Jemar Tisby Quotes

The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow. The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.

Jumping ahead to the victories means skipping the hard but necessary work of examining what went wrong with race and the church.

History demonstrates that racism never goes away; it just adapts.

Being complicit only requires a muted response in the face of injustice or uncritical support of the status quo.

Christian complicity with racism in the twenty-first century looks different than complicity with racism in the past. It looks like Christians responding to 'black lives matter' with the phrase 'all lives matter.' It looks like Christians consistently supporting a president whose racism has been on display for decades. It looks like Christians telling black people and their allies that their attempts to bring up racial concerns are 'divisive.' It looks conversations on race that focus on individual relationships and are unwilling to discuss systemic solutions. Perhaps Christian complicity in racism has not changed after all. Although the characters and the specifics are new, many of the same rationalizations for racism remain.

Historically speaking, when faced with the choice between racism and equality, the American church has tended to practice a complicit Christianity rather than a courageous Christianity. They chose comfort over constructive conflict and in so doing created and maintained a status quo of injustice.

Christians deliberately chose complicity with racism in the past, but the choice to confront racism remains a possibility today.

The KKK interspersed Christianity with racism to create a nationalistic form of religion that excluded all but American-born, Protestant white men and women.

Christians need to pay attention to how their educational choices for their own children reinforce racial and economic segregation in schools.

The Klan capitalized on white fears of just about anyone they defined as nonwhite, non-American, and non-Protestant. For example, Klan members successfully lobbied for the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited immigration from select countries.

The decades after the Civil War proved that racism never goes away, it just adapts. Although the Union had won the military victory, the ideology of the Confederate South battled on. Attorney Bryan Stevenson put it this way: “The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war.”43

Throughout the course of US history, when Christians had the opportunity to decisively oppose the racism in their midst, all too often, they chose silence. They chose passivity. The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.

History and Scripture teaches us that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth. The Color of Compromise is about telling the truth so that reconciliation—robust, consistent, honest reconciliation—might occur across racial lines.

Every person makes choices and is accountable for the consequences. At the same time, injustice imposes limits on the opportunities and choices people have.

the most egregious acts of racism, like a church bombing, occur within a context of compromise.

there would be no black church without racism in the white church.

It’s not that members of every white church participated in lynching, but the practice could not have endured without the relative silence, if not outright support, of one of the most significant institutions in America—the Christian church.

Complicit Christianity forfeits its moral authority by devaluing the image of God in people of color. Like a ship that has a cracked hull and is taking on water, Christianity has run aground on the rocks of racism and threatens to capsize—it has lost its integrity. By contrast, courageous Christianity embraces racial and ethnic diversity. It stands against any person, policy, or practice that would dim the glory of God reflected in the life of human beings from every tribe and tongue.

Reflecting on the events he said, “ ‘Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?’ The answer should be, ‘We all did it.’ Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and a decade ago. We all did it.”5

The hypocrisy of white Christians who said their religion condemned darker-skinned people to perpetual slavery even as they worshiped a brown-skinned Jewish man who was put to death by an imperial power could hardly be starker, both then and now.

The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow. The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression. History and Scripture teaches us that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth.

Oppressed people must either reform or reject a religion that preaches spiritual salvation but has little to say about their physical and material conditions. The hypocrisy of white Christians who said their religion condemned darker-skinned people to perpetual slavery even as they worshipped a brown-skinned Jewish man who was put to death by an imperial power could hardly be starker, both then and now.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, 'I think we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.' By contrast, in a sermon entitled 'Rioting or Righteousness,' Billy Graham stated, 'There is no doubt that the rioting, looting, and crime in America have reached a point of anarchy.' ... The differing responses of King and Graham to these riots further shows how Christian activists interpreted the civil rights movement differently from Christian moderates.

Thornwell’s vision of spirituality required the church, as an institution, to remain silent on the most critical social, political, and ethical question of the day.

The doctrine of the spirituality of the church has continued to influence the church in America, even to the present. Its adherents are diverse and often selective in how they apply the doctrine.

Historically, the doctrine of the spirituality of the church tends to be most strenuously invoked when Christians speak out against white supremacy and racism.29 Whenever issues like slavery and, later, segregation rose to the fore, the spirituality of the church doctrine conveniently reappeared

The Civil War paints a vivid picture of what inevitably happens when the American church is complicit in racism and willing to deny the teachings of Jesus to support an immoral, evil institution.

