Over the past twenty years, historians such as Charles Marsh, Paul Harvey, and David Hollinger have offered sensitive and learned discussions of white Christian theological defenses of racial hierarchy and division and placed those beliefs at the center of organized white resistance to the civil rights movement. Liberal Christians like South Carolinian Benjamin Mays, who argued during and after WWII that racial segregation was a theological as well as a social and political fallacy, were rebutted in real time by white supremacist Christians who posited a theological imperative to protect white racial “purity” through social separation.
In The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, J. Russell Hawkins uses South Carolina as a case study in how “segregationist theology” upheld faith-based arguments against racial equality (8). Many white South Carolinians believed that “God had segregated the races for his own purposes, given this arrangement divine sanction, and instructed the faithful through scripture not to pursue racial integration” (45). Yet by the 1970s, Hawkins argues, the argument that “God is against integration” was no longer a sufficient defense of segregation in public life. In its place, white segregationists argued that racial segregation could best be preserved through a rhetoric of colorblindness and a heightened focus on the family.
“Family” was defined broadly, to include religious congregations and institutions. Focusing on white Baptists and Methodists, Hawkins explains how they “fought to maintain white supremacy in arenas where they retained power: their church colleges, denominational structures, and households” (11). The most original and interesting chapters of the book are those that investigate private religious schools and universities (with a close focus on Wofford College [Methodist] and Furman University [Baptist]) and intradenominational power wars. Russell is adept at revealing internal disputes over segregation, as he does when describing the vote of Furman students and faculty to desegregate the school in the teeth of the state Baptist convention's resolution to keep Furman all-white.
Equally fascinating is Hawkins's detailed discussion of the vital participation of clergy in local White Citizens’ Councils (later Citizens Councils of America). Determined to “keep our Council on a Christian basis,” the CCA, like the Ku Klux Klan before it, cultivated ministers. Hawkins argues convincingly and originally that “clerical aid was particularly instrumental in legitimizing Citizens’ Councils, the most important anti-civil rights groups in the South.” Astoundingly, Hawkins reports, “In 1961, a quarter of the editorial board for the nationally distributed Citizens’ Council newspaper was made up of clergymen” (58).
Denominational institutions are an inspired place to look for conflicts over religious orthodoxy. For the historian (as opposed to the believer), orthodoxy is the product not of revelation but of conflict, in which the victory of one interpretation over another is historically produced rather than divinely ordained. Hawkins tends to skirt historical questions of causality: segregationist Christianity “evolved and persisted in new forms” (8); the theological defense of segregation “underwent a transformation” (66); “people retained conversancy” with segregationist theological arguments (129). Curiously, he views these arguments in isolation, and gives almost no sense of whom the segregationists—who considered themselves battling heretics preaching a Gospel of interracial brotherhood—were arguing against. While noting church publications that interpreted St. Paul's “brothers in Christ” formulation as “spiritual, not physical or racial,” Hawkins casts the argument in terms of truth and untruth, writing that segregationist Christians pushed back against the “false premise that ‘segregation is unchristian’” (55). The “segregation is sin” argument espoused by Benjamin Mays and others (for example, the Federal Council of Churches, as Hollinger has shown) was powerful enough to provoke a robust defense from pro-segregation Christians.
Hawkins insists that by the mid-1960s it was an “affront to polite social customs to talk about God's desire and plan for racial segregation.” Further, he maintains that “. . . when conservative Christians hold beliefs that run contrary to the broader culture, they have historically stopped publicly espousing those beliefs for the sake of social civility. But they do not stop believing them” (95). The latter assertion is almost certainly correct, but contemporary proponents of LGBTQ rights and access to abortion in the South may question the first.
People who had not changed their minds about segregation were prominent in the South Carolina Independent School Association, formed in 1965. By the mid-1970s South Carolina had a higher percentage of students in private schools than any other southern state (145). This sudden proclivity for private schools reflected a change in terms but not necessarily belief by white parents: Hawkins explains that “[t]he theology of segregation that evangelicals once employed to thwart racial mixing was recalibrated to endorse a biblically inspired defense of the family” (149). The God who previously demanded racial purity on His say-so now included it under the heading of familial protection. From here it was a short hop to parental control over their children's education. Public school desegregation “undermined God-given parental authority” (163). This “new” argument was no less likely to be criticized by opponents of segregation than the old theological one was. Indeed, as one South Carolina mother put it, “It is a little exasperating that ‘private school’ has become a dirty word, synonymous with racism and sin” (157). The shift from “God commanded segregation” to a “focus on the family” (150) allowed for the language of parental rights to flourish while bypassing laws that prohibit racial discrimination.
The battle cry of “freedom of choice” in education was linked by segregationist Christians to freedom of religion through the divine institution of the family. This position is unexpectedly timely. When South Carolina created a tuition grant program for students who withdrew from their public schools, the legislature stipulated that grant money could not be used at religiously affiliated schools (138). Today's Supreme Court has, in its recent ruling on religious schools in Maine, surpassed even the wildest dreams of segregationist South Carolina.
