The Church's Racial Sins: A Historical Reckoning

Today's Scripture

Before we look at the church's history, listen to the two prayers that make honesty possible.

Psalm 51:1-2 — "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!"

1 John 1:8-9 — "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."

The Big Idea

Today we tell the truth about what the church has done — slavery defended from pulpits, Scripture twisted into a weapon, segregation enforced in sanctuaries. Confession is simply telling God the truth about sin, without spin. The gospel is what makes that possible: people who are already loved at their worst do not need to hide their history. Only confessed sin can be forgiven; covered sin just keeps working in the dark.

Reflection

Telling the whole story

The record is not ambiguous, so let us say it plainly. For centuries, Christians enslaved image-bearers of God and used the Bible to do it. Preachers taught the "Curse of Ham" — a grotesque misreading of Genesis 9, where Noah curses Canaan — as if God had sentenced African peoples to permanent servitude. (The text says nothing of the kind; no race is cursed in it.) Whole denominations were founded specifically to defend slaveholding. Missionaries handed enslaved people carefully edited Bibles with the Exodus cut out. After emancipation came complicity with lynching and Jim Crow, segregated pews, and decades of silence. The Southern Baptist Convention did not formally repent of its founding defense of slavery until 1995 — within living memory.

Here is what makes this history blasphemous and not merely tragic: the Bible itself had already condemned it. Exodus 21:16 — "Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death." Man-stealing was a capital crime in Israel's law. Paul says the same: in 1 Timothy 1:9-10, his list of the "lawless and disobedient" includes "enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine." The slave trade was not an unfortunate gray area. It was a sin Scripture had named for three thousand years — committed by people holding that Scripture.

Frederick Douglass, who learned to read partly through the Bible his enslavers withheld, drew the only honest line:

"Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked." — Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

And lest anyone imagine all white Christians simply went along, Charles Spurgeon — the most famous preacher in the English-speaking world — refused communion-table fellowship with slaveholders, and said so:

"I do from my inmost soul detest slavery anywhere and everywhere, and although I commune at the Lord's table with men of all creeds, yet with a slave-holder I have no fellowship of any sort or kind." — Charles Spurgeon, letter to the American press, 1860

Southern booksellers responded by publicly burning his sermons. The truth was available. Some saw it. Many chose not to.

Why drag all this into the light now? Because God himself insists on it. Psalm 51:6 — "Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart." God is not honored by a flattering history. He delights in truth on the inside — of a person, and of a people. Telling the whole story is not disloyalty to the church. It is the first act of loyalty to the church's Lord.

The Edwards question

Now the part that hits closest to home for this plan. Jonathan Edwards is, by many measures, the greatest theologian America has produced — a man whose writings on the beauty of God still set hearts on fire. One of his most beloved sermons closes his series on love with this vision:

"Heaven is a world of love." — Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits

Edwards preached that — and owned at least six enslaved human beings. He defended the practice while his own congregation included Africans he held as property. This is not a footnote to be whispered. It is a moral catastrophe at the center of an extraordinary life, and honest Christians must hold both facts without letting either erase the other.

What do we do with him? Two easy options present themselves, and both are wrong. Option one: throw out everything Edwards wrote — but then we must also throw out David, whose psalm of confession we are praying today, written after he took a man's wife and arranged the man's death. God's strange habit is to speak truth through compromised men, and the truth remains true. Option two: explain it away — "man of his time" — but John Wesley was a man of the same time, and he wrote days before his death to the young Wilberforce:

"Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it." — John Wesley, letter to William Wilberforce, 1791

The vilest that ever saw the sun. It could be seen. Edwards' blindness was not inevitability; it was sin — the comfortable kind that pays your bills and keeps your household running, the kind hardest of all to confess.

John Calvin explains why this question matters for us and not just for history:

"Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

Knowing ourselves includes this: if a mind as brilliant and devout as Edwards could baptize an obvious evil because his world was built on it, then so can we. The Edwards question is not finally "What do we do with him?" It is "Where am I doing what he did?" Every generation has sins that feel like furniture. Pray to see yours.

Why we hide — and why we don't have to

1 John 1:8 — "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." A church that says it has no racial sin to confess is not protecting its witness; it is deceiving itself. And hiding has a cost. Proverbs 28:13 — "Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy." Concealed sin is like a leak sealed behind drywall. The wall looks fine. The rot spreads.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw what concealment does to communities:

"Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Sin loves secrecy — in a person and in an institution. That is why Scripture gives us corporate confession, a prayer form we have nearly lost. Nehemiah, a man born in exile who never committed his ancestors' sins, prays: Nehemiah 1:6-7 — "confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Even I and my father's house have sinned." Daniel, one of the most blameless men in the Bible, prays the same way: Daniel 9:8 — "To us, O Lord, belongs open shame... because we have sinned against you." Not "they." We.

This answers the common objection: "I never owned slaves — why should I confess anything?" Scripture distinguishes personal guilt from family ownership. You are not personally guilty of your great-great-grandfather's sins. But if you belong to the church, you belong to a family with a stained record — and biblical saints owned their family's record before God instead of editing it. There is also a quieter sin available to every generation, and Martin Luther King Jr. named it from his Birmingham cell:

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice." — Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Most of us will never burn a cross. All of us are capable of preferring quiet to justice. That, too, belongs in the confession.

Mercy runs to confessors

So why would anyone volunteer for this much honesty? Because of who is listening. Romans 2:4 — "God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance." Repentance — turning around and walking the other way — is not the price of God's love; it is the response to it. John Newton knew. He captained slave ships, then was converted, and late in life put his memory to work for abolition:

"It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders." — John Newton, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade

The man who wrote "Amazing Grace" never airbrushed what grace had saved him from. His testimony helped end the trade. Confessed sin, in God's hands, became a weapon against the very evil confessed.

And the promise stands over every honest prayer: 1 John 1:9 — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us." Just — because at the cross the penalty was actually paid, not waved off. That is why Psalm 51:16-17 can say, "you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise." God does not ask the church to launder its reputation. He asks for a broken heart — and he has never once turned one away. From there, healing turns outward: James 5:16 — "confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed." Truth-telling is not the enemy of the church's witness. In a world full of spin, it may be the most credible thing we have.

Going Deeper

Write a two-part confession tonight. Part one, personal, from Psalm 51: name one specific way prejudice, partiality, or comfortable silence lives in you — no generalities. Part two, corporate, from Daniel 9 and Nehemiah 1: confess one specific sin from your church family's history, using the word "we." Then read 1 John 1:9 out loud over both parts. Notice that the promise is not "if we explain our sins" or "if we contextualize our sins" — only confess. End there, in mercy.