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СКАЧАТЬ not end and was accelerating the current racial crisis that had in its midst “frustrating confusion and blurred issues.”³⁵

After civil rights laws were passed, 1964 and 1965 proved to be a time for significant change in the SBC’s language on race. It began recognizing the need for civil rights legislation, desegregation, and opening up society for housing, voting, and extension of church ministries without racial restrictions. It wrote in 1964 that they acknowledged and repented of their own involvement in discriminatory patterns that have ignored African Americans’ rights and dignity. It wrote, “Our thunderous silence in the face of oppressive injustice for American Negroes has amounted to a serious complicity in the problem … We have been part of a culture which has crippled the Negro and then blamed him for limping.”³⁶

The SBC finally had acknowledged that it had failed to create a “climate” of Christian good will based on justice, mercy, and love. Yet it believed there were avenues for redressing legitimate grievances and for resolving the crisis other than racial protest movements: “Indeed we have contributed to the belief of many Negroes that these movements offer their only avenue of recourse. Is there not in Christ a more excellent way? We believe there is.”³⁷ The SBC did not mention what solutions it would propose to tear down the walls of racism. The SBC seemed to propose that it was Christ’s involvement that would solve the current racial crisis.

In 1965, the SBC continued to argue that only the gospel could reach the hearts and minds regarding the problem of race. It issued a statement that the racial problem could only be solved on “distinctively spiritual grounds.” Accordingly, the law can desegregate the public schools, extend public accommodations, and guarantee voting rights, but only the gospel can transform human lives.³⁸ Importantly, this resolution also spoke about how racism limited the SBC’s ability to be effective in its mission endeavors both at home and abroad. SBC evangelism leaders had received complaints that the SBC’s reputation for racial prejudice had impeded its evangelistic work.³⁹ Their foreign missionaries were hampered by the SBC’s racism and it should be rejected so that missionaries’ hands might be unchained to do their tasks. They also included the statement that racism “does violence to the altar of God and is rightly understood as a sin against God and humanity.”⁴⁰ Followed by a confession of its “conformity to the world,” it rededicated itself to a ministry of reconciliation between African Americans and whites, between believers in segregation and integration. The SBC vowed to work, finally, toward solving the problems of unfair housing, unequal justice, and voting rights. The resolution ended as it had begun, with the SBC’s justifications for it: “We further recognize that our main task is to support and promote our programs of world missions and evangelism.”⁴¹

      Following the Brown decision in 1954, the SBC had merely desegregated its institutions as the law demanded. There was no official expression of Christian compassion offered to African Americans, and the SBC offered no responsibility for having supported the pain of the Jim Crow system until the peak of the civil rights in the mid-1960s. Its official statements and resolutions always were carefully crafted to show interest in African Americans, but they were more concerned with the criminality of mob violence, especially by racial agitators, and with maintaining social order. It began to change its tone only after it became clear that its desire to plant new churches in African American and other ethnic communities had been thwarted by its racist reputation.

These official public statements are a lesson in how those who support the subjugation of others can minimize their own complicity while deflecting blame for its tragic results. The SBC criticized African Americans’ lack of progress and used mildly worded resolutions to voice its concerns over racial strife. It deflected blame for almost the entirety of the twentieth century, until in 1995 it finally apologized for its participation and support of racism, slavery, and segregation. These efforts, however, would have consequences in terms of appeals to African American Baptists (see Box 3.7).⁴² Its stance over the previous century had solidified a racist reputation unknown to them (see Box 3.8).

       Box 3.7

      Footnote 42 is where the author introduces a contrast with another denomination. She explains that Roman Catholics did take a different approach. This footnote is important. This is a careful history of all the key pronouncements from a denomination. The reader might, at this point in the article, be thinking: Well, were the SBC so much worse than the other denominations? To explore this question in any detail would be a major distraction from the careful historical analysis of one denomination. But the author skillfully uses this note to respond to this obvious question that the reader might have.

       Box 3.8

      The change of heart, explains the author, comes in 1995 with the apology. This is the third and final shift in the narrative. As a good historian, the author is working both thematically and chronologically.

      The SBC’s Change of Heart: The 1995 Apology

The problem of a racist reputation plagued the SBC even as it announced its 1995 apology for support of slavery and segregation and beyond. It had been stigmatized as being racist, an unusual description for a mainline American Protestant denomination. This negative perception has been underplayed by scholars not only because of African Americans’ outsider status but also because of their history of subjugation as a religious community. Rarely do we write about outsider perceptions of majority religious institutions. Only those who have felt the anguish of racial oppression, however, understand what it means to mistrust major institutions that have participated in their oppression (see Box 3.9).

       Box 3.9

      This entire article has explored the attitudes of one denomination and its attitude to racism in the light of the Golden Rule. As the author comes to a key moment in the narrative, the apology, she explains why this matters so much. A dimension of racism is the way a deep distrust can form of an institution or an organization or, in this case, a denomination. Racism is more than the sum of individuals with prejudice; racism can shape an entire denomination and the lack of trust can continue long into the future.

      Ultimately, the SBC issued an apology to African Americans during its 150th anniversary in 1995. Entitled “Resolution on Racial Reconciliation on the 150th Anniversary of The Southern Baptist Convention, Atlanta, Georgia (1995),” it acknowledged its historic role in the support of slavery, racism, and segregation in the exclusion of African Americans from SBC congregations. It also recognized its failure to support the civil rights movement; how the SBC divided the body of Christ between whites and African Americans; how it promoted the distorted belief that racism and discrimination were compatible with the gospel; and its minimal commitment to eradicating racism. It concluded:

      Be it further RESOLVED, That we apologize to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime; and we genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously (Psalm 19:13) or unconsciously (Leviticus 4:27); and

Be it further RESOLVED, That we ask forgiveness from our African-American brothers and sisters, acknowledging that our own healing is at stake.⁴³

This apology symbolized an evolution in attitudes that the SBC would have to prove was genuine through its work for racial reconciliation. The planning for this historic resolution occurred during a Race Relations Conference on May 22, 1995.⁴⁴ The group consisted of eight white pastors and eight African American pastors. According to the Rev. Gary L. Frost, an African American Southern Baptist who attended the meeting, Albert Mohler and Paige Patterson, both presidents of SBC seminaries, also attended the meeting. Frost described how surprised those present were when Mohler and Patterson mentioned the problem of sin in the same breath as racism. Frost described individual reactions, as well as the general tenor of the meeting itself as one of regret, СКАЧАТЬ