The Church's Racial Sins: A Historical Reckoning

Today's Reading

Read Psalm 51:1-12: "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin."

Then read 1 John 1:8-10: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

Reflection

Today we must do something painful: we must look honestly at what the church has done.

The history is not ambiguous. For centuries, Christians used the Bible to justify the enslavement of African peoples. The "Curse of Ham" — a grotesque misreading of Genesis 9 — was taught from pulpits as divine sanction for racial hierarchy. Southern denominations were founded explicitly to defend the right of Christians to own other human beings. Missionaries carried the gospel to enslaved people and then used it to teach submission to masters. After emancipation, the church — North and South — largely acquiesced to Jim Crow, enforced segregation in its own sanctuaries, and remained silent during lynchings.

This is not ancient history. Living Americans remember segregated churches. The Southern Baptist Convention did not formally apologize for its defense of slavery until 1995. Many Christian institutions — colleges, seminaries, denominations — bear the names and honor the legacies of slaveholders.

Jonathan Edwards is a case study in this painful complexity. Edwards is arguably the greatest theologian America has produced. His works on the nature of true virtue, the freedom of the will, and religious affections remain essential reading. He was also a slaveholder. He owned at least six enslaved people. This is not a peripheral fact about Edwards — it is a moral catastrophe at the center of his life, and honest Christians must reckon with it rather than explain it away.

Does Edwards' slaveholding invalidate his theology? No — by that standard, we would have to discard nearly every pre-modern thinker. But it does demonstrate something that Bonhoeffer understood deeply: "We should ask ourselves very seriously whether we have not been evading repentance by our willingness to admit the abstract idea of sin while we carefully guard against the concrete encounter with the brother who has been wronged." The church has been remarkably willing to acknowledge that racism is wrong in the abstract while resisting the specific confessions, reparative actions, and structural changes that genuine repentance requires.

Augustine knew that confession is the beginning of healing, not its completion. First John makes the point absolute: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves." The church that says it has no racial sin to confess is deceiving itself. The question is not whether there is sin to confess. The question is whether the church is willing to move from abstract acknowledgment to concrete repentance.

Going Deeper

Psalm 51 is David's prayer after he was confronted with his sin against Bathsheba and Uriah. Notice that David does not minimize, deflect, or excuse. He says: "Against you, you only, have I sinned." What would it look like for the American church to pray this prayer — not as a ritual but as a genuine cry for mercy? And what would genuine repentance, as opposed to empty apology, actually require?