AND LO, IT CAME TO PASS LAST WEEK THAT 219 YEARS after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, 132 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, 41 years after the Supreme Court struck down segregation and three months after Mississippi ratified the 13th Amendment, the Southern Baptist Convention finally got around to admitting that slavery is sinful and asked forgiveness from blacks for its historic role in defending segregation.
That’s mighty white of them.
Forgive me for being underwhelmed by this astonishingly belated act of contrition from the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Like most African Americans, I would have been more impressed if the revelation had come a generation ago, when prominent Southern Baptists like George Wallace were standing in the schoolhouse door and never-miss-a-Sunday Ku Klux Klansmen were murdering fellow Christians who believed in civil rights. Instead the message from many Southern Baptist pulpits was that God himself had ordained the separation of the races and that to tamper with it was to go against his will. “Just think of all the violence and bitterness we might have been spared if the Southern Baptists had repudiated racism sooner,” says C. Eric Lincoln, a retired professor of religion at Duke University. “The country would have been 100 years ahead of where it is today in race relations.”
In fact, the Southern Baptists had plenty of chances to reverse their backward stand on racial issues but passed them by, even though many courageous members of the church and some maverick pastors protested in vain against the policies. In his famous “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. responded to a group of “liberal” Southern church leaders who had criticized his nonviolent demonstrations as “unwise and untimely” acts of outside agitation. Wrote King: “In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sidelines and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, ‘These are social issues with which the Gospel has no real concern.'” But for the most part, King’s powerful appeal to his fellow pastors to act like Christians fell on deaf ears. Even today, there are few more segregated places than the average Baptist church on Sunday morning.
So why are the Southern Baptists suddenly moving to put the disgraceful past behind them? Some scholars believe the church has reached a point of diminishing returns in attempting to lure more white converts. But so long as the convention, founded in 1845 by die- hard defenders of slavery, clung to its noxious racial theology, it would be hard to evangelize among African Americans, who currently account for about 500,000 of the church’s 15.5 million members. “This is very much connected to the Southern Baptists’ attempts to reach out to blacks, who share with them a very strong belief in Fundamentalism,” says John Hope Franklin, the distinguished black historian. Moreover, as Lincoln notes, the antislavery resolution “costs very little in real terms. It’s one thing to make a gesture by asking forgiveness for somebody else’s sins. It’s much more difficult to lay out a real plan in which you say we are going to do certain, specific things to demonstrate our good faith and rectify our relationship with blacks. We haven’t got that from them yet.”
Even so, the Southern Baptists can probably count on most blacks to take the apology in good faith. African Americans are by nature a forgiving people, says Lincoln. So much so that many of them, including several prominent Baptist ministers in Harlem, threw a lavish ceremony last week to welcome ex-heavyweight champion Mike Tyson home from prison, despite howls of outrage from black feminists who charged that the much hyped ceremony was tantamount to enshrining brutality toward women. If blacks harbor such forbearance for a convicted rapist who has yet to repent his crime, it stands to reason that they will forgive fellow Christians who confess their sins, even if that admission seems too little and too late.
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