Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Evangelical Colorblindness

Evangelical Colorblindness

Last updated on: January 12, 2022 at 12:01 am by David Swartz

Evangelical Colorblindness 2022-01-11T22:46:25-04:00 David Swartz

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I’m pleased to welcome Jesse Curtis to the Anxious Bench. He is an assistant professor of history at Valparaiso University and the author of the just-released The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era. You can follow Jesse at his blog https://colorblindchristians.com/ and on Twitter @jncthehistorian. What follows is a conversation we had last week about evangelicals and race in the twentieth century. –David

***

David: Christian Smith and Michael Emerson’s Divided by Faith used massive amounts of survey data to critique evangelical racial practices. What do your methodologies and source bases contribute to the scholarly conversation they launched several decades ago?

Jesse: It’s appropriate to start with this book! I encountered Divided by Faith before I was a historian or had any plans to become one. I read it simply as a white evangelical Christian, and it hit very close to home. I was astounded by that book. Their book is a work of sociology at its core, while mine is delving into a historical archive and offering a new account of the history that came before the 1990s moment they described.

My interpretation of this longer history makes the 1990s racial reconciliation moment seem less groundbreaking than it appeared to some observers at the time. White evangelicals were refining and perfecting a script they had been working on ever since the 1950s. If Emerson and Smith captured a snapshot in time, I’m saying, “Let’s roll the tape; it turns out we’ve seen this movie before.” I think this history makes it harder to credit claims of good intentions and well-meaning attempts at achieving racial equality. While Emerson and Smith framed white evangelicals’ counterproductive racial practices as somewhat ironic or tragic, I’m more inclined to see white evangelicals actively achieving the things that are most important to them—and racial equality is very low on that list of priorities.

You open the book with the reaction of megachurch pastor Rick Warren to the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Warren tweeted “#AllLivesMatterToGod” and “Racism isn’t caused by SKIN but by SIN.” If you had found this colorblind sentiment in an archival document from 1964 instead of on Twitter in 2014, would you critique it in the same way?

I love this question because I find it so hard to give you a clear answer! I think the short answer is no, because context ought to shape our interpretive choices, and the contextual gap between 1964 and 2014 is large. I did find a woman using the “skin/sin” line in a 1960s letter, and I evaluated her statement as reactionary. But this interpretive choice wasn’t automatic, as if colorblind sentiments are inherently bad, or as if their meaning is fixed. In the case of the 1960s letter, my interpretation had to account for her social position, the rest of the contents of the letter, the events happening at the time, and so on. Part of the whole point of this book is that theological language of race, including scripture itself, is not inherently freeing or oppressive. It depends on context and purpose!

What led you to this topic?

Gosh, my whole life led me here. This is a subject for another book someday. Suffice it to say, as a young adult I had a tangled journey of realizing I was a white Christian racist. Only the Christian part of that identity had been visible to me until I moved to Chicago for college in 2005.

That’s the deep background. The shorter story is that I began my PhD work at Temple University in August, 2014, the very month Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. I saw how my fellow white evangelicals were reacting to the protests, and I didn’t like it. I could hardly focus on my work. I wanted to know more about why my religio-racial tradition acted this way. That was the beginning. So, for me, it was important that the first paragraph of the book start with Michael Brown’s death. This is a black lives matter book.

Back in the day I was the editor of a student newspaper at an evangelical college. I remember how raw some of our work was, so I imagine you bumped into some real gems. Can you share a couple of the funniest or poignant or painful sources you encountered?

There was some funny stuff for sure, but the one that comes immediately to mind isn’t funny at all. I mention this in the book, but there was a black student at Houghton College in the 70s who wrote in the student newspaper about the racism and alienation she experienced on campus. I’ve always thought it was courageous of her to write that. The line that is seared into my mind is this: “I had to stay really close to the Lord to keep from committing suicide.”

My own work has chronicled how missionaries often acted as a progressive force for racial change. Your chapter entitled “Growing the Homogeneous Church” offers an important corrective to that single story. How did the so-called “homogeneous unit principle” developed by missiologists encourage evangelicals to double down on, rather than challenge, whiteness?

It provided a missiological justification for focusing on the growth of white congregations. It was quite seductive. Here you had this scientific-sounding jargon coupled with a supposedly gospel-centered desire to see churches grow. And it turned out homogeneous churches grew fastest of all! Leading experts of church growth ripped whiteness completely out of its context of ongoing harm, describing it as a healthy expression of pluralism. Middle class white evangelicals were just as entitled to homogeneous worship as a foreign-language immigrant congregation. It was all part of America’s dynamic mosaic of peoples. People like to worship with people like themselves. Give them what they like. For experts like Donald McGavran and C. Peter Wagner, this was explicitly race-conscious. On the ground, it justified and enabled white spaces where race could be ignored and colorblind theology could flourish.

