How Does Race Influence Your Views of Faith, Science and Politics?

Last updated on: July 20, 2017 at 10:08 am by Paul Louis Metzger

How Does Race Influence Your Views of Faith, Science and Politics? 2017-07-20T10:08:51-07:00 Paul Louis Metzger

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Outside the Scopes Trial, Dayton TN July 25, 1925. Creative Commons

All too often, I hear people say they’re color blind. I’m not referring to a color vision deficiency, but to the claim that they’re not racist. Regardless of what you and I make of such claims, it has been argued that racial considerations shaped white and black Evangelicals’ views at the time of the Scopes Trial. It makes one wonder how often racial concerns shape people’s views on faith and science as well as politics in various other contexts, even today.

Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews is the author of Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University Alabama Press, 2017). In a recent article, she claims that African American evangelicals held many of the same views as their white counterparts on theology and morality at the time of the Scopes Trial on evolution and creation in 1925. But they went further. While white fundamentalist evangelicals chastised Protestant liberals for abandoning the faith, their African American counterparts “charged that white Christians were not truly Christian because they allowed segregation, discrimination, and violence against African Americans…White fundamentalists had made fundamentalism a racialized term by excluding African Americans from the conversation and doubting their ability to understand Christianity; African Americans evangelicals returned the favor and made salvation contingent on racial equality.” (Mary Beth Mathews, “The History of Black Evangelicals and American Politics,” in Black Perspectives, March 30, 2017). Consider also Jeffrey P. Moran, “Reading Race into the Scopes Trial: African American Elites, Science, and Fundamentalism,” in The Journal of American History, vol. 90, No. 3 (Dec., 2003), pp. 891-911. See for example 898-899; Jeffrey P. Moran, American Genesis: The Evolution Controversies from Scopes to Creation Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).)

Mathews’ work brings to mind the highly acclaimed study by Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided By Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). No matter how color blind we make ourselves out to be, our racial presuppositions and experiences shape our convictions on many subjects, including faith, science, and politics. Mathews closes her article stating that the racialized divisions of the past persist today:

These racialized perspectives continue to the present day. Evangelicals have never been a single voting bloc, nor should white evangelicals be allowed to stand in for “the evangelical voters.” Meanwhile, African American evangelicals continue to fight for the same goals their ancestors did in the 1920s and 30s—equality, freedom from violence, and freedom from oppression. Historians, pundits, and pollsters need to pay more attention to the doctrine and race of the people we study.

Not only do they need to pay more attention, but also the rest of us do, especially Christians if we wish to understand what divides us so that we can overcome hostility and indifference and pursue diverse unity in Christ.

Mathews’ and Moran’s research, as well as Emerson and Smith’s work in sociology of religion along with social psychologist Christena Cleveland’s study, Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013) can help us see the connections between these various spheres and help us grow in sensitivity so that we move beyond color blindness to see with our blue, green and brown eyes wide open. Perhaps we could even go so far as to ask one another of different ethnic backgrounds what really matters to us on faith and science, politics and beyond, and why? The answers might help us see how blind we really are to what divides us.

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