Christians and the Crisis of Race

The renewal of the crisis over school integration in the South raises issues which go to the heart of the relations between the Gospel, the Church and the world. The Christian commitment to brotherhood and love is as much at stake as the central idea of democracy—the dignity of the individual.

The crisis makes us ask again some ancient questions. What is the role of the Church of Christ in a democratic society? If it be granted that the Gospel requires us to seek to have its truth applied to the social situation, are we to declare principles only, or programs for action? In any case, is it the organized church or individual Christians acting in their capacity as citizens who must bear this witness?

Such questions as these lie subordinate to another one whose significance the worldling often fails to see. It is this: can Christians speak or act unlovingly to gain the ends of brotherhood and love? Dare we compromise the means to reach the goals? Surely, our answer here is no.

The Slavery Crisis

All these issues resemble closely those which the slavery crisis raised among evangelical Christians a hundred years ago. Then, as now, an institution of long social and legal standing came to seem contrary to both God’s law and democratic principle. Then, as now, churchmen debated whether the Christian witness against social evil was the task of the regenerate citizen or the believing community. The unity of both church and nation seem to be at stake. And the same law of love which condemned the Negro’s bondage held Christian men back from direct action to strike away his chains.

The tensions of that crisis of long ago found resolution at last in the outbreak of a tragic civil war. In time, antislavery churchmen who had not wanted nor expected war came to see the bloody conflict as a work of divine judgment upon both North and South. Julia Ward Howe set this thought to unforgettable words and music in her famous “battle hymn.” An awakened generation had learned at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville a new conception of the Coming of the Lord. The wine of liberty was to flow blood-red from the sword of his wrath. Likewise Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural, reminded a sorrowing nation that the judgments of the Lord were true and righteous altogether.

What are evangelical Christians to do in the social crisis of our times, therefore, when they remember the involvement of their spiritual forbears—Charles G. Finney, William E. Boardman, Dwight L. Moody, and Gilbert Haven—with the conflict of that age?

The question comes with particular force when we realize that today’s trouble arises from an evil expressly forbidden in God’s Word, whereas slavery itself is not so condemned. The antislavery preachers had to establish the point that the Bible enjoined upon both masters and servants such commitment to personal respect, to brotherhood and mutual acceptance in the fellowship of the Gospel, as to make slavery in the long course of Christian history unthinkable.

How, then, can today’s Bible-believing Christian justify any permanent status for the racial injustices of our time? The essence of discrimination is a rejection of persons and a violence to the spirits of men which Christ and the Apostles clearly condemned. The Sermon on the Mount is very explicit at this point. Murder you have been taught to abhor, Jesus said. “But I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca [of which a free translation might read, ‘you nigger’], shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.”

Ought we not to ask ourselves in the light of these words what happens to the spirit of a sensitive Negro youth when he sees the sign “white only” over the cleaner drinking fountain, the more decent rest room, the more respectable tourist court and restaurant? Can we escape responsibility for the wounding of minds and hearts which goes on every day when bright young Negro couples try to escape the crowded colored districts of New York, Chicago and Detroit?

Is not the murder of the spirits of men which goes on every day, in my native Southland as well as in the North, a more literal contradition of the Word of God than chattel slavery ever was?

To say this does not of course alter very much the roots of emotion and feeling which lie beneath every southerner’s struggle with his conscience on this issue. This is especially true for someone reared among the small-farmer class of southern whites. Nor does seeing the reality of the evil resolve our dilemma concerning what we may do about it.

However, it is good to ask ourselves what courses of action or expression evangelical Christians, North and South, might follow in this crisis.

Courses Of Action

Let us begin with first things. In whatever we say or do, we dare not violate the spirit of love and brotherhood into whose rich enjoyment we wish the Negro to be brought. The Kingdom of love cannot be enlarged through deeds of violence. For this great lesson’s recent underlining we must be grateful to the colored population of Montgomery, Alabama.

A second mutual resolve seems open to us, namely, that we shall not allow ourselves to become partners in a conspiracy of silence. The editor of The Arkansas Gazette has said recently that the conflicts over the Supreme Court decision on school integration have turned the clock back 50 years, and undermined completely the freedom of “moderate” southerners to speak on this issue. If this be so, Christian men can have no business bowing to it. When in the history of Christ’s church have men of piety had license to be silent in the face of evil?

