How White Christianity Learned Not to See

In honor of Juneteenth, a reflection on Southern Baptists, white Christianity, and a long overdue reckoning.

Note: In honor of Juneteenth, I publish today a lecture I gave to the American Baptist Historical Society in September 2018. The lecture was to be about “The Progressive Social Ethical Tradition in Baptist Life.” I used the occasion to drill down on white Christian racism and then to examine the abortive Southern Baptist Convention efforts to address it, notably at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which has been in the news again recently due to its president, Al Mohler, and his efforts to sponsor further restrictions on women’s pastoral service in the SBC.

I did my Master of Divinity at Southern from 1984-1987, in the last days of its moderate Baptist leadership. I taught there at the beginning of my career, from 1993-1996, in the first days of the Mohler era. This essay excerpts from an essay that the Mohler team asked me to write about Southern’s history on teaching ethics, but which was then blocked from publication without explanation.

Overall, this is a glimpse into why White (Southern) Baptists have made only the most ambivalent contribution to addressing our nation’s history of racial injustice, a history in which they/we are deeply implicated. It captures my thinking at a moment in time when I was drilling down much more deeply on the problem of US Christian racism during the first Trump presidency. Now halfway into the even more radical second term of Donald Trump, whose political base continues to be disproportionately White, Southern, and “Christian,” this 2018 essay seems all the more relevant.

ANNOUNCED TOPIC

My announced topic is the progressive social ethical tradition in Baptist life. To the great frustration of event planners, scholars rarely stay with their announced topics, because ideas develop in the research and writing process. I will invite you inside my own reflection process this evening, eventually wending my way back to the announced topic, I promise.

Theological and ethical diversity among Baptists are well-known and can be assumed in any discussion involving Baptists. Focusing on the social-ethical side, the global Baptist movement has a mixed heritage when it comes to what might be described as the application of the gospel in socio-political arenas, with Baptists among the leaders in both conservative and progressive socio-political engagement, while other Baptists hold to an understanding of the Gospel that eschews public engagement. My own work, I hope, is understood by most to stand in the progressive social-ethical-political tradition among Baptists of North America, and thus as part of a highly politically engaged lineage that in the 20^th century would claim figures such as Walter Rauschenbusch, TB Maston, Henlee Barnette, Glen Stassen, and others.

What I had thought I would do in this lecture was to trace some of the outlines of this progressive Baptist ethical tradition, some of its key figures, moments, beliefs, and perspectives, and in the end essentially celebrate all right thinking (or should I say left thinking?) Baptists who believe all the right things like we do.

THE TURN TO RACE

But recently I have been arrested, stopped in my tracks, by the pervasive problem of race in American life, and in US White Christian life. I have become persuaded that my engagement with White US Christian (including Baptist) racism has been far too superficial in my published work – and, dare I say it, in good Baptist fashion, far too superficial in my heart. I am in a moment of repentance in relation to this, and I am rethinking everything accordingly.

Two primary factors are contributing to this change in focus for me.

One is that (at last) the pressure of Black and Brown colleagues in religious studies and Christian ethics for White scholars to attend seriously to race, and to their work, has struck home. In my leadership roles in the Society of Christian Ethics and American Academy of Religion I have found it impossible not to listen, and this has been very good for me. One very good reason for involvement in academic professional associations is exposure to colleagues who come from different backgrounds and social locations. Of course, scholars of color have been asking White scholars to decenter the work of other White scholars for quite a while. But it was really only in leadership in these professional societies that the request seriously registered for me. I had responsibilities to the whole scholarly community, and the urgent and just requests of scholars of color for an end to their marginalization became central to my work in both presidencies.

The second factor is the recent resurgence of open and virulent racism in America, primarily of a very mean White “Christian” ethno-nationalism that expresses itself in a variety of ways, including attacks on mosques, Muslims, Mexicans, Blacks, Latino/a Americans, and legal and illegal immigrants.

Over the last year, in preparing for my AAR presidential address, I have undertaken an intensive engagement with African American fiction, theology, ethics, and other public intellectual work. particular, I have been listening for what Black authors say about White people, White racism, White morality, and White Christianity. I have sought to lay down any defensive, evasions, or excuses, and simply to listen.

