The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy by J Russell Hawkins

Summary: A history of Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina arguing for the continuation of segregation for theological reasons. 

I have read a lot of Civil Rights and Civil War/Reconstruction/Jim Crow history. And some of that history, like Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, is trying to be comprehensive, but much of it is telling the history from the side of the abolitionists or the opponents to segregation. The Bible Told Them So is telling an essential part of this history from the side of the segregationists and why they were arguing for the continuation of segregation and how they made that argument. The arguments are so explicit and clear here that it becomes hard to avoid the reality of how in the 1950-70s there was a real fight to “preserve white supremacy.”

The book is structured in five chapters. The first focuses on congregational response to Brown v Board and how many pastors were fired for supporting the ruling. The second chapter looks in more detail at the theological reasoning for the defense of segregation. The third chapter looks at how Baptists and Methodists responded to proposals to integrate their denominational colleges (and pairs nicely with the chapter on college from The Myth of Colorblind Christianity). The fourth chapter is about the rise of colorblind language and justifications for segregation in the face of the larger culture’s rejection of segregationist rhetoric. And the final chapter is about the rise of private schools and how those schools were framed, primarily using colorblind rhetoric but for segregationists reasons.

I think the arc of this history is essential. There is a movement from overt segregationist language, theologically informed and undergirded, to alternate public rhetoric while maintaining the private communication, to a colorblind public and private rhetoric without a change in practice, to a denial that the earlier segregationist language was ever used. In many ways, I think this builds on the work on the history of memory from David Blight and others about how there is an intentional misremembering. One of the parts of this story that was new to me was how early colorblind language was drawn directly from the Plessy v Ferguson decision.

“The phrases “natural affinities,” “mutual appreciation of merits,” and “voluntary association of individuals” were not Workman’s. They were the words of Henry Brown Billings, words the Supreme Court in 1896 used to deny Homer Plessy–and all who shared his skin color–ful equity as American citizens…At first blush, Workman’s letter seemed to gesture at a new era of white Christians’ acceptance of racial integration. But by appropriating word for word a line from the Supreme Court case that gave Jim Crow legal sanction in the South for nearly seven decades, Workman’s letter also reveals ways in which the new language of colorblindness had its roots in the desire of segregation. Understanding the historical links between colorblindness and segregationist theology reveals a continuity of segregationist Christianity from the 1950s to the 1970s and a perpetuation of racial separatism by white Christians–even unwittingly so–into the decades beyond.”

As expected, I have a lot of highlights, primarily of quotes that need to be read to be believed. You can see my 12 notes and 76 highlights on my Goodreads page.

One of the interesting realities is that arguments, primarily those in the 1950s and early 1960s, included the positive use of the phrase “white supremacy.”

During the afternoon session, H. K. Whetsall was one of the first to speak, declaring that, while the state convention and committees might be nudging Baptists toward integration, the Bible did not. “There is scriptural basis for White supremacy,” Whetsall asserted, and he reminded those in attendance that the Bible “condemns racial intermarriage.”46 Robert Head followed Whetsall at the microphone and scolded the state convention “for ‘brainwashing us’ about integration.” Head’s comment drew agreeable laughter and applause from those in attendance.

The focus of the book is on the theological undergirding of segregationist defenses. These theological defenses were not used just against secular forces seeking integration like the courts. They were in many ways more explicit in countering religious groups advocating integration. In response to an SBC national convention resolution in 1956 affirming integration, many local churches passed their own resolutions denouncing integration.

“…the white parishioners of Clarendon Baptist included additional rationale that revealed the theological convictions from which such resolutions emerged: We believe that integration is contrary to God’s purposes for the races, because: (1) God made men different races and ordained the basic differences between races; (2) Race has a purpose in the Divine plan, each race having a unique purpose and distinctive mission in God’s plan; (3) God meant for people of different races to maintain their race purity and racial indentity [sic] and seek the highest development of their racial group. God has determined “the bounds of their habitation” (Last part of Acts 17:26). This resolution explicitly stated what Camden First Baptist’s had only implied: God had segregated the races for his own purposes, given this arrangement divine sanction, and instructed the faithful through scripture not to pursue racial integration. What began as a voluntary separation between Christians of different races in the nineteenth century had, by the midpoint of the twentieth, become a holy command in the minds of many white southerners.”

