Acknowledgments
I made my first trip to South Carolina to conduct the research that would eventually become this book in 2006. One of the difficulties with a project that spans fourteen years is the accumulation of debts so numerous that they are impossible to fully remember, let alone repay. What follows is a meager attempt to, at a minimum, acknowledge some of those debts. I hope that the people named below recognize their influence on this project far exceeds the brief mention I am able to give them.
Financial support for researching this book came in part from the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History, the University of South Carolina’s Institute for Southern Studies, Rice University’s Dean Currie Fund, and Indiana Wesleyan University’s Lilly Scholarship Fund and Sabbatical Grant Award. The generosity of these various entities allowed me to pursue research in nineteen different archives in half a dozen states. While a cursory glance through the notes will reveal that some of those archival visits were more fruitful than others, the archivists at each and every stop were unfailingly helpful and went out of their way to provide me with the materials I knew I needed and point me to more that they knew I needed. Among this group of archivists, Bill Sumners, Graham Duncan, Kate Moore, Herb Hartsook, and Phillip Stone deserve special recognition for sharing their insights, expertise, and camaraderie during my visits to their respective collections.
John B. Boles oversaw this project in its early stages as a graduate dissertation at Rice University and pushed me to extend my arguments and analysis as it evolved into a monograph. Along the way, John has been an unwavering source of encouragement and kindness. Those of us who have been students of Dr. Boles know how fortunate we are to have been recipients of his brilliance and generosity. Michael Emerson’s scholarship on race and evangelical Christianity also played a significant role in shaping the ideas found in these pages during their nascent stage at Rice and in their final form in this book. Michael’s professional and personal advice and guidance over the years have been indispensable to me. Early in my career I was fortunate to participate in a three week interdisciplinary seminar that Michael convened at Calvin
University in 2010 on the topic of race in American religion. A decade later, many of the relationships forged during that seminar continue to endure and the arguments in this book have been strengthened by the historians, theologians, and sociologists Michael gathered together that summer: Ed Blum, Tanya Brice, Ryon Cobb, Korie Edwards, Paul Gordiejew, Luke Harlow, Kimberly Hill, Karen Joy Johnson, Rebecca Kim, Mark Mulder, Jerry Park, Julie Park, Regina Shands Stoltzfus, and Erica Wong. Another member of our group, theologian Bruce Fields, passed away before this book’s publication, but his influence helped shaped not only this book but my own life as well.
It has been a pleasure working with Oxford University Press again, and I am especially grateful for Cynthia Read and Brent Matheny who shepherded this project along. In addition to designing the incredible cover, Oxford also lined up stellar anonymous readers whose helpful suggestions and trenchant critiques made for a much better final product.
As helpful as the anonymous readers were, so too have been the innumerable colleagues and peers who have provided invaluable feedback at different points in the writing of this book. Three deserve special mention. Carolyn Dupont has been generous with her analysis of my work in its various stages and the insights drawn from her research of Mississippi evangelicals helped sharpen my own conclusions. In addition to commenting on chapter drafts, Wes Phelps has served as my roommate at many academic conferences over the years where he has endured a decade’s worth of discussions about this book and its arguments. Finally, Luke Harlow has read drafts of seemingly everything I have written going back to our earliest days together as new graduate students at Rice and has never failed to provide suggestions that improve my analysis and arguments at every turn. Carolyn, Wes, and Luke have all made this a significantly better book.
My academic home the past twelve years has been in the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University. My honors college colleagues have been the best I could have wanted and I have lost track of the number of drafts I have asked them to read or conversations about race and evangelicalism I have subjected them to. These fine individuals include Annastasia Bonczyk, Brian Clark, Lena Crouso, Lanta Davis, Lexi Eikelboom, Kirsten Guidero, Amy Peeler, Lance Peeler, Todd Ream, Jason Runyan, Jeff Tabone, Sara Scheuneman, Anneke Stasson, Julia VanderMolen, Lisa Toland Williams, and Sameer Yadav. It has been a gift to be part of this interdisciplinary community where my own research has been pushed and deepened by
the insights and scholarship of these incredible peers. Two additional honors college colleagues warrant further recognition. David Riggs has been my dean since the day I arrived at Indiana Wesleyan and has been nothing but supportive of my research and teaching from the start. I am thankful for both his professional leadership and personal friendship. I had the good fortune of having an office across the hall from Charles Bressler for my first seven years at Indiana Wesleyan and learned how to teach and interact with students and colleagues by following his example. Charles read every single word of this book in its manuscript form. And after I incorporated his feedback, he read every word again. With his keen editorial eye, Charles improved this book immensely. Thank you, kind sir!
