The Color of Compromise

by Jemar Tisby

  The words black power proved controversial for black and white people alike. Their increased use coincided with highly visible urban uprisings in cities such as Watts, Newark, Detroit, and Chicago. The destruction of property coupled with an attitude of black pride and independence concerned and frightened many observers. The rising protests against the Vietnam War along with the push for women’s rights and gay rights gave some Americans a sense that the country was teetering on the brink of collapse. Politicians, including Nixon, began delivering a message of “law and order” to convey to voters their commitment to social stability.

  “Who is responsible for the breakdown of law and order in this country?” queried Nixon in a 1966 article for U.S. News & World Report. His answer: the seeds of anarchy had been “nurtured by scores of respected Americans: public officials, educators, clergymen, and civil rights leaders as well.”15 One of Nixon’s campaign ads depicted scenes of riots and demonstrations. The narrator’s voice articulated what the pictures were meant to convey. “I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.” A caption read, “This time . . . vote like your whole world depended on it.”16 In effect, Nixon was pointing to the civil rights movement and its nonviolent direct action, not as the endeavor to secure long-denied justice to black Americans but as the tarmac to tyranny and disregard for the law.

  Law-and-order rhetoric fueled an increasingly aggressive criminal justice establishment. Today, the United States has just 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its incarcerated persons. While the reasons for this are many, some of the seeds were planted under Nixon’s administration when the federal government began issuing harsher sentences for criminal offenders, supporting the deployment of undercover police squads in cities, and providing incentives for the construction of prisons. The result was “a significant expansion in America’s carceral state.”17

  Some historians and political analysts have called Nixon’s approach the “Southern Strategy.”18 The Southern Strategy exploited racial backlash against the civil rights movement, as well as an emerging sense of white, middle-class suburban identity, to mobilize disaffected white voters in support of the Republican Party. Richard M. Nixon and his advisers adopted this Southern Strategy as they reached out to the “great silent majority of Americans,” a demographic that increasingly included evangelicals.19 The conservative approach to politics in the 1970s and in the decades that followed began to court voters with white racial resentment and to downplay the concerns of black communities. In 2010, the chairman of the Republican Nation Convention, Michael Steele, who is black, admitted this: “For the last 40 plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.”20 Politically conservative elected officials aimed to recruit not only white male voters in the South but white evangelicals as well.

  Yet the idea of the Southern Strategy, however accurate it may be in some ways, furthers the erroneous idea that political conservatives resided mainly in the South. While there were many conservatives in the South, a new coalition of Republican voters had formed in cities and suburbs across the western United States, many of whom identified as white and evangelical. In the 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips, who coined the term Sunbelt, articulated an ethos designed to appeal to this emerging group that was “fiscally and socially conservative enough to win the confidence of the new moneyed suburbanite, but also racially conservative enough to attract [George] Wallace’s voters.”21 These Sunbelt voters lived in places like Dallas, Phoenix, and Orange County, California. Indeed, rather than being confined to a particular region of the country, the Sunbelt ideology was a suburban value system.22 These were men and women who believed in free-market capitalism, meritocratic individualism, local control of communities, and the idea that America had been founded as a “Christian Nation.” Historian Darren Dochuk argues that these Sunbelt citizens blended their evangelical religion into their political outlook as well, as Sunbelt evangelicalism “melded traditionalism into an uncentered, unbounded religious culture of entrepreneurialism, experimentation, and engagement—in short, a Sunbelt Creed.”23

  Given this Sunbelt Creed, it should not surprise us to learn that Billy Graham first came to national prominence not in his home state of North Caroline or anywhere else in the “Bible Belt” but during a crusade in Los Angeles in 1949. The preacher’s message resonated with LA audiences so much that even though planners scheduled it to last three weeks, they extended it to a full eight weeks. Thousands of Californians, most of them white and conservative, converted to Graham’s evangelical version of Christianity, and over the next several decades nurtured their faith in the milieu of conservative Sunbelt politics. Twenty years later, parts of California have become something of a haven for conservative evangelicals. At the start of another crusade in Southern California in 1969, Graham said to an audience of fifty-thousand faithful, “I feel more at home here than any place I’ve ever been.”24

  While Martin Luther King Jr. was proclaiming, “I have a dream!” on the steps of the capitol in Washington, grassroots conservatives were working on their dream from kitchen tables in California. A white suburban homemaker may not fit the typical image of an activist, but that is the best way to describe Estrid Kielsmeier. Historian Lisa McGirr writes about a day in early 1964 when Kielsmeier set her kitchen table with coffee cups and chairs and prepared for a gathering of her friends and neighbors. This would not be a simple social visit, however, but a political action meeting.25 Next to the coffee cups, Kielsmeier laid a stack of petitions to nominate Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate for president. As people trickled in throughout the day to sign the petition, Kielsmeier and her fellow “kitchen table activists” amazingly gathered the requisite 30,000 signatures before noon on the first day of their drive. The rise of the Religious Right was predominately a grassroots movement with origins among these “suburban warriors” of the 1960s who “set in place the ideas, strategies, and politics that would pave the road to national power.”26

