I’m old enough to remember when theaters forced African Americans to sit in the balconies, public transportation authorities required them to sit in the back of the buses or train cars, and restaurants served them only if they came to the back door.  The motto of most businesses in the 50’s and 60’s in my neck of the woods could very well have been, “If you’re black, go to the back.”

The belief in white supremacy was seldom questioned in my home town.  It was everywhere—in the schools (separate but equal—an astonishing logical fallacy), in the social and fraternal organizations, and, sadly, in the churches.   The undeniable truth that turns my cheeks crimson to this day is that I never saw a person of color in my home church.  The fact is that the most segregated hour of the week was 11:00 a.m. on Sunday mornings.  Incredibly, that statement is still true despite the discernible improvements in race relations over the past five decades.

I remember the racial tensions of the 1960’s as if it were yesterday.  I recall warnings that “freedom riders” from the North were coming to town to picket local businesses.  It happened.  There was a rumor that representatives of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference intended to integrate the churches.  They were going to march through the streets and join the pickets in front of businesses that practiced discrimination.  Unannounced they were going to enter white churches on Sunday and ask to be seated.

What I am writing now grieves me as much as anything I have ever written.  It involves people that I loved and admired--people who taught me to love Jesus and love a lost world.  But those same people were so blinded by their prejudice they could not see the incongruity between their faith in Jesus and their lovelessness toward people of color.

Here’s the story.  When the deacons of our Louisiana church heard the rumor that African Americans were going to enter white churches and demand to be seated, some of the leading men of the church said—and I heard them say it—that they would have their revolvers with them as they served as ushers on Sunday morning and that no “n_____” was going to get into our church.

How can one explain such an attitude?  How can one process the historical fact that, according to DeYoung, Emerson, Yancey, and Kim (UNITED BY FAITH, Oxford University Press, 2003), throughout the United States in the early 20th century “[a]pproximately forty thousand ministers were members of the Ku Klux Klan with Protestant ministers serving as Grand Dragons in Pennsylvania, Texas, North Dakota, and Colorado”?  How do you reconcile the logic of sending missionaries to Africa with the policy of excluding Africans from your home church?

I’m ashamed.  I have grieved for years over the enormity of our collective sins against African Americans, Native Americans, and anybody who doesn’t look like “us.”  My grief and shame are not merely my personal identification with the flaws of my forefathers and contemporaries; they are the result of my passion for the honor of Jesus Christ, whose people—the ones who claim Him as Lord—have failed Him so miserably in this regard.  The word “Christian” means “little Christ.”  I suppose in an ironic way that title is descriptive of those of us who were in complicity with this xenophobia—we were very “little” like Christ.

Jesus Christ was the archetypal anti-racist.   It was no mere coincidence that the Father sent His Son to be born and live for 33 years in the very middle of the geographic center of the known world; that his earthly skin would not have been black or white, but the Middle Eastern blend of the two; that He could never legitimately be called “the white man’s god.”  True Christianity teaches that there is only one world created by the one, true God.  It teaches that there is only one race—the human race (Acts 17:26). There is no white race and black race and yellow race and red race or brown race.  There is the human race—all descendents of an original set of parents.

Immediately the educated reader might say that “modern science” has proven that the idea of an original pair is an outdated myth and that enlightened people cannot accept such nonsense.

Alright, let’s turn to a scientist and to scientific “theories” of the “origin of the species” to see if we can find help with the issue of race.

Charles Darwin taught that natural selection and the evolutionary process favored certain races because of inherent biological advantages.  The full title of his 1859 work was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin’s writings were used by  communists and Nazis to support their own perverted forms of racism, economics and politics.  The greatest bloodbaths in history happened in the 20th century as a result of this bad science wedded to economic and social and political theories and speculative philosophy.  Even in the United States, racism informed by the pseudo-science of “natural selection” became the fuel for the advocacy of forced sterilization, birth control, and abortion—under the guise of helping women and the poor, but driven by the philosophy that certain races and classes were inherently inferior.  The vestiges of this bad science and social policy are alive today in the organizations that promote and provide abortions.  The original goal, according to the founders of the abortion industry, was to purify the gene pool and eliminate those peoples destined to be a drain on society.

Christians have used the Bible to defend racism. Communists and Nazis and other atheists have used scientific theories to justify racism.  To paraphrase an aphorism from another context, “Racism has many defenders, but no defense.”

Racism blights humanity.  It is a scandal in the church.  It dehumanizes people and dishonors Jesus Christ.

Can a racist go to heaven?  I’m not God, so I don’t get a vote on that question.  I do believe that only those who have received Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord are true Christians.  So the question could be phrased, “Can a person believe in Jesus and still embrace racial prejudice?”

You will have to answer that for yourself.  If I were God, I might let persons with prejudice in their hearts go to heaven.  I suppose they could ride the Glory-bound Transportation System to Beulah Land.  But they would have to sit in the back of the bus!

Pastor Alan Day