Many students over the years have enrolled in my honors seminars on religion and the civil rights movement and have helped sift through the archival material that is the basis of so much of this book. Two students in particular served as research assistants at key points in the book’s production and deserve their own mention. Early on, Stephen German accompanied me on a week-long research trip to South Carolina and went through countless boxes and folders to amass a significant amount of the evidence presented in the book. Allison Tinch, meanwhile, provided invaluable support in the final stages, hunting down sources, double checking endnotes, and providing helpful feedback on final drafts. A hearty thanks to Steve and Tinch for their contributions to this project.
I have been fortunate to be part of two intentionally multiracial churches in Texas and Indiana during the duration of writing this book. City of Refuge Church in Houston was my church home when this project began and REAL Community Covenant Church in Marion is where my family and I attend at its publication. My church families in both these congregations have been a source of support and inspiration to me over the years and give me hope that the history found in this book may yet be redeemed.
My biological family has likewise been a source of indispensable encouragement in the course of bringing this book into being. My father and mother, James and Carolyn Hawkins, nurtured my love of history at a young age with every quarter deposited at my “president’s stand.” Along with my sisters, Emily Dennis and Kathryn Lalli, my parents have been consistent supporters—and served as my imagined readers—throughout the writing of this book.
My sons, Caleb and Micah, have listened to (and occasionally even requested) countless lectures on American history during family hikes and
bike rides over the years. In addition to pushing me to make my stories interesting and relevant, they have been a source of incalculable pride and joy and have helped me maintain much needed balance and perspective about the important things in life.
Finally, this book would never have been finished without the encouragement and support of my wife, Kristi. She more than anyone else in my life has lived with this book for the past fourteen years. Kristi has sacrificed countless evenings and weekends to ensure that I finish this project and never stopped believing I could even when I gave her every reason to do so. She is my biggest supporter, proudest promoter, and best friend. This book is dedicated to her, along with the promise that the next one won’t take so long.
Introduction
“As Old as the Scriptures . . . ”
On a June afternoon in 1963, nearly 250 religious leaders gathered in the East Room of the White House. Hailing from all corners of the country and representing different faiths and multiple Christian denominations, the clerics assembled that late-spring Monday at the invitation of President John F. Kennedy to discuss how American pastors, priests, and rabbis could rally support for Kennedy’s recent call for sweeping civil rights legislation. Less than a week before this meeting with the clergy, Kennedy couched black equality in explicitly moral terms during a televised address to the nation that Martin Luther King Jr. later called “one of the most eloquent, profound, and unequivocal pleas for justice and the freedom of all men ever made by any President.” With his bold speech, Kennedy positioned his administration on the side of the black demonstrators organizing and marching in the streets of southern cities that year. But the President understood that persuading Congress to pass a bill elevating black Americans from second-class citizen status required more than well-crafted speeches. For this reason, Kennedy followed his televised address with a campaign to sell his proposal to groups whose power and influence in American society would benefit the civil rights crusade. Governors, labor leaders, educators, lawyers, hotel and theater owners—all were summoned to the White House to hear the president discuss the need for new civil rights legislation. Kennedy’s staff reserved June 17 for the nation’s religious leaders to receive the presidential pitch, and as Kennedy prepared for his meeting with the clerics, his aides reminded the president to tailor his remarks to this particular group by emphasizing “the moral position of the churches on the question of racial equality.”1 The president indicated he understood.
The assembled clergymen respectfully rose from their gilded chairs as Kennedy strode into the East Room for their meeting, his characteristic charm on full display. Smiling, the president welcomed the group to “this old house,” invited them to have a seat, and expressed his hope that the media’s
absence from the gathering would allow Kennedy and his guests to have a candid conversation regarding the need for a civil rights law. Kennedy told the men that while his main objective that day was to hear their thoughts, the president nonetheless felt obliged to offer a few introductory remarks: “I would hope each religious group would—and again I don’t think we can say this too often—underscore the moral position of racial equality,” the president said. “There is bound to be resentments against Washington. There is bound to be resentment against outsiders. The more we can make this . . . a community action, with moral overtones and not merely a political effort, the better off we will be.” Recalling his staff’s instructions, Kennedy reiterated his charge that civil rights was a moral issue before opening the floor to suggestions that his administration could heed to maximize support from people of faith for his proposed legislation.2
Around the room hands went up, and the president signaled to individuals eager to express their views. “I am very happy this meeting was held because the holding of this meeting is a recognition of the fact by the entire country that this is a moral problem, essentially,” said a local minister from Washington, DC. “It may have economic, legal and social overtones,” he continued, “but we as religious men must consider it solely the essential thing that it is, a moral problem.” Similar comments continued in the East Room as northern clergymen of liberal theological persuasions suggested means for communicating the righteousness of civil rights to their parishioners.3
