LITMIR.BIZ

3 Racial Stigma and Southern Baptist Public Discourse in the Twentieth Century

       Pamela D. Jones

      RESEARCH LEVEL 1

      Editors’ Introduction

      Some of the best pieces of writing start from a very simple question: How can Christians committed to the Golden Rule support slavery? No one would say that they would like to be treated as a slave. In this powerful piece of historical analysis, the author starts with this question. The answer, this author explains, is that assumptions about the inferiority of African Americans created a culture where the Golden Rule is evaded. She then develops a substantial case study. The author takes the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and divides the history into three periods: the Jim Crow Era, post the 1954 Brown decision, and the 1995 Apology. She argues that African Americans are so traumatized by the racism of the denomination that the “change of heart” may not be sufficient to heal African Americans’ mistrust and skepticism toward the denomination as racist.

They had for more than a century before been regarded as being of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. ... And no distinction in this respect is made between the free negro or mulatto and the slave, but this stigma, of the deepest degradation was fixed upon the whole race. Dred Scott, 1857. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 HOW.) 393 (1857) ¹

The historic theological crisis in American race relations between blacks and whites not only has been a conflict with biblical interpretations that justified slavery and segregation, it also has involved conflicting views about what it means to be fully human and who has the power to define this. The heated biblical debates of the nineteenth century over whether slavery could be justified moved into the twentieth century in the debates over Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy. Whether to extend notions of Christian compassion and charity to African Americans as part of humankind or to continue to view them as inferior humans, as racially stigmatized beings, was at the heart of this controversy over racism, white supremacy, and racial segregation and their impact on African Americans.

      I trace the road taken by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to cope publicly with the changing racial dynamics, especially in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, and then with its efforts in 1995 to formally repudiate racism and past sins of slavery and segregation. I suspected that a major theological impediment to dismantling segregated institutions in the South after the Brown decision in 1954 was whether Christian denominations were willing to accept views that African Americans were fully human and therefore were entitled to be extended Christian love, charity, and compassion in light of their suffering during Jim Crow.

      The SBC split from Northern Baptists in 1845 over its support of slavery, supported the Confederate states, and supplied biblical justifications for African American enslavement and treatment. In the twentieth century, it retained its independence as a denomination even after other former southern and northern denominational schisms over race and slavery had begun the process of healing and reuniting. Especially in the South, the SBC fervently supported Jim Crow segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, and belief in African American inferiority. Its official resolutions and agency recommendations were often paternalistic in tone and demonstrated little interest in dismantling attitudes and policies that were central to the maintenance of the racial stigma of African American inferiority.

      How ideas of Christian charity and the Golden Rule were applied to African Americans is key to understanding how the SBC helped reinforce racial stigma against African Americans. On the one hand, it is no surprise that the language of love, charity, and the Golden Rule did not resonate in the SBC because African Americans had been stigmatized as inferior to whites based on the ideology of white supremacy. On the other hand, the SBC’s language does evolve over time, with consequences for its long-held view of African Americans. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it still believed that African American upward mobility had to be shaped by association with its white superiors. More recently, the SBC has begun to speak the language of integration and diversity while making slow strides in this direction.

      As we will see, racial stigma works in two directions. It is reciprocal. In 1995, the SBC apologized for its support of slavery and segregation. But the SBC had held on to its stigmatized view of African Americans for so long that it had itself developed the stigma of being a racist institution, due to its long-held support of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and anti-miscegenation laws. Consequently, it did not achieve the increases in African American membership and integration within its own institutions that it had hoped for.

(See Box 3.1.) After brief histories of the application of Christian teachings on love, charity, and the Golden Rule during debates on slavery, I outline segments of the SBC’s twentieth-century public statements, including resolutions, on race and racism. Then I explore the SBC’s 1995 apology on slavery and racism, followed by the election of the first African American SBC president in 2012. I discuss the two-way, reciprocal nature of the stigmatization process. Finally, I conclude with a contemporary snapshot of the SBC in terms of the integration of its own institutions and its membership numbers among racial and ethnic communities.

       Box 3.1

      This is the author’s signpost that gives the reader a sense of her article. She will start by looking at the manner in which white Christians interpreted key Christian themes (such as the Golden Rule) in the debates over slavery. She will go on to track the journey of a major Christian denomination (the SBC) and then look at how, despite a changing rhetoric, African Americans are still suspicious of the SBC.

      The Use of Biblical Teachings in Arguments about Slavery

      Biblical Teachings on Christian Charity and

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