Controversial New York Times bestselling author and historian Jemar Tisby recently joined Interfaith Alliance President and progressive Baptist minister Paul Brandeis Raushenbush to discuss racism within white evangelicalism, the wider church, and the critical role of cross-cultural relationships in achieving racial justice.
In 2022 Grove City College, a conservative Christian school, disavowed having hosted Tisby as a chapel speaker in 2020 after critics accused him of advocating critical race theory. Tisby, who is Presbyterian, denies alignment with critical race theory.
The Interfaith Alliance is a Religious Left group founded in the 1990s to rebut conservative Christian activism. Raushenbush, who is married to another man, is ordained in the American Baptist Church and descends from early Social Gospel proponent Walter Rauschenbusch.
Presented by State of Belief, the Interfaith Alliance weekly radio show, the podcast discussion centered upon what Tisby characterized as his rejection from wider evangelicalism for his engagement in matters of racial reconciliation.
The African American author spoke of coming to Christian faith in a “white, evangelical context” and a youth group where pastoral messages began to sink in. In accepting Christ through the sinner’s prayer at youth group, Tisby began a path to become a lifelong Christian, unaware, he described, of how embedded race was into religion among his fellow evangelicals.
Tisby attended Notre Dame University and became involved with social justice through service projects which brought him to work at the campus Center for Social Concerns. Shortly thereafter, he was introduced to Reformed theology through books “even whiter than evangelicalism at Notre Dame.” He attended a Dutch Reformed Christian church where he was “the only black person” and “an outsider in every way.”
Raushenbush characterized Reformed theology as “a strong movement” interested in what could be “pure Christianity.”
“They wanted to be the essential,” the liberal Mainline Protestant clergyman emphasized. “It’s a very theologically conservative movement and they claimed Christianity in an aggressive manner.”
Tisby claimed he was part of the most conservative branch of Reformed theology, with an undertone that “we get Christianity right.”
After graduation, Tisby joined Teach for America, instructing sixth grade social studies in Arkansas, in the fourth poorest county in the nation.
“All of these ‘social issues’ now have a human face and they’re walking into my classroom every day, the families in the community that I’m interacting with,” Tisby recalled. “This exposure to generational injustice in the form of racism and economic exploitation is clashing with this Reformed and evangelical tradition I’m in, which doesn’t seem to have much to say about the real-world material social issues. So, I’m starting to ask questions of my faith and what does my faith have to do with what I’m seeing every day in the [Mississippi River] Delta.”
Tisby proposed that people need to understand the subtleties occurring, “It’s not as if Reformed and evangelical leaders are saying we shouldn’t care about anyone, but what they’re saying is that’s ancillary. They would use this language ‘core to the gospel or an implication of the gospel.’ The idea is what is core to the gospel is these sorts of lofty theological questions about salvation and redemption and these intellectually rigorous questions.”
Tisby suggested anything besides those questions falls into “selective social issues.”
“If it was about abortion, they’d be all about that as core to the gospel or some other issue but if it’s about addressing racism or poverty ‘well, you know, sure but don’t make too big a deal about that because that’s replacing the Gospel not core [to the Gospel].’”
This problem created a “what do I do about it moment” for Tisby, led him to enroll at Reformed Theological Seminary, “which is uber conservative and got exposed to firsthand the racism that is in these white churches.”
While at seminary, Tisby started the African American Leader Initiative, exposing him to what he characterized as “naysaying, whispering, and backbiting that went on for people who were engaged in racial justice work.”
He remembered a moment when “one member of our group who was white, just sort of offhandedly said some of the other students have been talking about ALLI [African American Leadership Initiative] and how it’s a distraction from the gospel. They’re questioning why you’re doing it.”
Tisby recalled feeling hurt and deeply cut, “These are the folks I’m sitting next to in class. Unbeknownst to me they think that what I’m doing and what I’m involved in is not ‘truly biblical’. I was like, ‘oh, this is near me, like right next to me.’ This is not some racism far off, this is truly right here on the campus.”
The Color of Compromise author pointed to historic examples: “the election of [Barack] Obama as the first [U.S.] black president or the rise of the tea party, the murder of Trayvon Martin, the rise of Black Lives Matter after Mike Brown’s killing” concluding that “all of these things add up to you can be black or Christian, but you can’t be both.”
Tisby realized, “God made me black on purpose, that’s not an accident and that’s not something I need to shed or leave behind to be Christian. It’s who I am as a Christian. So I volunteered to remove myself but it was very clear that in the circles I was in, the work I was doing and represented wasn’t welcomed.”
Raushenbush praised Tisby’s effort: “You gave people the opportunity to engage these ideas in a welcoming and engaging way. I respect you all enough and this tradition that gave me my conversion enough to engage about these questions, but you also engaged that community and said can we talk about this. It’s part of a broader effort by black Christian leaders who live predominantly within white Christian spaces to say ‘can we all grow’?”
“I think about the Southern Baptist Convention which, you know, its origins are racist,” Raushenbush charged. “It’s not like it’s a mystery or something like that, it’s very clear the Southern Baptist convention was started so slave owners could own people.”
Tisby asserted, “Seeing things, how the Southern Baptist convention gets started if you look at any denomination’s name and it has ‘Southern’ in the name that means pro-slavery.”
The How to Fight Racism author went on to form the Reformed African American Network, now The Witness: a Black Christian Collective.
“Folks like me in my generation, we really believed in this racial reconciliation stuff. We believed it when white churches and Christian leaders said they wanted reconciliation, they wanted diversity. So, we came into ‘their spaces’, their nonprofits, their churches, their seminaries in good faith. And we gave a good faith effort to expand the narrative.”
Tisby contrasted concepts of desegregation and integration.
“It’s the difference between unlocking a door and opening a door and going out on the street and inviting people in and making them feel welcomed.”
Tisby assessed desegregation of schools, businesses, and churches as passive in their removal of barriers for entry.
“If you use the [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] DEI framework, that would be more of the inclusion part. A lot of these Christian spaces desegregated but they didn’t integrate. They didn’t really incorporate black people and other people of color, namely our cultures, our questions that we bring to theology and to God and didn’t really incorporate that into the life of the organization or the congregation.”
Tisby recalled an invitation by the Grove City College multicultural coordinator in October 2020 before the presidential election.
“I go, and the experience is fine, it’s clearly a conservative college and student body, there’s some, you know, light disagreement in questions from students, but nothing outlandish. I move on to the next thing. Not until a year later does this online petition called ‘Save GCC from CRT’, Save Grove City College from Critical Race Theory, and it’s put [forward] by these alumni, by these donors, very few students’ participation at all. But basically, it’s listing all these reasons why Grove City College is going down this ‘wrong left liberal woke’ path and among their grievances they name my appearance at the college a year prior.”
After the 2016 election, Tisby recalled a sinking feeling.
“This isn’t going to be good for the country. It’s not going to be good for black people or the immigrants. I also knew there were people in my church who were celebrating, they were glad, ‘Christianity had come back to the White House’, their concerns were being prioritized. Again, this is not distance. This is my church family, they’ve held my child in their arms, we’ve prayed together, we’ve shared meals together and been in each other’s home. And yet for 81 percent of white evangelicals who voted to pull the lever for [Donald] Trump and have that reality in my own church, it felt like, what am I even doing here?”
“It’s almost like that missionary mentality where for a lot of U.S. missions, history, these white missionaries would go into different countries, and they would serve in different ways, but they would really live separately and apart,” Tisby claimed. “They wouldn’t really be one among the people that must’ve been happening. I try to bring the experiential lived reality of things like White Christian nationalism to bear in my work. This is affecting real people in real congregations.”
Comment by Jason on March 15, 2024 at 8:37 am
In Tisby’s telling, he was never mistreated in any serious way in relatively conservative, white evangelical circles, in fact it sounds like he was generally embraced. Instead he relays that he went to college, grad school, got into some lefty politics. People still didn’t exactly “reject” him, rather they disagreed with him, but apparently in his worldview, this is the same thing as “racism”. Rejecting his politics is the same as rejecting him personally and, apparently, black people in general.
There is a lot to be said about the way the white evangelical church has been compromised by partisan Republican politics, just as the black evangelical church has been compromised by partisan Democratic politics. The problem is Tisby is nowhere near an honest broker in this discussion.
Comment by Mike on March 15, 2024 at 1:52 pm
“.., it’s very clear the Southern Baptist convention was started so slave owners could own people.” What a ridiculous statement. If that statement is true, then the Democratic party was started to promote slavery.
Comment by Tom on March 15, 2024 at 5:38 pm
“unaware, he described, of how embedded race was into religion among his fellow evangelicals.”
Just as I am unaware of how embedded flying unicorns are into religion among my fellow evangelicals.
Comment by MikeB on March 17, 2024 at 1:21 pm
I think there is some miscommunication.
When white and black churches welcome members of any race, they expect that those new members will adhere to the church’s theology.
Bringing in a new spirit to any church is looked on as heresy no matter what the race of the newcomer. In fact it’s rather rude.