But when Kennedy called on the raised hand of Albert Garner, a Baptist minister from Florida, the meeting took an unexpected turn. Rising to address Kennedy, Garner informed the president and his fellow clergy that he and other white people of the “Southland” were certainly in agreement that civil rights was a moral issue, but not in the same way the others in the room viewed it. Instead, Garner noted that many southern white Christians like himself actually held a “strong moral conviction” that “racial integration . . . is against the will of their Creator.” After all, Garner reasoned, “segregation is a principle of the Old Testament and . . . prior to this century neither Christianity nor any denomination of it ever accepted the integration philosophy.” Since Kennedy and his fellow clergy in the East Room were intent on casting civil rights in a moral light, Garner wondered if the president had “any remedy by which we can change these [southern white Christians’] moral convictions and religious convictions of people in the Bible and do you feel that these convictions are absolutely wrong?”4
If Kennedy was startled by Garner’s question, his surprise did not show. Instead, the president brushed aside Garner’s query—one account claimed Kennedy easily dismissed “this familiar bugaboo”—responding that perceived biblical injunctions against interracial mixing remained matters of personal religious convictions, not public policy. His administration’s concern, Kennedy informed Garner, was not to force the social intermingling of the races. Rather, the White House sought only the “equality of jobs and a chance to get an education, so you can get a job, and a chance to move freely through this country and stop at places where others stop.”5
Before Garner yielded the floor, he fired a second question to Kennedy. Could the president suggest ways to calm southern white fears “on the moral issue of this mixing from [the] high school level down?”6 Once again, Kennedy parried Garner’s question, this time dispatching the minister’s concern by declaring that school desegregation fell under the purview of the nation’s courts. But Kennedy ended his exchange with Garner on a conciliatory note: “I realize how difficult it is,” the Catholic president told the Baptist preacher, “but we are asking your people to do what only seems fair and not cut across their religious convictions.”7
Just two days after Kennedy’s meeting with the religious leaders, the president submitted a civil rights bill to Congress that started the legislation on its long and difficult journey to eventual passage. In the intervening months, white Christians in the South proved that Albert Garner had not misrepresented them during his White House visit. On a Wednesday evening in August 1963, five hundred miles south of Washington, DC, members of a Southern Baptist church in Hanahan, South Carolina, called a special meeting after their midweek Bible study to discuss Kennedy’s proposed law. Although the president had hoped congregations like Hanahan Baptist would help make straight the path for civil rights in the 1960s, the faithful Baptists gathered that summer evening in this small community outside of Charleston voted to “take a firm stand against the present civil rights legislation.” Describing themselves as “Christ centered” and “Bible believing,” these Hanahan Baptists saw no contradiction between their Christian faith and their opposition to a law they perceived as forcing them to accept black Americans as their equal.8 The Hanahan Baptists were not alone. Across the South, white Christians thought the president was flaunting Christian orthodoxy in pursuing his civil rights agenda. “Where does Mr. Kennedy get his views and rules?” queried one white southerner for many during the national
debate over civil rights. “Certainly not from the Holy Bible of God and Jesus Christ.”9
Although Kennedy would not live to see the realization of his desired law, a little more than a year after he proposed his hallmark bill, the 1964 Civil Rights Act became law. This watershed legislation was followed the next year by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, an equally if not more important law in the quest for black equality. Taken together, these two acts fundamentally altered the American South more quickly than the region’s residents could have ever foreseen. The passage of such revolutionary legislation immediately aided the black southerners’ defeat of Jim Crow so much so that Kennedy’s inhouse historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., predicted that twenty-first-century historians would struggle to explain why liberal achievements like the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act took so long to be enacted. Schlesinger wondered how was it that for more than a century after the end of slavery, white Americans countenanced the “systematic dehumanization” of their fellow black citizens.10
Standing before Kennedy in the East Room of the White House in June 1963, Albert Garner had provided an answer to Schlesinger’s rhetorical question for those who were able to hear. The president of the United States, however, did not have such ears. Kennedy simply could not comprehend the truth Garner was communicating: based on their religious beliefs, southern white Christians thought integration was evil. When Kennedy told Garner he wanted southern white Christians to do only what was fair and not violate their religious beliefs, the president was inventing a dichotomy between their Christian faith and racial attitudes that few white southerners would recognize or even accept. As demonstrated by the Hanahan Baptists, religious convictions forged by reading and interpreting scripture and following inherited traditions formed many white Christians’ sense of fairness regarding black equality. Asking white southerners to ignore their religious beliefs in pursuit of racial equality was seemingly asking the impossible. These white southerners did not undertake their resistance to black equality in spite of their religious convictions, but their faith drove their support of Jim Crow segregation. 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.
