The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era

299 Pages·2021·1.573 MB·English

by  Jesse Curtis

The Myth of Colorblind Christians

The Myth of Colorblind Christians
Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era
Jesse Curtis
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY Press
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2021 by New York University
All rights reserved
Portions of chapter 3 appeared in an earlier form as “White Evangelicals as ‘a People’: The
Church Growth Movement from India to the United States,” Religion and American Culture:
A Journal of Interpretation 30 (2020): 108– 146. It is reprinted with permission of Cambridge
University Press.
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the
author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or
changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Curtis, Jesse, author.
Title: The myth of colorblind Christians : evangelicals and white supremacy in the Civil
Rights Era / Jesse Curtis.
Description: New York : New York University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003106 | ISBN 9781479809370 (hardback) | ISBN 9781479809387
(paperback) | ISBN 9781479809417 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479809394 (ebook other)
Subjects: LCSH: Evangelicalism—United States—History—20th century. |
Race relations—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Civil rights movements—
United States—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC BR1642.U6 C87 2021 | DDC 270.8/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003106
New York University Press books are printed on acid- free paper, and their binding materials
are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppli-
ers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
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Contents
Introduction 1
1. What Does It Mean to Be One in Christ? The Civil Rights
Movement and the Origins of Christian Colorblindness 13
2. Creating the Colorblind Campus 49
3. Growing the Homogeneous Church 78
4. A Mission Field Next Door 109
5. Two Gospels on a Global Stage 138
6. The Elusive Turning Point: Colorblind Christians
and “Racial Reconciliation” 171
Conclusion 209
Acknowledgments 221
Notes 223
Bibliography 265
Index 281
About the Author 291

Introduction
On the evening of November 24, 2014, St. Louis County prosecuting
attorney Bob McCulloch announced that a white police officer would
not be indicted for the shooting death of a black teenager, Michael
Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. As the nation looked on, Michael
Brown’s family cried out in grief and fires raged in the night. The
moment produced astonishing split- screen images: the president of
the United States calling for calm while buildings up and down Floris-
sant Avenue burned to the ground. The following summer, as Black
Lives Matter activists marked the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death
with renewed protests, one of the country’s most influential evangeli-
cal pastors decided to weigh in on social media. Rick Warren shared
an image of two police officers standing together, one white and one
black, each holding a hand toward the camera. On each palm were the
words “His life matters.” The meme seemed to be a typical example of
the colorblind ideology that has dominated so much of American racial
discourse. But for Warren, the matter was theological. And so he added
a commentary of his own:
#AllLivesMatterToGod
Racism isn’t caused by SKIN but by SIN.
“From one man GOD made every nation of men to inhabit the whole
earth; and He determined the times set for them and the exact places
where they’d live.” Acts 17:261
As cries of “Black Lives Matter” rang out on the nation’s streets, War-
ren universalized and sacralized the slogan. “All Lives Matter” was God’s
word on America’s raging racial controversy. Warren’s diagnosis of the
roots of racism—“ SIN” rather than “SKIN”—w as a pithy alliteration
with a long history going back at least to the civil rights movement.2 But
what did it mean in this case? Warren implied that Black Lives Matter
1
2 | Introduction
activists were misguided because they failed to recognize the root of sin
in the human heart, a disposition that knew no bounds of color. War-
ren’s generic invocation of sin effectively hid the reality of American
white supremacy from view. His audience could imagine themselves as
opponents of racism and as allies of a God- ordained racial order while
sidestepping the specificity of black activists’ demands. Where did Rick
Warren get these ideas? How did his audience know how to interpret
them? Warren worked with the tools that generations of white evangeli-
cals had created in their adaptive response to the civil rights movement.
His intervention in social media conveyed abundant meaning in few
words because it expressed the colorblind theology that white evangeli-
cals had spent the better part of five decades developing.
In the second half of the twentieth century, black evangelicals in the
United States made unprecedented demands for inclusion and reform
in white evangelical institutions. In response to these demands and the
upheavals of the civil rights movement, white evangelicals discarded
theologies of white supremacy and embraced a new theology of ra-
cial colorblindness. But instead of deploying this colorblind theology
for antiracist purposes, white evangelicals used it to protect and shape
new investments in whiteness as they attempted to grow the evangeli-
cal movement. They offered an individualistic message of repentance
and salvation as the most potent force able to change lives and tran-
scend racial boundaries. Seeking to address racial problems close to
home through their churches, colleges, and parachurch ministries, white
evangelicals emphasized the spiritual unity of all true believers in Jesus
Christ, the power of the gospel to solve racial problems, and the impor-
tance of interpersonal relationships to heal the wounds of racism. As
black evangelicals sought change in white evangelical institutions, they
repeatedly insisted that white evangelicals’ brand of colorblind Chris-
tianity failed to eradicate racism. White evangelicals often responded
that black evangelicals’ efforts were a divisive threat to the unity of the
church. Christian colorblindness fostered communities in which white-
ness often remained an invisible investment carried on under the ban-
ner of Christian unity and faithfulness to the gospel. The result was a
distinctly evangelical form of whiteness.
This book argues that white evangelicals’ turn to a theology of color-
blindness enabled them to create an evangelical brand of whiteness that