Session 4: Religious Liberty & Segregation
In the Jim Crow era, Southern churches and religious communities were integral to the maintenance of legally enforced white supremacy. In this session, learn how racist laws and policies were justified on religious grounds, how a theological emphasis on personal salvation served to shield the Church from responsibility for systemic racial inequalities, and how legal approaches to religious liberty during Jim Crow failed to protect Black religious freedom.
About the speakers
Brandon Paradise is Associate Professor of Law and Professor Dallas Willard Scholar at Rutgers Law School. He is a leading scholar of the intersection of race, law, and Christianity and is a widely sought-after speaker on issues of religious liberty and racial equality. He studied law at Yale Law School, church history at Union Theological Seminary, and economics and philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is a McDonald Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, a Nootbar Fellow at Pepperdine Caruso Law School, and a board member of the Institute for Studies in Eastern Christianity housed at Union Theological Seminary.
Carolyn Dupont is Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University, where she specializes in African American history and American religious history. Her book, Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975 won the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History in 2014. In fall of 2024, Prometheus Press will publish her most recent book, a history of the Electoral College and an argument for abolishing it. Her opinion writing has appeared in The Huffington Post and The Washington Post, among other outlets.
Key Takeaways
March from the Arkansas State Capitol to Central High School to protest school integration (John T. Bledsoe, 1959), Library of Congress.
The longstanding “cultural captivity” thesis held that while Christianity is, at its core, nonracist, the white Southern Church was held “captive” by the broader racist culture in the Jim Crow era. This thesis, however, fails to take into account that, as Dr. Dupont explains, the “Church was a full partner in creating a race-based hierarchy.”
Conservative white Southern churches conceptualized Christianity as a matter of individual sin and personal salvation. This allowed more moderate Southern Christians to deny any responsibility for remedying–or even recognizing–larger systemic inequalities.
Both explicitly and implicitly, conservative Christian theologies found their way into laws and legal opinions of the Jim Crow era. Most famously, the lower court judge in the famous Loving v. Virginia case, which eventually struck down all anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional, wrote in his initial opinion upholding such a law: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
Reflection Questions
Some historians have sought to explain away white Christians’ support for segregation by arguing that religion during this time was held “captive” to a larger racist culture. Do you agree with this argument? How do we–or can we–separate “religion” from “culture”? Do you see any modern iterations of the “cultural captivity” argument today?
Even beyond the South, white Americans in the Jim Crow era frequently labeled Black religious communities and leaders– from new religious movements like Father Divine’s Peace Mission and the Moorish Science Temple of America to Christian members of the Civil Rights Movement–to be “political” rather than truly religious. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, was famously branded as a “communist” rather than a Christian (further implying that these are incompatible ideologies). Why was denigrating the religiosity of these communities important for the maintenance of white supremacy? Do you see any examples today of faith communities that are deemed primarily “political”?
When Southern churches refused to admit Black worshipers and faith leaders during the 1963-64 church visit campaign, missionaries abroad grew frustrated that this commitment to segregation was stymying their efforts to gain converts. Are there any examples today of similar disputes among religious communities?
16th Street Baptist Church after bombing (1963), FBI Media.
Further Reading
Carolyn Renée Dupont, Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975 (2015)
Kelly J. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (2011)
Watched this session of the curriculum and have some thoughts? We’d love to hear from you.