In the novelistic tradition, I have as of now read the following works:

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (which has an amazing parable/fiction chapter), 1903

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1952

Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982

Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937

Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter, 1930

Richard Wright, Native Son, 1940

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks, 1933 (short stories)

Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men, 1983

Octavia Butler, Kindred, 1979

Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 1971

Dorothy West, The Wedding, 1995

Jesmyn Ward, Sing Unburied Sing, 2017

I have also been reading in Black theology, ethics, and public intellectual sources, including some of the novelists as essayists (DuBois, Baldwin), and in James Cone, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Eddie Glaude, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Delores Williams, Emilie Townes, Angela Sims, and others.

I strongly urge this kind of reading program. It is having a very significant impact on my own work. Here is a report on my preliminary findings, focusing especially on the novels:

The African-American literary tradition, in its storytelling about Black experience, offers consistent, realistic, “thick” critical description of White racism, even when that is not the main subject of a scene, chapter, or book. These novels trace a long arc of American racism that, while altering somewhat over time, contains far more continuity than discontinuity over its 400 years.

Whenever written and in whatever year their stories begin, these novels regularly work their way back and forth over multiple generations of Black history, remembering, grieving, and processing collective, family, and individual trauma at the hands of White people. But these works simultaneously remember and honor ancestors who survived, endured, and transcended their circumstances.

These novels offer a far clearer, fuller, and more realistic description of the structures and practices of White racism than most White people ever allow ourselves to face. Reading these works has made me feel embarrassed at the superficiality of my understanding of collective Black experience in America, at my historical amnesia, and my highly limited empathy. They also help me understand much more fully why Black people tend to interpret current events as fully continuous with past events and as ongoing expressions of racism. A great example is excessive use of police force against Black people, including children, which is interpreted within the context of hundreds of years of official state violence and injustice, from slavery days on down.

The picture these novels offer is of America as a systematically criminal and abusive White racist enterprise under the color of law, justified by an absurd ideology of White moral superiority; a system which inflicts massive and multifarious forms of oppression on Black people, and in which unchecked White power over Black bodies morally ruins white perpetrators; a system which completely violates America’s stated ideals, a fact about which White Americans seem largely unaware of or indifferent towards.

These novels continually return to the unforgettable symbols of American slavery and what must be described as White terrorism, including chains, auction blocks, whips, nooses, rapes, guns, and marauders on horseback. I daresay few White people have such images very deeply inscribed on our consciousness, or consciences, but they continually recur in these novels, as if in nightmares of collective memory. I am not a psychologist, but certainly the novels I have read suggest that African Americans are still collectively working out in literature the collective PTSD of Black experience, a PTSD triggered repeatedly by ongoing experiences.

My effort at synthesizing what I have read in these African American literary sources suggests three primary organizing themes related to White racism: moral debasement, religious impotence and idolatry, and perceptual blindness.

In short, according to the universal witness of the classic novels of the African-American literary tradition, White people are morally debased by their/our racism. That debasement looks like what I will call the seven deadly sins of greed, pride, slander, arbitrary use of power, unchecked anger and violence, abuse of truth/reality, and alienation from relationship. The novels do not suggest that every White person exhibits all of these characteristics, but that this is the type of behavior and attitude routinely experienced by Black people at the hands of White people. This theme – that White racism must be overcome, for the moral well-being of the racist, not just the victims of racism – was central in the preaching and activism of the great Baptist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He saw that White American racism had done profound damage the soul of White America, and that it needed to be overcome for everyone’s sake.

Of course, one could hope that the religious teachings of White churches and the religious convictions of White Christians could make a constructive difference. But White religion, when commented upon in these novels, looks like some combination of impotence and idolatry. Impotence, in the sense that all the resources of Christian scripture, tradition, piety, and church life seem to have little effect in curbing White racism and its practices. Idolatry in the sense that at least a great number of White people seem to worship a god they have constructed in their own image, a White god who created and blesses a world of White supremacy. These are painful judgments to hear if one is a White preacher or White Christian. But the wondering over why the religion of Jesus does not seem able to overcome the power of systemic White racism is well nigh universal in Black theology and ethics and not just in these novels. We must face it.

