about some kinds of human suffering. In 1919, for example, the organization issued a resolution on the condition and suffering of Jews through persecutions and massacres. It resolved that “All right-thinking men, and especially Christians, should let their voice be heard for the justice, humanity, mercy, forgiveness, and love of true Christianity, as taught by the Lord Jesus Christ; therefore, be it.”28 However, the SBC was unwilling to apply these same kinds of considerations to oppose racism, Jim Crow segregation, and African Americans’ persecution.
During the 1930s and 1940s, at the height of the African American humiliation during Jim Crow segregation, the SBC issued resolutions on race that challenged unequal pay, yet it did not believe that it was necessary to pay African Americans and whites equally.29 With regard to lynching and mob violence, the SBC never endorsed efforts in the US Congress to gain approval of anti-lynching legislation, although it did denounce lynching itself.30
The SBC’s 1941 resolution on race relations is worth note. First, although there was no call to take down the structures of Jim Crow segregation, there was a call to continue to work in “parallel lines” with African Americans. It encouraged the convention to maintain good relations with African Americans. Second, it noted the uptick in the number of victims of mob violence and emphasized the necessity for law and order and the suppression of mob violence.31
The SBC’s acceptance – even promotion – of African American racial stigma, of African American inferiority, was a dominant current in SBC public pronouncements throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Even after the 1954 Brown decision, however, it continued in its path of denial of Christian brotherhood to African Americans (see Box 3.6).
Box 3.6
The author has organized the discussion around key historical periods. The section covering the Jim Crow era is coming to an end; the second, post the 1954 Brown decision, now starts. The theme is that, right up to 1965, there is continuing evasion of any calls for real structural change in the organization of society that protects racism and white supremacy.
Southern Baptists and Racial Stigma after the 1954 Brown Decision
In an important study of southern Protestant denominations, David Chappell describes the dissension among white Christians in the 1950s and 1960s as racial concerns grew. He notes that southern Protestant religious bodies quickly desegregated their seminaries after the Brown decision, and the SBC did so in 1958.32 Since southern Protestant church members probably were as racist as the rest of the white South, what was significant, he argues, was that they generally did not join the anti-civil rights movement and unite with white southern politicians in defense of segregation.33 Chappell’s insight is important because it illustrates the willingness of southern Christians to abide by the law. However, they continued to deny church membership to African Americans.
The 1960s was an era of great racial upheaval because of the civil rights movement under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., other ministers, and activists. The SBC’s 1961 resolution committed them “as Christians to do all that we can to improve the relations among all races as a positive demonstration of the power of Christian love.”34 Yet, it decried both mob violence and those who were involved in provocations – comments aimed at civil rights advocates. There was no mention of the problems with segregation that lay at the center of the civil rights movement, but it did mention the toll of racial prejudice on race relations. The resolution referred to the civil rights movement as a “racial revolution” at its doorstep that would not end and was accelerating the current racial crisis that had in its midst “frustrating confusion and blurred issues.”35
After civil rights laws were passed, 1964 and 1965 proved to be a time for significant change in the SBC’s language on race. It began recognizing the need for civil rights legislation, desegregation, and opening up society for housing, voting, and extension of church ministries without racial restrictions. It wrote in 1964 that they acknowledged and repented of their own involvement in discriminatory patterns that have ignored African Americans’ rights and dignity. It wrote, “Our thunderous silence in the face of oppressive injustice for American Negroes has amounted to a serious complicity in the problem … We have been part of a culture which has crippled the Negro and then blamed him for limping.”36
The SBC finally had acknowledged that it had failed to create a “climate” of Christian good will based on justice, mercy, and love. Yet it believed there were avenues for redressing legitimate grievances and for resolving the crisis other than racial protest movements: “Indeed we have contributed to the belief of many Negroes that these movements offer their only avenue of recourse. Is there not in Christ a more excellent way? We believe there is.”37 The SBC did not mention what solutions it would propose to tear down the walls of racism. The SBC seemed to propose that it was Christ’s involvement that would solve the current racial crisis.
In 1965, the SBC continued to argue that only the gospel could reach the hearts and minds regarding the problem of race. It issued a statement that the racial problem could only be solved on “distinctively spiritual grounds.” Accordingly, the law can desegregate the public schools, extend public accommodations, and guarantee voting rights, but only the gospel can transform human lives.38 Importantly, this resolution also spoke about how racism limited the SBC’s ability to be effective in its mission endeavors both at home and abroad. SBC evangelism leaders had received complaints that the SBC’s reputation for racial prejudice had impeded its evangelistic work.39 Their foreign missionaries were hampered by the SBC’s racism and it should be rejected so that missionaries’ hands might be unchained to do their tasks. They also included the statement that racism “does violence to the altar of God and is rightly understood as a sin against God and humanity.”40 Followed by a confession of its “conformity to the world,” it rededicated itself to a ministry of reconciliation between African Americans and whites, between believers in segregation and integration. The SBC vowed to work, finally, toward solving the problems of unfair housing, unequal justice, and voting rights. The resolution ended as it had begun, with the SBC’s justifications for it: “We further recognize that our main task is to support and promote our programs of world missions and evangelism.”41
Following the Brown decision in 1954, the SBC had merely desegregated its institutions as the law demanded. There was no official expression of Christian compassion offered to African Americans, and the SBC offered no responsibility for having supported the pain of the Jim Crow system until the peak of the civil rights in the mid-1960s. Its official statements and resolutions always were carefully crafted to show interest in African Americans, but they were more concerned with the criminality of mob violence, especially by racial agitators, and with maintaining social order. It began to change its tone only after it became clear that its desire to plant new churches in African American and other ethnic communities had been thwarted by its racist reputation.
These official public statements are a lesson in how those who support the subjugation of others can minimize their own complicity while deflecting blame for its tragic results. The SBC criticized African Americans’ lack of progress and used mildly worded resolutions to voice its concerns over racial strife. It deflected blame for almost the entirety of the twentieth century, until in 1995 it finally apologized for its participation and support of racism, slavery, and segregation. These efforts, however, would have consequences in terms of appeals to African American Baptists (see Box 3.7).42 Its stance over the previous century had solidified a racist reputation unknown to them (see Box 3.8).
Box 3.7
Footnote 42 is where the author introduces a contrast with another denomination. She explains that Roman Catholics did take a different approach. This footnote is important. This is a careful history of all the key pronouncements from a denomination. The reader might, at this point in the article, be thinking: Well, were the SBC so much worse than the other denominations? To explore this question in any detail would be a major distraction