  That national power was on full display when Billy Graham officially endorsed Nixon for president in the reelection campaign of 1972. Graham had been in close contact with presidents since Truman, but this was the first time he had endorsed one. The well-respected preacher and evangelist not only lent his support but actively encouraged the president to court the evangelical vote. “I have been pointing out to you in a number of conversations that we have had that there is an emerging evangelical strength in this country that is going to have a strong bearing on social and political matters probably for a generation to come,” Graham said to Nixon. Graham believed that evangelicals would be the critical constituency to “promoting the president’s vision of ‘law and order.’ ”27

  At this point, readers of this book may be searching for the proverbial “smoking gun”—explicit evidence that connects the American church with overt cooperation with racism. But racism, since it is socially constructed, adapts when society changes. By the late 1960s, politicians at the national level had moved on from explicitly racist rhetoric (George Wallace’s prosegregationist platform in the 1968 presidential election being an obvious exception), but the absence of that language did not mean that racism no longer affected politics. In place of obviously racist policies, law-and-order rhetoric “had become a surrogate expression for concern about the civil rights movement.”28 One of Nixon’s closest advisers, H. R. Haldeman, said, “[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”29 At the time, several black evangelicals publicly criticized the Nixon administration, and many Christians of color likely recognized the rhetoric, even if it was subtler this time. To wit, only 4 percent of black Protestants voted for Nixon in his first presidential victory.30

  Should this be taken to mean that the more than eight out of ten evangelical voters who pulled the
lever for Nixon were racist? It is possible that white evangelicals were not concerned with matters of race when they voted. But even a color-blind ideology is problematic since it “depended upon the establishment of structural mechanisms of exclusion that did not require individual racism by suburban beneficiaries.”31 Since the late 1960s, the American church’s complicity in racism has been less obvious, but it has not required as much effort to maintain. Nowadays, all the American church needs to do in terms of compromise is cooperate with already established and racially unequal social systems.

  RACIAL INTEGRATION AND THE TRUE ORIGINS OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

  When most people think about the Religious Right, the matter of abortion comes to mind. Like no other issue, the rejection of legalized abortion has come to define the Religious Right. Repealing Roe v. Wade stands as a perennial high-priority issue for conservative Christian voters, so much so that today it is hard to imagine a time when that was not the case. But in the early 1970s, abortion was not the primary issue that catalyzed the Religious Right, as it would in later years. Initially, the Christian response to Roe v. Wade was mixed.32 Instead, conservative voters coalesced around the issue of racial integration in schools.

  Perhaps some will be surprised to learn that abortion has not always been the defining issue for evangelicals. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, passed a resolution on abortion that called upon Southern Baptists “to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”33 No less than W. A. Criswell, pastor of the largest SBC congregation, stated after the Roe v. Wade decision that “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had life separate from its mother . . . that it became an individual person.” He further explained, “It has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”34 A poll in 1970 discovered that 70 percent of Southern Baptist pastors “supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the mother, 64 percent supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity and 71 percent in cases of rape.”35 Like the Southern Baptists, many other conservative Christians were not uniformly against abortion in the early 1970s.

  Instead, the impetus that galvanized the Religious Right came from an unexpected source, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Historian Randall Balmer explains that conservative power brokers originally came together as a political force to combat what they perceived as an attack by the IRS and the federal government on Protestant Christian schools.36 Three black families in Mississippi sued the Treasury Department, headed by David Kennedy, to disallow tax-exempt status for three new “segregation academies” in the county. The plaintiffs had a solid case for alleging racial discrimination. In 1969, when the federal government began more aggressively enforcing desegregation, white attendance in public schools in the area plummeted from 771 to 28. The following year, exactly zero white students remained in the local public schools.

  When the case of the black families went to court, the court granted a preliminary injunction and determined that any school—public or private—that discriminated on the basis of race could not hold the designation of “charitable” institution. In 1971, the Supreme Court upheld that decision in Green v. Connally and said that “racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions.”37 This ruling threatened the financial solvency of any Christian school that could not demonstrate an integrated student body or show positive efforts to desegregate. The IRS, however, did not strictly pursue penalties against racial discrimination, so very few schools felt the effects.38

  It only took one school, Bob Jones University, to bring the threat of government-enforced integration to the attention of Christian conservatives and to politically mobilize them. A poor white person in the South had few advantages. They typically had little schooling and not enough food, and the richer white people often looked down on them. The only advantage many felt they had was their whiteness. This was the context in which Bob Jones Sr. grew up. Born in rural Alabama in 1883, he adopted Jim Crow ideas of racial segregation even though his poverty likely gave him more in common with the black people around him than the wealthy whites. But Jones absorbed the cultural values of racism and eventually brought these ideas of racial hierarchy with him when he set out to found a new school.

