The Color of Compromise

by Jemar Tisby

  In giving us a history of America and the Protestant church, Jemar Tisby has given us a survey of ourselves—the racial meanings and stratagems that define our negotiations with one another. He points courageously toward the open sore of racism, not with the resigned pessimism of the defeated but with the resilient hope of Christian faith. The reader will have their minds and hearts pricked as they consider just how complicit the church has been in America’s original sin and how weak a word complicit is for describing the actions and inactions of those who claim the name of Christ!

  THABITI ANYABWILE, pastor, Anacostia River Church

  With clinical precision, Jemar Tisby unpacks the tragic connection between the American church and the countless historic iterations of American racism. Readers are served well by Jemar’s refusal to minimize the horror of this history or sanitize the church’s hands from its complicity. For this reason and many others, The Color of Compromise is an appropriately discomforting volume for such a time as this. May it be referenced and heeded as a prophetic warning for decades to come.

  TYLER BURNS, vice president, The Witness

  If you want to understand why we remain mired in racial unrighteousness, you need to read this book. Its pages radiate not just historical but also moral insight, as Tisby shines a light on to the dark places of American church history. The Color of Compromise tells the truth—and only the truth will set us free.

  HEATH W. CARTER, associate professor of history, Valparaiso University, author, Union Made

  The Color of Compromise is essential reading for American Christians. By telling the brutal history of white Christians’ deliberate complicity in racial oppression, Jemar Tisby confronts the church with its own past. But his is not simply a story of condemnation. If racism can be made, it can be unmade, he reminds us. “There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote. Tisby’s book is a labor of love and, ultimately, a work of hope.

  KRISTIN DU MEZ, professor of history and gender studies, Calvin College

  Each individual and society is a compilation of what has come before them, whether they own this notion or not. Tisby’s thoughtful work reminds us that you can run from, deny, or remix it, but history will find you out. The American church’s history of wanting to hold holiness in one hand and racial stratification in the other has seeded a deeply corrupted tree. The book causes us to examine the implications of the historical trajectory of our theological influences. Yet this book, with the same intensity that it offers historical truth, provides grace. If race can be constructed, racism can be deconstructed. In Christ’s name, it must be!

  CHRISTINA EDMONDSON, dean for intercultural student development, Calvin College

  Christianity in the United States has had problems for centuries as it concerns racial injustice, and most American Christians need what can only be described as remedial education when it comes to understanding the abusive racist history of our faith tradition. In The Color of Compromise Jemar Tisby courageously challenges some of our long held collective assumptions and whitewashed accounts of rationalized racism for the church in America. With a thoroughly researched and detailed examination of archival documents and literary sources, he compels readers to focus on hard truths, addresses the realities of American Christianity’s past, and does so in a well-reasoned and lovingly direct writing style. Upon reading this book, one will come away having to reconsider how individuals who proudly boast of a Christian way of life in America continue to do so at the expense of others. As a historian and a Christian, Tisby presents truth with accuracy but also with much love and humility. If it is true that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, then this book is a timely must-read for any Christian seeking justice and mercy, as we learn how problems in American Christianity’s past could lead to solutions in our future.

  ALEXANDER JUN, professor of higher education, Azusa Pacific University, author, White Out and White Jesus

  Reconciliation doesn’t happen without truth telling. Jemar takes us on a historical journey laying out the racial complicity of the church. It’s difficult to understand the complexities of the history of racial oppression in America; one must begin to identify the intentional and unintentional blind spots many have. Jemar calls the church to face its tragic history in an effort to build a new future and to save it from repeating past mistakes. The foundation of reconciliation begins with truth. Tisby encourages us to become courageous Christians who face our past with lament, hope, and humility. History is imperative to understanding the present. The Color of Comprise gives us an aerial view of our past with hopes of a Christian awakening. This is a must-read for all Christians who have hopes of seeing reconciliation.

  LATASHA MORRISON, founder and president, Be the Bridge

  With the incision of a prophet, the rigor of a professor, and the heart of a pastor, Jemar Tisby offers a defining examination of the history of race and the church in America. Comprehensive in its scope of American history, Tisby’s data provides the full truth and not a sanitized version that most American Christians have embraced. Read this book. Share this book. Teach this book. The church in America will be better for it.

