What Would You Do If You Could Bring Conciliation?

This is a review of the book “The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism”

The key issue that continues to break America’s soul is racism.

Full stop.

One hundred fifty years before Yorktown there was Jamestown. 1619 was the arrival of captive slaves of African descent, sold to English settlers and colonists looking for cheap labor that could be used for profit and personal success. By 1667 Virginia had passed a law perpetuating the eternal status of chattel slaves; in the last half of the 18th century the same people who held self-evident truths of liberty also held black humans as property to be bought, sold, abused, tortured, and killed as if they were only dumb beasts of burden.

There’s no way to get around this. America started off as slave colonies. In spite of a great civil war to decide the status of slavery in the United States, the subjects of enslavement remained as provisional citizens, neither slave nor free, and without legal and political acknowledgement of their equal humanity.

Tragically—grievously—settling the status of our fellow American citizens has not been completed even now. We live separate lives from each other. Separated schools. Separated communities. Separated friendships.

And most tragically—separated churches.

For it was the American Evangelical/Protestant church that worked hand-in-glove with the American government to establish, maintain, perpetuate, and extend the scope of chattel slavery.

American Evangelicals, firmly committed to the same Lord Jesus Christ, split their churches and denominations and families and hearts over the issue of white slavers controlling America’s purpose. The cross did not unite the church; rather, the role of white slavers in the church was more important than the redemption offered by that cross.

But…

But there is a hope.

Jemar Tisby has written a book on this history of America and American Christianity, on how we Christians (I identify as a follower and worshipper of Jesus) have made terrible, self-centered choices in the past.

This same book also is full of a great hope, that we as Christians and followers of Jesus who is called “Christ” might take seriously the redemption he offers in our lives as well as the conciliation—the healing of this divide—that he can bring.

Now, to be honest, the first 3/4 of the book is simply history, laid out cleanly and dispassionately. It is hard to read, even if you might know some or all of it. Page after page it’s there. There really isn’t a moment when the American church fiercely and corporately resisted the allure of profit to be reached by owning human bodies. Some heroes of the American church—George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards—participated enthusiastically in owning humans for profit. It continues for four hundred years, through the founding of the great missionary outreaches from America to all the world, through the great division of the biblical literalists and the moderate believers, through the works of men such as Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, to the faith-inspired social movements for justice and civil rights, championed by men such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Where the book does shine is when Tisby talks about what must be done to concile American Christians. This is a book that lays out culpability and responsibility, mourning that none of this racial animus and division had to happen, but it goes the next step to say “and here is what we together can do to heal this division.”

I finished this book feeling overwhelmed and sad at how we have done such terrible things, often in the name of our Savior. So it was good to have Tisby’s ideas and direction on what we can do.

I opened this review with the idea of “if you could bring conciliation, would you?” The reason for that question is that the cost of that conciliation might be very high. Do we really want to spend that much time and effort on healing our divisions and restoring our relationships?

It’s a hard question that we must ask, each one of us, who follows Jesus.

I would hope that we might answer this question.

And I hope the answer might be simply “Yes.”