There are ways in which we can speak lovingly. Agitation may not be the Christian’s task, but intercession and witness ever are. In our public prayers, frequently in our sermons, in our Sunday School classes, and in the things we write and publish, we can find quiet but effective ways to say again and again that there is unfinished business at hand, that a great evil in our midst is not yet forsaken.

We must speak. Often enough for our hearers not to forget our concern and their duty. Lovingly enough for the world not to forget the crying compassion of a crucified Lord.

Absolutizing A Program

Yet a third common stand invites us. Ought we not to forswear putting the Church of Christ in bondage to a particular program of reform? Confronted with the mystery of God’s will and man’s perverseness, can we presume to declare in Christ’s name a specific solution to a social problem?

We can know the principles upon which the right answer may be based. We can believe that the Gospel must judge in truth and love all solutions which fall short of those principles. As individuals, we can and must seek and support practical programs which we believe will accomplish ours and the Saviour’s ends. But the task of the Christian community is not agitation. We are commissioned to reach men’s hearts with a saving gospel, and to prepare them for a better world.

The citizens of this country, and especially of the southern part, are the ones who must find the way to real progress toward a Christian and a democratic brotherhood. If they fail, and if the evangelical Christians within the citizen body contribute to that failure, the judgments of the Lord will again turn out to be true and righteous altogether. In any case, the Church itself must not seek to force a program of reconciliation on unwilling men nor assume the moral responsibility which lies upon the nation as a whole.

The Christian Fellowship

One final suggestion to believing Christians seems worthwhile here. The regulation of the inner life and fellowship of the Church is indeed the clear responsibility of the Christian community. The New Testament speaks very plainly about it, particularly on the point of respect of persons. Ought we not, then, prayerfully to consider the segregated condition of the Church in the light of the Scriptures and a burning world? If we can not transcend it now must we not set our course toward a point where we can?

The writer is aware of the thousand and one problems which consideration of this problem calls up. Sometimes, it is true, the integration of congregations has turned out to be a way in which a company of Negro Christians, however unintentionally, have secured a building for their use at no cost to themselves. Moreover, as many will readily remember, the separated church was one of the chief desires of the enslaved Negroes, and one of their first and most permanent achievements after emancipation.

But the fact is that today the pressure to keep the church officially segregated is coming from the white people. In all too many cases, this pressure is part of the widespread campaign to prevent desegregation of the public schools. Wherever churches have gone further and promised the use of their buildings for schools organized solely to resist integration, they have brought shame to their fellow Christians.

It is no doubt true that only a small minority of Negroes actually wish to worship with other than their friends and fellows. However, the one who feels most keenly the rejection of closed pews, the one who senses when he cannot see the sign “white only” over the church doors, is the very person who most deeply needs the compassionate love of his white friends. The Negro preacher in his town may not be able to reach him at all, because of the wounds of conflict over race.

There was no segregated church in the first century. There was no segregated church in pre-Civil War America. Dare we commit ourselves for the long run now to an organization of church fellowship which requires men to be excluded from association with others in the house of God because of their skin?

What makes all these questions absorbing is their portent for the fate of both Christianity and democracy in the world beyond our borders. A hundred years ago, evangelical leaders believed that our nation’s destiny was to nurture both Christianity and liberty for the benefit of the whole world. Then, as now, patriotism and piety flourished side by side. But its thrust was outward, rather than inward. The modern missionary movement was borne forward on its strength.

Again, today, human destiny hangs largely on the willingness and ability of America to remain a beacon of faith and liberty in a world of lawlessness and totalitarianism. Let judgment begin at the house of God. And the day may come, if Christ our Lord tarries, when the power of an awakened Christian conscience will stir the conscience of the nation and the world.

And so may we in that day see our children praying, with greater assurance than we now have, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.”

Timothy L. Smith is the author of Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America, which won the Frank S. Brewer Prize for 1955 from the American Society of Church History. A graduate of the University of Virginia, he received the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard. A minister in the Church of the Nazarene, he is currently serving as chairman of the history department at East Texas State College.

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