RACE, CHURCH, AND SEGREGATION

My response to a brother who blames whites for the divisions within the Church:

“I appreciate your response, although I disagree with your diagnosis of the present Church:

·       It’s impossible, as WASPs, to fully appreciate the cultural segregation fostered upon the black community in our country as the segregated church continues to bear witness.“ As for me, I am coming to understand more deeply the inherent racism…

While we both grieve over the racial tensions among believers, I think that you are mistaken to blame today’s white church for the “segregated church” and what you have termed as its “inherent racism.” Instead, I have found that the black racism has become more acceptable, flagrant, and even fashionable. (This is not to say that blacks are any more racist than whites. Rather, none of us should get a free moral pass.)

If you are talking about “inherent racism” within the human heart, I would certainly give you an “amen.” But I think that you are unfairly ascribing this to the WASP church. Nevertheless, during Jim Crow, this church had been a dismal failure.

However, I would hesitate to claim that this is inherent to the WASP church. Our Leftist dominated universities and media are very prone to demean the white church to further exacerbate the divisions and de-legitimize the Church. Therefore, they have been happy to focus on the segregation era. However, there are other equally revealing narratives that they have conveniently overlooked. Retired Professor of History and Black Church Studies and author of “Black Preaching,” Henry H. Mitchell, had been charged with “teaching Black Church history like it’s your own family album.” Mitchell admitted to the charge, adding that he had also written to raise the esteem of his Black people.

Nevertheless, Mitchell also had some good things to say about the White Church and their role in Reconstruction:

·       After the South was opened up to the missionaries, under protection of military occupation, the Protestant churches of the North launched a veritable crusade to bring literacy to the huge host of the newly freed. (Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings, 142)

Well, how great was this crusade? Mitchell investigated the annual reports of the American Baptist Home Mission Society:

·       I was stunned to see whole pages of names of people who had been sent south to do mission work. There were hundreds of these names, in tiny print, on page after page. (142)

·       Regardless of paternalism and hazards to African American self-esteem, it was this huge crew of volunteer and minimally paid instructors, of not just Baptist but all denominations, who laid the foundation for all the secondary and college work reported in the pages that follow. There may have been only a log cabin church to teach in at first; it may have been by firelight, but these volunteers taught their very hearts out. There simply isn’t room to begin to cover the host of primary reading classes that were begun in churches and elsewhere soon after the Union troops took over. (142-43)

Mitchell later listed a vast multitude of schools started by these white missionaries to train Black teachers.

The unbalanced treatment of the black/white experience tends to be quite divisive and inflammatory. It keeps our brethren of color at an unproductive boiling point. Should we blind ourselves to the racism within the Church? Certainly not! However, the broad unsubstantiated blanket indictments against the white church have illegitimately turned seekers away from the Church and even from Christ. Sadly, even many of our youth have turned away because of all of the negative publicity.”