“White evangelicals who champion racial justice through individual heart changes, or reconciled relationships, or appeals to colorblindness are using the tools fashioned and utilized by their segregationist forebears precisely to avoid the racial justice their descendants now seek” (166).
In The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, J. Russell Hawkins traces the history of how such a personal emphasis and facially race-neutral claims were used to subvert, delay, and undermine the structural changes needed to create a more racially just society. Focusing primarily on the Jim Crow South from the 1950s to 1970s, Hawkins demonstrates the ideological and rhetorical through-lines from the antebellum period to today.
For so many of us today, racial justice is a moral issue—and this, indeed, is the springboard of Hawkins’ story in the East Room of the White House with President John F. Kennedy seeking the support of religious leaders to help pass civil rights legislation. Countless books and movies have told of the moral struggle of black churches in the civil rights movement. But what were the white churches doing? Hawkins explains that they, too, saw it as a moral struggle, but sometimes in the opposite way: as a struggle to preserve a way of life that they believed had been ordained and blessed by God, as one of the pastors in attendance at that meeting had tried to inform Kennedy. The belief that the culture of the Jim Crow South was in accordance with God’s will shaped southern Christians’ hermeneutical framing of biblical passages, inspiring them to act to preserve segregation in schools, universities, and churches.
Hawkins’ careful study focuses on these institutions in South Carolina, specifically from the Methodist and Southern Baptist churches, which would have made up the majority of the population at the time. He relies on primary sources from church meetings, annual conferences, personal communications, and various publications of the era, sharing numerous quotes and copious endnotes. The stories and the rhetoric are frequently emotionally difficult to digest but serve to expose the connections between today and the past. Hawkins shows that not only did segregationists believe that their society was God-ordained, but that their arguments to maintain it evolved over time to suit the evolving mores of the broader society.
The detailed narrative of the book illustrates the social dynamics that were at play. Hawkins describes the positions of the denominational leadership, contrasted with the positions of the laity, often with the clergy caught in between—risking job insecurity and facing pressure from the Citizens’ Councils. He shows the effect of polity (episcopal for the Methodists and congregational for the Southern Baptists) on how decisions about desegregation were made, implemented, and resisted. While the power of such decisions ultimately rested with the populace (directly for Baptists and indirectly for Methodists, due to polity differences), the effect of federal law, the financial implications of legal compliance, and the changing values of the broader society forced the segregationists to try to exert their influence in increasingly smaller enclaves of the private sphere.
Chapter 1 of the book explains the tensions between the denominational leadership and the laity, while Chapter 2 focuses on the biblical hermeneutic employed by the segregationists in their cause. Chapters 3 through 5 examine the retreat from public sphere debates to private sphere ones (church-affiliated universities, congregational membership and denominational structure, and the private school boom), while also showing the changing rhetoric that was employed in defense of these privatized segregated institutions—away from the more blatant segregationist theology of the Jim Crow era to emphases on personal attitudes, relationships, and responsibilities that redirect our attention from the ongoing importance of structural changes in bringing about real justice. Hawkins concludes by stating that white evangelicals would do well to acknowledge the influence that segregationist theology still has on our discourse today.
This book is an excellent beginning to confronting these ghosts of our past that still haunt our pursuits of racial justice. As the quote at the beginning of this review suggests, it is not enough to pretend to be colorblind or assume that discrimination exists only at the individual level. Rather, we must understand the sociohistorical and systemic nature of racial injustice if we are to attempt to dismantle it. Anyone with an interest in the history of race in the United States—particularly as it connects to religion—will learn a great deal from this book. It is well-suited for a variety of courses in the sociology or history of religion, as well as for seminary courses.
V. Jacquette Rhoades, Ashland University
V. Jacquette Rhoades
Date Of Review:
February 19, 2023