It should give every citizen and Christian in America pause to consider how strongly ingrained the support for slavery in our country was. People believed in the superiority of the white race and the moral degradation of black people so strongly that they were willing to fight a war over

White people in the North and the South sought to limit the civic and social equality of black people across the country. They devised political and economic schemes to push black people out of mainstream American life. To keep power, white Americans used terror as a tool through lynchings and rape, violently solidifying the place of people of color as second-class citizens.

Yet there were those who continued to fight ardently for the rights of black people in the post-Civil War era. They became known as “Radical Republicans.

The president claimed that using federal interventions to ensure black civil rights “violated ‘all our experience as a people’ and constituted a ‘stride towards centralization, and the concentration of all legislative power in the national Government.’ ” Johnson also made claims that interceding for black people actually discriminated against white people.

In opposing the use of government power to protect civil rights, Johnson voiced many themes that opponents of the political reforms that empower black people continue to invoke to this day.

Even today, the Lost Cause mythology functions as an alternative history that frequently leads to public disputes over monuments, flags, and the memory surrounding the Civil War, the Confederacy, and slavery.

The writers state that "Patriotism is inspired by love, nationalism by hate.

White Christian nationalism's" "deep story" goes something like this: America was created as a Christian country by (white) men who were "traditional" Christians.

As white Christians reach minority status, white Christian nationalists are beginning to turn against American democracy. After all, the essential basis of democratic democracy is majority rule. So

Confronted with the potential of minority status themselves, some members of the old white majority are adopting authoritarian politics as a method of defending their "freedom.

Most Americans were stunned by the carnage they observed in the nation's capital on January 6, 2021. And many were startled by the visuals shown by the insurrectionists: a wooden cross and wooden gallows; "Jesus saves" and "Don't Tread on Me;" Christian flags and Confederate flags; even a prayer in Jesus' name after storming the Senate chamber.

white Christian nationalism has animated the oppression, exclusion, and even extermination of minority groups while securing privilege for white Protestants. It permits white Christian Americans to demand "sacrifice" from others in the name of religion and country, while protecting their "rights" in the names of "liberty" and "property." White Christian nationalism inspires the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and violent instincts on display in our contemporary political situation.

We concentrate on three such features because of their ties to threat perception and boundary construction: perceived victimization; reinforcing racial and religious identity; and absorption in conspiratorial information sources.

One of the most well-known revivalist preachers of the day was Charles Grandison Finney. Finney led Oberlin College, which became the first institution of higher education to accept both women and black people. Finney was an outspoken abolitionist, but he was not a proponent of black equality. He advocated for emancipation, but he did not see the value of the “social” integration of the races. Though he excluded white slaveowners from membership in his congregations, he also relegated black worshipers to particular sections of the sanctuary. Black people could become members in his churches, but they could not vote or hold office.17 Finney’s stance for abolition but against integration arose from his conviction that social reform would come through individual conversion, not institutional reform. Finney and many others like him believed that social change came about through evangelization. According to this logic, once a person believed in Christ as Savior and Lord, he or she would naturally work toward justice and change. “As saints supremely value the highest good of being, they will, and must, take a deep interest in whatever is promotive of that end. Hence, their spirit is necessarily that of the reformer.”18 This belief led to a fixation on individual conversion without a corresponding focus on transforming the racist policies and practices of institutions, a stance that has remained a constant feature of American evangelicalism and has furthered the American church’s easy compromise with slavery and racism.

Many white Christians failed to unequivocally condemn lynching and other acts of racial terror. Doing so poisoned the American legal system and made Christian churches complicit in racism for generations. While some Christians spoke out and denounced these lynchings (just as some Christians called for abolition), the majority stance of the American church was avoidance, turning a blind eye to the practice.

You may have desegregated your leadership team, but that does not mean you have an integrated team. Integration means incorporating diverse perspectives, people, and practices into an organization so that the culture expands to include diversity while maintaining unity.

If you have not learned to lament, you have not learned to love. To love someone is to know and be known, which means opening oneself up to the possibility of being hurt by another.

When evangelicals focus on bringing people together, they often leave out any analysis of the systemic and institutional forces that led to the separation in the first place. Occasional racial proximity is too low a goal for reconciliation.

But only what is revealed can be healed. It does no service to a community to hide its shortcomings. Failures of racial justice must be faced with humility, truth, and courage.

As he explored the ethic of love through the lens of nonviolent noncooperation with evil, King began formulating an approach to opposing racism in the United States.

