is deeply discrediting.”54 Stigmatized individuals are not simply different or peculiar, but are deeply flawed and less than human. Racial stigma has characterized the plight of African Americans since the beginning of chattel slavery.
Glenn Loury has theorized about the consequences of racial stigma and its profound impact on social inequities that still exist in American social structures. Loury observes that racial stigma creates “vicious circles” of causation in which African American failure to progress in society justifies the prejudicial attitudes that often ensure that African Americans will not advance in society.55 In a religious context, racial stigma, justified by biblical interpretation, made it difficult to include African American Christians as part of Christian unity on an equal basis with whites. Moreover, this racial stigmatization of African Americans reinforced racism within the SBC’s own membership.
Stigma normally attaches to “aliens” and “others” in society and is part of the common narratives of American religion that discuss race. It typically is not discussed from the perspective of racially oppressed groups. Here, however, we can see that stigmatization has been a two-way street, one that is both reciprocal and consequential. The cumulative effect of the SBC’s long-standing support of racism, slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow segregation led to the stigmatization of the SBC itself as being racist. It was especially the apathy the SBC displayed toward African Americans over the many years as they suffered through slavery and the daily humiliations of Jim Crow segregation that was damaging to African Americans. As Dorothee Sölle explains, “the toleration of exploitation, oppression, and injustice points to a condition lying like a pall over the whole of society; it is apathy, an unconcern that is incapable of suffering.”56 In the eyes of many African Americans, the SBC is a discredited religious body that has stigmatized itself as a racist organization.
The SBC’s powerful resolutions and inactions over many years have had such a lasting impact in large part because they expressed their view of African Americans as racially stigmatized beings – as being less human than whites in the eyes of God, and thus as being unworthy of Christian brotherhood, charity, and the universal application of the Golden Rule. The unforeseen consequence for the SBC, however, was that many African Americans also came to distrust the denomination, saw it as a racist organization, and have not accepted its change of heart on matters of racial equality.
One should not underestimate the damage the SBC’s ideological affiliation with white supremacy has had on its ability to engender trust and lessen its racist stigma among African Americans Christians. Belief in white racial superiority clouded the SBC’s belief in 1995 that African Americans quickly and without question would accept the SBC’s “right hand of fellowship” following the SBC apology. One of the lessons of atonement and reconciliation processes, however, may well be that they only work when aggrieved parties see a change of heart both in words and in institutional deeds, or else the atonement and reconciliation process may not work at all.
While SBC official statements after the mid-1960s have been part of a consistent pattern of symbolic change that should not be minimized, evidence of change in actual policies and institutional practices also is important. For example, the SBC should be credited for its resolution to repudiate the Confederate Flag during its June 2016 convention. The resolution read in part, “We call our brothers and sisters in Christ to discontinue the display of the Confederate battle flag as a sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ, including our African-American brothers and sisters.”57 Such statements on Christian unity and the inclusion of African Americans continue to signal the SBC’s change of heart on racial matters.
Conclusion
When writing history, a careful examination of the problem of race, stigmatization, and its complex consequences changes how we understand the intersection of religion, race, and oppression and helps elucidate how major religious institutions, in this case the SBC, can damage their own reputations among oppressed communities. Religious institutions that have harmed whole segments of society are not left undamaged, and that damage might be long term and may require a great deal of rehabilitation. Thus, when writing history, it is important not only to tell narratives as completely as possible, but also to assess the complex consequences of institutional activities as realistically as possible. We should not settle for conventional descriptions of how certain white religious institutions supported their constituents’ identities that were driven by notions of “purity,” “whiteness,” or “theological racism” without also showing the complex consequences. It is not only important to understand the support of racism and white supremacy by major religious institutions, it is equally important to understand how racist stigmas attach to religious institutions like the SBC and how they create mistrust and skepticism among African Americans, even as whites apologize, atone for their policies, and ask for forgiveness and reconciliation.
One religious historian, for example, asserts that during the civil rights era it became difficult for southern Christians to defend racial segregation. He adds, “Their beliefs played a significant role in making white southern Christians obsessed with conceptions of purity. Their beliefs had been set in a mythological context that gave them properly religious sanction.”58 I would add: “or so they believed.” This same historian also states that white southern Christian ideas of social and racial hierarchy did not have to sound hypocritical because particular biblical passages clearly explained why spiritual equality does not imply temporal equality but agrees with “godly order.”59 The problem, however, is that there was a litany of ungodly practices against enslaved people.
Religious institutions have choices in terms of how they create, sustain, and destroy vestiges of racism. I have described the journey of the SBC, its support of white supremacy and racism, the Christian disunity it fostered with African Americans because it would not regard them as equals, how the SBC stigmatized itself as being a racist organization, and then how it recently has worked to remove this stigma in order to build relationships with African Americans and other ethnic groups.
Postscript
Today, like many American mainline denominations, the SBC is in the midst of declining membership. According to reports, it is doing everything possible to stem the tide of decline by becoming more ethnically diverse in its membership. Russell Moore, president since 2013 of its influential Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has tried to change how the SBC talks about race, speaking with empathy, and sometimes anger, over recent racial conflicts. For example, he has asked the denomination to listen more to African Americans’ experiences of racism. Yet, because the SBC believes that racism is due to the sinful nature of human beings, it seems reticent to deal with the oppressive societal structures that it helped to build and support. It believes that changing the ill will within individual minds and hearts is key and often sees it as the only step to be taken.
Within the denomination, efforts have been made to offer scriptures that promote racial equality, in distinction to those scriptures used to defend racism, slavery, and segregation. For example, those who are more inclusive and are what is referred to as “contemporary Southern Baptists,” believe that the Bible has been misinterpreted on the issue of race. They express hopefulness that the SBC is capable of making internal shifts in theology while continuing to adhere to the idea of biblical inerrancy.60
The SBC also has placed a great deal of emphasis on Hispanic membership, which has grown by 40% since 1998. However, according to Pew Research Center, as of 2014 the SBC remains one of the least racially diverse denominations in the United States, with only 6% African American and 3% Hispanic membership.61 In the American Baptist Churches USA, for example, African Americans constitute 10% of the membership. Meanwhile the Catholic Church’s ethnic composition is more diverse, with 3% African American and 34% Latino membership. Despite the SBC’s recent efforts, it remains an overwhelmingly majority white denomination.
Notes
1 1 Dred Scott v. Sanford,