Jim Crow on Christian Campuses

Chapter 3 highlights the continued influence of segregationist theology in evangelical circles even as explicit segregationist rhetoric began losing purchase outside that sphere in the mid-1960s. The centerpieces of this chapter are parallel narratives detailing the desegregation of Wofford College and Furman University, the respective flagship institutions of the Methodist and Baptist denominations in South Carolina. In describing the battles between school administrators who sought to desegregate their institutions and the laity of the state’s two largest denominations who resisted such measures, this chapter emphasizes white evangelicals’ continued opposition to black civil rights even as the broader southern culture was forced by the federal government to acquiesce on integration in institutions of higher education. Segregationist theology remained influential for a majority of white Baptists and Methodists who voted against desegregating the church schools in the mid-1960s and who withdrew their support when the colleges integrated against these Christians’ desires.

Embracing Colorblindness

Chapter 4 traces the transformation of segregationist theology into the blossoming ideas of colorblind individualism in the early 1970s. This chapter narrates the integration of the United Methodist denomination to demonstrate how some white evangelicals adopted a language of colorblindness in an attempt to subvert racial integration. The story of South Carolina’s Methodists illuminates ways that religious ideas can adapt to the imperatives of the culture in which they reside. Accordingly, this chapter demonstrates that while many evangelicals were still influenced by traditional notions of segregationist theology, the growing acceptance of racial equality in American society dictated the need for new rhetoric to keep segregationist Christianity in line with cultural benchmarks of acceptability. Colorblind individualism proved to be such rhetoric.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the two major arguments of The Bible Told Them So. First, the book argues that many southern white evangelicals who resisted the civil rights movement were animated by a Christian faith influenced by biblical exegesis that deemed racial segregation as divinely ordered. A complete understanding of southern white resistance to civil rights requires wrestling with this unique hermeneutic. Second, The Bible Told Them So argues that segregationist theology did not cease with the political achievements of the civil rights movement. Instead, in the years after 1965, segregationist Christianity evolved and persisted in new forms that would become mainstays of southern white evangelicalism by the 1970s: colorblind individualism and a heightened focus on the family.

Focusing on the Family

Chapter 5 examines how by the early 1970s white evangelicals utilized the emerging rhetoric of colorblindness in service to the defense of their households. When the Supreme Court forced South Carolina to enact substantive desegregation of the state’s public schools in the closing years of the 1960s, white Christian parents interpreted the move as a threat to their children’s well-being. In response, these parents helped create private religious schools that functioned as havens, they believed, for keeping their children safe. White Christian parents rarely discussed race, maintaining instead that they were merely following God’s mandate to shepherd their children by creating schools with stricter behavioral standards and higher educational expectations than the integrated public schools. But this chapter documents how these private schools, in actuality, represented another bastion of religiously motivated resistance to racial equality and helped extend the legacy of segregationist Christianity into the twenty-first century.

Not in Our Church

Chapter 1 explores the tensions that arose in southern evangelicalism between local church congregations and state- and nation-level bodies in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision. Such tensions reveal how Southern Baptists and Methodists negotiated the heightened antagonism emerging between denominational leaders and the people in the pews over civil rights in the mid-1950s. The chapter opens with South Carolina Southern Baptist churches rejecting broader Southern Baptist Convention efforts to advocate for civil rights in religious language and concludes with lay South Carolina Methodists defending the White Citizens’ Councils against criticism from a small number of Methodist clergy. Both these studies reveal the effective authority of local congregations in directing southern white churches’ responses to matters of race in the civil rights years. This chapter highlights that the congregational-level perspective gives the best vantage point for understanding white evangelicalism’s response to the civil rights movement, regardless of church polity.

The Bounds of Their Habitation

Chapter 2 explicates the theology behind southern evangelicals’ resistance to civil rights. It explains why conservative white Christians opposed civil rights reforms, arguing that a significant percentage of these Christians constructed a theology from both the natural world and biblical texts in which God was viewed as the author of segregation, and one who desired that racial separatism be maintained. Referencing letters, sermons, pamphlets, and books, this chapter documents how segregationist theology was crafted, defended, and deployed throughout the 1950s and 1960s in the South. It also demonstrates how such a theology supported a segregationist Christianity that became common in southern white churches, proving influential in shaping the social and political responses white southerners had to the civil rights movement.

Epilogue

In the twenty-first century, descendants of segregationist Christians began pursuing the racial justice their forebears had fought. In a reversal of the biblical interpretations that segregationist Christians promoted a half-century earlier, these latter-day conservative Christians embrace racial diversity as a biblical command. But these contemporary evangelicals promote racial justice through individual heart changes, reconciled relationships, and appeals to colorblindness, the tools fashioned and utilized by their segregationist forebears precisely to avoid the racial justice their descendants now seek. Despite a growing number of conservative white Christians professing a desire to solve the problem of race, they are hindered in such efforts by the colorblind theology they inherited from their segregationist forebears.