An intramural Christian dispute over God’s position on civil rights is perhaps difficult to imagine in the twenty-first century. Devout Christians who read their Bibles, prayed to Jesus, and sincerely believed God desired segregation—people like Albert Garner and the Hanahan Baptists—are most often left out of public remembrances and popular culture portrayals of the civil rights movement. These segregationists Christians’ absence in popular civil rights accounts makes it difficult to grasp the religious dimensions of resistance to the black freedom struggle, inadvertently lending credence that black protestors alone were motivated by their faith. Hollywood films and best-selling novels set in the civil rights years, for instance, almost invariably include scenes of activists packed in the pews of black churches with freedom songs ringing out and powerful sermons soaring from pulpits to recruit and fortify foot soldiers in the march to black equality. And these depictions are not wrong. Historians such as David L. Chappell and Lewis V. Baldwin have accurately shown that a deep and abiding Christian faith forged in and through experiences of oppression energized many black civil rights activists and helped sustain them throughout their freedom struggle.11 As Chappell underscores, black Christianity rooted in the prophetic tradition made the civil rights movement move.12
But another version of Christianity is seldom portrayed in the well-known renditions of the civil rights movement that many Americans celebrate: the Christianity characterized and articulated by Albert Garner standing in the East Room of the White House, insisting that white southerners’ biblical defense of segregation was hermeneutically correct. This version of Christianity allowed Hanahan Baptists to move seamlessly from studying their Bibles to denouncing civil rights legislation on the same Wednesday evening. It is the version of Christianity practiced by a large percentage of southern white evangelicals, justifying their resistance to racial equality during the civil rights years. In the previous century, a significant number of white southerners found in their holy scripture coupled with church traditions a blueprint for racial segregation, not a call to universal brotherhood. The present book tells their story, offering an account of white Christians like Garner and the Hanahan Baptists, who sincerely believed racial integration violated God’s will. The pages that follow explain how southern white Christians reached such theological conclusions and illustrate how this version of Christianity adapted to defend segregation’s righteousness even after the gains of the civil rights movement.
The Bible Told Them So takes as its vantage point an underexplored corner of Dixie in the study of white resistance to civil rights: South Carolina. Although South Carolina has a similar history as other southern states in the civil rights era—peaceful protestors facing down violent defenders of Jim Crow, Citizens’ Councils using economic intimidation to thwart black gains, reactionary politicians vowing never to integrate—the state’s massive resistance story occupies far less space in Americans’ collective memory than its Deep South neighbors. By examining white evangelicals’ fight to thwart civil rights gains in the Palmetto State, this book breaks new ground in our understanding of religious massive resistance in South Carolina while providing a fuller understanding of segregationist Christianity’s purchase in the South.
In the same way that The Bible Told Them So derives its arguments primarily from South Carolina, its study of white evangelical Christians is limited chiefly to the state’s Southern Baptists and Methodists.13 In the context of midcentury South Carolina evangelicalism, however, examining “only” Baptists and Methodists is hardly a limit at all. In the mid-twentieth century, the percentage of southerners who identified as Protestant Christian was extraordinarily high; nine of ten southerners identified as such in 1954. The percentages also had significant persistence. By 1966, the percentage of Protestant southerners had slipped only three points to 87 percent.14 While no specific data exists concerning the percentage of South Carolinians identifying as Protestant during the years covered in this book (1955–1970), it is reasonable to believe the state reflected the same percentages as the region to which it belonged, at or near 90 percent. South Carolina is no exception to the Baptist and Methodist numerical dominance that scholars have shown existed throughout the South in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, among Protestant Christians in South Carolina in the mid-1960s, over 80 percent identified as a Baptist or a Methodist.15 South Carolina’s white Southern Baptists and Methodists thus provide a numerically significant sample for a study of white evangelicals’ racial perspectives and feelings.
In addition to their sheer volume, Southern Baptists and Methodists provide useful groups to study because their unique forms of church governance enabled the two groups to respond differently to racial issues. Congregational and autonomous in their polity, each Southern Baptist church governs itself independently of a church hierarchy or denominational oversight. Consequently, when sending representatives to state and national meetings of Southern Baptists, individual churches pointedly send “messengers,” not “delegates.” Delegates have power to act on behalf of a church, whereas
Baptist messengers are allowed only to communicate the desire of their congregation and then report back to their churches news and statements from the Baptist convention. As church representatives, messengers can vote to accept or reject reports and proposals at the convention meetings, but none of these reports or proposals is binding upon the churches within the denomination.16 Methodists, on the other hand, have an episcopal and bureaucratic church polity in which congregations submit to the authority of bishops and to other denominational structures of power. Unlike Southern Baptist churches, individual Methodist churches cede authority to members of the laity and clergy who serve as “delegates” to denominational meetings and conduct binding business on behalf of the represented churches and conferences at such gatherings.
Taken as a whole, white Southern Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina were remarkably similar in their belief in and support of segregationist Christianity. Yet the significant difference between Southern Baptist and Methodist church governance caused the two groups to pursue different strategies to maintain and protect segregation in their churches, schools, and denominations. As will be seen in the chapters ahead, the particulars of church polity required Southern Baptists and Methodists to navigate issues of race in different ways at various times during the civil rights period. Accounting for these differences provides a fuller understanding of segregationist Christianity’s influence during and after the civil rights period.
