The Color of Compromise

by Jemar Tisby

  Importantly, it was everyday Christians, including many “mothers and fathers, Sunday School Teachers and new Christian entrepreneurs” who made this image of a white Jesus famous. Depicting Jesus as a white American man hampered the cause of the civil rights movement because, as Blum and Harvey explain, “fashioning Jesus into a particular and visualized body made it impossible for any universal savior to rise above the conflicts.”46 Warner Sallman’s famous but contrived image of Jesus served to reinforce among Christians the status quo of the American racial hierarchy. Certainly, some black ministers pushed back against this Eurocentric image of Christ. On Easter Sunday in 1967, Rev. Albert Cleage Jr. consecrated the Shrine of the Black Madonna, formerly Central Congregational Church, and revealed a seven-foot-tall painting of Mary and the baby Christ, both depicted as black people.47 And needless to say, his alternate depiction of Jesus proved to be quite controversial.

  EVANGELICAL RESPONSES TO MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

  Although Martin Luther King Jr. remains the face of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement, our present-day social memory of him obscures much of his life. In a seminal essay on the civil rights movement, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall wrote that King has been “endlessly reproduced and selectively quoted, his speeches retain their majesty yet lose their political bite.”48 For many Christian evangelicals, he has become the “quotable King,” whose entire message has been reduced to his dream when his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Some of the more “radical” elements of King’s message—which included democratic socialism, ending the war in Vietnam, nuclear de-escalation, a Poor People’s Campaign to force the federal government to address systemic poverty, and support of a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis when he was killed—have largely been omitted from popular American memory. Along with the unpopular elements of King’s and the civil rights movement’s platform, people have also forgotten how strongly many moderate Christians opposed him.

  Back in 1961, King spoke at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the flagship school of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Although he was there at the invitation of a professor, powerful Southern Baptists opposed his visit. As historian Taylor Branch wrote in his biography of King, “Within the church, this simple invitation was a racial and theological heresy, such that churches across the South rescinded their regular donations to the seminary.”49

  King saw an indissoluble link between the Christian faith and the responsibility to change unjust laws and policies. But his emphasis on the social dimensions of Christianity, especially regarding race relations, angered many white evangelicals in his day. Some Christians opposed King’s activism because they considered race relations a purely social issue, not a spiritual one. They tended to believe that the government should not force people of different races to integrate. As shown above, some even thought that segregation was a biblical requirement.

  Again, Billy Graham represents the moderate position well. After his death in February 2018, news outlets and admirers across the country unearthed pictures of Billy Graham smiling alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Christian commentators made much of Graham’s gestures toward supporting black civil rights, such as the time when he personally removed the ropes dividing white and black attendees of an evangelistic crusade he held in 1953—a year before the Brown v. Board ruling. In 1957, Billy Graham even invited King to give the opening prayer at one of his rallies, an invitation that King accepted. Yet a few years later, as the civil rights movement continued and King became an even better-known figure, Graham advised King and his allies to “put on the brakes.” Like the white moderates King wrote about in his letter from jail, Graham never relented from the belief that “the evangelist is not primarily a social reformer, a temperance lecturer or a moralizer. He is simply a keryx, a proclaimer of the good news.”50 Though it is evident that Graham did more than many during his time, he held back from making bold public proclamations of solidarity with black citizens and from demonstrating alongside activists during the March on Selma, a move he later said he regretted.51

  For decades, Billy Graham claimed membership at First Baptist Church of Dallas. Even though Graham officially resided in North Carolina, he made frequent trips to Texas and had great respect for the church’s pastor, W. A. Criswell. At the time, First Baptist had the largest congregation of any Southern Baptist Convention church. Criswell was a magnetic preacher, but like Graham, he had a dim view of the civil rights movement and of activists like Martin Luther King Jr. When officials invited Criswell to preach at an evangelism conference for the South Carolina Baptist Convention in 1956, he railed against government enforced integration. Criswell stated that desegregation is “a denial of all that we believe in.” He went on to say that Brown v Board was “foolishness” and an “idiocy,” and he called anyone who advocated for racial integration “a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up.”52 Notably, Criswell did moderate some of his stances and statements later in life, but not before thousands of Christians in his own congregation and tens of thousands more of his followers nationwide had absorbed his views of civil rights and activists like King.

  One final example offers a particularly distasteful illustration of how a moderate Christian during this time viewed Martin Luther King Jr. Writer Edward Gilbreath relates the experience of a black college student at a predominantly white Christian school in the late 1960s, who received the offer of a spot on the basketball team through the persistent efforts of an admissions director. The student, Dolphus Weary, a black rural Mississippian, agreed to attend Los Angeles Baptist College, which is now known as the Master’s University. Weary was one of the first two black students at the school, and at first it was a positive experience. He earned good grades and helped lead the basketball team to a 19–5 record that season.

