God the Original Segregationist

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God the Original Segregationist was a 1954 sermon in defense of racial segregation in the United States by the Rev. Carey Daniel, pastor of First Baptist Church of West Dallas, Texas. Daniel wrote the sermon in response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education , which ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

Contents

The sermon was first published as a pamphlet in 1955, and then later as a collected book of sermons. It was influential with the Christian right in pro-segregation Southern states, who viewed racial integration as a threat to white supremacy and the system of Jim Crow laws which held it in place. These laws were slowly dismantled by the legislative achievements of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Background

The curse of Ham was used by some Christians as a biblical justification for imposing slavery and racial discrimination on black people, although this concept has been criticized for being an ideologically driven misconception. [1] Regarding this matter, the Christian leader Martin Luther King Jr. called such an attempt a "blasphemy" that "is against everything that the Christian religion stands for." [2]

For Southern slave owners who were faced with the abolitionist movement to end slavery, the curse of Ham was one of the many grounds upon which Christian planters could formulate an ideological defense of slavery. [3] Even before slavery, in order to promote economic motivations within Europe associated with colonialism, the curse of Ham was used to shift the common Aristotelian belief that phenotypic differentiation among humans was a result of climatic difference, to a racialist perspective that phenotypic differentiation among the species was due to there being different racial types. [4]

The split between the Northern and Southern Baptist organizations arose over doctrinal issues pertaining to slavery and the education of slaves. At the time of the split, the Southern Baptist group used the curse of Cain as a justification for slavery. Some 19th- and 20th-century Baptist ministers in the Southern United States taught the belief that there were two separate heavens; one for blacks, and one for whites. [5] Southern Baptists have either taught or practiced various forms of racial segregation well into the mid-20th century, though members of all races were accepted at worship services. [6]

Sermon

On Monday, May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. [7] Rev. Carey Daniel, a proponent of segregation and pastor of First Baptist Church of West Dallas, Texas, wrote a response to the decision and delivered it as a sermon on Sunday, May 23, 1954. [8]

Publication

Daniel later published the sermon as a small pamphlet in 1955. It found currency among some conservative white Christians in Southern states who were opposed to racial integration. In a sign of its popularity, the most prominent newspaper in Dallas, the Dallas Morning News , published an abridged version of Daniel's pamphlet on August 13, 1955. [9]

The pamphlet was distributed by Citizens' Councils, a network of white supremacist, segregationist organizations in the Southern United States. [10] Daniel was vice-chairman of the Dallas chapter of the Texas Citizens Council. [11] Over a ten-year period, the pamphlet sold over a million copies. [12] The pamphlet was later published in a collection of sermons.

Legacy

Daniel’s segregationist theology was popular and influential in the political and religious community of Southern states. Just five months after Daniel delivered his sermon, Rev. Guy T. Gillespie, the retiring president of Belhaven University, gave a speech in November 1954 to the Synod of Mississippi of the Presbyterian Church. The address, titled "A Christian View on Segregation", made the same arguments as Daniel and was also highly influential. [13] Five years later, Ross Barnett successfully campaigned on the idea of the biblical god as the original segregationist in the 1959 Mississippi gubernatorial election. [14]

In a 1960 Easter radio address, evangelist Bob Jones Sr., the founder of Bob Jones University (BJU) in South Carolina, declared that god had been the author of segregation and that opposition to segregation was opposition to god. [15] It would take an additional forty years for BJU to finally abandon their racial discrimination policies against students, while spending the four intervening decades continuing to use the Bible to defend segregation up until the year 2000.

In 1995, approximately 130 years after slavery had ended in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention officially denounced racism and apologized for its past defense of slavery. [16]

See also

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References

  1. ↑
    • Goldenberg, David M. (2005). "What did Ham do to Noah?". In Stemberger, Günter; Perani, Mauro (eds.). The Words of a Wise Man's Mouth Are Gracious. Walter de Gruyter. p. 168. ISBN   9783110188493.
    • Lulat, G. (2005). A History of African Higher Education from Antiquity to the Present: A Critical Synthesis. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. pp. 85–86. ISBN   9780313068669.
    • Metcalf, Alida C. (2005). Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (1st ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press. p. 164. ISBN   978-0292712768.
  2. ↑ "Paul's Letter to American Christians". King Research and Education Institute, Stanford University. Archived from the original on October 2, 2013.
  3. ↑ Boles, John B. (October 2003). "Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery". The American Historical Review. 108 (4): 1150–1151. doi:10.1086/ahr/108.4.1150. ISSN   1937-5239.
  4. ↑ Fredrickson, George M. (2015). Racism: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 44. doi:10.1515/9781400873678. ISBN   9781400873678.
  5. ↑ "Land of the Till Murder". Ebony . April 1956. Archived from the original on 2005-03-11.
  6. ↑ Miller, Randall M.; Smith, John David (1988). Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery . Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. p.  78. ISBN   0-313-23814-6. Slaves were accepted for membership in the same manner as whites. After expressing a desire to join a church, one was required to relate his or her religious experience. If the congregation was favorably impressed by one's testimony, the applicant was accepted into the fellowship and was baptized. When black church members moved from one community to another, they were given letters of dismissal which they might place with another Baptist church. Black church members worshiped in the sanctuary with whites, participated in the service of Holy Communion, and contributed to help support the various programs of the denomination. Still blacks and females in antebellum Baptist churches held a membership status subordinate to that of white adult males, since that group determined denominational policies and procedures.
  7. ↑ Feldman, Glenn (2005). Politics and Religion in the White South. The University Press of Kentucky. ISBN   9780813123639. pp. 106-109.
  8. ↑ Daniel 1955. Title page description.
  9. ↑ Miller, Edward H. (2015). Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy. University of Chicago Press. ISBN   9780226205410. pp. 71-74; 176.
  10. ↑ Herring, Taylor O. (2015). "'All That is Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is That Good Men Do Nothing': Anticommunism, Protestant Christianity, and State Sovereignty in the Civil Rights Era South Archived 2022-05-17 at the Wayback Machine ". University of Southern Mississippi. Honors Theses. pp. 23-25.
  11. ↑ Dallas FBI file 105-484A
  12. ↑ Weinberg, Carl R. (2021). Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America. Cornell University Press. ISBN   9781501759307.
  13. ↑ Chapell, David L. (2009). A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN   9780807895573.
  14. ↑ Kinder, Donald R. Lynn M. Sanders (1996). Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals. University of Chicago Press. ISBN   9780226435749. p. 221.
  15. ↑ Turner, 225, 369
  16. ↑ Kunnerth, Jeff (21 June 1995). "Baptists Renounce Racist Past". Orlando Sentinel.

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