Here is part 1.

Several Christian groups in America before the Civil War separated the races into different congregations, white congregations and black congregations. But the Stone-Campbell Movement aimed at Christian unity, and this emphasis for the most part ensured that they refused to separate based on race, but rather they encouraged masters and slaves to be members of the same congregation. The Cane Ridge congregation, in 1838, seems amazingly integrated: 222 total members, 72 of whom were Black. But these Black members sat in the balcony. Sometimes congregations would serve the Lord’s Supper to the black members only after the white members had been served. Perhaps ironically, the Civil War and the abolition of slavery contributed to institutionalized segregation based on race in churches of Christ.

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[A]fter the Civil War, white and black Churches of Christ went their separate ways, forming two distinct fellowships. Racism evidently overpowered and overshadowed the bonds of full Christian unity even as doctrinal unity remained firm. Although some black Christians in Mississippi chose to stay with white believers after the demise of chattel enslavement, African Americans in Texas and Alabama voluntarily and cordially severed ties with their former owners and charted their own paths—even though often relying on white monetary support for a variety of projects. (Robinson)

David Lipscomb stood opposed to this trend, condemning in no uncertain terms the idea that whites and Blacks should not worship together. Already in 1878, he wrote in the Gospel Advocate, “We believe it sinful to have two congregations in the same community for persons of separate and distinct races now.” In 1907, in response to the situation in which the church in Bellwood, Tennessee wanted a Black girl to attend a Black congregation (mentioned at the beginning of the previous post), Lipscomb basically asserted that such a congregation cannot be a true church of Christ: “I would expect the Master to refuse to meet with or accept the service of such a church.”

Nevertheless, Black churches of Christ did form when Black Christians were not welcome in white churches. One of the earliest Black churches of Christ was established by George Ricks, who had been an enslaved African and learned to read due to his master’s wife, Charlotte Ricks, “who violated the slaveowner’s code,” according to Edward Robinson. George Ricks became the first Black property owner in Alabama, and he became a preacher at the Christian Home Church of Christ, near Muscle Shoals.

Members of white churches of Christ were sometimes members of the KKK (though H. Leo Boles basically said that a KKK member couldn’t be a Christian; Gospel Advocate [March 10, 1927]: 232). Both white and Black church members) often favored segregation. The Black leader S. R. Cassius (1853–1931) tried to illuminate the racism in churches of Christ to which white leaders seemed blind.

Cassius understood something that most white Stone-Campbell leaders failed to comprehend: namely, that centuries of chattel enslavement had tainted their view of black people, causing them to underestimate “our intelligence” and overestimate ‘their ability to give us what we needed then and still—a pure gospel.” White decision makers, explained Cassius, “forgot that four hundred years of slavery had bred a prejudice that even zeal for the cause of Christ could not overcome, and that in the mind of every white man lurked the thought the Negro was, in some way, inferior and that the Negro himself had been taught to suspect and fear the white man.” (Robinson)

But the ideology of churches of Christ—specifically that this movement represented the one true church and was distinct from every other religious body in the world—contributed to a distinctive approach to issues of race, fostering relationships among whites and Blacks while also compelling preachers to focus more on eternal matters than on civil rights.

These sources illustrate the divergent experiences and perspectives among white Churches of Christ in the years preceding the 1960s. Admonitions against racial prejudice could serve as the basis for a Sunday school lesson, but jokes that depended on crude racial stereotypes might appear in church bulletins or sermon outlines. Black preachers could preach to predominantly white audiences, and white preachers could speak in black churches. But most communities, in the South and elsewhere, maintained separate facilities for blacks and whites. Even in these paradoxical contexts, personal and interracial relationships were sometimes established. And all along, most white members of Churches of Christ would affirm without equivocation that all people were equal in Christ and that God was “no respecter of persons.” The primary objective, however, for both black and white Churches of Christ was practicing their conception of New Testament Christianity. Maintaining their identity as restorers of the primitive church took precedence above all temporal concerns, including race relations. (Key)

There were certainly moments of head-shaking racial prejudice, which prompted varying reactions among Black Christian leaders. Marshall Keeble is well-known for his practice of putting up with much racist nonsense in order to not distract from spreading the gospel, while other Black leaders were often more vocal in pushing back. (For these two approaches among Black preachers outside churches of Christ, see David G. Holmes in Allen.)