The Bible Told Them So makes two central and interconnected arguments. First, the book argues that many white South Carolinians who resisted the civil rights movement were animated by a Christian faith influenced by biblical exegesis that deemed racial segregation as divinely ordered. A complete understanding of southern white resistance to civil rights requires wrestling with this unique hermeneutic. Prior to a recent historiographical turn, southern evangelicalism’s role in fueling white animus toward the black freedom struggle was understudied or even downplayed within civil rights scholarship.17 Recently, however, a growing number of scholars have demonstrated the power that religious belief held for white evangelical resistance to the civil rights movement.18 The Bible Told Them So contributes to this important crop of scholarship by offering a fulsome explication of the biblical interpretations white evangelicals used to construct their segregationist theology. At the same time, the book demonstrates how such theology fueled southern white Christians’ defense of Jim Crow segregation in their society and churches. Drawn from a particular biblical reading, segregationist
theology became the lifeblood of a segregationist Christianity around which many white southerners ordered their lives in the 1950s. The first two chapters of this book document this story. In so doing, The Bible Told Them So demonstrates that the efforts of white Christians in South Carolina to block the racial gains of their black neighbors harmonized with similar efforts that historians such as Carolyn DuPont, Ansley Quiros, and Stephen Haynes have documented in other southern locales. This book’s first argument, then, extends the current historiography, further revealing the ubiquity of white evangelical resistance to black equality throughout the South while deepening our understanding of Christianity’s centrality to southern white resistance to civil rights.
The book’s last three chapters contain its second central argument and represent a departure from rather than extension of the current scholarship of religious massive resistance. Tracing the continuation of segregationist Christianity after the significant gains of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, I argue that segregationist theology did not cease with the political achievements of the civil rights movement. Historically speaking, Albert Garner’s appeal in the White House to a biblically inspired justification for segregation occurred during the twilight of legal segregation. As noted previously, not thirteen months after Garner stood in front of President Kennedy, Jim Crow had crumbled under the weight of a powerful civil rights act, and the following year black southerners had successfully secured voting rights. It is tempting to interpret the religious objections Garner raised in 1963 to integration as the last gasp of a belief system soon to be relegated to history’s dustbin. As I show in the pages ahead, however, the biblically inspired segregationist Christianity Garner represented did not die. Indeed, in the years after 1965, segregationist Christianity evolved and persisted in new forms that would become mainstays of southern white evangelicalism by the 1970s: colorblind individualism and a heightened focus on the family.
Segregationist Christianity’s capacity to evolve beyond a biblical literalism defending Jim Crow in the 1950s and take on the form of colorblind familial protection by the 1970s was a product of white evangelicalism’s insulated subculture. While the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act forced a fundamental transformation of the broader southern society, southern white evangelicals’ claim to religious liberty in their private schools, church buildings, and denominations provided safe harbor for continued segregation, denying the black freedom struggle power to change white evangelicalism. As southern society acquiesced to the changes wrought by
the civil rights movement in the late 1960s, however, white evangelicals felt pressure to justify their support of segregation in new terms. A new “colorblind” form of segregationist Christianity allowed southern evangelicals to maintain social standing by eschewing appeals to the overt segregationist theology they had made freely a decade hence. But, as this book argues, the linkages between the explicitly theological Christian segregation in the 1950s and its more subtle version in the 1970s must not be overlooked. Caught in the tension between their sincere beliefs that God desired segregation and their reticence to publicly vocalize such ideas for fear of seeming bigoted or intolerant, southern white evangelicals eventually arrived at a strategy that embraced both colorblindness and protection of the family as measures to maintain both segregation and respectable social standing. Such a strategy, I argue, took root, blossomed, and spread widely throughout the evangelical subculture in the early 1970s, setting white evangelicals on a detrimental path for race relations in the decades ahead.
Understanding the argument presented in the following pages requires a clarification for the way the word “theology” is used in this book.19 To claim that white Christians who used religious justifications to defend segregation in the South were employing a “theology” is not to claim that these individuals were drawing upon a codified or systematic argumentation of racial separation. Although I attempt in Chapter 2 to provide the contours of such a systematized segregationist theology, few rank-and-file Christians thought in these terms. Even fewer of these individuals making religious arguments against integration would have considered such acts as “doing theology” or conceived of themselves as theologians. Assigning the term “theology” is therefore attributing a level of category sophistication to white religious conservatives that likely only a handful would have assumed for themselves. Segregationist theology, then, must be properly understood as the myriad arguments white southerners made against integration using either the Bible or the broader natural world.
Such a definition is not intended to imply that segregationist theology lacked sophistication of thought or sincerity of belief by those who employed it. Nor should segregationist theology be understood solely as an endeavor of the Christian laity. To the contrary, southern ministers were instrumental in both teaching and spreading segregationist theology throughout the region. While some of these clergy published their formulations of segregationist theologies in pamphlets, books, and sermons, most toiled away in the obscurity of the ubiquitous small churches that dotted the southern
landscape, content to make their views on segregation known only to their congregations in their weekly sermons.