In order to effectively fight racism, we must learn from the past. Contrary to the popular saying, historians are quick to point out that history does not, in fact, repeat itself. Historical events are too circumstantial and too contingent on a multitude of factors, decisions, actors, and conditions to ever simply repeat. But history does rhyme. We can hear cadences and syncopations of the past in the present. Learning about history is more than learning about what has happened before, it is about understanding what is happening now.

The past unavoidably impacts the present. If we want to pursue racial justice today, then we need to know what happened in the past to create the circumstances of the present. History provides the vital context to pursue solutions that are rooted in a firm understanding in the causes and consequences of racism.

Over the next 300 years, the transatlantic slave trade transported more than ten million Africans to the Americas in a forced migration of epic scale.

The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice.

The pain is worth the progress.

Evangelicalism focused on individual conversion and piety. Within this evangelical framework, one could adopt an evangelical expression of Christianity yet remain uncompelled to confront institutional injustice.

While black Christians left white churches and denominations en masse after the Civil War, the formation of African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) stands as an early example of black Christians exercising agency to escape racism in the church and form their own more affirming fellowships.

In one of American history’s clearest contradictions, not even Revolutionary ideals of independence and equality or the religious transformations brought on by the Great Awakening could deconstruct the foundations of the social pyramid. Instead, slavery and the meaning of race became more institutionalized

Education must lead to liberation. The acquisition of knowledge should not result only in personal enlightenment but also the alleviation of oppression.

In Reagan’s first term, antidrug spending by the FBI went from $38 million to $101 million. The Drug Enforcement Agency’s budget went from $86 million to over $1 billion. At the same time, the budget for the Department of Education’s drug prevention programs dipped from $14 million to $3 million.

Through a series of rules and customs, government employees and real estate agents have actively engineered neighborhoods and communities to maintain racial segregation.

The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red.”41 Neighborhoods with any black people, even if the residents had stable middle-class incomes, were coded red, and lenders were unlikely to give loans in these areas. This practice became known as redlining. The HOLC policy was a form of government-sponsored racism.

At critical turning points throughout history, people made deliberate choices to construct and reinforce a racist America.

It must be noted, however, that Europeans did not introduce Christianity to Africans. Christianity had arrived in Africa through Egypt and Ethiopia in the third and fourth centuries. Christian luminaries like Augustine, Tertullian, and Athanasius helped develop Trinitarian theology and defended the deity of Christ long before Western Europeans presumed to “take” Christianity to Africans.

History and Scripture teaches us that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth. The Color of Compromise is about telling the truth so that reconciliation—robust, consistent, honest reconciliation—might occur across racial lines. Yet all too often, Christians, and Americans in general, try to circumvent the truth-telling process in their haste to arrive at reconciliation.

Another definition explains racism as prejudice plus power. It is not only personal bigotry toward someone of a different race that constitutes racism; rather, racism includes the imposition of bigoted ideas on groups of people.

Through the centuries, black people have become the most religious demographic in the United States. For instance, 83 percent of black people say they “believe in God with absolute certainty” compared to 59 percent of Hispanics and 61 percent of whites. Additionally, 75 percent of blacks say “religion is very important” to them compared to 59 percent of Hispanics and 49 percent of whites.

the revelation of the heavenly congregation provides a blueprint and a motivation to seek unity right now. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). Christians have been mandated to pray that the racial and ethnic unity of the church would be manifest, even if imperfectly, in the present. Christ himself brought down “the dividing wall of hostility” that separated humanity from one another and from God (Eph. 2:14). Indeed, reconciliation across racial and ethnic lines is not something Christians must achieve but a reality we must receive. On the cross when Christ said, “It is finished,” he meant it (John 19:30). If peace has been achieved between God and human beings, surely we can have greater peace between people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

weight of their collective failure to consistently confront racism in the church. This should lead to immediate, fierce action to confess this truth and work for justice. Then, perhaps, Paul’s words to the Corinthians might ring true for today’s church: “As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting” (2 Cor. 7:9 ESV).

Christians participated in this system of white supremacy—a concept that identifies white people and white culture as normal and superior—even if they claim people of color as their brothers and sisters in Christ.

addition to federal redlining policies, realtors and neighborhood associations used private measures to enforce residential segregation. For much of the twentieth century, “restrictive covenants” provided a legal, race-based mechanism to exclude black people from purchasing homes in white communities. “Private but legally enforceable restrictive covenants . . . forbade the use or sale of a property to anyone but whites.”43 These restrictive covenants, which also dictated details such as what color residents could paint their houses, effectively kept black people out of communities, especially new growth suburbs, for decades. Even after the 1948 Supreme Court ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer forbidding these racial covenants, real estate brokers simply dropped explicitly race-based language but still effectively excluded minorities from buying homes in white areas.

