Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars
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Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars
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Overview
By presenting African American Protestantism in the context of white Protestant fundamentalism, Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars demonstrates that African American Protestants were acutely aware of the manner in which white Christianity operated and how they could use that knowledge to justify social change. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s study scrutinizes how white fundamentalists wrote blacks out of their definition of fundamentalism and how blacks constructed a definition of Christianity that had, at its core, an intrinsic belief in racial equality. In doing so, this volume challenges the prevailing scholarly argument that fundamentalism was either a doctrinal debate or an antimodernist force. Instead, it was a constantly shifting set of priorities for different groups at different times.
A number of African American theologians and clergy identified with many of the doctrinal tenets of the fundamentalism of their white counterparts, but African Americans were excluded from full fellowship with the fundamentalists because of their race. Moreover, these scholars and pastors did not limit themselves to traditional evangelical doctrine but embraced progressive theological concepts, such as the Social Gospel, to help them achieve racial equality. Nonetheless, they identified other forward-looking theological views, such as modernism, as threats to “true” Christianity.
Mathews demonstrates that, although traditional portraits of “the black church” have provided the illusion of a singular unified organization, black evangelical leaders debated passionately among themselves as they sought to preserve select aspects of the culture around them while rejecting others. The picture that emerges from this research creates a richer, more profound understanding of African American denominations as they struggled to contend with a white American society that saw them as inferior.
Doctrine and Race melds American religious history and race studies in innovative and compelling ways, highlighting the remarkable and rich complexity that attended to the development of African American Protestant movements.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817390723 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 01/20/2017 |
| Series: | Religion and American Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Doctrine and Race
African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars
By Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2017 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9072-3
CHAPTER 1
"Too Frequently They Are Led Astray"
White Fundamentalists and Race
"Cuff was a negro slave who lived in the South before the war," the 1929 article in William Bell Riley's The Pilot, told readers. "He was a joyful Christian and a faithful servant." But Cuff's master, greedy for money, sold him to "an infidel," who insisted that Cuff not pray. Cuff persisted, despite repeated whippings. The "infidel" master, suddenly taken ill and believing himself to be on his death bed, insisted that his wife not call the doctor but instead bring Cuff in from the fields. Cuff, naturally, came to the man's bedside and when asked to pray for him, responded, "'Yes, bress de Lord, Massa, I'se been prayin' for you all de night,' and at this he dropped on his knees, and like Jacob of old, wrestled in prayer." The master and mistress both converted, Cuff "embraced" the master, and "race differences and past cruelty were swept away by the love of God, and tears of joy were mingled."
This anecdote illustrates the complicated racial views of many white fundamentalists in the early decades of the twentieth century. Cuff, as a "faithful servant" in more ways than one, embodies for the unnamed author the honorable yet childlike faith of slaves. Slavery and its attendant cruelties are compartmentalized in the past, even as a certain nostalgia pervades the brief piece. Cuff serves as a model slave, and a model evangelist, for the white editor and his readers — a man who rendered unto Caesar his labors and to his heavenly master his witness. Cuff's appearance in a 1929 fundamentalist paper provides a window into white fundamentalists' racial views. These leaders created a definition of fundamentalism that was white but relied heavily on African Americans in their storytelling, discussions, and performances to legitimate and underscore the "whiteness" of the fundamentalist movement.
The formal movement of fundamentalism was primarily a white phenomenon. Defined and debated by white men, it grew during a time of racial segregation and white hegemony. As such, it should come as no surprise that, in the words of Joel Carpenter, "fundamentalism, like other historical evangelical movements, has tended to attract Anglo-Americans and Northern European immigrants of Protestant background." While Carpenter declined to elaborate on why this attraction was so strong for whites, an investigation into the words and deeds of the early fundamentalists reveals both reasons for the appeal as well as means by which these leaders sought to place themselves firmly in the white Protestant power structure of the early twentieth century.
Why these men felt a need to argue their case for a return to the "old-time religion" has received much attention from scholars. The changing theological climate, brought about by new methods of biblical criticism and a perceived conflict with Darwinian evolution, combined with large internal migrations by both black and white southerners, as well as an influx of millions of foreign immigrants, led many white Protestants to believe that the world they had grown up with was fast fading. America's entry into World War I and the subsequent riots and labor disputes following the armistice only provided additional proof that their worst fears were coming true.
Pivotal eras often produce cultural changes. But while both the white men who were to lead the fundamentalist movement and whole families of African Americans moved northward, they did not abandon their notions of race. Nor did the North and its inhabitants embrace a view of race that could be construed as divergent. Instead, the migrants, both white and black, found that racism pervaded all sections of the nation. Historian Edward J. Blum has convincingly chronicled the methods by which white northerners and white southerners explicitly embraced themes of white supremacy and marginalized African Americans in the late nineteenth century. Protestant leaders were no exception to this rule, and Dwight L. Moody "accepted race-based segregation at his revivals and thereby offered religious legitimacy to Jim Crow," to name but one example from Blum's research.
