I grew up white in segregated Nashville, Tennessee. My neighborhood was white, my schools were white, and my church was white.
Along the way, my ideas about race and the segregated system were challenged. Why couldn’t black families enjoy traveling and motels like my family did? Why did a group of white boys jeer at an old black lady walking to the bus stop?
After a while, I no longer believed in the segregated system or that whites were a superior race. Eventually, the churches I joined as I moved around for job changes in the south and elsewhere were integrated.
However, I was an old woman when I read Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman.
At that moment, what I had not understood all my life came into focus. Every time a black American stepped out of their neighborhood, they had to remember what I rarely thought about—that they were likely to be noticed because of their skin color. Always, they must be on guard.
A country that, for most of its existence from early settlements until centuries later, treated a segment of its population as inferior has much baggage to unpack. Interestingly, some of the difficulty comes not so much from those now-integrated or willing-to-be-integrated churches, but from those who used to attend them but now don’t.
As we know, attendance at churches in the south and elsewhere has dropped and is dropping. Some of those who, in their youth attended white only churches, dropped out before many of their churches answered the altar call to change their ways.
Yes, Southern churches have changed, but, as Russell Moore commented in an interview with historian Daniel K. Williams, studies show “a fast-growing trend among white Southern Protestants who seldom or never attend church and yet self identify as evangelical Christians.” (Russell Moore “When the South Loosens its Bible Belt,” Christianity Today, postdated August 11, 2022.)
Some of these former churchgoers may become even more extreme. Says Russell: “The kind of cultural Christianity we now see often keeps everything about the Religious Right except the religion. . . . Cultural Christianity, as we once knew it, is largely being replaced by a kind of blood-and-soil sense of belonging and obligation not to a church but to a particular brand of white political and cultural identity.”
Moore calls for what, indeed, the church has always called for: reaching out to those in need.
“Yes, if all people see of ‘Christianity’ is the anger and loneliness of half-Christians, they will not see the real Jesus. But the converse is true, too. In a time of loneliness, separation, and boredom, we ought to see craving for what Jesus told us we all need.”
From slavery to women’s rights to civil rights and more, the needs have always called forth those who answered. Sometimes they seemed to have failed—Germany as a nation followed Hitler. However, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others in the confessing church are the ones who inspire us today.
I can see the faults of my south only as one raised there can see them. I also know that people, black and white, are working to overcome those centuries of wrongdoing. May God have mercy and bless these efforts.