The Craft of Innovative Theology. Группа авторов. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

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Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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isbn: 9781119601562
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about some kinds of human suffering. In 1919, for example, the organization issued a resolution on the condition and suffering of Jews through persecutions and massacres. It resolved that “All right-thinking men, and especially Christians, should let their voice be heard for the justice, humanity, mercy, forgiveness, and love of true Christianity, as taught by the Lord Jesus Christ; therefore, be it.”28 However, the SBC was unwilling to apply these same kinds of considerations to oppose racism, Jim Crow segregation, and African Americans’ persecution.

      The SBC’s acceptance – even promotion – of African American racial stigma, of African American inferiority, was a dominant current in SBC public pronouncements throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Even after the 1954 Brown decision, however, it continued in its path of denial of Christian brotherhood to African Americans (see Box 3.6).

       Box 3.6

      The author has organized the discussion around key historical periods. The section covering the Jim Crow era is coming to an end; the second, post the 1954 Brown decision, now starts. The theme is that, right up to 1965, there is continuing evasion of any calls for real structural change in the organization of society that protects racism and white supremacy.

      Southern Baptists and Racial Stigma after the 1954 Brown Decision

      Following the Brown decision in 1954, the SBC had merely desegregated its institutions as the law demanded. There was no official expression of Christian compassion offered to African Americans, and the SBC offered no responsibility for having supported the pain of the Jim Crow system until the peak of the civil rights in the mid-1960s. Its official statements and resolutions always were carefully crafted to show interest in African Americans, but they were more concerned with the criminality of mob violence, especially by racial agitators, and with maintaining social order. It began to change its tone only after it became clear that its desire to plant new churches in African American and other ethnic communities had been thwarted by its racist reputation.

       Box 3.7

      Footnote 42 is where the author introduces a contrast with another denomination. She explains that Roman Catholics did take a different approach. This footnote is important. This is a careful history of all the key pronouncements from a denomination. The reader might, at this point in the article, be thinking: Well, were the SBC so much worse than the other denominations? To explore this question in any detail would be a major distraction