and families. In turn, European countries demanded more raw materials from their colonies. To meet the growing European demands, the North American colonizers increasingly turned to slavery.
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
Over the next 300 years, the transatlantic slave trade transported more than ten million Africans to the Americas in a forced migration of epic scale. About two million people perished on the voyage. The human cost in terms of suffering, indignity, and death caused by this commerce can never be fully comprehended, but the experience is often misunderstood or downplayed in the present day. The appalling nature of Christian cooperation with slavery cannot be understood apart from a description of bondage and its effects on Africans.
The process of enslavement began with the European desire for products that needed raw materials from the Americas. Ships would sail from England, France, Spain, Portugal, and other nations to the western coast of Africa. There, the Europeans would either barter with local African tribes for slaves captured in war—a common practice at the time—or kidnap their own slaves.6
Enslavers marched their captives sometimes hundreds of miles to the western coast of Africa. The slaves were tied together or had their necks clamped with wooden yokes. Many died of starvation or exhaustion. Some committed suicide along the way. Those who survived were taken to structures called “factories.” These were fortress-like facilities designed to hold African slaves until they were loaded onto ships. Slave traders separated families and tribes so the Africans could not band together and rebel. Finally, sometimes after months of waiting, the slaves shuffled onto ships called “slavers” bound for the Americas.7
Though the process of dehumanization began at the moment of capture, it took on new dimensions on the ship. Slave traders often shackled Africans together to prevent them from jumping overboard or rebelling. African slaves endured a horrific journey, the so-called “middle passage,” from their native land to South America, the Caribbean Islands, or North America. It normally took two or three months to cross the Atlantic, but for some the journey lasted up to six months.
Olaudah Equiano published an autobiography in 1789 called The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa to record his life as a slave and eventually a free man. He was born around 1745 as part of the Igbo tribe in modern-day Nigeria, and slave traders kidnapped Equiano and his sister when he was about eleven years old.8 Years later Equiano wrote about the traumatic experience of being packed into a slave ship as a piece of cargo. In one particularly stomach-churning recollection, Equiano described the heat, smell, and human waste that accompanied slaves as they languished below deck. “The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time.” He continued, “This produced copious perspirations, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves of which many died.” Finally, he told of the tubs which held human excrement “into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated.”9
By the time he wrote his autobiography, Equiano had converted to Christianity. As he reflected on his life, he viewed his experiences through the lens of his faith and commented on the hypocrisy of slave traders who claimed to be Christian. Recollecting on the repeated rape of African women by slave traders aboard the ship, Equiano wrote that it was a “disgrace, not only of Christians, but of men. I have even known them to gratify their brutal passion with females not yet ten years old.”10
On the kidnapping of unsuspecting Africans and their separation from family, Equiano asked, “O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do un
to you?”11 Black people immediately detected the hypocrisy of American-style slavery. They knew the inconsistencies of the faith from the rank odors, the chains, the blood, and the misery that accompanied their life of bondage. Instead of abandoning Christianity, though, black people went directly to teachings of Jesus and challenged white people to demonstrate integrity.
These depredations occurred before the slaves had even arrived in the Americas. The inhumanity of bondage began as soon as kidnappers snatched the Africans from their tribes, and most often the cruelty continued until the African’s death, unless one happened to secure freedom.
John Newton, born in England in 1725, is best known for penning the hymn “Amazing Grace,” and his life is remembered as a story of redemption. A lifelong sailor, Newton served as captain of a slave ship for a time. He marks March 10, 1748, as his Christian conversion. He did not stop his involvement in the transatlantic slave trade immediately, however. He continued slaving until he suffered a major stroke in 1754 and retired from the sea. After years of waiting and several attempts with different denominations, Newton was finally ordained as an Anglican priest in 1764 and became famous for his ministry at a church in Olney.
More than three decades after he retired from sailing, Newton wrote a pamphlet called Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade. He wrote it as both an encouragement for English politicians to abolish the slave trade and as a personal confession. “I hope it will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was, once, an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders,” he wrote.12 Newton, a celebrated example today, stands out because he eventually repudiated slavery. If Newton had simply remained a slave trader, he would have been so typical that it is likely no one would remember his name.