Although ministerial participation in defending racial segregation should not be discounted, the importance of the laity for segregationist theology’s ultimate purchase cannot be overemphasized. As historians have noted, because the democratic strain of evangelicalism in the American context usually means “it is the people who are custodians of orthodoxy,” it mattered little that segregationist theology did not pass muster with the seminary-trained theologians of the day who made up a small minority of southern white churchgoers.20 As long as the majority of white southern Christians—in either actual numbers or mere perception—believed that the Bible they read and the natural world they observed endorsed the separation of the races, they continued to work against attempts at racial integration. And, as will become clear in the chapters ahead, white southerners in the twentieth century had little difficulty seeing segregation written in either the book of nature or the Good Book itself.
Following this introduction, Chapter 1 begins the story of segregationist Christianity with an exploration of the tensions that arose in southern evangelicalism between local church congregations and state- and national-level bodies in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision. Such tensions reveal how Southern Baptists and Methodists negotiated the heightened antagonism that emerged between denominational leaders and the people in the pews over civil rights issues in the mid-1950s. The chapter opens with South Carolina Southern Baptist churches rejecting broader Southern Baptist Convention efforts to advocate for civil rights in religious language and concludes with lay South Carolina Methodists defending the White Citizens’ Councils against criticism from a small number of Methodist clergy. Both these studies reveal the effective authority of local congregations in directing southern white churches’ responses to matters of race in the civil rights years. This chapter highlights that the congregational-level perspective gives the best vantage point for understanding white evangelicalism’s response to the civil rights movement, regardless of church polity.
Chapter 2 explicates the theology behind the resistive response of southern evangelicals described in the previous chapter. This chapter explains why conservative white Christians opposed civil rights reforms by arguing that a significant percentage of these Christians constructed a theology from both the natural world and biblical texts in which God was viewed as the author of segregation, one who desired that racial separatism be maintained.
Referencing letters, sermons, pamphlets, and books, this chapter documents how segregationist theology was crafted, defended, and deployed throughout the 1950s and 1960s in the South. It also demonstrates how such a theology birthed a segregationist Christianity that became common in southern white churches, proving influential in shaping the social and political responses white southerners had to the civil rights movement. Segregationist theology enjoyed enough adherents among church laity and clergy to prevent southern white evangelical churches from participating in the cause to extend equal treatment to African Americans and often served as the basis for active resistance to that cause.
Of course, despite the desires of segregationist Christians, change did come to the South by the mid-1960s. The book’s last three chapters detail how segregationist theology lived on and evolved in the face of the broader legal and social gains black Americans achieved after 1964. While the world changed around them, white Baptists and Methodists fought to maintain white supremacy in arenas where they retained power: their church colleges, denominational structures, and households. Chapter 3 highlights the continued influence of segregationist theology in evangelical circles even as segregationist ideas began losing purchase outside that sphere in the mid-1960s. The centerpieces of this chapter are parallel narratives detailing the desegregation of Wofford College and Furman University, the respective flagship institutions of the Methodist and Baptist denominations in South Carolina. In describing the battles between school administrators who sought to desegregate their institutions and the laity of the state’s two largest evangelical denominations who resisted such measures, this chapter emphasizes white evangelicals’ continued opposition to black civil rights even as the broader southern culture was forced by the federal government to acquiesce on integration in institutions of higher education. Segregationist theology remained influential for a majority of white Baptists and Methodists who voted against desegregating the church schools in the mid-1960s and who withdrew their support when the colleges integrated against these Christians’ desires.
Chapter 4 traces the transformation of segregationist theology into ideas of colorblind individualism in the early 1970s. This chapter narrates the integration of the United Methodist denomination to demonstrate how white evangelicals adopted a language of colorblindness in an attempt to subvert racial integration. The story of South Carolina’s Methodists illuminates ways that religious ideas can adapt to the imperatives of the culture in which they reside. Accordingly, this chapter demonstrates that while evangelicals were
still influenced by traditional notions of segregationist theology, the growing acceptance of racial equality in American society dictated the need for a new rhetoric to keep segregationist Christianity in line with cultural benchmarks of acceptability. Colorblind individualism proved to be such rhetoric.
Finally, Chapter 5 examines how by the early 1970s white evangelicals utilized the emerging rhetoric of colorblindness in service to the defense of their households. When the Supreme Court forced South Carolina to enact substantive desegregation of the state’s public schools in the closing years of the 1960s, white Christian parents interpreted the move as a threat to their children’s well-being. In response, these parents helped create private religious schools that functioned as havens, they believed, for keeping their children safe. White Christian parents rarely discussed race, maintaining instead that they were merely following God’s mandate to shepherd their children by creating schools with stricter behavioral standards and higher educational expectations than the integrated public schools. But this chapter documents how these private schools, in actuality, represented another bastion of religiously motivated resistance to racial equality and how they helped extend the legacy of segregationist Christianity into the twenty-first century.
