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 the Golden Rule
(See Box 3.2.) The SBC and other southern denominations that separated from Northern denominations over slavery in the late 1830s and early 1840s wrestled not only with whether slavery was part of the divine order of God but also over the nature of Jesus’s teachings on love, charity, and the Golden Rule. One way religion has supported structures of oppression, such as slavery, has been to limit how the love of Jesus would be distributed and how the Golden Rule should be applied, based on a person’s or group’s racial or ethnic status. If these teachings applied completely and universally to African Americans, then slavery was a sin. However, if African Americans were not regarded as fully human, and therefore were valued less than whites, then these teachings had only minimal or no application to the enslaved.
Box 3.2
The author is making good use of subtitles. This is the first subtitle after the introduction. The focus is on how the Golden Rule is used in debates around slavery. The great advantage of the subtitle is that you know exactly where you are in the paper.
Some believed these Christian teachings applied universally and did everything possible to help African Americans overcome cultural and Christian barriers to equality. As they saw it, slavery was contrary to the teachings of Jesus, including the love of one’s neighbor and the Golden Rule. These teachings signaled a new order, the Kingdom of God. Jesus’s teaching, as found in Matthew 22:37–40 (NRSV), is:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
In John 13:34–35 (NRSV), Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” The Golden Rule, found in Matthew 7:12 (NRSV), reads: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”
Many antislavery proponents argued that slavery never would have originated had these teachings and the Golden Rule been followed by all Christians. Arguments from Quakers John Woolman and Anthony Benezet in the eighteenth century, from nineteenth-century biblical scholars and pastors such as Charles Elliott and Albert Barnes, as well as from African American activists such as David Walker all used the Sermon on the Mount and other New Testament teachings to help persuade the country of the evil and sinfulness of slavery and why it had to be abolished (see Box 3.3).2
Box 3.3
Footnote 2 is very interesting. The author is making sure that the assertion in the text is supported by primary sources that confirm that there were those in the eighteenth century who affirmed that you cannot deduce the institution of slavery and take the Golden Rule seriously. Do note that the author uses the appropriate conventions around footnoting and internet sources, which includes indicating the date it was accessed.
In the eighteenth century, for example, John Woolman offered one of the earliest arguments against slavery based on the Golden Rule. Woolman believed all humans and nations were of one blood, subject to the same afflictions, infirmities, and heavenly judgment. He also believed that all persons should place themselves in the situation of others in order to understand that slavery was unjust. According to Woolman, one should ask, “How should I approve of this conduct were I in their Circumstances, and they in mine?”3 During the same period, Quakers Anthony Benezet and David Cooper also argued that one must put themselves in the position of being slaves and imagine having their wives and children as slaves.4
Many nineteenth-century antislavery arguments utilized similar teachings from the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule. Charles Elliott,