For white ministers, including those who would become fundamentalists, the prevailing sentiment was one of segregation and racial differentiation. That prevailing sentiment, however, was by no means a monolithic front. Rather, various fundamentalists embraced similar themes but with different interpretations of the role of African Americans in public life, the religious beliefs of African Americans, and the proper interactions between the races. In general, fundamentalist leaders did not advocate that African Americans could be a particular mission field for them, and none proclaimed a possible alliance with their black Protestant counterparts. Instead, these white leaders tended to ignore race except when the use of racial paternalism benefited their narratives. In those instances, they relied on paternalism and a belief in black inferiority to argue for white agency as spokespeople and guardians of African Americans. They repeated these arguments in private and in public, in letters and in sermons, adding a fundamentalist layer of support for the continued subjugation and segregation of African Americans.
The prevailing mores of race prevented white fundamentalists from reaching out to African Americans for several reasons. First, white Americans who considered African Americans as intellectual and social equals were few and far between in the general US population, let alone in a group of men who wished to return the country to what they saw as traditional values. In other words, fundamentalists had no interest in challenging established racial norms in their quest to return America to those norms. Instead, they chose to reify and even sanctify the racial constructs of the day. In this way, the fundamentalists were not advocates of change; they were proponents of the status quo. Second, any overt outreach to African Americans was not in the strategic interest of early fundamentalists. Cross-racial movements were risky politically, both in secular and church politics, and the fundamentalists would be less likely to gain a national audience for the balance of their goals if they included outreach to minority populations among them. Third, most white Protestant leaders, whether liberal or conservative, were largely unaware of developments and events within the African American denominations. Indeed, the black Protestants of the South had walked out of white churches in the late nineteenth century, and white southerners had done little to invite them back. Black denominations in the North were already well established. White Protestants, because they could not control these groups, had for the most part abandoned dialogue with them, substituting in lieu of dialogue monitoring and mission outreach. Despite the fact that fundamentalism had challenged all segments of Christianity to meet their orthodoxy or be labeled as hopelessly erroneous, white fundamentalists did not realize that African Americans had heard their challenge and were in the process of debating the matter in response. Finally, fundamentalism itself had a built-in mechanism that limited social outreach — the attention to conversion rather than amelioration of social ills meant that, once fundamentalists saw a group as being squarely in the "saved" column, they were less likely to work to assist that group in any social and political challenges they faced. In short, in their expectations of Christ's imminent return, they did little to improve the social problems of their day, including those of racial segregation and discrimination.
White fundamentalists frequently commented in letters, journals, sermons, and articles about the racial differences between whites and blacks, and they sought to preserve and reinforce those differences and the attendant segregation of the races. When they spoke publicly, these fundamentalists situated themselves as experts on the construction of divinely sanctioned racial boundaries in American society. One such example was J. C. (Jasper Cortensus) Massee, a northern Baptist who was born in Georgia but eventually pastored churches in the Northeast. While his biographer, C. Allyn Russell, saw in Massee a tendency toward individualism, in race relations, he displayed no such trait. In a sermon entitled "How Did the Negro Get His Skin?" Massee argued that the only answer to the difference in color among humans was "that God made them so." The sermon survives only in outline format, but despite its brevity, it suggests conformity with racial ideals of the time, with an occasional turn of phrase that, while hinting at new ideas, served only to return the outline to the straight and narrow. The line "God made them so" occurred before another notation in which Massee appeared to argue for racial distinction — "we should not let a previous condition of servitude prejudice ... or provoke to discontent" — but then added "let us recognize that God has set this difference ... and strive to preserve the purity of the race to which we belong ... and make it worthy of God." Massee clearly wanted whites and blacks to maintain their races as separate and in this way continue the racial division God had created. Here was a minister in a prominent northern city giving his benediction to segregation and discrimination.
Like Massee, Amzi Clarence (A. C.) Dixon gave religious favor to segregationist views, which should come as no surprise considering Dixon's background (he was born in the South before the Civil War) and his family ties (his younger brother was Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman, the book that inspired the famous movie The Birth of a Nation). Indeed, Texas fundamentalist J. Frank Norris praised Dixon, saying that he had "been through many battles, being a member of the original Ku Klux Klan and a brother of Thomas Dixon, Jr., who wrote the 'Clansman.'" In an undated manuscript, Dixon outlined what appears to be a sermon entitled, "Our Brother in Black." Dixon noted that "our brother in black [as] a man" could go one of two different directions, "grace of God can make a good man. Sin makes a bad man out of him." Dixon then observed that "more of them [African Americans] want to be preachers," adding "older men [in] particular." He commented that African Americans are "emotional" in their "sermons," and "like it warm." After dispensing with the religious propensities of African Americans, Dixon added that blacks have good imaginations, citing the Brer Rabbit stories as evidence of how black southerners create tales from animals, "all but cats. Don't like them." Blacks were also "humorous without intending it," and given to "good natural humor." He even mentioned the "eloquent" preachers, with John Jasper as his particular example. Jasper, a former slave from Virginia, was most famous for his sermon, "The Sun Do Move," a literal interpretation of the biblical account of Joshua 10:12–14, in which God stopped the sun so that Joshua could defeat his enemies. The text of Jasper's sermon was made famous by William Hatcher, who published it in 1908. The sermon would remain a contentious point for African American preachers in the 1920s and 1930s, many of whom were both proud of the ex-slave's accomplishments and repulsed by his lack of education. That lack of education, the unintended humor of blacks, and black emotionalism were ways for Dixon to reduce African Americans to religious novices, people who needed white guidance because they lacked the ability to discern the gospel for themselves. Dixon's racism meant that there could never be a full-fledged dialogue between whites and blacks on religion or any other issue.