Perceptual blindness, finally, is the term I am using to synthesize all the ways the African American literary tradition “sees” the extraordinary ability of White people not to see the morally debased reality that we created and sustain. Ralph Ellison spoke of Black invisibility, suggesting that White people can’t really see Black people, not as individuals, not as full and equal human beings. James Baldwin spoke, even more devastatingly, of White innocence; innocent in our own eyes, we have little to no idea of the mountain of racism (to borrow from Langston Hughes) that we have created. The Black radical tradition, as in Malcolm X, routinely has described White Christian America in all these terms: morally debased, religiously impotent or idolatrous, and utterly blind to the wrongs we have done and the world we have created.

Now you may have noticed that in terms of skin tone I am a white person, and I don’t like the harshness of these judgments any more than most of you probably do. But I take them seriously in part because, in this moment, I think the evidence for them even in contemporary society remains unmistakable. I also take the charges seriously because of the universality of these negative judgments in authors ranging over a hundred years of writing -- novelists especially so far, but everywhere else I turn in Black intellectual life I see the same thing.

I think of all the pastor’s prayer breakfasts and interracial gatherings that I have attended over the years in search of racial reconciliation. So many times we have heard earnest prayers for racial harmony and interracial reconciliation, and organized our koffeeklatches and pulpit exchanges. In light of what I have read, and in light of modern-day America, I marvel that Black Christians still engage White Christians in such efforts. That requires an awful lot of patience, forgiveness, and good will, I think. And I also think that it is time that Black Christians pushed us a lot harder, beyond polite gatherings and talk of reconciliation to a far more serious engagement with a history that White people have never really repented, and an unjust society that we have never really repaired.

HOW DID WE MANAGE TO SUSTAIN THIS VERSION OF CHRISTIANITY?

My immersion in this massive body of African American literature is raising an old question with powerful new force. A mild and more familiar way to put the old question might be: where was/is the White church amid all this racism? But let’s sharpen the question to a more dangerous edge: how did White Christians, especially in the South, manage the semi-miraculous feat of taking the religion of Jesus and turning it into something that could live with slavery and Jim Crow’s moral debasement, perceptual blindness, and spiritual impotence and idolatry, and that today is largely silent about continued race-based, or race-inflected, injustices? How did the great majority of the best trained clergy and scholars, the most spiritually serious Christian leaders, manage to abide the contradiction between the social order they were living in (and benefiting from) and the teaching and example of Jesus? How, in short, were they able to sleep at night? It seems like a finger-pointing question at our forebears -- but I ask it of ourselves as well.

To begin to explore this question, I want to take you to a document of mine that is in the ABHS archives and that has never seen the light of day. It was written by a very young David Gushee, when I was serving as assistant professor of Christian ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 31 years old. I think it was written in fall 1994 for publication in early 1995. Some in this room may remember what it was like at Southern Seminary in 1994-1995.

Al Mohler was the still newish, 32-year-old president of Southern. He asked me to write this article for the glossy seminary magazine. It was, dare I say it, pretty good. And then, the article was rejected without explanation. I was puzzled then; I am not puzzled now. I offer large parts of it to you tonight, without any edits, because I think it speaks to the questions we are considering.

“Southern Seminary and the Social Conscience of Southern Baptists” (1995)

As the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) marks its 150th anniversary this year, consideration of the Convention’s interaction with the great social and moral issues of its time, and of Southern Seminary’s role in that interaction, is appropriate and instructive. A review of this history reveals the mixed moral record that is a fact of our existence as Southern Baptists, and more generally of the history of the Christian church. Times when we have misunderstood God’s will are interwoven with occasions of moral insight and moral courage. Southern Seminary has played an important role in some of the best moral moments in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention, without being exempt from participation in some of the worst.

The SBC was organized in 1845. Its primary official purpose was to foster national and international missionary activity.