Although The Bible Told Them So is a study of the twentieth century, the book’s five chapters open with a short vignette from the nineteenth century corresponding to the history examined in each respective chapter. The inclusion of these brief prologues at the start of each chapter affirms James Baldwin’s powerfully articulated truth that “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”21 The twentieth-century Christians whose stories appear in the pages ahead were deeply influenced by the history they inherited from the century before. Indeed, the segregationist Christianity explored in this book in many respects is merely a continuation and persistence of the white supremacy that has existed across time in the South under many different guises. Recognizing such continuity and persistence is crucial for understanding the present. Segregationist Christianity’s ability to evolve and persist means the history described in this book has ramifications for American evangelicalism today, a truth I demonstrate in the book’s epilogue.
When John Kennedy appeared on television screens across the country to announce his civil rights bill the week before his showdown with Albert Garner in the East Room, the president declared from the Oval Office that
the racial crisis facing the nation was “as old as the Scriptures.” Kennedy was right to invoke scripture in his articulation of the racial problem, but not as a marker of time. Instead, as the president learned in his exchange with Albert Garner the following week, scripture was a significant source of the problem Kennedy sought to solve. The pages ahead explain why.
1 Not in Our Church
Congregational Backlash to Brown v. Board of Education
William Tecumseh Sherman and his soldiers entered Orangeburg, South Carolina, in February 1865, only weeks before the horrific war they were fighting marked its fourth year. The Union general had recently completed his destructive march across Georgia. Having reached the Atlantic coast, he turned his army north, determined to bring the full force of military might against South Carolina, the seedbed of the Confederacy. Sherman had initiated “total war” during his campaign—destroying anything of military value as a way to break southern morale—and arriving in Orangeburg, his federal troops were keen on introducing the town to Sherman’s style of warfare. The county courthouse, depot, and “a good deal of cotton” were all set aflame, sacrifices to Sherman’s war strategy.1 Although not burned, Orangeburg’s First Baptist Church also played a part in Sherman’s foray through the city. Situated directly across the street from the courthouse, the church grounds proved convenient for Sherman’s men to stable horses and stockpile supplies while torching the rebels’ governmental seat. From the front steps of the church, Union soldiers watched as flames devoured the Orangeburg County courthouse on the opposite side of Russell Street. After two days, Sherman’s army departed the church grounds, leaving behind the smoldering ruins of the courthouse across the street.2
Three decades after Sherman’s uninvited stopover in their community, white women of Orangeburg set out to redeem the desecration the general’s visit had wrought. They planned to erect a monument honoring those who had donned Confederate gray during the war and the cause for which they fought. By 1893, the women’s preparation and fundraising efforts were completed. On an autumn day that year, Orangeburg citizens gathered for a dedication ceremony at the site of the former courthouse. Eager to see the fruit of the women’s efforts, the crowd eventually grew so large that it spilled across Russell Street onto the First Baptist grounds, providing celebrants the same vantage point that federal troops had enjoyed decades earlier while
the courthouse burned. After a prayer by Reverend S. P. H. Elwell and the reading of a letter sent for the occasion by former governor and Confederate general Wade Hampton, the monument was unveiled: a thirty-three-foot stone pedestal capped with a statue of a Confederate soldier, a tribute to those who died defending “our rights, our honor, and our homes.”3
But the ceremony was not purely celebratory. It was also a time for somber reflection on the meaning of the Confederacy and the reason for the veterans’ sacrifice. For this purpose, the Orangeburg women invited Colonel James Armstrong to address the crowd. In his oratory, the former Confederate officer moved the crowd, vividly recounting the “grand memories and glorious recollections which beautify and ennoble and immortalize the cause” for which the men of Orangeburg and all of South Carolina had given their lives a generation before. Thanking the “noble women” who brought the monument into being, Armstrong reminded his listeners of the importance of such memorials. The statue of the Confederate soldier, forever in uniform with his rifle at his side, would remind all who looked up to his perch “to guard the memories of our fallen comrades, ever to have faith in the righteousness of our cause . . . that cause which the broken shield of the Confederacy resting above the pulseless breast of our President Davis, is as stainless as a star.”4 The Confederacy had been defeated, but as Armstrong made clear, its purpose remained holy and just.