  On April 4, 1968, a white classmate ran up to Weary and asked whether he had heard the news about Dr. King. When Weary turned on the radio to get an update, he was “devastated” to hear that King had been shot. As he sat in his room he could hear his white peers down the hall, laughing. Then came the awful news that King was dead. As soon as commentators reported this news, the young black man “could hear white voices down the hall let out a cheer.” Reflecting back on this experience, Weary said, “Laughing at Dr. King’s death was just like laughing at me—or at the millions of other blacks for whom King labored.”53 Remarkably, Weary did not let the hate of others consume him. He has spent his life working for racial reconciliation in his home state, Mississippi.

  The Bible says, “A prophet has no honor in his own country” (John 4:44). We might extend it: A prophet (or truth-teller) has no honor in his or her own time. A couple of decades after his death, white evangelicals finally came to recognize King’s contribution to American democracy and biblical justice. During his lifetime and at the height of the civil rights movement, a large segment of the American church derided King and other activists and even resisted the efforts of the civil rights movement. Certainly, changing attitudes can be viewed as a form of progress, but it is also helpful to remember that such positive perspectives on the movement have not always been popular.

  As with other periods in America’s sordid racial history, the Christian church of the mid-twentieth century often served to reinforce racism rather than oppose it. The Brown v Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court offered a clear sign to segregationists that the federal government could no longer be trusted and that the “southern way of life” was once again under assault. In response to government efforts to desegregate, moderate Christians, organized to oppose racial integration of neighborhoods, started segregation academies to keep their white children separate from black kids in schools, and continued to approve of church leaders who espoused prejudiced remarks and actions. While not all moderate Christians were racists or feared integration, enough went along with the Jim Crow consensus for those like Martin Luther King Jr.
to abandon the hope that they would find many allies among their white brothers and sisters in Christ in their struggle for black freedom. Instead, the American church largely chose to compromise with racism through passive complicity, rejecting yet another opportunity to come alongside black people in the nation’s “Second Reconstruction.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  ORGANIZING THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  Lee Atwater once said he had two great aims in life: “To manage a presidential campaign and to be chairman of my party.” He achieved both goals before the age of forty.1 A strategist for George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign, Atwater became one of the youngest chairs of the Republican National Convention the following year. In his early thirties Atwater had begun working in the Reagan White House as an adviser. He earned that position for his shrewd insights into the electorate and his sometimes brutal advertising tactics.2

  Before his untimely death from a brain tumor in 1991, Atwater had laid bare the racially coded appeals used by some Republicans to recruit voters: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.” He said all of this in an interview recorded in 1981.3 “Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites,” he continued. “ ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ ”4

  Atwater articulated what has become known as “color-blind conservatism.” By excising explicitly racial terms like “black,” “white,” or “nigger” from their language, practitioners can claim they “don’t see color.” As a result, people can hold positions on social and political issues that disproportionately and adversely harm racial and ethnic minorities, but they can still proclaim their own racial innocence. As Atwater articulated, it is clear that the switch from racial language to supposedly color-blind discourse was once a conscious and deliberate choice. Today, it has become second nature—and the unconscious practice of many American Christians.

  This chapter traces the rise of the “Religious Right,” a politically conservative movement organized to resist the liberal turn in national sociopolitical life and to return America to “traditional” values. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, conservative Christians coalesced into a political force that every major Republican politician had to court if they hoped to have lasting success. But there was also a cost to this influence; it meant that American evangelicalism became virtually synonymous with the GOP and whiteness. While neither Democrats nor Republicans adequately addressed the multitude of issues that continued to plague black communities, people of color increasingly felt disregarded and even, at times, degraded by political conservatives. Politics became a proxy for racial conflict, and because of the Religious Right, that conflict translated into divisions in the church.

  EVANGELICALS AND POLITICS IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  Evangelicalism in America exploded during the 1970s and 1980s. The “Jesus Movement” inspired a generation of college-age Christians to devote their lives to religion. President Jimmy Carter described himself as a “born again” Christian and taught Bible study at his church. Newly formed evangelical megachurches, like Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Orange County, started cropping up. Hal Lindsay’s book The Late Great Planet Earth, based on a literal interpretation of biblical end-times prophecies, sold twenty-eight million copies.5 Evangelicals had so captured national attention that Newsweek magazine dubbed 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical.”

