The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

Tisby shifts his analytic focus from the South to the North to highlight racism as a national problem, countering the popular narrative that distinguishes the South as traditionally racist and the North as progressive and democratic. Tisby adds nuance to his account of The Historical Complicity of the American Church in Racism by focusing on the racist attitudes of Northern denominations. He emphasizes that race was a central issue in ongoing conflicts within denominations in Northern urban environments, which ultimately reinforced racial tensions. As the Black church experienced a revival during the Azusa Street movement in Los Angeles and appealed to interracial audiences, the Pentecostal church was “divided by race” (114). The church furthermore endorsed segregation, marginalizing the Black denomination. While advocates of the social Gospel developed a social understanding of Christianity, attempting to challenge the social structures that dehumanized urban communities, Fundamentalists developed a “race-laced understanding of theology” centralizing whiteness in their movement (116). Such tensions within the church marginalized Black Christianity, which could not fit into white Christian categories.

Furthermore, Tisby highlights that racism in the North also became evident during the period of the Great Migration and the Great Depression. Tisby notes that when a rising Black population fled the South to settle in the urban North, racial tensions exacerbated, with early “race riots” and violence against Black people that demonstrated the pervasiveness of racial hatred beyond the South. The economic reforms promoted by the Roosevelt administration to ameliorate the effects of the Great Depression on citizens “conformed to the contours of Jim Crow” through discriminatory laws (121), demonstrating that racism was a national issue. Tisby also emphasizes the “redlining practices” that enforced residential segregation from the post-war era to the 1960s, and the ways the church cooperated in it. The church participated in the phenomenon of the “white flight” by leaving integrated neighborhoods and reintroducing segregation. Tisby thus presents a nuanced analysis on racism, countering the depiction of the Northern Americans as “abolitionists” and “open-minded.” He stresses that racial prejudices and “compromised Christianity” transcended the boundaries of the South, demonstrating the embeddedness of racism throughout the nation. As these examples indicate, to make his case, Tisby adopts a methodology whereby he shows the existence of racism by showing the existence of its effects, such as the statistical increase in racial violence following the Great Migration or the way that white flight reinscribed segregation. While these phenomena may not be as explicitly racist as KKK propaganda, the text suggests that they are nevertheless “traces” indicating the existence of racism nationwide.

The text also suggests that the traditional narrative of the racist South and the progressive North is part and parcel of a broader tendency to oversimplify the history of racism in the US; thus, Tisby also dedicates significant attention to the church’s complicity during pivotal historical moments. For example, he explores the refusal of white Christians to actively participate in the Civil Rights movement. Even though a limited number of white evangelists supported the quest for Black civil rights, most church leaders appropriated the Bible anew, this time to justify and sustain segregation. It continued to promote the individualistic aspects of faith and refrain from the “social issue” of institutional racism. Tisby explicitly discusses the whitewashed narrative that suggests that Martin Luther King Jr. was an almost universally beloved activist who had the support of white Christians. By showing that this was far from the case, Tisby upends those historical narratives that elide the pervasive existence of racist attitudes among white people and in white churches more specifically.

Furthermore, Tisby underscores the pervasive existence of racist attitudes among white people by highlighting the hypocrisy embedded in their critiques of civil rights activism. Referring to Martin Luther King Jr. as an activist and representative of Black Christianity, Tisby highlights the ignorant and rationalistic criticism of church leaders against the practices of civil rights activism. Moderate church leaders fervently opposed Martin Luther King Jr., who connected his Christian faith to his activism for racial justice and social transformation. White Christian moderates also rejected boycotts and marches as prompts for violence while failing to condemn the racial hatred and violence of white supremacists. As a collective, the American church thus chose “complicity” instead of “advocacy.” White church leaders remained skeptical over radical political reforms like civil rights legislation and encouraged Black people tο pursue justice through legal means. Tisby stresses their failure to acknowledge how power structures and institutions sustained racism against marginalized groups as well as their failure to recognize the hypocrisy of condemning direct action on the grounds that it will promote violence while simultaneously ignoring the reality that Black people constantly face racist violence.

While Tisby continues to advocate for the idea of Black Christianity as a Source of Empowerment, he observes that ongoing backlash against civil rights activists urged Black people to find alternative political and belief systems. Similarly, he acknowledges the complexity of the civil rights era by noting that Black moderates also objected to direct action activism. Tisby writes that the Black Power movement and the Nation of Islam emerged as alternatives to Christianity during the civil rights era as civil rights activists began to see Christian faith as “the religion of the enslavers” (144). Tying this in to his claims about white Christians’ hypocrisy, Tisby claims that, as everyday citizens, white Christians failed to discern the “contradiction between their faith and racism” (144). As they continued to resist residential and school integration, the church also remained discriminatory, centralizing whiteness through Eurocentric images of Jesus Christ that reinforced the dominant racial hierarchy. Ultimately, the church adopted anew a stance of “passive complicity.” The church compromised with racism during the civil rights era, reinforcing the chasm between Black and white Christians, thereby, the text suggests, obscuring the capacity for Christianity to be a source of empowerment for Black people.