Why Are Some Christian Institutions So Bad at Remembering Their Racial History?
Why Are Some Christian Institutions So Bad at Remembering Their Racial History?
An examination of one seminary's whitewashed retelling of its own origin story.
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When I began seminary in 2011, the staff gave everyone in the incoming class a copy of a short book detailing the history of the school to commemorate its fortieth anniversary.
Mind you, the anniversary was back in 2006, and five years later they were still handing out free copies, but whatever.
I honestly never did more than flip through a couple of pages when I first received the book. Then it ended up on a shelf for the next five years of grad school. Then it ended up in a box for another six years after we moved.
On a recent Saturday, I was cleaning the closet and I stumbled across the book. I didn’t really want to keep cleaning, so I decided to take a closer look at this examination of the first 40 years of the seminary.
What I read was a shockingly whitewashed history that reminded me how bad some Christian institutions are at remembering the past and why we have to take responsibility for our own historical knowledge.
I went to Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi. It is a nondenominational institution, but it has strong ties with southern Presbyterianism. What makes it “southern” Presbyterian is the defense of slavery and, after the Civil War, the ways its leaders clung to the Jim Crow racial hierarchy.
In a section entitled “Southern Presbyterian Decline,” the author, John Muether, a professor of church history and dean of libraries at the school, details the divergence between northern and southern Presbyterians.
To fully understand the rationale for the founding of Reformed Theological Seminary, one needs to go back over 100 years. With the outbreak of the War Between the States in 1861, American Presbyterians divided along the Mason-Dixon line, when Presbyterians in the South formed the Presbyterian Church of Confederate States of America.
If you’re waiting for some mention of slavery or how southern Presbyterians split from their northern counterparts in defense of the “peculiar institution” don’t bother. There is no mention of race, white supremacy, or chattel slavery in the book.
In fact, Muether doesn’t even mention the Civil War. He calls it the “War Between the States.” I don’t know if this was his own decision or that of the editors, but the choice has significant implications.
This term has found various usage since the 19th century, but it was especially championed by southerners who wanted the war to be remembered as a conflict between two equal and sovereign nations rather than a seditious rebellion of the slaveholding class against their own government. (Maybe we should use the term Frederick Douglass used for the Civil War—the “Slaveholders’ Rebellion.”)
Muether goes on to explain why Presbyterians remained divided along regional lines. “In the North, there was a strong impulse toward progressivism—the idea that Presbyterianism must continually evolve to meet the challenges of the modern age.” He mentions the bugaboos of Darwinism and higher biblical criticism as examples of northern progressivism.
By contrast, “In the South, there was a tendency toward the preservation of the past.” The author does not even hint that the past many southern Presbyterians wanted to preserve was one of slaveholding and, later, Jim Crow segregation and exclusion.
Far from repudiating the racist roots of southern Presbyterianism, he uplifts notorious proslavery theologians as exemplars of the tradition.
Southern Presbyterians were steeped in the tradition of old-school giants such as James Thornwell, John Girardeau, [Benjamin Morgan] Palmer, and Robert Lewis Dabney…
These “giants”—especially Thornwell, Palmer, and Dabney—championed white supremacy and believed the rightful place of Black people was in subordination to white men.
I remember sitting in my seminary classes and hearing about these southern Presbyterian theologians with no mention of their support for the Confederacy or their white supremacist views.
They were lauded as adroit bible scholars whose example we should follow. It was the theological equivalent of holding up Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis as models of piety and patriotism.
This section of the book concludes with a description of growing theological differences between northern and southern Presbyterians—essentially doctrinal conservatism vs. modernism and neo-orthodoxy. Surely these were important differences, but what is missing?
As white Christians in the United States often do, their historical examinations often focus on intricate matters of doctrinal difference. There is relatively little analysis of relevant historical figures acted in light of Christian ethics regarding love of neighbor and honoring the image of God.
Reading the histories of many Christian institutions is like reading a systematic theology textbook. There is a heavy emphasis on doctrinal beliefs without corresponding attention given to how the institution and its leaders actually lived out the faith.
This lack of attention to the ethical choices of white Christians is how you get an institutional history that lauds its southern roots without mentioning its support of slavery, racism, and white supremacy.
On the occasion of a southern seminary’s fortieth anniversary, a more helpful book would have been one recounting the many failings of its founders to address issues of racism and inequality(especially in Jackson, Mississippi!).