In 1920, A. M. Burton and white Christians in Nashville organized the Southern Practical Institute for African American students. C. E. W. Dorris, a white minister and superintendent of the new school, demanded that students, all of them black, enter the building through the back door. [G. P.] Bowser, principal of the fledgling institution, vehemently denounced the practice since the school was only for African Americans. [Marshall] Keeble exhorted Bowser to accept the back-door policy, as long as students obtained the “Christian education they so much desired.” Unrepentant, Bowser abruptly resigned his post as principal, left the school, and urged other black parents to withdraw their children, resulting in the school’s hasty demise. Keeble passively accepted racism as long as he achieved his evangelistic or educational goals; Bowser adamantly repudiated racism even when it eliminated opportunities for himself or other African Americans. (Robinson)

As it was for everyone, the Civil Rights movement was difficult for churches of Christ. Black leaders continued to call out racism as they saw it. Norman Anderson’s 1965 essay in the journal Christian Echo described racism as a “stench in the nostrils of God, and therefore subjects them [= racists, specifically “white Christians”] to eternal damnation.” In 1963, R. N. Hogan railed against segregated Christian colleges “headed by so-called gospel preachers and they are living in rebellion against God.” Andrew J. Hairston, preacher for the Simpson Street Church of Christ in Atlanta, suggested that white churches of Christ stop calling themselves Church of Christ and instead use the name “Church of the White Man.”

Most of the colleges affiliated with churches of Christ continued to prohibit Black students through the early 1960s, and the students at these all-white colleges sometimes engaged in what is today considered clearly racist activities. “Students at all of the aforementioned colleges enjoyed minstrel shows that caricatured blacks, but they seemed to be most popular at Freed-Hardeman, where they received prominent coverage in the Skyrocket [the student newspaper] and remained annual events through the spring of 1964, just before the first black students arrived on camps” (Key). For example, this advertisement appeared in the February 1963 issue of the Skyrocket (available online here).

Here is one from Harding, 1958, as reported in the student newspaper, The Bison (here).

It was this kind of activity, and the barring of Black students, that led some Black church members to insist that the church of Christ had not yet been restored. In 1959, the Black preacher and editor R. N. Hogan wrote about segregated Christian schools: “The fact that Negroes are not allowed in these churches and schools is proof that God is not there; for where God is, no man is barred because of the color of his skin.” In 1963, Hogan urged black readers “to love all white people, for you will go to hell if you hate them, like some of them are going to hell for hating you.”

For the most part, the magazines Gospel Advocate and Firm Foundation ignored the Civil Rights movement. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. died as well as Marshall Keeble. The Gospel Advocate devoted an issue to Keeble (July 18, 1968), and Reuel Lemmons wrote in the Firm Foundation an editorial that Richard Hughes described as “infamous,” in which he attributed to Keeble’s work the fact that “there has been an infinitesimally small amount of racial prejudice in the Church of Christ.”

Not everyone in churches of Christ in the 1960s seemed so out-of-touch with the events going on around them. Lemmons’ editorial generated critical responses. Lemmons printed an article written to challenge his own position, but he also printed responses to the article. Mission journal was founded in part to address issues of contemporary concern such as race, and the position of the journal toward race was one sympathetic to the Civil Rights movement. At the Abilene Christian College Lectures in 1960, Carl Spain challenged the college on the issue of the enrollment of Black students. (Listen to the speech here. There is now a Carl Spain Center at ACU.)

And earlier, in Spring 1953, Everett Ferguson, an undergraduate student, gave a chapel speech at the all-white Abilene Christian University in which he condemned racism and looked forward to the admission of Black students. (Listen to this speech here, read by a 72-year-old Ferguson.)

