Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн

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(See Box 3.5.) The intense southern disdain for African American citizenry following the end of slavery in 1865 became enshrined in the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which endorsed Jim Crow segregation, a totalistic system of racial, political, and social subjugation. Just as many southern Protestant denominations had used the Bible to support the architecture for racism and slavery, after slavery ended they continued to support Jim Crow segregation based on notions of white superiority and a particular view of a godly social order. Southern white culture and religion appended itself to a system of segregation in which whites dictated the terms of engagement with African Americans. Many, if not most, southern white Protestants never questioned the structures of racial hierarchy that became a seamless part of southern culture. They had no inkling of the negative consequences for themselves of continued support for a system of racial inequality because they assumed that they would never find themselves in a reverse situation of subjugation. Their limited imagination and their sense of racial superiority made it difficult for white southerners to take any responsibility for African Americans’ inhumane plight. While southern denominations like the SBC often acknowledged the difficult circumstances of black life in the South, they seemed indifferent to the ultimate consequences of their support for racial oppression.