A country’s history of racial, political, and religious practices depicts the values held by the people and their influence in today’s sociopolitical environment. Tisby (2020), in the “Color of Compromise,” demonstrates what happens whenever the American church is “engaged in racism and prepared to repudiate the teachings of Jesus to defend an immoral, terrible institution” (p. 87). The text demonstrates the theological challenge that slavery posed to the American church during the Civil War. While some members of the church lobbied for slavery’s abolition, countless pious Christians battled and died to preserve the institution. Some Christians perpetuated the vice of lynching because they had come to accept it as their right treatment. “The question of Christ and Caesar,” was a crucial preoccupation of the Civil War era as people justified their actions using these concepts (Tisby, 2020). The concepts of Caesar and Christ, as in the civil war era and abolition, have continued to shape the American church and, specifically, Black Christianity.
In life, people seek elements and figures to compare themselves to and justify their injustices and misgivings. Looking at Tisby’s (2020) argument, “Caesar” had explicitly stated that slavery for black people was permissible. The text reveals that “black people were of an inferior order… and that the Constitution did not include black people when it described the roles and obligations of citizens” (Tisby, 2020, p. 73). As a result, black people had no privileges that a white man was obligated to respect. The lack of rules regarding black man’s rights and privileges perpetuated discrimination at all levels. This situation continues to affect the American society whereby, to date, white supremacy continues to be the determinant in many political and religious discussions.
In a society founded on racism, individuals who choose to stand against the vices are labeled as anti-nationalists. Lincoln “made it obvious that abolitionists who condemned the system of slavery may be anti-black and even racist,” according to Tisby (2020, p. 74). Comparing Lincoln’s view to the American political system and especially President Trump’s leadership, Trump argued that he was fostering an America for Americans and by Americans. The years following his election saw unparalleled racial discrimination in which migrants and non-white Americans were made a subject of segregation in the education, religious and political arenas.
The current American church has founded its faith not on the biblical truths but rather the interpretation of scriptures based on the early Christians’ experiences. Parallel to Caesar, Tisby (2020) examines the fractures in mainline Christian institutions, most notably the Presbyterian Church, to trace the believers’ articulation of “Christ” by examining three primary justifications used to justify slavery in his theory. To begin, he describes how the church regarded the “curse of Ham,” a Genesis narrative, as a Biblical “fact,” claiming that “slavery had been a lamentable but essential reality ever since Ham’s sinned” (Tisby, 2020, p. 83). Following this interpretation, many people have been subjected to suffering and, ultimately, death due to sin. It is not surprising that in some black churches, congregants have been indoctrinated with the belief of holiness or death.
Christianity has wrongly interpreted the concepts of nobility with respect to their faith and society. According to Tisby (2020), the church’s missionary purpose was to bring enslaved Africans, a “morally inferior” race, “into close connections with a nobler race” (p. 91). The classification of nobility on the basis of color made the blacks subject to the rules established by the white theologians and religious leaders. When the missionaries introduced Christianity in Africa, for example, the subjects were inclined to follow the new ways without questioning their interpretation and understanding of the religion brought to them. This racial segregation was such that there were different churches for white and black Christians, yet they believed in the same God.
Compromise and lack of spiritual insight contributed to a static religion bounded within the right and wrong frames. The American church established dualism between natural and spiritual, legal and ethical, ecclesial and social, as elaborated by Tisby (2020). As a result, at the time, a critical doctrinal lens was that “the church may only assert whatever the Scriptures say and must keep mute about what the Bible does not teach”(Tisby, 2020, p. 85). Because the church was unable to provide a specific biblical reference that forbade slavery, church leaders believed that the church should stay silent. As a result, slavery became the right and fitting place of Africans in one sweep of questionable demography. Looking at today’s American church, many social evils continue happening, but the Christians have remained mute, as seen through the public killing of George Floyd. Many religious leaders preferred to watch silently, yet they should have stood up for justice.
The establishment of many new churches in society, separated by scriptural interpretations, reveals that Christianity failed to unite believers as was expected. Tisby (2020) wrote that the war successfully ended slavery, but the conflict did not end. Opposing biblical interpretations have become the bullets that have continued to separate Christians and aggravate discriminatory practices in the American church. Tisby (2020) speculates that “Reconstruction may have been the beginning of a beautiful America where black Americans enjoyed the full promises of liberty” with the conclusion of the war (p. 89). Liberty would mean the right to practice Christianity without fear of seclusion or discrimination. However, today’s churchgoer has become more of a religious slave than a free believer.