For Dixon, the concern with African Americans was more of a political issue than a theological one. Indeed, in this sermon and in his extant papers, he discussed African American religious beliefs only in passing. Far more important was Dixon's concern about the black vote. In an article he wrote for The Living Word, Dixon argued that "ignorance, whether black or white, has no right to the ballot." He echoed this sentiment in his "Our Brother in Black" sermon, posing the issue in the form of a question: "As citizens, do they have their rights?" He answered it with, "All that the same class of whites have [sic]. Ignorance should not be allowed to vote." While Dixon's opposition appears to be class-based or education-based, his argument was disingenuous. Most affluent white men of his time would have supported poor white male rights long before they would embrace equal civil rights for African Americans. His use of education may have been an attempt at making his position appear more moderate for his audience. Like many other members of his family and his acquaintances, Dixon stood firmly against black enfranchisement.
In another undated manuscript, Dixon addressed the "Future of the Educated Negro." Setting the tone early, Dixon proclaimed that "the educated negro, like the educated white man, needs to know that manual labor is honorable, and however classical and thorough his education, it does not raise him above the dignity of toiling with his hands for daily bread." Dixon told the story of a black man, imprisoned and facing execution for "a capital offence," who had told Dixon's father, "'I am going to be hanged tomorrow because I was educated. I got above work.'" Dixon's conclusion was that education had spoiled the man, who had turned to crime rather than "return to the drudgery of his former life." According to Dixon, "he should have been taught that education was not intended to raise him above the necessity of manual labor, but rather to dignify such toil by enabling him to do his work better." Dixon's words are reminiscent of John Calvin's opinion that the reprobate belonged in church because it taught them why they were worthy of damnation. For Dixon, African Americans could never escape the content of their character, to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King Jr., because they were doomed by the color of their skin. Here was scientific racism, the use of data to prove racial differences and to justify discrimination, at its worst.
Dixon argued that African Americans needed to remember that they were, indeed, black and should be "willing to remain a negro, and give to posterity only negro children." While he tolerated African American claims that Adam was "a colored man" and other statements of racial pride by black orators, he drew the line at intermarriage. "For [an African American] to assert and practice the right to intermarry with the whites," Dixon argued, "is to doom his race to extinction." Citing Frederick Douglass, whom Dixon claimed had confessed to making "the mistake of his life in marrying a white woman," Dixon warned of "race antagonism" against blacks should intermarriage occur. According to his second wife and hagiographic biographer, Helen Cadbury Dixon, A. C. Dixon was troubled when President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House in 1901. She quoted her husband as saying that he doubted Roosevelt's "'political sagacity in so doing, and Booker Washington's wisdom in accepting the invitation. ... The South looked upon it as an effort to force upon them social equality with the negro. Social equality means inter-marriage, which would portend the extinction of the Anglo-Saxon race, and its transmutation into a race of mulattos.'" Like so many white Americans (and many black Americans), Dixon opposed intermarriage, stating, "'I do not want the negro, or the Mongolian, to marry my daughter nor my son to marry his daughter. 'They twain shall be one flesh'; and to my thinking, the one flesh includes one skin.'"
In making his case for racial separation, Dixon drew on a classic dichotomy of southern whites: the distinction between political rights and "social privileges." For such proponents, the ballot was a political right, but equal and integrated accommodations were a "social" concern, one that the US Constitution had no control over. In language that would be echoed by Texas fundamentalist J. Frank Norris and Arkansas Baptist Ben Bogard in 1928, Dixon told his congregation that "a man may demand his political rights, but, if he comes demanding social rights, he will find that what he claims as a right, others regards as a privilege, and if he persists in his demand even privileges are apt to be withdrawn."
The threat of intermarriage and racial equality played a role in the 1928 presidential campaign, as J. Frank Norris and Ben Bogard used New York governor Al Smith's record while he was mayor of New York City to incite southern Democrats to break party lines and vote for the Republican, Herbert Hoover. While some historians have noted the concern that many southern Democrats and Protestants nationally had about Smith's Roman Catholicism, the race question among Protestant ministers has not yet received much scholarly attention.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Doctrine and Race by Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews. Copyright © 2017 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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