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

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Tearing down Jim Crow segregation went against the will of southern Protestant denominations like the SBC, which did very little to support African Americans’ full humanity or their civil rights. The religious support of legal segregation tore at the social fabric of democratic society and eliminated any possibility of national Christian unity on issues of race and racism. Not only did white Christians disagree about the morality of segregation, they also created further chasms between themselves and African American Christians.

Examining public statements by the SBC, including resolutions at annual conventions, allows us to view both the continuities and the changes over time in the SBC’s stance on racism and Jim Crow segregation. Although such resolutions are not binding on individual member churches, these member-ratified public statements nevertheless represent the majority views of the entire denomination through votes cast at official conventions. Thus, these statements are both legitimated and preserved by the SBC.²¹ Because of its pro-segregation stance, which was consistent with its earlier support of slavery and the Civil War, in its public resolutions and official commission statements the SBC consistently avoided language on Christian charity and love toward African Americans. Its twentieth-century statements rarely, if ever, included biblical or theological language that challenged segregation. These public resolutions often demonstrated indifference to the sources of African American suffering to which the SBC had contributed. While they detailed the poor quality of African American life and its problems, nevertheless its rhetoric declared that it was not its role to solve these problems. As part of its 1905 official proceedings, for example, the convention declared, “It is no affair of this Convention to solve the negro problem … God will take care of the problem.”²² While it noted evidence of social improvement, the convention expressed concern about African American drug habits, low morality, crime, and the prevalence of insanity that had not existed before emancipation. It also observed, “By far the greatest force in leading the negroes up from savagery has been his varied contact with Christian white men and women, and especially the influence of the Christian home.”²³ This was written just nine years after the Plessy case was decided in 1896 by the US Supreme Court, at a time when Jim Crow segregation legally subjugated African American citizens to a racial caste system that included myriad forms of oppression, including exploitation, marginalization, and mob and interpersonal violence.