But proslavery advocates did not give ground on the treatment of slaves, let alone on whether the institution of slavery itself was immoral. Advocates of white supremacy certainly were affirmed in their beliefs by the 1857 Dred Scott decision in which the Supreme Court famously ruled that all African Americans were racially stigmatized and thus could be treated as “ordinary articles of merchandise.”17
American religious scholar Mark Noll has described in great detail the theological crisis surrounding the Civil War, slavery, and biblical interpretation. This theological crisis resulted, in part, in “an inability to act on biblical teaching about the full humanity of all people, regardless of race.”18 Christian white Americans’ attitudes were so deeply embedded in beliefs about the inferiority of African Americans that their interpretations of the Bible ensured the continuation of a racial crisis that was biblically justified long after the Civil War had ended.
Southern Baptists and Racial Stigma in the Jim Crow Era
(See Box 3.5.) The intense southern disdain for African American citizenry following the end of slavery in 1865 became enshrined in the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which endorsed Jim Crow segregation, a totalistic system of racial, political, and social subjugation. Just as many southern Protestant denominations had used the Bible to support the architecture for racism and slavery, after slavery ended they continued to support Jim Crow segregation based on notions of white superiority and a particular view of a godly social order. Southern white culture and religion appended itself to a system of segregation in which whites dictated the terms of engagement with African Americans. Many, if not most, southern white Protestants never questioned the structures of racial hierarchy that became a seamless part of southern culture. They had no inkling of the negative consequences for themselves of continued support for a system of racial inequality because they assumed that they would never find themselves in a reverse situation of subjugation. Their limited imagination and their sense of racial superiority made it difficult for white southerners to take any responsibility for African Americans’ inhumane plight. While southern denominations like the SBC often acknowledged the difficult circumstances of black life in the South, they seemed indifferent to the ultimate consequences of their support for racial oppression.
Box 3.5
Having operated a level of generality (and having shown that the implications of the Golden Rule are evaded by the assumption that African Americans are inferior), the author now wants to take a case study and provide a more detailed analysis. She turns to the SBC in the Jim Crow Era.
In his dissent in the Plessy case in 1896, US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote famously that although whites see themselves as the dominant race in America, in the view of the US Constitution, there is no such thing as a ruling class of citizens. He argued:
Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.19
Justice Harlan eerily predicted the tragic consequences of Jim Crow segregation in American life. He believed that Plessy would permit “the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law” and create distrust between the races.20 Justice Harlan had the foresight to understand that the social and political inequalities legally enshrined in American society through Jim Crow segregation would have logical but tragic consequences: racial hate, racial distrust, and interpersonal and mob violence. These consequences and the attendant social instability ultimately would lead to the civil rights movement in mid-twentieth century.
Tearing down Jim Crow segregation went against the will of southern Protestant denominations like the SBC, which did very little to support African Americans’ full humanity or their civil rights. The religious support of legal segregation tore at the social fabric of democratic society and eliminated any possibility of national Christian unity on issues of race and racism. Not only did white Christians disagree about the morality of segregation, they also created further chasms between themselves and African American Christians.
Examining public statements by the SBC, including resolutions at annual conventions, allows us to view both the continuities and the changes over time in the SBC’s stance on racism and Jim Crow segregation. Although such resolutions are not binding on individual member churches, these member-ratified public statements nevertheless represent the majority views of the entire denomination through votes cast at official conventions. Thus, these statements are both legitimated and preserved by the SBC.21 Because of its pro-segregation stance, which was consistent with its earlier support of slavery and the Civil War, in its public resolutions and official commission statements the SBC consistently avoided language on Christian charity and love toward African Americans. Its twentieth-century statements rarely, if ever, included biblical or theological language that challenged segregation. These public resolutions often demonstrated indifference to the sources of African American suffering to which the SBC had contributed. While they detailed the poor quality of African American life and its problems, nevertheless its rhetoric declared that it was not its role to solve these problems. As part of its 1905 official proceedings, for example, the convention declared, “It is no affair of this Convention to solve the negro problem … God will take care of the problem.”22 While it noted evidence of social improvement, the convention expressed concern about African American drug habits, low morality, crime, and the prevalence of insanity that had not existed before emancipation. It also observed, “By far the greatest force in leading the negroes up from savagery has been his varied contact with Christian white men and women, and especially the influence of the Christian home.”23 This was written just nine years after the Plessy case was decided in 1896 by the US Supreme Court, at a time when Jim Crow segregation legally subjugated African American citizens to a racial caste system that included myriad forms of oppression, including exploitation, marginalization, and mob and interpersonal violence.
The tone of this 1905 resolution was part of a consistent pattern in the SBC’s official resolutions, recommendations, and policies toward African Americans until the mid-twentieth century. Despite the social and political subjugation of American citizens who were denied the right to vote, proper and decent public education, and the daily humane civility accorded to white citizens, the SBC expressed that African Americans needed aid that would encourage self-help and self-respect. Its pattern of thinking, including absolution of responsibility for the consequences of segregation, made it clear that help from the convention to solve the major issues that denied African Americans’ equal humanity and justice would not be forthcoming. Instead, support of segregation formed the normal context for its resolutions, concerns, and calls for law and order to deal with responses to race problems and violence in the twentieth century. With regard to lynching, for example, it wrote in 1906 that although lynchings blunt the conscience, it also is important to condemn the horrible crimes that cause them.24
In 1915, the SBC voiced its optimism that African Americans would elevate their standing with education, moral, and religious development. Among the African American values the convention praised were their docility, respect, thrift, and being law abiding. What was needed, however, was patience and helpfulness by the “dominant” race.25 This resolution’s racist and paternalistic views of African Americans were reflected in their belief that African Americans not only were docile, but that the SBC’s ideal was the “worthy white man.” The SBC believed in working for African Americans’ equal opportunity along “parallel lines,” that is, within the structures of segregation. While it lauded some African American ministers as superior, it asserted that the mass of them was ignorant and deficient in moral character. What African Americans craved, according to the SBC’s resolution, was “the aid of their favored white brethren.”26 Finally, the SBC concluded that African Americans never could come into their own in American life without Christianity to overcome their defectiveness of character.27
However,