When black evangelicals and other critics raised the alarm about the ethics of this investment in whiteness, church growth experts had their trump card in hand: what could be more important than people becoming Christians? Don’t we have to use the most effective methods possible? This was all taking place in a context of the crisis of the American city and white suburbanization. Ordinary white evangelicals and their congregations effectively exacerbated the crisis of American racial inequality, as Mark Mulder showed so well in Shades of White Flight. But their self-conception was that they were simply biblical Christians trying to spread the gospel. It’s these kinds of stories that I have in mind when I talk about white evangelicals investing in whiteness as evangelicals. They deliberately used race for their purposes, while at the same time constantly criticizing black evangelicals when they brought up race. It’s as if they said, my use of race reflects my commitment to the gospel; your use of race is a distraction from the gospel. These pernicious narratives remain dominant in white evangelicalism right up to the present day.

In one of your final chapters, you describe a group of black evangelicals who challenged colorblind Christians. Could you describe the content and reaction to Clarence Hilliard’s article “Down with the Honky Christ,” which was published in Christianity Today in the 1976?

The black evangelical story is absolutely crucial, and it’s been overlooked. Black evangelicals were pioneers of a kind of colorblind theology in evangelicalism. They used it in the 1950s and 1960s to call for change. Paul says we’re one in Christ. If that’s so, said black evangelicals, you must include us. In the context of open discrimination, these colorblind interpretations of scripture were powerful indictments of white evangelicalism. But white evangelicals turned the tables, using the same kinds of rhetoric to silence criticism. The basic rhetorical move shifted as white evangelicals said, if we’re one in Christ, you shouldn’t be talking about race.

So by the late 1960s and early 70s, you see black evangelicals becoming more race conscious, recognizing the ways scripture was being deployed against them. I still can’t believe Christianity Today published this piece from Clarence Hilliard in 1976. In it, Hilliard basically brings the long African American tradition of a black Christ to the pages of white evangelicalism’s flagship magazine. It’s a searing critique of people like Donald McGavran and Billy Graham, who Hilliard accused of peddling a cheap personal relationship kind of salvation that didn’t call on people to follow the ethical commitments of Christ. Hilliard comes right out and says that Christ is black and true followers of Christ will become black. He’s not talking about phenotype, of course, but a way of seeing and living in an unjust world. In a racist society, blackness was the closest connection Americans could envision to the upside-down values of the Kingdom of God. Hilliard thought the evangelical mainstream was rejecting this demanding path of theological blackness and chasing after the shiny rewards of a theologically white Christ. The influence of James Cone on Hilliard is obvious, and that fact alone would be enough to make him seem to most white evangelicals like a dangerous gadfly.

Amidst profound racial tensions in the wake of the O. J. Simpson trial and the Million Man March in the 1990s, the racial reconciliation work of Promise Keepers seemed very promising. Many observers thought that the movement could offer racial healing on a national scale. Why didn’t it turn out that way?

Because it’s not what ordinary white evangelicals wanted. McCartney (PK’s founder) himself pointed to this at the time. Even when packaged in evangelical idiom and bathed in scripture, most white evangelicals didn’t want to talk about race. And why would they? They supported the racist status quo.

Many readers of this blog will have recently listened to Christianity Today’s podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” and read books like Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood and Kristin Kobes DuMez’s Jesus and John Wayne. How do the dynamics of racialized evangelical power you describe resemble or differ from those of gender? How do they intersect?

There’s much that could be said on this, but I’ll just note one foundational difference in the rhetorical dynamics at play here. Gender hierarchy is actively advocated and proudly defended in large swaths of evangelicalism, while racial hierarchy is nearly everywhere condemned. The same people who preach that the Bible teaches male headship also tend to preach that the Bible rejects racial hierarchy. So even though both gender and racial hierarchy are widely practiced, the rhetorical context around them is quite distinct. This has practical consequences insofar as many white evangelicals participate in practices and institutions of racial hierarchy but are unable to see them for what they are.

What are you working on now?

Trying to stay sane while being the best father and teacher I can be. I hope space will open up for my next book project sooner rather than later, but I don’t yet know what.

American Religious History

David Swartz

Evangelicalism

race

church growth movement

colorblindness

Divided by Faith

Previous Post

January 11, 2022

Why I'm Still a Protestant

Next Post

January 13, 2022 Did the Fundamentalists Win? A Centennial Retrospective

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was known as the "beloved physician"?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Luke Mark John Matthew