This is a fine monographic study that provides new insight into how white Southerners shifted their opposition to racial integration after the successes of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s. It is grounded in a thoroughly researched account of the responses of Southern Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina to the US Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which in 1954 mandated an end to segregation in public schools. South Carolina, the first Confederate state to secede from the Union, was the last state to integrate its schools. What Hawkins makes clear is that religious opposition to integration in the state was not spearheaded by denominational leadership; initially, both Baptist and Methodist bodies counselled acceptance of the Supreme Court's ruling. Rather, it came from the people in the pews, aided and abetted by a handful of segregationist preachers armed with religious argumentation – and they won the day in a rout.
The post-Brown religious defence of segregation should be seen as a weak successor to the religious defence of slavery that preceded the Civil War. The latter at least had recourse to texts from both Testaments that treated slavery as a normal part of the social order. The former was forced to rely on a handful of biblical passages indicating that God had divided the humanity into different nations, thus allegedly proving that separation of the races was a divine ordinance. (On the other side was Paul's declaration that ‘all are one in Christ Jesus’.) That their slave-owning male ancestors had made a practice of violating this supposed ordinance by impregnating female slaves went unmentioned by white Baptists and Methodists, but they could hardly have been unaware of it. However, their dominant concern was that integrated schools imperilled their daughters, not their sons. It is, in any event, hard to see the Bible-based defence of segregation as anything but a pretext for prejudice.
After the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965, public opposition to integration became unacceptable in polite white Southern mouths but did not disappear from hearts and minds. It manifested itself most clearly in the creation of whites-only private schools – ‘segregation academies’, as they were called. Often these were sponsored by churches; whether they were not, they claimed to advance ‘Christian values’ and incorporated the prayer and Bible-reading that the Supreme Court had recently banned from the public schools as violating the First Amendment's ban on religious establishments. As their nickname makes clear, these schools were created to keep the races separate, but white Southerners insisted that was not so. They were only interested in assuring a high educational quality for their children, they claimed. More broadly and significantly, they left off using the Bible to justify segregation and instead turned to a rearguard action against mandatory ‘race mixing’ by adopting language taken directly from the Supreme Court's notorious Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which in 1896 upheld the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws. In the words of the court's majority opinion, ‘If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other's merits, and a voluntary consent of individuals.’ Thus did white South Carolinians rationalise sending their children to segregated private schools and keeping their denominational organisations apart from those of their Black brethren.
At the end of the book, Hawkins turns to the present day, writing, ‘White evangelicals who champion racial justice through individual heart changes, or reconciled relationships, of appeals to colorblindness are using the tools fashioned and utilized by their segregationist forebears precisely to avoid the racial justice their descendants now seek.’ The current conservative war against Critical Race Theory – understood as anything that so much as hints at the existence of structural racism and the need to do something about it – is just the latest iteration of this racist rhetorical strategy.