Through the end of the 19th century the Convention basically steered clear of direct public engagement with the major moral issues of the day. The reason most often given for this approach was that the SBC was a missionary society concerned with the propagation of the gospel; as such it should avoid discussing controversial, distracting, and ultimately irrelevant moral and political issues. This privatistic rationale was operating in 1888 when the seminary’s founder and first president J.P. Boyce, serving as SBC president, ruled two temperance (anti-alcohol) resolutions out of order at that year’s Convention meeting. It is a line of reasoning one sometimes still hears today.

In retrospect, however, it is possible to discern a related but distinct cause of the SBC’s early silence on major public moral issues: the Convention’s captivity to southern culture, especially with regard to the issues of slavery and racism. It must be remembered that the main reason for the founding of the SBC was slavery, the gravest moral issue of the day. From its inception , the Southern Baptist Convention by word and deed stood with the great majority of southerners in defending the moral legitimacy of slavery. Regrettably, the founders of Southern Seminary fully reflected their culture in this respect. In the aftermath of the Civil War, southerners were in no hurry to make public pronouncements of regret for having defended slavery; nor were Southern Baptists eager to distance themselves from the southern culture in which they were so deeply embedded.

We now know and deeply regret, of course , that the SBC and the seminary’s founders were on the wrong side of the greatest moral struggle to that point in American history. It has seemed to many observers that this embarrassing yet unrepented sin helped to drive social and moral concern underground in SBC life until the early 20th century. It is hard for a people to want totake up great moral crusades when that people has yet to repent of its resistance to the greatest moral crusade of its time.

In any case, for more than fifty years the SBC made little or no comment on major public moral issues. Our forebears failed to realize that through their actions they had indeed spoken --in a profoundly unsatisfactory way--to the issue of slavery. This reminds us that it is not possible for the church to remain completely disengaged from the world in which it lives. We speak through our actions and our inactions, our words and our silences. Remaining silent and inactive on the moral questions of one’s time is itself a moral act--usually an immoral one. Another way to say it is that the propagation of the gospel, rightly understood, involves aggressive and proactive social, moral, and political engagement.

That Southern Baptists came to realize this is apparent in the work of the SBC and Southern Seminary over the past hundred years. The year 1995 marks an obscure but nonetheless important centennial; for it was in 1895 that E.C. Dargan, professor of homiletics and ecclesiology, offered the first “Christian sociology” lectures at Southern Seminary. The catalog description of this part of Dargan’s course is instructive: “The relation of the churches to the Kingdom of God and to the great social problems and schemes of our time is carefully considered.” Southern Baptists were beginning to turn their attention to the crying social and moral needs of their nation and the world.

The 1908 Convention was critically important in that respect. That year the messengers received a report pertaining to “Civic Righteousness.” This unprecedented report called Southern Baptists to “make down here [on earth] a righteous society in which Christ‘s will sha l l be done, his kingdom come.” As well, a Committee on Temperance was formed. This committee, the earliest antecedent to [the] SBC Christian Life Commission, was energetic and aggressive. It is generally credited with contributing to the passage of the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) in 1920. Since this period the Convention has remained quite active in its opposition to such personal yet socially disastrous vices as alcohol, drugs, and gambling. Beginning in the 1930s, Southern Seminary professor J. B. Weatherspoon (1886-1964) played a critical role in bringing together the broader “civic righteousness” approach with the more narrow but still important temperance concerns. The result was the wholistic biblical moral agenda that has characterized the SBC Christian Life Commission and the best Southern Baptist moral thought from that time until today.

Indeed, Southern’s Weatherspoon is generally considered the progenitor of the social conscience of the SBC.

Weatherspoon served as chairman of the Social Service Commission (later the Christian Life Commission) from 1943 to 1955. He helped to convince Southern Baptists that social and moral concern were fully biblical in themselves rather than adjuncts or mere “implications” of the Gospel. He was sufficiently persuasive that the Social Service Commission was finally given staff and funding ( $10 ,000) in 1947. The headquarters of the Commission became a desk in the corner of Weatherspoon’s office.

Soon the Commission emerged as the leading prophetic voice in southern Baptist life. One critical accomplishment during these years was its 1954 support for the Supreme Court ruling (Brown v. Board of Education) regarding integration of the public schools. By the grace of God, Weatherspoon was sufficiently persuasive at that summer’s Convention meeting that the messengers voted overwhelmingly to accept the Commission’s courageous report. Given the racial climate at the time in the south and the SBC, this was a glorious achievement.

