The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy

by J. Russell Hawkins

Overview

Why did southern white evangelical Christians resist the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s? Simply put, they believed the Bible told them so. These white Christians entered the battle certain that God was on their side. Ultimately, the civil rights movement triumphed in the 1960s and, with its success, fundamentally transformed American society. But this victory did little to change southern white evangelicals' theological commitment to segregation. Rather than abandoning their segregationist theology in the second half of the 1960s, white evangelicals turned their focus on institutions they still controlled--churches, homes, denominations, and private colleges and secondary schools--and fought on. Focusing on the case of South Carolina, The Bible Told Them So shows how, despite suffering defeat in the public sphere, white evangelicals continued to battle for their own institutions, preaching and practicing a segregationist Christianity they continued to believe reflected God's will. Increasingly caught in the tension between their sincere belief that God desired segregation and their reluctance to give voice to such ideas for fear of being perceived as bigoted or intolerant, by the late 1960s southern white evangelicals embraced the rhetoric of colorblindness and protection of the family as measures to maintain both segregation and respectable social standing. This strategy set southern white evangelicals on an alternative path for race relations in the decades ahead.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197571071
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/13/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	798,847
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

J. Russell Hawkins is Professor of Humanities and History in the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: "As Old as the Scriptures"Chapter One: Not in Our Church: Congregational Backlash to Brown v. Board of EducationChapter Two: The Bounds of Their Habitation: The Theological Foundation of Segregationist ChristianityChapter Three: Jim Crow on Christian Campuses: The Desegregation of Furman and WoffordChapter Four: Embracing Colorblindness: The Methodist Merger and the Transformation of Segregationist ChristianityChapter Five: Focusing on the Family: Private Schools and the New Shape of Segregationist ChristianityEpilogue: The Heirs of Segregationist ChristianityIndex

Editorial Reviews

"This book is an excellent beginning to confronting these ghosts of our past that still haunt our pursuits of racial justice. Anyone with an interest in the history of race in the United States — particularly as it connects to religion — will learn a great deal from this book. It is well-suited for a variety of courses in the sociology or history of religion, as well as for seminary courses." — Jacquette Rhoades, Reading Religion

"This book ... not only enhances our understanding of American religious history, but also the development of lay-clerical relations among Southern Baptists and Methodists. ... Hawkins is to be congratulated on writing such a timely and thoughtprovoking book." — Simon Lewis, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society

"This is a great book, compelling and necessary in every way." — Felipe Hinokosa, Texas A&M University, The Journal of Southern History

"This book ... not only enhances our understanding of American religious history, but also the development of lay-clerical relations among Southern Baptists and Methodists. ... Hawkins is to be congratulated on writing such a timely and thoughtprovoking book." — Simon Lewis, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society

"The Bible Told Them So is a helpful and enlightening addition to the historiography of religion and the CRM. Hawkins convincingly and logically presents the ways that Southern evangelicals actively lived a segregationist theology in opposition to the CRM. No future historian will be able to claim that Southern evangelical religion bent to the power of the CRM without dialoguing with Hawkins's work." — Caleb Wesley Southern, Christian Scholar's Review

"a book for Church historians, political scientists, and a wider general public" — PETER BALLANTINE, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

"In one concise study, Hawkins adds to the literature on Evangelical racism in the South and expands the direction of future research while enhancing understandings of a religiously justified prejudice that continues in national politics." — J. Kleiman, CHOICE

"How is possible that Southern White Christians could employ their faith to oppose racial equality and opportunity? Dr. Russell Hawkins shows us how with piercing clarity. This deeply-researched work reads like a novel, yet is at the same time packed with page after page of insight and revelation. A true eye-opener." — Michael Emerson, co-author of Divided by Faith and United By Faith

"Hawkins convincingly demonstrates how religion framed, informed, and bolstered South Carolina whites' resistance to racial equality. He further shows how, once the raw biblical justification of segregation acquired a bad reputation, the rhetoric of color-blindness and anti-identity politics carried this resistance forward under a more respectable but deceptive guise." — Carolyn Renée Dupont, author of Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975

"Increasingly scholars of evangelicalism in the United States are telling more complex stories about the interplay of race and politics within its faithful ranks. The Bible Told Them So generates an important new ripple forcing us to consider the ubiquitous nature of disparate white evangelical Christian denominations in their stance against black racial progress and desegregation. Stylistically unflinching while managing to remain approachably delicate, Hawkins has produced a tour de force that tells an unsettling tale of certain white evangelicals' efforts to maintain a dominant social order" — Derek S. Hicks, author of Reclaiming Spirit in the Black Faith Tradition

"Hawkins's book is both an important contribution to the field, and a reminder of the contemporary relevance of documenting and analysing the influence and tenacity of white supremacy in churches." — Charlotte Thomas, Modern Believing

"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." — Mark Silk, Journal of Ecclesiastical History

"This is an impressive book, thoroughly researched, and compellingly argued." — Randall Balmer, Journal of Church and State

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