A survey of the history of racism and the church shows that the story is worse than most imagine. European colonists brought with them ideas of white superiority and paternalism toward darker-skinned people. Minor repairs by the weekend-warrior racial reconcilers won’t fix a flawed foundation. Th...

Christianity served as a force to help construct racial categories in the colonial period. Instead of highlighting the dignity of all human beings, European missionaries told Africans that Christianity should make them more obedient and loyal to their earthly masters. But if racism can be made, i...

The American church compromised with racism in the eighteenth century by permitting slavery to continue. Clergymen like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards typify the contradiction of American Christianity: they attempted to treat the people they enslaved humanely, yet they still acquiesced to...

The antebellum period was a time of compromise and complicity. During this time, many Christians engaged in evangelism to enslaved and freed blacks. The black church grew, laying the foundation for a distinctive tradition that would stand at the center of the black freedom struggle for the next c...

During the Civil War, pastors and theologians supported the Confederacy by providing theological ballast and biblical backing for the continuation of slavery. They prayed over the troops, penned treatises on the inferiority of black people, and divided denominations such as the Methodists, the Ba...

In the South after the Civil War, the Christian-Confederate connection was visible in public spaces and in houses of worship in their monuments, memorials, and ceremonies. The Ku Klux Klan emerged, fusing Christianity, nationalism and white supremacy into a toxic ideology of hate. Jim Crow laws, ...

Christians of the North have often been characterized as abolitionists, integrationists, and open-minded citizens who want all people to have a chance at equality. Christians of the South, on the other hand, have been portrayed as uniformly racist, segregationist, and antidemocratic. The truth is...

As with other periods in America’s sordid racial history, the Christian church of the mid-twentieth century often served to reinforce racism rather than oppose it. In response to government efforts to desegregate, moderate Christians organized to oppose racial integration of neighborhoods, starte...

With the rise of the “Religious Right,” conservative Christians coalesced into a political force, and American evangelicalism became virtually synonymous with the GOP and whiteness. While neither Democrats nor Republicans adequately addressed the multitude of issues that continued to plague black...

Christian complicity with racism in the twenty-first century looks different than complicity with racism in the past. It looks like Christians responding to *black lives matter* with the phrase *all lives matter.* It looks like Christians consistently supporting a president whose racism has been ...

This session presents practical ways to address the current state of racial injustice in America, including ecclesiastical reparations, taking down confederate monuments, learning from the black church how to lament and rejoice, starting a diverse seminary, hosting freedom schools and pilgrimages...

When it comes to racism, the American church does not have a “how to” problem but a “want to” problem. The primary reason more of us do not exhibit the strength and courage required to root out racism is *fear.* The time for the American church’s complicity in racism has long passed. It is time t...