As the civil rights movement unfolded in the late 1950s and 1960s, Southern Seminary’s first full professor of Christian Ethics, Henlee Barnette, continued the Weatherspoon tradition.

Barnette, named to the faculty in 1951 and as professor of Christian Ethics in 1958, was a tireless advocate for racial justice and a full supporter of the civil rights movement . It was Barnette who organized the famous (infamous in some eyes) 1961 visit of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Southern campus.

Under Barnette a generation of students was trained to see racial reconciliation as a gospel imperative. These men and women are now scattered throughout the nation. Two of them, Glen Stassen and Paul Simmons, succeeded Barnette in ethics positions at Southern Seminary in the 1970s. Both continued Southern’s progressive heritage on racial issues. Meanwhile, Simmons fo cused his work on the new frontier of biomedical ethics, dealing with issues which continue to grow more pressing as the decades pass. Since the 1970s Stassen has been a leader both in SBC and broader national and international circles on peace issues. He was one of the leading religious activists for nuclear arms reduction during the Cold War, and remains on the cutting edge of reflection on peacemaking in this new, hopeful-yet-dangerous post-Cold War era.

Southern Seminary also has contributed to the social conscience of the SBC through its church and community and social work programs. The late G. Willis Bennett was the leading figure in institutionalizing church and community concerns both at Southern and in Southern Baptist life. Anne Davis was the founding dean when social work, which had been a program within the School of Religious Education, became its own school (the Carver School of Church Social Work) in 1985. Diana Garland followed her in this position in 1993. The work of the Carver School faculty has brought such contemporary moral issues as marriage enrichment, family disintegration, spouse abuse, and child advocacy into the forefront.

As the newest addition to the Christian Ethics faculty, and a Southern graduate ( 1987), I can only hope to be faithful to the legacy of my own SBTS ethics professors and others who have gone before them. Southern Baptists come to the close of the twentieth century facing pressing moral issues both new and old--from abortion-on-demand to economic justice, from stewardship of creation to racial reconciliation, from physician-assisted suicide to international peacemaking, from “ethnic cleansing” to sexual fidelity, from new reproductive technologies to marriage and family enrichment, and so on.

Southern Baptists, along with other evangelicals and Christians of every stripe, are by now fully engaged in wrestling with these pressing social, moral, and political issues. As a people we have recognized the inadequacy of a head-in-the-sand privatism. We continue to need skilled, informed, and fully biblical moral leadership--in the churches, the seminaries, and the Christian Life Commission. May God bless the work of all who are charged with this sobering but rewarding task in the decades ahead.

2018 GUSHEE ON 1994 GUSHEE

I wonder what you noticed as you listened to this renegade, unpublishable 1995 essay by young David Gushee.

Here is what I noticed:

1) Already in 1994, I was suggesting that early Southern Baptists first developed a privatized and ethically vacuous version of “the Gospel” because they pretty much had to do so in order to avoid dealing with the manifest injustices of Southern slavery and Jim Crow. Unwilling to repent of slavery or racism, therefore unwilling to face the most obvious social injustice of their social context, they instead developed a privatized understanding of the Gospel or Christian mission in which what God cares about is solely domestic and global evangelism and the salvation of souls. Such a perspective can still be heard today. So that’s the first answer to the “where was the church” question – the Southern church, at least, was intentionally bracketing all social ethical questions off from Gospel questions.

2) I had forgotten about how the obscure EC Dargan managed to get early Christian ethics and Kingdom of God concerns into the Southern Seminary curriculum. This was in the same period when modern social ethics was developing as a discipline, and when the Social Gospel was coalescing. (The former was a result of the latter, this is now clear.) So already in 1895, a proto-Rauschenbusch, progressive social ethics tradition was beginning to find a tentative foothold at Southern. Having recently studied the Social Gospel and the early development of modern Christian social ethics as a discipline, I can confirm that 1895 is really quite early for this to happen at Southern, and really quite unexpected. Southern joined only a handful of northern schools in making this move before the turn of the 20^th century.