  Bob Jones Sr. ostensibly started what would become Bob Jones University (BJU) not out of any racial considerations but to stand as a bulwark against what he saw as the increasing secularization and liberalism in the public schools. He already had a prolific career as a traveling evangelist, and hundreds of thousands has heard him preach. Many more recognized his name. In the 1920s, Jones grew concerned about the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy and more specifically about the way the theory of evolution had infiltrated public education, so Jones decided to start his own fundamentalist Christian college as an alternative to both public colleges and denominational schools that he felt had become too liberal. His friends prevailed upon him to use his own name in the school’s title in order to transfer his fame as a preacher into the successful launch of a new institution.39

  Classes commenced at Bob Jones College in 1927 with eighty-eight students. The south Florida school grew quickly but was forced to sell its property in Florida during the Great Depression. It relocated to Tennessee where a young preacher named Billy Graham enrolled in 1936, though Graham soon transferred as he chafed under the college’s strict rules and fundamentalist doctrines. For those unfamiliar with the differences between fundamentalists and evangelicals, it is worth noting that while there are many similarities, the two are not identical. Historian George Marsden, in his book Fundamentalism in American Culture, writes: “Fundamentalists were evangelical Christians . . . who in the twentieth century militantly opposed both modernism in theology and the cultural changes that modernism endorsed.”40 Fundamentalists espoused separatism from the modernizing culture and even from other evangelical denominations and churches considered too liberal in their beliefs. Their strict rules for moral behavior alienated more moderate evangelicals who sought greater engagement with the world for the sake of evangelism.41 In this case, the young Billy Graham was in the process of clarifying his own convictions as an evangelical and could not stomach the more restrictive culture of Bob Jones, a fundamentalist institution.

  In 1947, the school moved to its current residence in Greenville, South Carolina, where it became a university. Politically and in his preaching and teaching, Bob Jones Sr. supported segregation as a biblical mandate and stood firm in his convictions all throughout the civil rights movement. He died before the issue of integration came knocking on the door of the university he founded, so it fell to his son, Bob Jones Jr., to defend his father’s vision during one of the most tumultuous and notorious eras of the school’s history.

  The younger Jones continued the school’s tradition of segregation, and during his tenure as president the younger Jones granted honorary degrees to notorious segregationists such as Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and Lester Maddox.42 The university did finally admit its first black students in 1971, but they were only allowed if they were married. The ages-old bugaboo of interracial marriage and miscegenation made the idea of having single black men on campus as potential suitors for young white ladies an unconscionable prospect for the leaders at Bob Jones University. In 1975, the school changed its policy and allowed unmarried black students to enroll, but as clearly outlined in the student handbook, the school prohibited interracial dating. Bob Jones III, who served as president from 1971 to 2005, stated in an interview: “There are three basic races—Oriental, Caucasian and Negroid. At BJU, everybody dates within those basic three races.”43 Anyone involved in an interracial relationship o
r those who promoted such pairings would face expulsion.

  The Civil Rights Act and the IRS’s newly adopted policies meant that Bob Jones University’s stance on interracial dating placed it in violation of racial discrimination laws. The IRS revoked the school’s tax-exempt status in 1976, but these financial penalties did not deter university officials. They sued the IRS and presented their case as an issue of religious freedom. “Even if this were discrimination, which it is not, though the government disagrees,” Jones III said, “it is a sincere religious belief founded on what we think the Bible teaches, no matter whether anyone else believes it or not.”44 Similar to what some proponents of slavery had argued in the Civil War era, segregationists in the twentieth century considered it a “right” to separate people based on race. It was a religious belief with which the government had no right to interfere. Even as recently as 1998, Jonathan Pait, a spokesperson for the university, explained, “God has made people different from one another and intends those differences to remain. Bob Jones University is opposed to intermarriage of the races because it breaks down the barriers God has established.”45

  In recent years, Bob Jones University has officially changed its views on race and interracial relationships. In 2000, George W. Bush, who was the Republican candidate for president at the time, endured harsh criticism for speaking at BJU. In response to the controversy, the school’s president, Bob Jones III, led the decision to officially change the rules and allow interracial dating. In 2008, Stephen Jones, the new leader of the school since 2005, issued a formal apology for Bob Jones University’s past racial recalcitrance. The apology reads, “For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture.” Jones was finally able to see the connection between the American church’s historic complicity with racism and the university’s specific policies regarding race. He goes on to explain, “We conformed to the culture rather than providing a clear Christian counterpoint to it.”46 In other words, Stephen Jones acknowledged his Christian school’s complicity in racism. Yet the damage had been done. Bob Jones University had intentionally indoctrinated generations of students with racist ideas about interracial relationships.