that “a part of the anguish of African-American Christians was during the sixties, when we needed a friend, the evangelicals weren’t there.”46
Some African American pastors who were a part of the resolution-drafting meeting no doubt realized that the 1995 resolution would be met with skepticism and mistrust by African American pastors. Frost mentioned that African American National Baptists were cool to the 1995 resolution for several reasons. The resolution was seen by many African Americans as an opportunity to steal African American Baptists and bring them into the SBC at a time when its white membership had plateaued. Frost was personally hurt by the National Baptists’ reaction because they were not willing to accept the possibility that the SBC had a changed heart toward racism. It would seem that the SBC’s stained reputation would be difficult to overcome immediately.
African Americans outside the SBC pointed to the history of racism and abuse that African Americans historically had endured. A test for many in the African American Christian community would be whether words matched deeds and whether the SBC transformed from its original roots of racism. According to the Rev. Arlee Griffin, Jr., who served as historian for the African American Progressive National Baptist Convention during the time of the SBC’s historic resolution, “It is only when one’s request for forgiveness is reflected in a change of attitude and actions that the victim can then believe that the request for forgiveness is authentic.” The proof, for the Rev. Griffin Jr., would be in the integration of the SBC’s institutions and churches, including seminary faculties and agency staffs.47
The SBC’s racist reputation was not limited to segments of African American Christian communities. SBC Pastor Jonathan Merritt discussed the problem of the SBC’s general reputation in an article some sixteen years later. He noted:
Then there’s the stigma attached to the name. A 2006 Center for Missional Research/Zogby poll found that many Americans have a negative impression of the denomination. More than 40% of 18- to 24-year-olds said knowing a church was Southern Baptist would negatively affect their decision to visit or join.48
The same article recounted that even the name, the SBC, was problematic and that it needed a break with its past to embrace a more culturally diverse American society. Merritt wrote, “I was reminded of this recently when an African-American friend asked me about the denominational alignment of our church. I saw pain in her eyes when I told her ‘Southern Baptist.’”49
After the 1995 resolution, the SBC’s public resolutions on race continued to reflect a change in tone, especially during the 2007 recognition of the 150th anniversary of the Dred Scott case. In this resolution, the SBC repudiated the court’s decision that declared that African Americans had no rights that whites had to respect. Instead, it wrote that it “wholly lament[ed] and repudiate[d] the Dred Scott Decision and fully embrace[d] the Lord’s command to love our neighbors as ourselves.”50
(See Box 3.10.) Its change of tone also was reflected in 2012 when the SBC elected its first African American convention president, the Rev. Fred Luter, Jr. of New Orleans. It was not something the Rev. Luter sought, but he believed that it was God’s will that he become president to assist the SBC’s efforts to become more diverse.51 It also must be noted that at the time it elected the Rev. Luter, the convention faced a decline in overall membership.52 This move toward more diversity came as the SBC grappled with a 2010 baptism rate that was down 5% from 2009 and a 0.15% drop in membership – the fourth consecutive year of decline.53 The work toward a more ethnically diverse SBC may have begun in earnest with the election of the Rev. Luter, but the work to evince trust with oppressed groups has been difficult. As a part of its work thus far, it has opened its congregations and has planted churches in African American and Hispanic communities.
Box 3.10
The author has sketched some of the understandable suspicion surrounding the apology among African American Christians. So here the author highlights the decision of the convention to elect its first African American president. However, she links this decision with the data around the decline of membership. She invites the reader to wonder if the passion for inclusion is mainly driven by declining attendance.
Stigma: A Reciprocal Process
The stigma and stain of African American inferiority developed over centuries of life in America, beginning with chattel slavery. The “curse of Ham” and other biblical arguments were early tools of stigmatization of African Americans and illustrated the meaningful role scripture played in promoting racism, slavery, and segregation. Erving Goffman notes that stigma refers to “an attribute that is deeply discrediting.”54 Stigmatized individuals are not simply different or peculiar, but are deeply flawed and less than human. Racial stigma has characterized the plight of African Americans since the beginning of chattel slavery.
Glenn Loury has theorized about the consequences of racial stigma and its profound impact on social inequities that still exist in American social structures. Loury observes that racial stigma creates “vicious circles” of causation in which African American failure to progress in society justifies the prejudicial attitudes that often ensure that African Americans will not advance in society.55 In a religious context, racial stigma, justified by biblical interpretation, made it difficult to include African American Christians as part of Christian unity on an equal basis with whites. Moreover, this racial stigmatization of African Americans reinforced racism within the SBC’s own membership.
Stigma normally attaches to “aliens” and “others” in society and is part of the common narratives of American religion that discuss race. It typically is not discussed from the perspective of racially oppressed groups. Here, however, we can see that stigmatization has been a two-way street, one that is both reciprocal and consequential. The cumulative effect of the SBC’s long-standing support of racism, slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow segregation led to the stigmatization of the SBC itself as being racist. It was especially the apathy the SBC displayed toward African Americans over the many years as they suffered through slavery and the daily humiliations of Jim Crow segregation that was damaging to African Americans. As Dorothee Sölle explains, “the toleration of exploitation, oppression, and injustice points to a condition lying like a pall over the whole of society; it is apathy, an unconcern that is incapable of suffering.”56 In the eyes of many African Americans, the SBC is a discredited religious body that has stigmatized itself as a racist organization.
The SBC’s powerful resolutions and inactions over many years have had such a lasting impact in large part because they expressed their view of African Americans as racially stigmatized beings – as being less human than whites in the eyes of God, and thus as being unworthy of Christian brotherhood, charity, and the universal application of the Golden Rule. The unforeseen consequence for the SBC, however, was that many African Americans also came to distrust the denomination, saw it as a racist organization, and have not accepted its change of heart on matters of racial equality.
One should not underestimate the damage the SBC’s ideological affiliation with white supremacy has had on its ability to engender trust and lessen its racist stigma among African Americans Christians. Belief in white racial superiority clouded the SBC’s belief in 1995 that African Americans quickly and without question would accept the SBC’s “right hand of fellowship” following the SBC apology. One of the lessons of atonement and reconciliation processes, however, may well be that they only work when aggrieved parties see a change of heart both in words and in institutional deeds, or else the atonement and reconciliation process may not work at all.
While SBC official statements after the mid-1960s have been part of a consistent pattern of symbolic change that should not be minimized, evidence of change in actual policies and institutional practices also is important. For example, the SBC should be credited for its resolution to repudiate the Confederate Flag during its June 2016 convention. The resolution read in part, “We