Religion is based on rules constructed by the religious leaders to guide their followers on conduct with reference to biblical principles. Despite the fact that Black people gained real access to social life as a result of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, Tisby (2020) finds that “the dream was short-lived” (p. 91). Tisby (2020) demonstrates how America and the American church built a new social order aimed to reinforce the inferiority of black people in America through the formation of the “Lost Cause narrative” (p. 89). The “Lost Cause,” a counter-history narrative, was created to portray the pre-Civil War South as a “virtuous, patriotic bunch of tight-knit Christian communities” (Tisby, 2020, p. 94). This concept bespeaks hypocrisy in the American church and Christians globally. People in society tend to act as pious believers who want to transform society, while in a real sense, their goals are founded on self-centredness and materialism.
When tragedies and war occur in society, people get hurt and, in their consolation, turn to memorials to honor their beloved and demonstrate their faith. Many people, particularly southern women, organized attempts to erect Confederate memorials that “not only remembered Confederate troops but also etched white supremacy into the fabric of public space” (Tisby, 2020, p. 95). Churches commemorated “Confederate Memorial Day,” but white “redeemers” have become exploiters. According to Tisby (2020), the people who claimed to be “God’s mission to save people from their sins and transform them into a holy nation” have exploited and kept Blacks out of civic life (p. 96). The effort of the “redeemers” was, therefore, “an overt appeal to white racial animosity” that resurrected the clouds of tyranny to obstruct the dazzling rays of freedom (Tisby, 2020, p. 97). This depicts a controversy between the so-called redeemers’ true mission and their actual roles in facilitating black people’s exploitation.
From the biblical perspective, Christians were meant to be individuals who have separated from any discriminatory practices within the community. However, this has not been the case in the American church from the civil war era to date. Tisby (2020) shows that the Ku Klux Klan’s ascent during Reconstruction was fueled by a “poison ideology of hate” that combined Christianity, nationalism, and racial supremacy to create a vision of a “white Christian America” (p. 100). Further, the creation of Jim Crow laws and traditions as a system to “reinforce the racial hierarchy” and the “social order” of slavery to this combination (Tisby, 2020, p. 103). Christians’ unreadiness to oppose and condemn lynching corrupted the United States’ legal system and turned Christian churches into indirect supporters of racial discrimination. The same has been happening in today’s American church, whereby the clergy has remained silent on things that matter, justifying themselves through scriptural interpretations.
There were some churchgoers who did not engage in lynching. However, through the few leaders’ compromises, the whole Christian community was counted as supporters of racial and religious segregation of black Christians. Tisby (2020) affirms that although there were few who did not partake of the lynching, the tradition wouldn’t have survived without the “utter silence, if not an explicit endorsement, of one of Country’s most prominent institutions—the Christian church” (p. 109). While unveiling the Christians’ acceptance of torture, Tisby (2020) quotes Cones, “The cross helped me deal with the lynching tree’s harsh heritage, and the lynching tree helped me understand the awful significance of the cross,” (p. 111). Clearly, the American church has perpetuated a false Christianity that has limited people to biblical references with the aim of subjecting them to continual suffering in the name of following Christ.
In conclusion, Tisby is right in arguing that the American church needs to change its beliefs of “Caesar” and “Christ” to reach a point of full liberty. Clearly, the combination of white supremacy, religion, and racism has been justified through the “Caesar” concept for decades. At the same time, black Christians have accepted these discriminatory practices, believing that they are bearing the cross of “Christ.” This way, many people have been bound in the form of liberty that denies them the true taste of Christianity. As shown herein, the early practices have only been changing form through the decades. Social evils in American society have increased significantly due to church leaders’ silence and hypocrisy. If only religious leaders stood up to fight for justice and embrace a sound interpretation of biblical truths. Looking at today’s church, one can affirm that although slavery was abolished decades ago, black Christians have been enslaved by the religious laws they constructed for themselves through the “Christ” concept described by Tisby in “The Color of Compromise”.
Reference
Tisby, J. (2020). The color of compromise study guide: The truth about the American church’s complicity in racism. Zondervan.