Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн
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One religious historian, for example, asserts that during the civil rights era it became difficult for southern Christians to defend racial segregation. He adds, “Their beliefs played a significant role in making white southern Christians obsessed with conceptions of purity. Their beliefs had been set in a mythological context that gave them properly religious sanction.”58 I would add: “or so they believed.” This same historian also states that white southern Christian ideas of social and racial hierarchy did not have to sound hypocritical because particular biblical passages clearly explained why spiritual equality does not imply temporal equality but agrees with “godly order.”59 The problem, however, is that there was a litany of ungodly practices against enslaved people.
Religious institutions have choices in terms of how they create, sustain, and destroy vestiges of racism. I have described the journey of the SBC, its support of white supremacy and racism, the Christian disunity it fostered with African Americans because it would not regard them as equals, how the SBC stigmatized itself as being a racist organization, and then how it recently has worked to remove this stigma in order to build relationships with African Americans and other ethnic groups.