No one would begrudge a Christian institution thanking God for its longevity and chronicling its own history, but it does not honor God to pretend as if one of the most glaring shortcomings of the institution simply does not exist.
Yet I would not have even known how bad this institutional history was if I had not taken ownership of my own historical knowledge—a task we must all undertake.
As a young seminary student with only passing knowledge of U.S. racial history, I might have missed the bright red flags that this institutional history presents. I might not have known the coded language often used to present a more favorable retelling of events than the facts afford. I might have been blinded by the glare of a whitewashed past.
What is the history of your own institution? Who wrote it? What was their purpose? How candid is it? Have they downplayed issues of racism and injustice or even skipped over them altogether?
Just as no person has a perfect past, neither does any institution. This should not be a reason to avoid historic shortcomings, but to tell the truth about them and commit to positive change.
If we fail to tell the unvarnished truth about racism in any institution, then we consign ourselves to a future that will contain dreadful echoes of the past.
I appreciate that final question: Do we need the history of our institutions?
And then the implied second question: Do we need *all* the history?
We do like to imagine that the institutions that we've given our allegiance to are without fault. Perhaps there are slight problems with the past, of course, but they were either minor disagreements *or* "they were men of their times."
But I think it's good to look at our institutions and see all of what they are. They did not become what they are today by simply becoming established today. They have a past that can and should be examined.
I was raised Presbyterian, in a mix of both Southern and Northern Presbyterian churches on the West Coast where there wasn't so much of a definite line between the Masons and the Dixons. :) I definitely enjoyed both experiences, and I probably will never get away from my Reformed formation even though I am becoming more aligned with the ideas and theologies of the Anabaptists/Mennonites.
One thing that just floored me was reading a paper in my 50s that was published in the 1850s as a defense of enslavement by the Southern Presbyterian Church. (REPORT ON SLAVERY: Southern Presbyterian Review, 5.3 (January 1852) 380-394.) Here I was, unaware of anything about the past except some vague notions of John Knox and Geneva and the Book of Order. And I read the words of "respected" theologians from the American South proudly and defiantly proclaiming their divine authority to rule and use Black people because of the inherent superiority of the white man, especially the white male Christian.
I felt robbed and cheated by the church. I don't think that anyone in the congregation knew much about it. Perhaps the pastors did as part of their education and seminary work. But in all my memories of attending the Presbyterian church with all its intricate theologies and worship and even floor plans for the buildings, there was no mention of how it was that we were *American* Presbyterians and not, say, Scottish or Presbyterians (who have their own complicated past--see John Knox, for example).
Would I have stayed in the church had I known the past? Honestly, probably not. Even back then, before I comprehended the nature of American history and our long-term abuse of Black bodies, I knew enough about enslavement to realize it was a Bad Thing, and certainly a *defense* of it would have shocked me.
What's even more curious, though, is back then I *was* a student of my own denomination, and I read books about our past. And they simply didn't mention this feature of the past, whether it was the Northern or Southern Presbyterian church. Yes, they mentioned the split, but even that never pointed out the severity of the heresy proclaimed by the Southern Presbyterians. To me it came across more as an issue of polity.
Yes, I might have left the church back then. I can understand the reluctance of an institution to talk about its past honestly because of this reason, that the people voluntarily holding themselves within the boundaries of that institution might leave if they were to find out the sordid details of the past.
But -- how can a *church* that says Jesus is not only Lord but Truth shy away from the realities of their history?
I have a quote from Eric Foner saved and printed for my review: "This history we were taught could not have produced the present we were living in." I cannot understand this present unless I examine all of history. Creating a history of the church--of any institution--that leaves out the shameful parts leaves us ignorant and incapable of seeing how our choices today will affect our future tomorrows. We can't be faithful to our principles and substantive in our choices if we think that what we do won't echo throughout the generations to come.
Studying that past can help us see how short-term decisions and cloudy language can hide the truth of our terrible choices from ourselves as well as to see how easy it is to do the same today. We cannot unmake the past but we cannot build a better today if we will not speak the truth about our past.
It's too bad that the history of the Presbyterian Church that I learned doesn't match the history of what actually happened. That created history was the stuff of legends and heroes, of mythical better times and better men. The real history shows that there is no generation that does not justify its terrible choices, and perhaps that is the most important lesson that a true history can teach us.
Anyway, thanks again for prompting me to think about my own past, my own choices, my ignorance, and the satisfaction of knowing better so I can do better.