  SOONG-CHAN RAH, Milton B. Engebretson Professor of Church Growth and Evangelism, North Park Theological Seminary, author, The Next Evangelicalism and Prophetic Lament

  In The Color of Compromise, Tisby reveals the role that racism has played in the American church and how that has manifested in policy making. Those following the relationship between white evangelicals and President Trump need to know that this union was a long time coming—even before the rise of the Moral Majority, led in part by the late Jerry Falwell, father of one of Trump’s most vocal evangelical supporters, Jerry Falwell Jr. Tisby’s book gives the historical context that is often missing from the conversation about how so many black and white Christians can be described as theologically conservative but vote so differently on Election Day. Compromise helps the reader understand that Martin Luther King Jr.’s assessment—that Sunday morning is the most racially divided hour in America—rings true today and manifests in the voting booths when Christians express their deeply held convictions.

  EUGENE SCOTT, reporter covering identity politics for The Fix for The Washington Post

  Some American evangelical Christians are often confused and sometimes frustrated by all the talk surrounding white supremacy and American Christianity. Some think that racism and its deleterious intergenerational, personal, psychological, social, institutional, and systemic effects are of the past and too often exaggerated in the present or that in a certain way American Christianity was somehow immune to this national spiritual and moral pathology. In The Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby has provided an account that reminds some of us and informs others of the sad demonstrably historical fact that the American church intentionally perpetuated racial injustice socially and politically while attempting to undergird all of this theologically. The claim itself will no doubt make some uncomfortable. We must nevertheless come to grips with these realities. Others may even become defensive, yet this response must be resisted. For those who care about the collective witness of the American church, it is necessary that readers journey with Tisby through this treacherous landscape of American church history. This sordid history should not be hidden, downplayed, or explained away. It must be confronted. There cannot be a way forward without a profound truth telling. This is exactly what The Color of Compromise does. Those who are deeply concerned about the witness of the American church must read this book and pass it on to others. By looking back, The Color of Compromise pushes us to look forward to live out a courageous Christianity that is authentically grounded in the gospel of Jesus Ch
rist.

  PATRICK SMITH, associate research professor of theological ethics and bioethics, Duke Divinity School, senior fellow, Kenan Institute of Ethics, Duke University

  The Color of Compromise presents an irrefutable and haunting historical survey of white evangelical churches’ complicity with racism and white supremacy. Tisby invites the reader to answer this question: What is the color of compromise? The answer is red, politically and literally, as the blood of black women and men—slain by the wickedness of white supremacy and antiblack racism vis-à-vis the altar of complicity—continues to pour out.

  EKEMINI UWAN, public theologian

  Jemar Tisby has written a concise history of the way white supremacy wrapped itself in Christianity in the American story, compromising the gospel for the sake of money and power. This slaveholder religion is with us still, adding fuel to the fire that threatens to consume the institutions of our common life. To face the truth this book illuminates is to see that it didn’t have to be this way—and that, by God’s grace, there has always been a prophetic tradition calling us to confront the compromise and be born again.

  JONATHAN WILSON-HARTGROVE, author, Reconstructing the Gospel

  ZONDERVAN

  The Color of Compromise

  Copyright © 2019 by Jemar Tisby

  ePub Edition © December 2018: ISBN 978-0-310-59727-8

  Requests for information should be addressed to:

  Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

  Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.Zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.®

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth & Associates, Inc.

  Cover design: RAM Creative

  Cover photography: Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo

  Interior design: Kait Lamphere

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  To Janeé and Jack

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Lecrae

  1. The Color of Compromise

  2. Making Race in the Colonial Era

  3. Understanding Liberty in the Age of Revolution and Revival

  4. Institutionalizing Race in the Antebellum Era

  5. Defending Slavery at the Onset of the Civil War

  6. Reconstructing White Supremacy in the Jim Crow Era

  7. Remembering the Complicity in the North

  8. Compromising with Racism during the Civil Rights Movement

  9. Organizing the Religious Right at the End of the Twentieth Century

  10. Reconsidering Racial Reconciliation in the Age of Black Lives Matter

  11. The Fierce Urgency of Now

  Conclusion: Be Strong and Courageous

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  FOREWORD

  On July 4, 2016, as my social media feeds filled with images of American flags and friends’ backyard barbecues celebrating America’s independence, I took to Twitter and posted a picture seven African Americans picking cotton in a field with the following caption: “My family on July 4th 1776.”

