Take & Read: New titles in American religious history
In Review
Myth of Colorblind Christians
Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era
To Know the Soul of a People
Religion, Race, and the Making of Southern Folk
Sincerely Held
American Secularism and Its Believers
Adopting for God
The Mission to Change America Through Transnational Adoption
Separating Church and State
A History
Before the Religious Right
Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States
The Church of the Dead
The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas
By Jesse Curtis
New York University Press
Jesse Curtis, a historian at Valparaiso University, explores how White evangelical Christians gradually abandoned segregationist theologies in favor of a “gospel of colorblindness” that, while not explicitly racist, often left racist systems unchallenged. Curtis eschews the world of formal politics and shows how the evangelical gospel of colorblindness was forged in more private spaces: homes, schools, and churches. Particularly interesting is his discussion of how the church growth movement emerged from the context of the civil rights movement. CGM advocates like Donald McGavran and C. Peter Wagner insisted that racially homogeneous congregations were not racist but rather reflected the human desire to be with “our kind of people” (as Wagner titled one of his books). Though not polemical, Curtis shows in painful detail how White evangelicals, when given the choice between confronting racism and ignoring it in the name of church unity, almost always chose the latter.
