Ivan Beals devoted fourteen years as managing editor of Herald of Holiness. During this time he wrote countless articles for church publications and penned ten books—all published by the Nazarene Publishing House, except one. Ironically, that one is his best-written book in this reviewer’s opinion. Our Racist Legacy: Will the Church Resolve the Conflict? is volume 9 in “The Church and the World Series” published by Cross Cultural Publications, a division of Cross Roads Books of Notre Dame, Indiana. The “Forward” is written by Emmanuel Cleaver, former mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, long-time civil rights leader, and a United Methodist pastor.
Beals was generally conservative in his political and social philosophy. Despite his lack of liberal credentials, he was burdened, nonetheless, by the lack of resolution to America’s ongoing racial divide. He began an intensive study of race in America that focused increasingly on the Christian Church’s historic role in the rise and perpetuation of racist attitudes and acts. Beals devoted several years to research, investigating a wide variety of primary sources and consulting some of the best secondary sources in the fields of Black history and American religion. Our Racist Legacy comes straight from the author’s heart. Yet it is a well-informed book, balanced in critical analysis and judgment, though sometimes blunt. It is an excellent introduction to the complicated intraction of race and religion in American society.
Beals avoids many of the cliches that often crop up in typical conversation about race. For instance, he disdains the “down on the South” attitude that makes the South the scapegoat for the racial sins of an entire nation. To the contrary, he confesses at the outset: “Living in Sioux City, Iowa, the first half of this 20th century, I eventually learned that subtle racism mingled with the Northern tradition against slavery” [ix]. It is a personal observation that dovetails with Leon Litwack’s compelling thesis in North of Slavery, which demonstrated that Blacks who escaped from slave states and reached freedom in the North still lived lives bounded by a racial prejudice that prevented the enjoyment of a humane life. As Beals states late in the book, “slavery eventually divided the churches” but the notion of “white supremacy prevailed in both Northern and Southern churches” [p. 186].
Our Racist Legacy is, fundamentally, an extended argument based on historical evidence. Beals explores the role of white religion in sanctioning the slave trade, including the construction of “the myth of Ham,” which asserted that Africans were the descendents of Noah’s son and were under a perpetual curse of servitude on account of their alleged ancestor’s sin. Around the myth of Ham, the Southern evangelical clergy played the leading role in constructing a view of reality in which God was the lynchpin in a hierarchical universe. Within it, everything was seen as subordinated by divine decree to a higher authority—women to men, children to parents, and slaves to masters. All parts of this rigid social orthodoxy had to be maintained, lest the system unravel, so the fate of women was tied as closely to the ideology as that of slaves.
There was, of course, another side to evangelical religion, and Beals deals with that also—namely the role of churchmen in the politics of abolition. Religious liberals, such as Unitarians, were active alongside some Northern evangelicals in advocating the cause of Black emancipation from slavery. And in the era immediately following the Civil War, people of faith took leading roles in educating the Black freedmen. But the abolitionist movement never really captured the heart of Northern churches generally, nor of the North as a region.
The problem, though, is that Christians have historical amnesia. Today they like to emphasize the abolitionist side of the Christian heritage, while ignoring the role that their religion played in the construction of racial barriers. The negative side is often perceived as “ancient history.” In reality, it is anything but that. Freed Blacks experienced nearly a full generation of social progress after the Civil War, but in the 1890s this progress slipped away as “Jim Crow” laws swept the South and the border states. And in this process, Christian ideology was adapted once again to serve conservative social needs at the expense of justice, as Beals recounts in the chapter “How the Church Befriended Jim Crow.” Even the Ku Klux Klan, a post-Civil War development, was billed primarily as a Christian organization and a “defender of the faith.” And the strongest state chapter of the Klan that developed was not on Southern soil but in the State of Indiana. As Beals shows so well, the distortion of Christianity to serve the ends of racial prejudice is not ancient but also recent, not “there” but “here,” and it extends well into the life-times of those who read this.
Thus, we are faced with our Christian legacy—a legacy that straddles both sides of America’s racial divide. And what will do with that legacy? Ignore it or learn from it?
Beals argues convincingly that if we ignore this legacy, we can never move past it. Ignorance is not bliss; it breeds far more problems than self-knowledge will. Those who sense no need for repentance and correction will neither repent nor amend their ways.
By Stan Ingersol, denominational archivist, Church of the Nazarene