Jemar Tisby, author of the NYT bestseller The Color of Compromise, explains the complicity and compromise of American Christians; the narrative war that confederate monuments wage (and how they were erected much later than you might think); the ugly theological justifications of racism and the shameful history of Christian white supremacy; the fraught project of selectively naming heroes and villains and then memorializing them; and the practical problem of how to go forward rightly from this moment of increased attention to racial injustice.
Jemar Tisby, author of the NYT bestseller The Color of Compromise, explains the complicity and compromise of American Christians; the narrative war that confederate monuments wage (and how they were erected much later than you might think); the ugly theological justifications of racism and the shameful history of Christian white supremacy; the fraught project of selectively naming heroes and villains and then memorializing them; and the practical problem of how to go forward rightly from this moment of increased attention to racial injustice.
Get Jemar Tisby's book! The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Jemar Tisby: These monuments are part of reasserting a story of white supremacy and saying, "this is a white man's country, and we're going to put up a concrete or granite or stone statue and monument to remind you all the time that this is who this nation really belongs to." And that's why they need to come down. They are offensive, they are backwards looking, they are romanticized visions of the South and of this nation's heritage, and it glorifies a system that would have kept me in chains.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with The Yale Center For Faith and Culture. Welcome everyone, we're continuing our appreciation for black voices and black history this month, with some segments from episode 19 of For the Life of the World. Jamar Tisby came on the show to discuss his New York Times bestselling book, The Color of Compromise, the Truth about the American Church's Complicity in Racism. Specifically, Tisby uncovers the layers of meaning that the Confederate monuments of the South represent. He unpacks the complex and twisted relationship between white supremacy and American christianity. But where exactly does the white supremacy attached to those monuments come from? One of Tisby's most profound points is his discussion of the idea that the Civil War was only won by the North in a practical sense. And that the South walked away with the prize of being able to set the narrative around race for the country. Let's listen.
Jemar Tisby: Bryan Stevenson, the founder of The Equal Justice Initiative said, 'the North won the Civil War, but the south won the narrative war.' And I think there's a lot to that. The North won the military battles associated with the Civil War, but this narrative of white supremacy, this myth of the lost cause, this subtext that the U.S. is really a white man's country, and that what it means to be American, or even Christian, is to be white. That is the narrative that continues to play out subtly and more overtly at times in this nation. And until we can really change that narrative, we're always going to see manifestations of racism.
Evan Rosa: But the question remains, where does that narrative meet Confederate monuments and Tisby locates that intersection not in a place, but in the timing of their establishment. Why do we have Confederate monuments in the first place? Tisby's answer is eyeopening. Many people think the monuments were erected to honor the soldiers. If you look closely at when they were put in place, that had little to do with it.
Jemar Tisby: The history is that these were not, as some people tried to describe them, simply remembrances of the people who died in the Civil War, on the Confederate side. If that were the case, you would have seen the great bulk of monuments going up in the years immediately following the Civil War. But that's not in fact what happened. What happens right after the Civil War, the period from about 1866 to 1877 or so, was Reconstruction, which was this unprecedented flowering of black civic and economic participation after emancipation. And of course, that goes away in a movement whose name I think is really telling, called Redemption, 'the Redemption Era.' Of course, in christianity, redemption refers to Christ, redeeming people, Christ restoring relationship between God and humanity and with other human beings. But in the historical lens, the Redemption Era is the period in which white people attempted to take back the South for white people from all these northern carpetbaggers and recently freed black people. And so that is the era that inaugurates the Jim Crow era in American history, which was essentially the system of white supremacy that took over after race-based chattel slavery was abolished, and it's in this context that these monuments go up. And so it's important to realize that these monuments are part of reasserting a story of white supremacy and saying, "this is a white man's country, and we're going to put up a concrete or granite or stone statue and monument to remind you all the time who this nation really belongs to."
Evan Rosa: Turning now towards how Christianity fits into all of this. It's almost right there in front of you. When you hear the words 'Redemption Era,' it just sounds theologic. Tisby speaks of how tight the white supremacist and Christian agendas were aligned at this time.
Jemar Tisby: If you ignore or downplay the role of religion and especially Protestant Christianity or Evangelical Christianity, then I think the story of race in America is virtually unintelligible because christians have had such a large role in promoting and defending racist. Also, if you think in terms of the black church and their allies in fighting against racism for the Redemption Era, it's fraught with theological implications and 19th century, of course, the biggest issue being the existence or abolition of race-based chattel slavery. The spirituality of the Church was used to dissuade Christians from getting involved in it. So that means the Church's primary function is to declare the good news of Jesus Christ. And to minister or shepherd people in becoming like Christ.
Evan Rosa: Here we see the extreme to which the concept of separation of Church and State was taken, twisted into a justification. The Church said, 'we have nothing to do with civil life and that includes race. This is just one of the many cases in which the Church has taken advantage of the fact that it is in fact, a legal and separate entity from the State. Tisby cites a specific example that really illuminates how cold and calculating this interpretation of separation of Church and State can be.
Jemar Tisby: Even see this with Baptists in the 1790s, a Baptist convention at their annual meeting actually passed a resolution saying you couldn't be a slave holder and be a Christian in good standing at your church. And they disseminated this decision to the local congregations. And there was such pushback that the convention eventually rescinded that and their reasoning was, is that race, or that slavery was a civil issue and not something that the Church could deal with. And that has been echoed throughout decades, where people essentially set up this dichotomy between the gospel and justice and especially between the gospel and racial justice, and say that marching and speaking out about quote unquote political issues like race is getting off track for Christians and they should just preach the gospel, is the common phrase. So one of the things we need to do is close that gap between the gospel and justice. And then, we all know this, but we can use the Bible just about any way we want to justify our beliefs by hypocritically or selectively assigning, cherry picking, passages to support our viewpoints, which is precisely what happened as theologians and Christians argued that the proper place of black people was enslavement or the proper place black people was segregated. That plays itself out in the Bible where it says you can't serve two masters. You'll either love the one and despise the other, and you can't serve God and money. That's exactly what many Christians were trying to do, is serve God in name, by labeling themselves Christians, but also serve their bottom line through slave trading, slave holding, and benefiting off of a racialized capitalist system.
Evan Rosa: It's easy to point out the flaws of this era and say we're nothing like those people that lived way back then. But what about the basic human instinct to desire to honor a hero? We're always looking for a hero to save the day. It's wrapped deeply into human psychology at a mythic, cultural level; looking for a Messiah, a king, a superhero, a political strong man maybe, an advocate. We still do it, more often than not it leads to further harm, further injustice. During the conversation, Ryan McAnnally-Linz spoke to this instinct to prop up a hero and Tisby responds.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It's pretty rare that historical figures fit neatly into the category of hero. That's true, I think America is starting to wrestle with how true that is of Washington and Jefferson, even somebody like Abraham Lincoln, and your book does such a good job of showing that it's true for Christians too, right? Like Jonathan Edwards, for white Evangelicals, somebody who you might want to make a hero like Billy Graham, comes out in your book looking a lot more broken, not heroic, than you might want. Do you have, what do you think about the kind of yearning for heroes? Is that something we need to just get beyond?
Jemar Tisby: I think it's, Christians have the resources in their own beliefs to understand the complexity of human character, what's happening in the national story is that the quote unquote founding fathers have been taught as unassailable paragons of virtue. And these are the people who brought this brilliant Republican democracy to reality. And so we should honor and venerate them without, the problem is, especially I think for most black people, it's not that we have an issue recognizing their contributions to the founding of what became the United States, but we give short shrift or completely ignore the fact that they were slave holders, or racists, or white supremacists, or they massacred indigenous people. That's the story that also needs to be told. And in that context, especially in a nation with a history of race-based chattel slavery, especially when our bloodiest war till this day is the Civil War, which was fought over the future of race-based chattel slavery. Should we be putting these men literally on pedestals? And I think there are a lot of people who are coming to the realization, well, maybe not. Can we highlight the stories of the people who actually lived up to the American ideals, not the people who put it on paper, but then went home to enslaved people, who they own this property. But the people who actually called America to account and called America to live up to its noble ideas of freedom, and liberty, and equality for all. So I do think there's a place for that in names on buildings, or perhaps statues, or at least memorials in parks and places like that. So it's two-sided, right? It's taking down racist, white supremacist symbols, but it's also putting up the symbols and the people who represent the best of what this nation is and could be.
Evan Rosa: But where do we go from? After we've looked back at the horror of our own past and have faced it, accepted it, what kind of future can we hope for? Tisby Is reluctant to say that we can be immediately hopeful.
Jemar Tisby: We really want the happy ending. We really want the triumphal narrative of yes, we were once racist, yes, we were one segregated, yes, white supremacy was once a problem, but look how we've overcome and look at these amazing people, and that is our story, without then grappling with the incredible opposition they faced. When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, a majority of people disapproved of him and his activism, according to polls. And so, where do we grapple with that? That's where I think we need new national rituals, new cultural models. I think it's an exciting and fascinating project for individual churches, especially if they've been around for a while, since the 1950s or 60s, or some historic churches that have been around since the 19th century, to really do a deep dive into your congregation's history. And compare notes from elder meetings or trustee meetings with newspaper events that were going on at the time. And this confession takes the form, not simply of a public 'we did this,' but making it public, the act of making it public, I think, is part of confession. Closely tied to confession is this idea of repentance. So you are intentionally distancing yourself from those ideologies and actions that are racist and white supremacist in nature. But as we all know, repentance means turning away from something, but it also means turning towards something different. And so that's where the, sort of, future looking impact comes. And we really need to, I think theologically unpack the idea of repair. So that's what needs to happen as a necessary consequence of acknowledging this history, is attempts to make repair, and there's no limit to what that can look like once you commit yourself to it, and get creative about it.
Evan Rosa: This idea of creative repair is exciting because it can take so many forms and acknowledgement of our racialized history is what opens the door to repair. Actions as simple as voting, reading, educating yourself, talking to a person who's different from you. These can begin to turn the dial in the direction of repair, and away from the kind of conscious ignorance that has perpetuated these narratives.