Armstrong received a “thunderous hurrah” from the crowd—including four hundred former Confederate veterans whose presence lent the ceremony additional honor and solemnity—until a band struck up a rendition of “Dixie” to close the ceremony.5 As the crowd dispersed, the Confederate sentinel atop the monument began his silent guard in the shadow of the First Baptist steeple, his back turned defiantly toward the North. After 1893, First Baptist parishioners traversed the steps of their church under the gaze of Orangeburg’s memorial to the Lost Cause, a perpetual reminder that the purported righteousness of an unholy and defeated cause can live on as long as people keep it secure in their hearts and lives.6
Sixty-four years after the Confederate statue took up its post, the pastor of Orangeburg First Baptist Church across the street faced his own lost cause. The summer of 1957 marked Fred T. Laughon Jr.’s third anniversary in the First Baptist pulpit, but a happy celebration was not forthcoming. Instead,
the forty-two-year-old Laughon found himself alone in his study on a June morning that year, pondering his future at the church. Inserting a clean sheet of letterhead into his typewriter, Laughon pecked out a confidential letter for Baptist headquarters in Tennessee to inquire about alternative employment options: “I will try so hard to live as the Lord wants me to do now, but I need a bit of extra strength. I hope I can achieve it. I also hope I won’t have to live in it much longer,” Laughon wrote. “The bad thing is that there are not many places to go to,” the pastor continued. “If you get any ideas for a man like me I’m open to them. . . . Do you know a good college who wants a man without a doctorate who can teach Bible or sociology?”7 The cause of Laughon’s angst and the reason he was looking to exchange the pastorate for the professorate had begun the previous Sunday. As Laughon was making final preparations for worship on June 23, he was approached by Preston Cone, who requested the pastor call a business meeting after the morning service to hold a congregational vote on a resolution prepared by church members. Although two years Laughon’s junior, Cone wielded authority in the church as a respected physician and leader of the Laymen’s Sunday School class. To ensure Laughon understood that the young doctor’s request was in truth a directive, Cone was accompanied by the chairman of the deacons, who also insisted that Laughon hold the congregational meeting after worship. Having no choice, Laughon conceded.8
Laughon had long dreaded this day. Over the previous year he had heard discontented rumblings among his parishioners about a growing emphasis on racial integration in Southern Baptist reports and literature, but thus far Laughon had managed to avoid addressing the issue directly with his congregation. But with Cone’s request, such avoidance was no longer an option. Accordingly, Laughon preached his prepared sermon on forgiveness, but as the notes of the last hymn faded and the benediction was uttered, the congregation remained seated in the pews rather than filing out of the sanctuary. The time had come for the white members of Orangeburg First Baptist Church to take a stand for racial segregation.9 Against Laughon’s wishes that June Sunday, his congregation unanimously passed a resolution registering their disapproval of the “admission of negroes to any . . . institutions owned and controlled or contributed to by the Southern Baptist Convention.” The resolution also threatened that if the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) did not change course on racial issues, the time may come for Baptist churches in the South to withdraw from the convention and organize a new association of churches that would maintain proper fidelity to Jim Crow segregation.10
Laughon was deeply disappointed with his church’s action. He personally agreed with the SBC’s call for racial integration and believed he had failed to help his two thousand parishioners properly understand the issue.11 As the summer wore on, Laughon’s despondence grew. To his displeasure, the First Baptist deacons followed up their resolution by voting the next month to mail copies of the document to every Southern Baptist church in South Carolina, at which point Laughon began receiving congratulatory letters from Baptists across the state praising him for his fine leadership in taking a stand against race mixing.12 By the end of July, Laughon decided the time for him to leave his Orangeburg church had arrived. Although his congregation had not asked for his resignation—“for this I am very grateful,” Laughon confessed—he had concluded that “the best thing is for me to move on quietly out” at the end of the summer.13 And so he did.
When Laughon exited First Baptist for the last time, the Confederate soldier the Orangeburg white women had erected the previous century was still standing guard on his pedestal across Russell Street. Though Laughon may not have realized it, his pastoral fate was sealed in part by the sentinel’s presence. Laughon’s inability to help his white parishioners harmonize their Christian faith with the idea of racial equality was related both consciously and unconsciously to the congregation’s veneration of the Lost Cause. Just as James Armstrong had hoped at the monument’s dedication in 1893, the Confederate statue had helped sustain notions about white supremacy and the supposed proper racial order in southern society. Such beliefs were essential for maintaining segregation and turning back attempts to foster racial equality in the twentieth century, even within the sacred space of southern churches. The Lost Cause, historians have argued, was tied “to the religion of southern churches. . . . On the racial question, indeed, the southern historical experience as embodied in the Lost Cause provided the model for segregation that southern churches accepted.”14 As Laughon learned in 1957, Confederate statues could wield more moral authority than pastors who were on the wrong side of the integration question. The Confederate soldier who watched over the First Baptist grounds was a constant reminder through the decades that the segregated all-white church meeting across the street did so in accordance with God’s will. The white supremacy that the Lost Cause had intended to preserve through slavery lived on after the Civil War, now clothed in the garb of segregation. Segregated churches were included in this postbellum arrangement, and white congregations in the twentieth century intended on maintaining them.
