The Color of Compromise

Most recent thoughts on the third full reading
Summary: The church has been complicit in the creation of a racial hierarchy.

Last night I finished up a discussion group for the Color of Compromise. I was not particularly interested in re-reading the book because I have read/listened to it two previous times and watched the video series twice. But the Color of Compromise is exactly the type of book that brings about a shared story of the history of the United States so that there can be a place for Christians of different racial groups to come together for real discussion and future work.

This discussion group was the fourth round of small groups that I have helped lead or participated in that explicitly focused on racial issues at my church. And one of the significant confirmations of participating in these groups is how important it is to have a shared understanding of history. That does not mean that everyone has to believe the same things on all policy or theology or historical understandings, but it does mean that a shared basic shape of the history of the US and the role that race has played in that history is important for moving forward. Color of Compromise is a basic introduction to the history of race in the US. I have read a lot of history around race, and there is very little that is controversial here.

That being said, one of the consistent critiques that I have heard about Color of Compromise is that its history is not very good. Generally, when I have asked for examples, there are two main threads that people are talking about. One is that there is a frustration that Tisby does not spend more time talking about the role of white abolitionists or those that opposed segregation. And generally, my response is that this is not a history of abolition or ending segregation. This is a history of the church's complicity in racism, and their complaint isn't with Tisby's history but the book's focus that he actually wrote. The second area where people have complained about the historical work is from people who want more clear heroes and villains in their history and who are offended that Tisby is pointing out that some of our heroes were not very heroic regarding race. So again, this tends to be a problem with people's understanding of the methodology of history and their theological anthropology.

The current historical methodology is not designed to create heroes. If you go back two hundred years, some early historians were trying to develop heroes and a shared ‘mythology' (using it in the sense of a shared creation/origin story). For example, the ‘myth' of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree arose about 10 years after Washington's death in the fifth edition of a biography of Washington by Locke Weems. Weemes was not trying to tell a historically accurate story that he got wrong; he was trying to illustrate the importance of virtue. By 1835, PT Barnum purchased an elderly slave woman and advertised her as Washington's nanny, and she told the cherry tree story as one of her acts. By 1854, the story was adapted to one of McGuffey's Readers to teach reading. But it was a ‘myth,' not in the sense of false story (although there is no historical evidence of it actually happening), but in the sense of a shared story of the virtue of our founding father, which allows us as US citizens to point to the story for a sense of identity and meaning.

When Color of Compromise points to how those important historical figures in the ‘mythology of American Christianity were complicit in racism or the culture of white racial superiority, it impacts how people see themselves and their faith. The article and backlash (here, here, here, and here as examples) over John Piper's defense of Jonathan Edwards enslaving people exemplify how we ‘mythologize' our Christian heroes. And it is exactly this mythologizing that is a perfect example of how the church has been complicit in racism.

That being said, there is one place that I am aware of a factual error. The quote is, “As historian Joseph Crespino relates, Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign at an annual fair in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where in 1964, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—had disappeared.” Tisby cites Joseph Crispino for Reagan starting his campaign at the annual fair in Neshoba County, but Reagan announced his campaign on Nov 13, 1979, and the Neshoba County Fair speech was on Aug 3, 1980. Except for the dating, the discussion of the content was accurate. (Update, Tisby is accurate here. This is the first speech after the National Convention where he was starting the campaign as the official GOP candidate for president.)

The final chapters, 8 to 11, are the real heart of the importance of the book. The chapters covering the pre-civil rights era are pretty straight narrative history, and I would find it hard to think that anyone familiar with the content has much to dispute. Chapter 8, complicity with racism during the civil rights era, uses MLK and Billy Graham as examples of ways in which the church could have responded, and did respond, to racism, again poking holes in our Evangelical mythology. Chapter 9 focuses on the rise of the religious right. I think it has a more nuanced version of the Randal Balmer thesis that government investigation of segregated Christian schools in the 1970s played a role in developing the religious right. Finally, chapter 10 is about Black Lives Matter and the recent church. Because I have followed Jemar Tisby on Twitter and his podcast since at least 2015, if not a bit earlier, I had experience with Tisby as a figure in this history, not just a writer of this history. And I think that matters to how you read his accounts of LeCrae and other Black Christians in White Evangelical spaces and the backlash they received for talking about racism in the church. And of course, chapter 11 is an early explication of Tisby's ARC model of racial reconciliation that is the subject of his second book, How to Fight Racism.

In some ways, it is hard for me to believe that this book was published just over 2.5 years ago (Jan 2019). It has been wildly influential and important to the current moment. There are many other history books about the church and racism and the US, but very few are targeted to a popular evangelical audience. In fact, Christianity Today has a whole article about how this was the first book by an evangelical publisher about race to sell more than 100,000 books and only the fifth book by a black author published by an evangelical press ever to sell more than 100,000 copies. Color of Compromise is a book that should be read in part because it has become so influential.

Summary: An introductory survey of American history and the relationship of the church to racism.

In previous eras, racism among Christian believers was much easier to detect and identify. Professing believers openly used racial slurs, participated in beatings and lynchings, fought wars to preserve slavery, or used the Bible to argue for the inherent inferiority of black people. And those who did not openly resist these actions—those who remained silent—were complicit in their acceptance. Since the 1970s, Christian complicity in racism has become more difficult to discern. It is hidden, but that does not mean it no longer exists. (page 155)

“Even after the calamitous events of the Civil War, many citizens and politicians maintained a moderate stance on race and civil rights. Unionists in the North tended to show more concern about the status of former white Confederates than for the status of freedpeople (page 92)”