Echoes from the Past: Historical Reflections on the White Christian Vitriol Toward BLM

2 minute read

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “We are not makers of history; we are made by history.”1 Some have taken this quote to mean history decides who we are because we’re inevitably shaped and formed by the world. Yet in the larger context of the sermon, it becomes clear Dr. King was driving at the exact opposite meaning. It was about taking responsibility.

Dr. King understood that those who do not know their own history will unknowingly conform to it. For us to have any hope of rising above the legacy of such errors, we need to develop a conscious awareness of how that history unfolded at the time and how it continues to influence us into the present. I’ve been thinking about this principle a lot recently while observing vitriol toward the Black Lives Matter movement coming from my fellow white Christians.

As a history major, I keep an eye out for echoes in history. It strikes me that if one’s religious tribe is now opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement and that same religious tribe was once equally opposed to and/or apathetic about the Civil Rights Movement, it’s not implausible that it’s because there’s lingering2 institutional racism present within the organization’s culture.

Since I attended a Baptist seminary in Texas, I’ll use that church tradition as an example. If a person’s Southern Baptist grandpa was once vocally opposed to, or annoyed by, the Civil Rights Movement in 1960, then as a Southern Baptist today he or she might want to be a little extra careful about expressing those same sentiments toward Black Lives Matter in 2020.3

As my fellow contributor, Dustin Gardy, recently put it, “The more primary sources I see, going back to the first white slave owners in this country into the late 1600’s, it’s the exact same wording. It’s not merely similar, it’s the same structures of argument. It’s the same. This is blowing my mind.” Given our troubling history, that should give us all a bit of pause.

This is not one of those “wrong side of history” arguments. I’ve literally never used that overly simplistic and self-righteous rhetorical device, and I never will.4 Yet I do think people of faith need to study their own familial and institutional history as a means of taking a good, hard look in the mirror. Nothin’ but love to our grandparents, but this is one of those times where most of us probably want the apple to fall far from the tree.

Please be mindful of our history. The Civil Rights Movement is widely celebrated today, but in the 1950s and 1960s most white Christians downplayed, dismissed, and denigrated the movement. They said it was anti-Christian. They said it was full of communists. They said the protestors were agitators. They said the severity of police violence was being exaggerated. Some even said they agreed with the cause but not with the timing. Sound familiar?