  The term evangelical has been used for centuries, but its definition is something of a moving target. Historian David Bebbington’s definition serves as a good starting point. According to “Bebbington’s quadrilateral,” evangelicals accept and promote four principles: conversionism, an emphasis on a personal decision to follow Jesus Christ; biblicism, an understanding of the Bible that interprets miracles as true and Scripture as divinely inspired; crucicentrism, a focus on the crucifixion of Christ as a sacrifice for his followers; and activism, an engaged faith whose adherents seek to work out their faith through evangelism and advocacy.6

  In late twentieth century America, evangelicalism took on a decidedly more political tone. In their article on the reinvention of evangelicalism in American history, scholars Hannah Butler and Kristin Du Mez conclude that “it seems reasonable to assume that when Americans self-identify as evangelicals today, many are identifying with the movement as it has taken shape in recent decades—a conservative politicized movement—and not with a static conception rooted in a centuries-old history.”7 This swift and energetic mobilization of evangelical voters that began in the 1970s has been labeled as the “rise of the Religious Right.”8 A 1976 article in the New York Times declared that the evangelical movement had “become the major religious force in America, both in numbers and in political impact.”9 Evangelicals had become a political movement, and the nation was starting to pay attention to them. But even then, Christian complicity with racism remained a factor influencing the American church.

  An honest assessment of racism should acknowledge that racism never fully goes away; it just adapts to changing times and contexts. This is evident when we trace the development of the relationship between race and politics after the civil rights era. The civil rights movement certainly made a difference; there was a monumental shift in the rights afforded to black Americans. In 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into the law. The next year, the Voting Rights Act passed, and in 1968 the Fair Housing Act became law. Legalized segregation in the form of Jim Crow was now officially banned. Given these shifts, one might be tempted to declare that systemic or legal racism in America had ended, and that aside from a few backwards thinking people—the real racists—the progress of the civil rights movement indicated that the nation had largely overcome its racist past. Such an optimistic assessment would be wrong.

  Though it was necessary to enact civil rights legislation, you cannot erase four hundred years of race-based oppression by passing a few laws. From the earliest years of slavery in the 1600s, through the legal end of Jim Crow in 1954, and in the numerous and varied ways in which racism is still enacted in law and culture today, the United States has had more than 300 years of race-based discrimination. A few short decades of legal freedom have not corrected the damage done by centuries of racism.

  In previous eras, racism among Christian believers was much easier to detect and identify. Professing believers openly used racial slurs, participated in beatings and lynchings, fought wars to preserve slavery, or used the Bible to argue for the inherent inferiority of black people. And those who did not openly resist these actions—those who remained silent—were complicit in their acceptance. Since the 1970s, Christian complicity in racism has become more difficult to discern. It is hidden, but that does not mean it no longer exists. As we look more closely at the realm of politics, we see that Christian complicity with racism remains, even as it has taken on subtler forms. Again, we must remember: racism never goes away; it adapts.

  Much of the discussion in this chapter focuses on white, theologically conservative Christians and the Republican party. This focus should not be taken to imply that Democrats don’t have their own problems with racism. The point here is not to advocate for one political party over and against another, as most Christians would agree (at least in principle) that there is no single “Christian” party with which all believers should align. Nevertheless, the historical reality is that theologically conservative people of faith have not traditionally organized to support Democratic candidates, but as seen in the election of Ronald Reagan, they intentionally organized to help elect Republican candidates.10

  This emphasis on the Republican Party
should not be construed as tacit support for the Democratic Party or as an indictment of every single Republican voter or official. It should also be recognized that the politically active coalition known as the Christian Right included far more than just evangelicals. Many fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and Catholics joined with Protestant evangelicals in uniting over political issues such as anticommunism and opposition to abortion. Their combined electoral force became a coveted vote for Republican politicians to pursue.11

  THE RISE OF LAW-AND-ORDER POLITICS

  Richard Nixon and Billy Graham had been friends for a long time. According to one of Graham’s biographers, William Martin, the two cemented their friendship in the 1950s. United by anticommunist sentiments, associating with many of the same evangelical leaders, and both nearly the same age, “Dick” and Billy became buddies. “Anytime you have a few days this winter,” Graham wrote in a letter to Nixon, who was vice president at the time, “we can take a swim or play a game of golf in Florida or, better still, in Hawaii.”12 For his part, Nixon reciprocated. When it came time for Nixon to decide whether to run for president the second time, he invited Billy Graham down to Florida for a few days to help him think through the decision. Even though Graham was fighting a bout of pneumonia, he made the trip. They went for long walks on the beach, watched football games, studied the Bible, and talked politics. Graham advised Nixon that if he didn’t run, then he would always wonder whether he would have won.13 Nixon, of course, decided to enter the presidential race and won the election with 68 percent of the evangelical vote. When he ran for reelection four years later, he boosted his share of the evangelical vote to 84 percent.14 Part of Nixon’s appeal to white evangelical voters depended on his commitment to the racially loaded stance of law-and-order politics.