The Bible Told Them So

Any Good Books, July 2021

The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy

J. Russell Hawkins (Oxford University Press, 2021)

       "I don't believe the Bible endorses it; I don't believe God approves it; if we're going to eat with them and go to school with them, the time is going to come...when some of you that sit in this audience today will have grandchildren with Negro blood." In 1954, Pastor W. M. Nevins could get up in front of the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention and argue against integration as an article of faith. He was speaking in a debate over a report from the SBC's Christian Life Commission which recommended an attitude of brotherly love in the face of the recent Brown v. Board of Education decision. The report was accepted, but iall across the South, resistance like Nevins's would be fervent and long-lived.

      J. Russell Hawkins devoted more than a decade to the research he presents in this book. He confined himself to one state, South Carolina and just two Christian denominations: the Baptists and Methodists. Such a robust slice of white Christianity generated plenty of letters, sermons, editorials, and meeting minutes for his purposes. His primary point is that southern white Christians considered themselves to have the correct Bible-based position on the matter of segregation, because they had been hearing it preached and taught from childhood, generation after generation. "Central to the drama for racial justice that unfolded during America's civil rights years lay an indisputable religious conflict between black Christian activists and their white Christian antagonists, both of whom confidently, proudly, and often joyously claimed God's favor for their political stance."

      Not only that: both sides cited the very same verse, Acts 17:26. "As recounted in the book of Acts, during Paul's visit to Athens, the apostle gave an impromptu sermon before the philosophers of the city in which he declared that God 'hath made of one blood all the nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.'" I'd like to point out that the slave trade itself had played merry hell with the bounds of their habitation, so it may be that that had been against God's will. No matter, the latter half of the verse served its purpose.

      "Interestingly, integrationists often appealed to the first half of Acts 17:26–the idea that God had made all the peoples of the earth from one person–as evidence that all humanity shared a common ancestry before God and could therefore lay claim to the equality that Jim Crow denied." Each side, as you might expect, accused the other of 'proof-texting', hunting for words in a row that supported their view.

       The white Christians of South Carolina had rhetorical recourse to other verses, as well, having to do with the tower of Babel and Noah's Ark, as well as the observation from the natural world that birds of a feather flock together. I think it's significant that the Baptists in particular were fundamentalists as to the Bible, considering it the literal Word of God. This stance made it bitterly difficult to accept that the Bible might be wrong, or that God might change his mind because the Supreme Court made a ruling. They also considered that each Christian had a right and a duty to read scripture for himself. For the Baptists, denominational power originated in the pews, for good or ill–it's a highly democratic system, but it means that pastors must cater to the views of his flock. A town with a Confederate soldier guarding the town square would never keep a pastor who appeared to accept school integration. Methodist bishops, by contrast, had authority over the placement of pastors, but that would not save the job of a 'radical' pastor in a church where the members disagreed with him. After the Brown decision, it was more likely that the minister would be found giving the invocation at a meeting of the local Citizens' Council. These organizations, comprised of leading businessmen, used economic power to preserve their social power over their black neighbors.

      Wofford, the Methodist College in Spartanburg, and Furman, in the Baptist university Greenville, were among the leaders in integration, albeit ten years after Brown. As private institutions, they could have opted to remain havens of whiteness, and plenty of alumni wished they would. But by 1964, the trustees and faculty could respond to other incentives: the schools preferred to attract serious scholars, and accept federal funds. Hawkins shows that the language of white supremacy had disappeared from the public arguments, while it's still seen in private communications. In any case, it took decades for enough black students to enroll to make either institution other than a safe white space.

      The Methodists of South Carolina, as part of the national United Methodist Church, spent the latter part of the 1960s working to reconcile the white and black conferences of the church, which had been separated by a 1939 compromise. In South Carolina, the merger was originally proposed to guarantee racially diverse bodies in the administration of the church, with a system of quotas; by the time the merger was hammered out, the white Methodists magically decided that they didn't need quotas because, in effect, their hearts were too pure to see race. Many fewer black Methodists voted for that version of the merger, but that's what passed. A posture of colorblindness drew a veil over the history of unequal treatment, which consequently went unresolved.

      South Carolina dragged its feet on school integration for nearly a decade; when it began to happen in earnest, the segregationist Christians changed their tune but not their intent. Segregation academies frequently started up using the Sunday School space of local churches. By this time, in the early seventies, people were careful to avoid mentioning race as a reason for choosing such a school. In the case of a school named after Wade Hampton, Confederate general and governor of the State at the end of Reconstruction, there's no need to say more. 'Heritage' and 'family values'' now carry the meaning.

       I don't entirely recommend this book as a reading experience: it's too close to its academic roots to be enjoyable as narrative. Hawkins quotes segregationists' anxious letters to Strom Thurmond, but he misses the chance to point out that Thurmond himself had black grandchildren (by way of a daughter whom he supported but never acknowledged, and whose rights he spent a long Senate career trying to quash.) Also, to my surprise, the copy-editing and indexing don't live up to the standards of the Oxford University Press.

       Howbeit, I was compelled to read it because the title answers a question I've wondered about pretty much all my life: what were they thinking? Why was there any such thing as a Christian segregationist? Within their bubble, these people were acting in good faith. The edifice of belief was too massive to move, sustained as it was by some admixture of self-interest and willful blindness. Of course I think they had much the worst of the argument, and many of their children were alienated from church by the perceived hypocrisy. I also think it's important to notice how that bubble continues to function down to the present day. White supremacy still comes in all flavors, from the violent to the genteel, and the church continues to be stained by it.