Revelation 7:9 says, “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.

Forged in the fires of racial prejudice, the black church emerged as the ark of safety for people of African descent

Preachers and leaders in the church saw the truth of the gospel message even as slaveholders and white supremacists distorted the message to make more obedient slaves.

Today, the United States has just 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its incarcerated persons.

coming to appreciate one idea or part of a system of thought, philosophy, or theology does not necessarily mean you are endorsing every aspect of that system.

The time for the American church’s complicity in racism has long past. It is time to cancel compromise. It is time to practice courageous Christianity.

Apparently, some slaveholders had concerns that their "charity and piety" in sharing the Christian message with enslaved children would result in the loss of unfree labor and income. Such a practice would also disrupt the ideology of white supremacy. It would be harder to maintain the social, economic, and religious superiority of white people if spiritual liberty translated into physical and material liberty for enslaved people as well.

White Christian leaders made the double move of enshrining their bigotry in laws while simultaneously labeling the question of slavery as a "civil" or "political" issue outside the purview of the church. Not only did the religious, political, and economic establishment create policies to codify slavery and white supremacy, they also pushed these actions outside the realm of Christian ethics. To challenge slavery on moral grounds was to distract from the (selectively) spiritual mission of the church and impinge on the Christian liberty of white slaveholders. White missionaries should not have been surprised, then, that they did not initially have much effectiveness in converting enslaved people to Christianity. Why would the enslaved adopt the religion of slave owners? What good to Black people was a foreign God preaching their perpetual bondage?

Looking back on the past four hundred years, this nation's story of racism can seem almost inevitable. But it didn't have to be this way. At critical turning points throughout history, people made deliberate choices to construct and reinforce a racist America. Our generation has the opportunity to make different choices, ones that lead to greater human dignity and justice, but only if we pay heed to our history and respond with the truth and courage that confronting racism requires.

Instead of focusing on intent, more attention should be paid to the impact or outcome of an action

We must look at outcomes to evaluate whether a policy moves us further toward racial justice or further from it.

This person made in God’s image and likeness became another victim of racism, anti-Black police brutality, and white supremacy.

This book prioritizes the practical.12 The ARC of Racial Justice How to Fight Racism is structured around a model I created called the ARC of Racial Justice. ARC is an acronym that stands for awareness, relationships, and commitment

At the outset of the nineteenth century, the United States could have become a worldwide beacon of diversity and equality. Fresh from the Revolutionary War, it could have adopted the noble ideals written in the Declaration of Independence. It could have crafted a truly inclusive Constitution. Instead, white supremacy became more defined as the nation and the church solidified their identities.

The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow.

injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”9 King’s words apply to racism in the church. The festering wound of racism in the American church must be exposed to the oxygen of truth in order to be healed.

By contrast, courageous Christianity embraces racial and ethnic diversity. It stands against any person, policy, or practice that would dim the glory of God reflected in the life of human beings from every tribe and tongue.

Paul Washer put it well when he noted, “Five years ago, I was amazed as I saw the young, restless, and Reformed crowd at conferences talking about their latest encounters with Spurgeon, Calvin, Kuyper, and Machen… now they’re all talking about Christian Smith, Jemar Tisby, and Robin DiAngelo.” Granted, most of the men mentioned above believe firmly in the sufficiency of Scripture and have done so for decades. I am not talking about the liberal, openly social gospel/liberation theology wing of the CSJ movement. (At least not in this chapter.) In fact, many of the men to whom I am referring here have been on the front line of the battle against liberalism, mysticism, and pragmatism for many years. That is why the allusion to an unofficial new canon is so disturbing.

By contrast, courageous Christianity embraces racial and ethnic diversity. It stands against any person, policy, or practice that would dim the glory of God reflected in the life of human beings from every tribe and tongue. These words are a call to abandon complicit Christianity and move toward courageous Christianity.

Morgan recognized that no matter who had physically planted the dynamite, all the city’s white residents were complicit in allowing an environment of hatred and racism to persist.

I cannot imagine how knowing one’s history would not urge one to be an activist.