Jemar Tisby: So I hope that Christians, and white Christians in particular, really lean into accessing that history because honestly, it's never been more accessible, through documentaries, through books, through scholars, it's at our fingertips and we need to access that. But obviously we can't stop there, nor can we stop with mainly symbolic actions like taking down statues or changing a state flag. Those are important, and I think they need to happen because there's such glaring contradictions to any notion of liberty and equality. At the same time, I think one of the main things Christians should be focusing on in 2020, is voting rights, and access to voting. So we're in a presidential election year, and voting is one of the most basic rights of being a citizen. And yet, as has been true throughout U.S. history, we see it becoming harder and harder for the poor, for people of color, and for black people to exercise their basic right to vote. And this is a non-partisan issue. So I think this is a no-brainer for Christians, it should be part of recognizing that we are part of the Kingdom of God, that we are citizens in the Kingdom of God, but we're also citizens of this nation. And equity says that if you have the right to vote, you should be able to vote with as little hinderance as possible.
Evan Rosa: This interview was recorded at a time, in 2020, when the turnout to vote was at an all-time high. It was still far lower than it needed to be. The obstacles people faced just to vote were unprecedented and frustrating to say the least. But many people didn't make it out to vote because they didn't feel strongly one way or the other, or felt alienated. The whole political process just wasn't relevant to them. And for Christians, this can look like that same tired narrative, that civic duty has nothing to do with what it means to be a devout Christian. But as Miroslav Volf regularly points out, Christianity does have an inalienable public dimension, and Tisby's point, to be part of the Kingdom of God is to be a citizen in it, really breaks apart that argument for disengagement. It speaks to a different kind of Christianity, one that is engaged across spheres, and building human connectivity. In the final moments of that interview, Tisby tackles this difficult question. What can we actually do about racism?
Jemar Tisby: A lot of people are asking the practical question, what do we do? What do we do about racism? What do we do to promote racial justice? And that's a great question, it's the most frequent one I get, honestly, and I used to just give this laundry list of different things that people could do, but I've been working on a model, the past couple of years, called the Arc of Racial Justice, and it's outlined in the last chapter of The Color of Compromise, but it's an acronym that stands for Awareness, Relationships, Commitment. And I think you need all three to have a sort of holistic approach to racial justice. So Awareness means building your knowledge. That's listening to podcasts like this one, that's watching documentaries, that's reading the books. That's understanding how race and racism operates. That's essential, but that's not enough. You also have to have relationships. And in a Christian frame, we know that all reconciliation is relational, that Jesus Christ becomes incarnate in the form of a human being to establish relationships on Earth, so that He can restore a right relationship with God and relationships between human beings and each other. And so, the same persists today where we can read all of this stuff, we can build our knowledge and awareness about it, but unless there's a human face to it, unless we understand with empathy and solidarity the suffering that racism and white supremacy cause, we're probably not going to be in it for the long haul or be willing to make the sacrifices necessary for true change.
Evan Rosa: This idea of relationality taps back into the human element that can get lost when you're trying to tackle political hurdles. The cracks open, yet again, the divide between civic life and Christian life, and Tisby's final point is profound. Relationality is at the very core of Christianity, it's deep in the triune dance of God. It's incarnate and Christ's restoration and redemption of broken relationality. But Tisby is quick to clarify that that's just a starting point.
Jemar Tisby: But, we can't stop there either. Relationships are necessary, but not sufficient. And a lot of white Evangelicals, especially, like to focus on the relational aspect and say, well, I've got black friends or we did a church swap and we have positive relationships with people across the color line, so I'm not racist and I'm doing my part to end racism. But that does nothing about the systemic and institutional inequalities that continue to operate. And so, Commitment gets at the idea that we need to fight against racist policies that perpetuate and deepen racial inequality, even in the absence of some particular individual with malice in their heart to work against black people and people of color. So we need to vote for new district attorneys, we need to work for voting rights, we need to change institutional policies, we need to make sure the board of trustees or the board of directors are representative, all of those things go into the Commitment aspect of racial justice; and by keeping Awareness, Relationships, Commitment in conversation, I think we can have a more robust approach to racial justice.
Evan Rosa: Thanks for listening today. We'll be back with another highlight clip for Black History Month next week.
For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured author and historian, Jemar Tisby, editorial and production assistance by Annie Trowbridge. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. New episodes drop every Saturday, sometimes midweek. If you're new to the show, welcome friend. Hit subscribe on your favorite podcast listening app and we'd love your feedback. Ratings and reviews on apple podcasts are particularly helpful, but we're just as happy to hear from you by email at faith@yale.edu. We read each comment and do our best to respond and improve the show, bringing you the people and topics that you want hear. And if you're a regular listener, it's a huge honor that you stick with us from week to week. So I'll ask you to step up and join us, help us share the show. Behind those three dots in your podcast app, there's an option to share this episode by text, or email, or social media. If you took a brief moment to send your favorite episode to a friend or share with the world, not only would you be supporting the show, you'd be sparking up a great conversation around stuff that matters with people that matter. Thanks for listening today friends, we'll be back with more of this coming week.