John Allen Chalk, the speaker for the Herald of Truth television program (who later became an attorney; he blurbs Allen’s new book on Marshall Keeble), encouraged Lemmons in private communication to be more favorable toward the Civil Rights movement, to condemn more openly the sin of racism within churches of Christ, but Chalk found little success with Lemmons.

In 1968, Chalk wrote to Lemmons on the issue of race, and Lemmons replied that racial prejudice is a sin no different from others, and so deserving of no more attention. (Here is Chalk’s letter, and here is the reply from Lemmons.) It seems, however, that Lemmons (at least, in the 1960s) was himself much more concerned about sins such as gambling and drinking than about racial prejudice, which he mostly mentioned to deny that it was a problem. According to Hughes, “By the 1960s, most mainstream Churches of Christ were far more concerned to win acceptance into the dominant ‘Christian’ culture of white America than to battle for social justice, racial or otherwise.”

But the times, they were a’changin. A new generation of scholars and leaders were willing to challenge the status quo in churches of Christ in accordance with what they felt were first principles of the gospel. They were more willing to be socially engaged. Whereas the conservatives in the 1960s accused the activists of changing the gospel into the social gospel, the activists accused the conservatives of simply not being Christian. This new generation founded Mission journal (already mentioned), that provided a platform to discuss the Civil Rights movement and other social issues from a more sympathetic vantage point than was typically allowed in the Gospel Advocate and Firm Foundation. In 1968, “race relations workshops” started to take place in churches of Christ. While the independence of each congregation in churches of Christ meant that different congregations would respond to issues of race in their own way, many leaders and congregations were recognizing not only that racism was sinful but that the churches of Christ were not immune to the sin.

Conclusion

Several things are important for us to understand about racism and the churches of Christ.

(1) Racism is contrary to the gospel. The New Testament is explicit about this.

(2) Churches of Christ have not been immune from the sin of racism. Certainly our churches have not been unique: America has struggled with racial problems for centuries, and all Christian groups have struggled in this area. Here I am thinking exclusively of American churches of Christ. I wonder whether similar struggles concerning racial issues have characterized churches of Christ in other areas of the world.

(3) Inasmuch as our movement began as a call for Christian unity, we should work against those forces that divide us. As Thomas Campbell said in the Declaration and Address:

Ministers of Jesus, we can neither be ignorant of, nor unaffected with, the divisions and corruptions of his church. His dying commands, his last and ardent prayers, for the visible unity of his professing people, will not suffer you to be indifferent in this matter. You will not, you cannot, therefore, be silent, upon a subject of such vast importance to his personal glory and the happiness of his people—consistently you cannot; for silence gives consent. You will rather lift up your voice like a trumpet to expose the heinous nature, and dreadful consequences of those unnatural and anti-christian divisions, which have so rent and ruined the church of God.

As positive as the Black church has been, its existence in some ways stands as a constant rebuke of the sin of racism that has characterized American Christianity for centuries. We now live with that legacy. One of Martin Luther King’s famous lines remains true today: the most segregated hour in America is Sunday at 11am. We look forward to the fulfillment of the prophetic vision for God’s church: not segregation but all nations uniting in praise (Rev 7:9).

For Discussion

Read Ephesians 2:11–18. Why do you think it was so hard for Jews and Gentiles to see themselves as the same people of God?

If someone objected to a person’s attendance at a church worship service based on that person’s appearance, such as their skin color, how should the church respond to such an objection? Is there any responsibility for the person “causing a disturbance” to make peace by going where they are more accepted?

What experiences of racism have shocked you in your lifetime? In what ways have your own views on race evolved over the years? Do you think this is an area in which the church has led the culture toward a better path, or the culture has led the church, or neither?

What do you think Christians should have done—or should do—on the race issue in America in the 1850s? The 1960s? The 2020s? Has the issue become more complicated or simpler?

Do you think racism is an issue on which God would want people to “disturb the peace” in order to bring about change in society? Do you admire Marshall Keeble’s tendency to focus on evangelism rather than social issues? Is racism a “gospel issue”?

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