From “US: The Resurrection of American Terror” by Rev. Kenneth W. Wheeler
In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin asks a salient question: “…If [God’s] love was so great and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far?” (1963, 45). And the question that became important for me and that guides this book is this: If white Christians and Black Christians are speaking of God in the same way and speaking of God’s love with the same understanding, why has the white Church been so slow to divest itself from a theological view that has been polluted and tainted by the heresy of white supremacy? The evidence of that glaring contradiction was visible for me at a young age each time I would pass First Baptist, the large white congregation near downtown Jackson.
First Baptist extended at least two city blocks. The church was located near the seat of government power. The Governor’s Mansion was neary, as well as the State Capitol Building. Some of the city’s most powerful leaders were members of this church. On occasion, we would ride past the church on the bus headed into downtown. It was illegal for Black people to attend that church. It was illegal for Black people to even enter that church. I wondered as we rode past if the people on the inside prayed to the same God that I heard my mother praying to every morning. I wondered if their God was a God of love. I wondered if the pastor of that church ever thought about the evil of Jim Crow segregation.
I determined that whatever God the people inside of that church were praying to could not be the same God that my mother was praying to, nor the same God that Black people were praying to. If he was the same God, the governor and members of the legislature would go back to their offices and immediately draft legislation to dismantle the evil system of segregation with all deliberate speed. They would come out of that church changed and committed to making things right for the Black citizens of Jackson as well as the entire Black population of the state of Mississippi.
The governor at the time was Ross Barnett, who was a staunch segregationist. Barnett was also a Sunday School teacher who famously once said, “God was the original segregationist. He put the Black man in Africa…He made white people white because he wanted them white, and he intended for white people to stay white.” (See Teutsch, July 2020.) This clearly was a perversion. It is the perversion that continues to pollute white evangelicalism, making it impossible for Black people to trust this kind of God. The white God created a crisis for me even as a young child. If God was a God of love why did white people not love us? Why did white people treat us with such contempt?
The apartheid that white people supported and nurtured in Mississippi and in all of the South was based on sheer hatred and not love.