3) This move at SBTS was then followed by a first ‘civic righteousness’ declaration at the 1908 SBC annual meeting. But it appears that the main civic righteousness concerns addressed at that meeting and through the 1920s were the classic vices of gambling, drink, and drugs. This is a second answer to the pressing question of where was the church. The church in any context first has to decide whether it will address ethical questions, but then it can restrict its list of ethical concerns to personal vices or to social problems/evils/injustices other than the ones in which our part of the Christian community is most actively participating. During a flood tide of lynchings in Jim Crow America, the moral voice of the SBC was addressing gambling, drugs, and alcohol.

4) JB Weatherspoon, a name hardly anybody knows today, turns out to be the first serious progenitor, at Southern Seminary at least, of the progressive social-ethical tradition that you thought I was going to talk to you about. He founded what became the SBC Christian Life Commission, made sure its agenda was broad enough to include the urgent problem of racism, and helped foster an environment in which the 1954 SBC meeting would actually urge Southern Baptists to support Brown v. Board. (This vote shocked and displeased a great many Southern Baptists back home. The stories of what happened when certain hapless pastors went home and told their people about the vote are chilling. Henlee Barnette used to talk about his graduates who lost jobs on the Sunday after that convention vote.)

5) The legendary Barnette accompanied and finally succeeded Weatherspoon, intensifying his efforts on racism. I knew Dr. Barnette and knew that he was relentless on race. I also knew that he paid a big price for inviting Martin Luther King to SBTS in 1961. Dr. Duke McCall, president of Southern at the time of the King visit, apologized to concerned Baptist laymen for the visit, which was never repeated. Some Southern Seminary people never forgave McCall for throwing Barnette under the bus in this way.

6) I can now see that at least from 1954 on, a growing gap became apparent between the increasingly clear social ethical progressivism of SBTS ethics faculty and the racist SBC constituency they (we) were serving. This broadened from race to all kinds of other issues, including bioethical issues with Paul Simmons, and peacemaking, economic, and ecological issues with Glen Stassen. The social work school opened a new front, as professional standards of social work can be viewed as intrinsically clashing with conservative Christianity. I now wonder whether the Convention Controversy should be viewed as beginning in 1954, rather than 1979.

7) I can also now see that my 1995 optimism that Southern Seminary (under Al Mohler) was not going to turn back from the social ethical tradition that I described in the paper was illusory. By 1996 the social work school and its faculty, and the ethics faculty, all disappeared from Southern. The school still would teach ethics, but a Christian Right agenda, not a Weatherspoon – Barnette – Stassen – Gushee agenda.

How did white Christians manage the semi-miraculous feat of taking the religion of Jesus and turning it into something that could live with slavery and Jim Crow?

8) My big picture analysis of what happened both in US politics and in the SBC is this: the GOP seized on race to bring the Solid South into the party; the Christian Right seized on rolling back feminism, abortion and homosexuality as its main stated agenda for the church, the GOP, and America. The progressive social ethical tradition of Weatherspoon, Barnette, Stassen, Gushee and their ilk had no place anymore at Southern Seminary or in the SBC. Evangelical historian Randall Balmer argues that the fundamental cause uniting the Christian Right and the GOP was opposition to gains for Black Americans and what reactionary White people considered the forcible integration of church, school, and society over their objections. One can then trace a more or less direct line from Brown v. Board to Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan to Trump, and the Southern Baptist Convention was a big part of that move.

The progressive ethical tradition was pushed out of the SBC, to the new seminaries like our own McAfee School of Theology, and of course to outposts up north where the racial and secular politics were different and where the social gospel tradition had never been uprooted.

CONCLUSION

If I have a closing word, it is something like this: in the United States, sooner or later it always comes back to race. Race has defined our politics for much of our history, and it does so today as well. Race has obviously divided our churches. Race also distinguishes our scholarship, not just in terms of the skin tone of scholars but their fundamental intellectual concerns. I am at a moment in my own work where I am trying to take race as seriously as it deserves, and the way I am doing so is by listening deeply, seriously, and as comprehensively as possible to scholars of color. I am late. But I am not turning back. Thank you for your kind attention this evening.