Abstract
Textbooks sometimes feel like a necessary evil. Students pay too much for them, and all too often the contents do not exactly reflect what a professor is trying to accomplish in the classroom. In The Color of Compromise, however, Jemar Tisby, doctoral candidate at the University of Mississippi and president of The Witness, a Black Christian Collective, provides a text outlining the US church’s complicity with racism in a form that is remarkably well-suited to help college students, seminary students, church educational groups, and the general reader understand this intensely important and timely topic.
Tisby notes at the outset that he intends his text to be a survey. It is based on secondary literature, and as a result, readers who are acquainted with recent works on race and religion in the United States, including material on the rise of the Religious Right, will find Tisby outlining some points they may find familiar. At the same time, Tisby’s bibliography is so broad that he will likely surprise even the most avid readers, especially since his narrative moves through 400 years of US history. Enticingly, Tisby has lifted the substance of his subject from a massive library of monographs and compressed it into a book that is easily accessible for the general reader. This attribute, in and of itself, makes the book important.
Beyond its accessibility, Tisby’s work is approachable because of his impeccable evangelical credentials. Holding a Master of Divinity degree from Reformed Theological Seminary, Tisby cannot credibly be dismissed as a “Marxist” (a criticism he anticipates in the first chapter) or even as a disinterested critic of the church. Instead, Tisby models a posture of critical love toward the church, never even so much as hinting that this lurid tale about the church’s participation in the United States’ racist past and present could push him to leave the church behind. For students who may approach the work with a touch of skepticism because of their own backgrounds, Tisby’s faith is an essential element that may make his words harder for them to dismiss.
The book’s approachability is an essential element in its presentation because the substance of Tisby’s argument is difficult to face. Tisby effectively shows that visitors to the New World from Columbus onward saw non-European persons as inferior and mainly suited for service to others. Later, as kidnapped and purchased African persons came to occupy the role of unpaid laborers, Tisby unflinchingly paints a picture of a white Christian population in the American colonies and, later, in the United States that went from tolerating slavery, to trying to ignore it as a moral issue, to finally defending it as a positive good in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Baptist readers will notice that the book does not mention Richard Furman, the Charleston Baptist minister often credited with first framing the biblical argument in favor of slavery. Setting this detail to one side, however, Tisby’s outline of the process by which slavery became imagined as a good for both the enslaved and their enslavers is an extraordinarily faithful rendering of a wide swath of secondary literature.
As Tisby continues his exploration of the church’s racist tendencies in the years following the Civil War, his story becomes, if anything, more painful to read. Tisby’s explanation of the phenomenon of lynching makes clear that these extrajudicial killings were designed to keep people of color subjugated through a reign of terror, in which black men and women were not only killed publicly, but tortured beforehand. Then, Tisby highlights the way Martin Luther King, Jr. noted that the most dangerous white tendency during the Civil Rights Movement was not outright violence, but the refusal to become involved. Courageously, Tisby offers Billy Graham as his example of a white evangelical whose tepid response hindered the progress of the movement, while also noting Graham’s role in helping Richard Nixon win the presidency through a “Southern Strategy.”
As he moves toward the present day, Tisby demonstrates that the rhetoric of the Religious Right is a demonstrable continuation of Nixon’s “law and order” rhetoric of the late 1960s, noting in the process that “racism never goes away; it adapts.” Redlining and other real estate practices established post-World War II housing segregation in ways that still linger, and the rise of Donald Trump makes clear that race is still a driving force behind white evangelical politics. In all of this, Tisby presents the reader with a paradox. While he asserts that racism persists in the US church because of people’s persistent free choices to perpetuate it, noting points in US history in which the church could have chosen a different path, he also writes that “the work of racial justice is difficult and will never truly end in this life” (p. 23). This paradox, though, is simply an application of an orthodox, reformed doctrine of sin to the problem of race in the United States. This aspect of the book, never explicitly explored but woven through the entire text, provides a teaching opportunity that can open rich classroom dialogue. The same is true of Tisby’s list of suggested action items, which form the substance of the final chapter.
Students probably do not read everything their professors assign, and they likely forget most of what they do read. Jemar Tisby has offered to the theological academy and to the church a book that students will read, that students must read, and that students will remember long after they sell everything else back to the bookstore. Professors in religion departments at Christian universities and at theological seminaries who need to begin a conversation about Christianity and race in the United States can learn from their own reading of this book and, in turn, assign it with full confidence. It will bear fruit.