Colorblind Christians: White Evangelical Institutions and Theologies of Race In the Era of Civil Rights

Abstract

This dissertation traces the history of black and white evangelical encounters between the 1960s and 1990s. In the crucible of these encounters, white evangelicals forged a new theology of race: Christian colorblindness. Drawing on biblical idioms and the rhetoric of spiritual unity, white evangelicals turned their back on white supremacist theologies even as they resisted black evangelical calls for a more thorough redistribution of power. In the ambiguous space between racist reaction and anti-racist Christianity, white evangelicals successfully expanded their movement and adapted to the changes the civil rights movement wrought. Professing to be united in Christ, they molded an evangelical form of whiteness while proclaiming colorblind intentions. Colorblind Christians embraced a politics of church primacy. They believed that conversion to evangelical Christianity, not systemic change or legal reform, was the source of racial progress. When people became Christians, their new identity as members of the Body of Christ superseded any racial identity. Black evangelicals could use such claims to press for inclusion in white evangelical institutions. But white evangelicals often used the same logic to silence black evangelical demands for reform. In these spaces of ostensible Christian unity, white evangelicals preserved whiteness at the center of American evangelicalism. The story of black and white evangelical encounters reveals an American racial order that was at once racial and religious. Colorblind Christians invites scholars of race to consider how religion shapes racial formation and encourages scholars of religion to think about how race structures religion. Using the archives of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, overlooked records from the most influential church growth initiative of the era, and rarely-examined sources such as student newspapers from white evangelical colleges, Colorblind Christians shows how white evangelicals shaped the American racial order and became successful religio-racial entrepreneurs in a time of rapid change. Using race strategically to grow their churches, white evangelicals invested in whiteness in the name of spreading a colorblind gospel. Black evangelicals promoted an alternative evangelical vision that placed racial justice at the center of the gospel. Their efforts to belong in American evangelicalism revealed the racial boundaries of the movement. By the end of the twentieth century, Christian colorblindness had helped to grow evangelicalism and enhance its political power, but it did so by coloring evangelicalism white. Black evangelicals, outsiders in their own religious tradition, continued to expose these often-invisible investments and pointed the way toward an evangelicalism beyond whiteness.