  While the tweet received more than 15,000 retweets and 23,000 likes, there were numerous tweets frustrated by the fact that I chose to post such an image and caption on the day celebrating America’s independence. One follower questioned my patriotism; another accused me of making every issue a race issue instead of a gospel issue. From where I sat, I was simply telling the truth about our country’s complicated, imperfect history on a day when people were celebrating a simplistic, incomplete narrative about our country.

  Though those responses frustrated and grieved me, they didn’t surprise me. My work as a black hip-hop artist with an audience in white evangelicalism has shown me the tension that exists between black and white America, specifically when it comes to the history of the white evangelical church in America.

  That’s why I’m excited that this book by my friend and brother Jemar Tisby is in your hands. Throughout its pages, Jemar carefully surveys the history of the white church in America and its complicity with racism. As a student of history, he’s careful with stories and data, seeking to let history speak for itself by boldly telling the truth and helping us connect the dots between events over the past 400 years of our country’s history.

  In a time when discussions grow heated quickly and narratives clash as black and white American Christians think about and discuss our country’s racial history and its ongoing implications, Jemar’s book challenges us to consider the history that has shaped us.

  As Christians, when we read the Bible, we recognize that events that happened thousands of years ago are still relevant today. We also see that Scripture never hides the ugly parts of history when it comes to the people of God. The Bible reveals David’s adultery, Jonah’s selfishness, and Peter’s failure of faith. Just as we can’t take out the parts of the Bible that we don’t like or that make us uncomfortable, we can’t celebrate the shining moments of the American church’s history and then ignore the shameful aspects of that history. We either fully acknowledge the entire history or dismiss it all. The truth about humanity’s heritage turns a mirror on our souls and pushes us to recognize who we truly are and who we are not.

  Jemar challenges us to take history seriously and account for it. My brother has done his due diligence in researching and understanding the history of the evangelical church in the United States. He has carefully collected historical records, interviews, and stories and then organized that history in a way that helps us see how the travesty of racism in and from the church deeply impacts our politics, churches, neighborhoods, schools. The account is sobering and challenging.

  Fortunately, Jemar doesn’t simply leave us on our own to figure out next steps. Along with the bleak, heart-wrenching account of the past, he offers thoughtful, constructive action steps we can take to pursue justice and reconciliation in our communities, churches, and country.

  Education should lead to informed action, and informed action should lead to liberation, justice, and repair. Through reading this book, we realize that if we built the walls on purpose, we need to tear down the walls on purpose. This demands political, social, and personal action that cuts through theological and political lines. It requires us to hold our Bibles with clarity and strength while correcting our country’s broken systems, such as mass incarceration and police brutality.

  We live in a country centered around whiteness that disregards how the image of God is on magnificent display in nonwhite bodies (and histories and theologies, etc.). If we don’t take responsibility for what has happened in America, we’re not willing to see the image of God throughout the world.

  Jemar has done a service to the church through this book. He has traced our country’s wicked, racist history and demonstrated how the church has been complicit in that work. Understand
ing the past isn’t simply an end in and of itself; it’s also a means to an end. Through understanding our history, we can look to the world around us with new eyes and see ways we can move forward with focus and intentionality to make right what has been wrong so that justice will “roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

  Lecrae

  CHAPTER

  1

  THE COLOR OF COMPROMISE

  Four young girls busily prepared for their big day. It was September 15, 1963, the day of the “Youth Day” Sunday service at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the girls, along with the other young people of the congregation, would spend the next few hours singing songs, reciting poems, praying, and giving encouraging messages in front of hundreds of beaming parents. The girls—Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14)—had just finished Sunday school and were in the church basement making final adjustments to their white dresses when the bomb exploded.1 The blast, which killed all four girls and injured at least twenty others, left a hole in the floor five feet wide and two feet deep. It decapitated Cynthia. Her parents could only identify her body by her feet and by the ring she was wearing.2 A newspaper report at the time indicated that all of the church’s stained-glass windows had been destroyed except one. That window depicted “Christ leading a group of little children. The face of Christ was blown out.”3

  Three days later, an integrated crowd of thousands of mourners gathered at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church for a funeral for three of the girls. So many attended that the mass of people spilled out of the sanctuary and into the street.4 The cover of this book shows the scene of the funeral.

  Before the funeral, on the day after the bombing, a young, white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. delivered a lunchtime speech at Birmingham’s all-white Young Men’s Business Club. Of course, he had heard about the tragedy in his city, and this lifelong southerner jotted down some words about racism and complicity that would prove to be a turning point in his life.