One of the reasons I am unconvinced by natural theology arguments is that they have been used so often to justify injustice, as happened here and so frequently throughout this era.

As a theological principle, general revelation suggests that humanity can learn about God through observation of the natural world; for many white southerners in the mid-twentieth century, nature revealed God to be a segregationist. “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handywork,” a segregationist minister quoted from the nineteenth Psalm. “The corollary of the above passage,” continued Pastor W. C. George, “is that since nature is God’s handywork, it reveals his laws to those who have the diligence and the insight to discover them.” Following George’s line of thought, white Christians found in nature divine justification for Jim Crow. While employing both scripture and general revelation in their defense of Jim Crow, Christian segregationists such as Festus F. Windham challenged anyone to prove that segregation was sinful. “I am referring to voluntary segregation,” Windham clarified, the kind he believed existed between southern whites and their black neighbors. “We find much voluntary segregation even in nature,” the Alabama Sunday School teacher continued. “Hordes of black ants several times larger than the little red ants do not integrate with any other ants, though they may live not too far apart in their ground tunnels.”

David French has recently used a phrase regularly in talking about racism that I think is relevant, “Systems and structures designed by racists for racist reasons are often maintained by nonracists for nonracist reasons.” Part of what is important about how the arc that I have described above works is that by the time the kids are in the segregated schools, they deny that their parents put them in those schools for racial reasons. Hawkins cites a researcher who interviewed parents and students at a conference for private school students in the early 1970s.

For some Christian parents, these justifications dovetailed nicely with an emerging theological emphasis on familial responsibility and values. “Parents’ rights come from God by way of the natural law,” wrote one parent referring to private schools.73 Whereas segregationist Christians viewed public schools as attempting to strip away parental rights, the private schools existed to reinforce them. And whereas segregationist Christians saw public schools as a threat to their children’s safety and quality education, private schools enhanced both. What was at stake for these Christian parents who sent their children to all-white private schools was nothing less than parental rights and obligations. In their assessment, race was not a factor. Denying that race was the cause for enrolling children in private schools did not make it so. But it did begin the process of allowing southern white Christians—intentionally or otherwise—to elide the connection between their school choices and race. A researcher who attended a convention in the early 1970s for private school students noted this lack of awareness in the students themselves.

Every student at the convention “said they were attending the private school because their parents did not want them in integrated schools.” But none of the students described this decision as race based. One of the students’ comments captured it perfectly: “N***** are dumb, can’t learn; and when you have a majority of low standard in a school, they will pull all the rest down. It’s not really a race issue, just a matter of lowering standards.”

This matters because many of those private, often Christian, schools still exist. And they continue to have a legacy of segregation even if they are not segregated for explicitly racist reasons today. For instance a number of cases of Christian schools that have dress codes that do not take into account Black hairstyles. Those policies may or may not have been put into place with explicit racist intent. It could just be that because the schools were segregated, they did not need to take into account Black hairstyles and it is not until there are Black students in the schools that the policies are examined and found to be a hindrance. But the point of David French’s quote is important because the result is that there is still a discriminatory result. And without understanding that there was in fact a real discriminatory purpose at the creation of these schools, then there will continue to be resistance to the idea that anything needs to change in response. It becomes a, “well my family didn’t own slaves” when in fact the systems that were put into place did invoke white supremacy as an explicit reason in the creation of that private school or that overwhelmingly white congregation, or there is a benefit to that white college student because their grandparent was a student when the school was segregated.

Books like The Bible Told Them So are important and we need to be reading them in order to understand the current reality that we have right now.

The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy by J Russell Hawkins Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition