It Didn't Have to be This Way: Reflections on The Color of Compromise

Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes

It didn't have to be this way. This is the truth that echoed through the chambers of my mind. In The Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby provided a haunting historical account of the church’s complicity in racism in this country.

Our past as a nation could be different if those in power had made intentional decisions to honor the image of God in all people. However, the opposite occurred, resulting in the heinous history that is embedded into every square inch of our society.

It didn’t have to be this way, though. As he wrote, Tisby pinpointed numerous occasions when those who cached control could have relinquished it for the flourishing of others.

 “Throughout this journey several themes dot the horizon of history. One notable theme is that white supremacy in the nation and the church was not inevitable" (p. 8).*

“This book says, ‘Don’t look away.’ Don’t look away from Christians using the Bible to justify the inferiority of African people. Don’t look away from the political cowardice Christians displayed when they could have changed the laws of the land” (p. 11).

“To grasp how American Christians constructed and cooperated with racism, one has to realize that nothing about American racism was inevitable. There was a period, from about 1500 to 1700, when race did not predetermine one’s station and worth in society… [This chapter] shows how individuals and groups who had power chose dividends over dignity and made America a place where darker-skinned people occupied a limited and inferior role in society. Through a series of immoral choices, the foundations were laid for race-based stratification” (pp. 19-20).

“Colonists could have, and may have initially, seen Africans in America as laborers just like any other and patterned their economy and politics to allow for their full inclusion. American history could have happened another way. Instead, racist attitudes and the pursuit of wealth increasingly relegated black people to a position of perpetual servitude and exploitations” (p. 30).

“At the outset of the nineteenth century, the United States could have become a worldwide beacon of diversity and equality. Fresh from the Revolutionary War, it could have adopted the noble ideals written in the Declaration of Independence. It could have crafted a truly inclusive Constitution. Instead, white supremacy became more defined as the nation and the church solidified their identities” (pp. 60-61).

“Although the demise of legalized slavery could have led to full citizenship privileges for black people, white supremacists devised new and frighteningly effective ways to enforce the racial hierarchy. They romanticized the antebellum South as an age of earnest religion, honorable gentlemen, delicate southern belles, and happy blacks content in their bondage. They also constructed a new social order, what we refer to as Jim Crow – a system of formal laws and informal customs designed to reinforce the inferiority of black people in America” (p. 103).

“White citizens and leaders had an unprecedented opportunity to craft a country that would truly honor the ‘inalienable rights’ of its residents. Reconstruction could have been the start of a new America where black people enjoyed the full promises of liberty. Racial reforms could have led to the inclusion of other historically marginalized groups, including women, Native Americans, and the poor. While some significant reforms did happen, powerful forces conspired to re-create the former racial hierarchy in a post-emancipation nation” (p. 104).

“The Plessy v. Ferguson decision legalized what soon became the standard practice throughout the country for the next sixty years – the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine. Had the nation’s highest court ruled differently in this case, the color lines of the twentieth century might have been drawn much differently. In Plessy v. Ferguson Americans had a choice – would they treat black people as full humans and fellow citizens. The court’s decision means they chose not to do so and in the years that followed many white Christians upheld racial segregation, defending it as a biblical mandate” (pp. 115-116).

“Owning a home in a neighborhood one chooses has often been seen as a decision based on hard work, individual effort, and free choice. Consequently, patterns of racial segregation appear to be the innocuous and unavoidable coincidence of individual preference, devoid of any major racist component. Views like these belie the deliberate and intentional nature of residential segregation. Through a series of rules and customs, government employees and real estate agents have actively engineered neighborhoods and communities in such a way as to maintain racial segregation” (p. 149).

“While not all moderate Christians were racists or feared integration, enough went along with the Jim Crow consensus for those like Martin Luther King Jr. to abandon the hope that they would find allies among their white brothers and sisters in Christ in their struggle for black freedom. Instead, the American church largely chose to compromise with racism through passive complicity, rejecting yet another opportunity to come alongside black people in the nation’s ‘Second Reconstruction’” (p. 185).

Our past as a nation determined the future we have inherited. This means that conscious and intentional decisions were made by white people to achieve the supremacy of whiteness in the United States. The plan from the conception of this country was for white men to secure and maintain authority. Tisby addressed this when he wrote, “White complicity with racism isn’t a matter of melanin, it’s a matter of power. Other nations have different dynamics. Whether society is stratified according to class, gender, religion, or tribe, communities tend to put power in the hands of a few to the detriment of many. In the United States, power runs along color lines, and white people have the most influence” (p. 6). When we scan the positions of power today, we see that authority is still largely held by white men. From a worldly perspective, the systems are not broken, then; instead, they are operating exactly as they were designed to do as I've seen explained by numerous activists.

Though the leaders who set these lies of white supremacy in place would be proud to see that their plan has prevailed for centuries, God is not pleased, and for this we must repent and repair. Church, it never had to be this way. Multiple missed opportunities of the past do not have to continue determining our future. It doesn't have to be this way.

“Yet if people made deliberate decisions to enact inequality, it is possible that a series of better decisions could begin to change this reality” (p. 20).

“If the church hopes to see meaningful progress in race relations during the twenty-first century, then it must undertake bold, costly actions with an attitude of unprecedented urgency. The solutions are simple though not easy. They are, in many cases, obvious though unpopular. No matter their difficulty or distastefulness, however, they are necessary in order to change the narrative of the American church and race” (p. 238).

“People of faith exercised remarkable ingenuity and energy erecting racial barriers. If the twenty-first century is to be different from the previous four centuries, then the American church must exercise even more creativity and effort in breaking down racial barriers than it took to erect them in the first place” (p. 240).

Christian, ask yourself what you can lay down to effect change in this nation. We are to be “making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3). Being eager to maintain the unity of the bond of peace is not an invitation for people to assimilate and adopt the perspectives, gifts, attitudes, or behaviors most highly valued by whiteness. It is a call to every Christian to count others more significant (Phil. 2:3), and many Christians of color have spent centuries being the primary people putting aside their preferences to not appear divisive to those in the majority culture. The time for white people to look to the interests of others (Phil. 2:4) came long ago, but we have yet to take this prescriptive command seriously.

History teaches us that black people were always telling the truth. We can look back and see that they were right. The wisdom and discernment of black Christians must be acknowledged by white Christians. Tisby wrote, “Black Christians in America have always discerned the moral hypocrisy of ‘slave-holder religion’ and have intuitively grasped the liberatory impulse of the gospel” (p. 72). White Christians should be positioning ourselves now to learn from black Christians because they saw, and continue to see, compromised Christianity and devotion to Christ conflated with other values. The syncretism that continues to plague white churches is deadly because this is sin and sin kills. Therefore, we should eagerly seek out black Christians to assist us in identifying our sins so we can mortify the sins in our own lives and in the culture. We should lay down everything we can, holding onto nothing that we think gives us worth, in order to advance the Gospel. The more status, freedoms, power, wealth, or privileges we have should lead to having more to lay down, more to count as rubbish (Phil. 3), for the sake of loving God, loving our neighbor, and counting others more important than ourselves. 

Remember, when you look around at the hostility between races right now, it doesn't have to be this way. Forsake any excuses and get to work to more fully embody the unity achieved by Christ. Look back to the perfect harmony of creation in the beginning and stretch forward with great anticipation of the eschaton. Christians are the people praying for God’s kingdom to come and His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, so let us push the culture toward this with great humility.

“In that heavenly congregation, we will finally see the culmination of God’s gathering a diverse people unified by faith in Christ. We will not all be white; we will not all be black. We will surround the throne of the Lamb as a redeemed picture of the ethnic and cultural diversity God created. Our skin color will no longer be a source of pain or arrogant pride but will serve as a multihued reflection of God’s image. We will no longer be alienated by our earthly economic or social position. We will not clamor for power over one another. Our single focus will be worshiping God for eternity in sublime fellowship with each other and our Creator. This picture of perfection has been bequeathed to believers not as a distant reality that we can merely long for. Instead, the revelation of the heavenly congregation provides a blueprint and a motivation to seek unity right now. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, ‘your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt. 6:10). Christians have been mandated to pray that the racial and ethnic unity of the church would be manifest, even if imperfectly, in the present. Christ himself brought down ‘the dividing wall of hostility’ that separated humanity from one another and from God (Eph. 2:14). Indeed, reconciliation across racial and ethnic lines is not something Christians must achieve but a reality we must receive” (pp. 14-15).

Leaders in the Christian community are not to be like the “rulers of the Gentiles” who lord it over them and “act as tyrants.” Instead, “whoever wants to become great… must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first…must be your slave” (Matthew 20:25-28). White Christian, do you bristle or bestow honor when presented with the opportunity to follow the example of Christ in Philippians 2? If we attempt to procure and retain power, this does not put the Gospel on display. Rather, willingly and humbly putting down any perceived rights does. Of course reconciling and repairing is costly. To reconcile and repair our broken fellowship with God and others, Christ gave Himself up, laying down His very life. In order to follow this model, all who claim to know Christ should be ready to give up everything, even their own lives, to reconcile and repair, remembering that Christ fixed what He didn't break. An implication of this is that we should be fixing damaged systems and relationships, even if we didn't break them, or don’t think we contributed to the enmity. 

Through reading The Color of Compromise, I was reminded of Tisby’s A.R.C. of racial reconciliation. In this model, awareness of racial issues for white people should inform intentional and healthy relationships with people of color, which should result in commitment to explicitly antiracist actions. With the A.R.C. in mind, think about these words from Tisby:

“The forty-fifth president did not produce a racial and political divide between black and white Christians, but he exposed and extended longstanding differences while revealing the inadequacy of recent reconciliation efforts” (p. 236).

“The malleability and impermanence of racial categories help explain how the American church’s compromise with racism has become subtler over time. History demonstrates that racism never goes away; it just adapts” (p. 9).

“This book is about revealing racism. It pulls back the curtain on the ways American Christians have collaborated with racism for centuries. By seeing the roots of racism in this country, may the church be moved to immediate and absolute antiracist action” (p. 4).

“Progress is possible, but we must learn to discern the difference between complicit Christianity and courageous Christianity. Complicit Christianity forfeits its integrity by worshiping the idol of whiteness. Such Christianity has lost its moral authority by devaluing the image of God in people of African descent…By contrast, courageous Christianity embraces racial and ethnic diversity. It stands against any person, policy, or practice that would dim the glory of God reflected in the life of every human being. These words are a call to abandon complicit Christianity and move toward courageous Christianity” (pp. 16-17).

I have never regretted listening to and implementing the advice of my friends about how I can better love them and show honor to them. The same applies here for white Christians toward our black siblings.

The release date for The Color of Compromise is Jan 22^nd, and you can pre-order by clicking here to access some amazing bonuses through midnight on January 21^st. The pre-order bonuses are:

•  A sneak peek of the Foreward by Lecrae and Chapters 1 & 2
•  An exclusive podcast episode from Pass The Mic with Tyler Burns and Jemar Tisby discussing the book
• Exclusive videos of Jemar answering questions about the book.

You can listen to the first chapter of the audiobook by clicking here.

* All quotes were taken from an advance reading copy of The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby.