Segregation as a law was struck down by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950s. There are many first hand stories about segregation in the schools, but I want to look into segregation in the Church. When Brown v. Board was passed, the Church tried to justify the continuation of segregation by using the Bible and Natural Law. In his book The Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby relates what happened in the churches when integration became the law of the land. G.T. Gillespie, president emeritus of a Christian School called Bellhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, gave a carefully worded message to pastors there, titled “Christian View of Segregation” He admitted that “The Bible contains no clear mandate for or against…
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Racism and the Bible
“Then the Lord God formed man from the [a]dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath or spirit of life, and man became a living being.” Genesis 2:7 When I was a new Christian, I knew nothing about the Bible. Even though my father was raised in a church setting, we didn’t go to church regularly. I absorbed everything I was hearing in the church where I got saved and taking the information as God’s truth. I was naïve and trusting, so I believed what the more experienced church people told me. When I encountered racism for the first time, I was unaware that it was racism until many years later. I think God shielded me from a lot of things in…