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Box 3.7

Footnote 42 is where the author introduces a contrast with another denomination. She explains that Roman Catholics did take a different approach. This footnote is important. This is a careful history of all the key pronouncements from a denomination. The reader might, at this point in the article, be thinking: Well, were the SBC so much worse than the other denominations? To explore this question in any detail would be a major distraction from the careful historical analysis of one denomination. But the author skillfully uses this note to respond to this obvious question that the reader might have.

Box 3.8

The change of heart, explains the author, comes in 1995 with the apology. This is the third and final shift in the narrative. As a good historian, the author is working both thematically and chronologically.

The problem of a racist reputation plagued the SBC even as it announced its 1995 apology for support of slavery and segregation and beyond. It had been stigmatized as being racist, an unusual description for a mainline American Protestant denomination. This negative perception has been underplayed by scholars not only because of African Americans’ outsider status but also because of their history of subjugation as a religious community. Rarely do we write about outsider perceptions of majority religious institutions. Only those who have felt the anguish of racial oppression, however, understand what it means to mistrust major institutions that have participated in their oppression (see Box 3.9).