The January 2008 national holiday commemorating Rev. Martin Luther King’s birthday comes in the year of the 40th anniversary of his assassination in Memphis, April 4, 1968. He would be celebrating his 79th birthday on January 15, had he survived.

He was the catalyst for a religious and political movement that began a struggle—that continues to this day—to free America from its racist legacy. From the founding of the American colonies until his time in the mid-20th century, race relations were defined by 250 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow segregation following the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Civil Rights movement in the United States was driven by religion as well as politics. Religion and politics also combined to create racism in colonial and ante-bellum America.

As Winthrop D. Jordan notes in his book, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812, in early colonial America, Europeans, Africans and native people were not identified by the current labels of “white,” “black,” and “native,” but as “Christian,” “heathen,” and “savage.” Europeans who enslaved Africans and exterminated the Native people as they colonized the New World were, in their own eyes, civilized Christians. Black Africans were viewed and defined as uncivilized heathen and native people or Indians—as they mistakenly named them—were seen as savages. Prejudice, based on the invention of race, was to come later.

In a narrative difficult to summarize briefly, Jordan argues that racism, as it became fully developed in 18th and 19th century America, was invented or developed to justify the unspeakable horrors of the “middle passage” and chattel slavery.

He demonstrates that white supremacy in the United States, as well as South Africa, was developed by Christians acting in harmony with their religious beliefs. We now recognize and admit that white supremacy resulted from a distortion of the Christian faith of the times. It was not until after the Civil War, near the beginning of the 20th century, that bogus scientific proofs for white supremacy began to replace the prevailing religious support of slavery, segregation, and prejudice.

Interestingly enough, the colonists has at least a tweak of conscience about slave-holding. They were convinced that a Christian should not enslave other Christians so they forbade the evangelization of the African slaves. Nevertheless, when the slaves began to embrace the Christian faith—one of the great ironies of racial history—the slaveholders reversed course. They realized they could take biblical texts out of context to justify white supremacy and the use of force to subdue their Christian slaves.

After acknowledging our racial problem, correcting history, admitting the sins of our ancestors, and confessing our complicity and guilt, a troubling question remains for me as a white Christian. How could it have been after centuries of Christian thought and culture, that from the so-called Christian West, among people of the Enlightenment, something could emerge as evil as white supremacy, slavery, and racism? How could the Christian faith, the ground of Martin Luther King’s social justice movement, also be the source of the problem he died fighting against?

There is something more disturbing to me than the obvious contradiction in American history of our slave-holding founders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. It is that George Whitefield, (in contrast to his contemporary, John Wesley, who spoke out against slavery) the most celebrated 18th century evangelist in England and America, became a slave-holder in the colonies. How could that have been?¹

It is one thing to know that as a white American I inherit racism from my culture as surely as my theology tells me I am embedded with original sin upon birth. I hope to be delivered from both. It’s quite another to learn that the religious tradition that calls me into a new community of justice and love was used as a premise to perpetuate evil. The barriers that continue to divide white and black Americans were originally constructed by my Christian religious tradition. As the struggle for racial equity in America continues, we know it will take more than political action to solve the problem.

Is there hope? There is if we believe the change that happened in the Apostle Peter’s life. As he preached to thousands on the day of Pentecost, he witnessed the birth of a new multi-ethnic, multi-language Christian community. Yet, even he continued to live by the prejudice of his religious past. Only after being led by a vision to the home of the Gentile Cornelius (Acts 10) and confronted in Antioch by the Apostle Paul (Galatians 2:11ff ) did Peter put aside what he believed to be his religiously justified racism against the Gentiles.

When will we white Christians be as willing as the Apostle Paul to confront people of our own kind who perpetuate prejudice and injustice? Are we as courageous now, as John Wesley and William Wilberforce were then, to speak out against political systems that produce racial inequity?

Today, as then, it takes a spiritual force as powerful as the Holy Spirit at work in the world and our lives to also deliver us from deeply ingrained prejudice supported by religious distortions of the past.

by Tom Nees
USA/Canada Mission/Evangelism Director

1 The strongest critique of racism in print written by a Nazarene is Ivan A. Beal’s Our Racist Legacy: Will the Church Resolve the Conflict? Beals, now deceased, served for 14 years as managing editor of Herald of Holiness (now Holiness Today). You can read a review of this book by denominational archivist Stan Ingersol online at www.missionstrategy.org.