Appropriating Colorblindness: Southern White Evangelicals and the Transformation of Religious Arguments for Segregation

Historians and pundits alike have long recognized the late 1970s as a period of political mobilization for conservative evangelical Christians who helped sweep Ronald Reagan into office in 1980.  Recent scholarship on this topic has focused on the prominent role southern religious conservatives in particular played in the Right’s political resurgence.  Central to motivating southern religious voters into an organized bloc, these new studies argue, was the attempted regulation of racially segregated private religious schools by the Internal Revenue Serve during the Carter administration.  Had the federal government’s inquiry into private religious education occurred twenty years earlier, most southern evangelicals would have defended segregation as divinely mandated.  In fighting the government’s charges of racial discrimination in 1978, however, the vast majority of private school leaders argued that their schools were by no means intentionally racially exclusive and instead practiced “colorblind” admissions policies. 

My paper examines the shift from theological defenses of racial segregation to the appeal to colorblind ideology by white southern religious conservatives that occurred in the early years of the 1970s.  Using the 1972 denominationally required merger of African American and white Methodist congregations in South Carolina—one of the rare instances that religious southerners were forced to make their thoughts on race known—I will show how white evangelicals moved from espousing a religious defense of segregation to advocating for abandoning racial distinctions altogether.  I will show that, ironically, the rhetorical shift to colorblind ideology that occurred as white evangelicals tried to avoid integration in early 1970s continues to divide white and black evangelicals today who purportedly desire racially inclusive churches.