You can fast forward to segregation in 1950. There’s a guy named G. T. Gillespie, who was the former president of Belhaven College, now University, who gives an address to a bunch of Presbyterian pastors about the biblical case for racial segregation, right? And then throughout the civil rights movement you have, white evangelicals, many times on the side of segregation and racism. And even to this day. We have people, [who are] slavery apologists in 2021, basically saying, you know, ‘slavery wasn’t that bad’ kind of a thing.

So, religion and specifically Christianity has always been in this mix. Robert P. Jones’ most recent book is called White Too Long, and he’s the head of the Public Religion Research Institute. So his book is packed with data, polls and statistics, and basically, all of it shows that being white, and Christian makes you more likely to be racist and makes it so that you hold on to those racist beliefs, more tightly, which is haunting.

It reveals that oftentimes we retrofit our theology to fit our ideology, and that we follow the culture first, rather than Christ. And so a lot of what we’re seeing is people who are racist going back to the Bible to justify that racism. But now, their bigotry is baptized in the Bible, which makes it have a lot more sticking power because it’s not just what ‘I believe’ or ‘our political party believes.’ This is ‘what God is teaching.’

How to Fight Racism Part 1: Share the History

When you learn the specifics of history, it invokes an emotional response, which can lead to empathy. Empathy is the foundation of solidarity and anti-racist action. Until we can understand one another on this human level—that these are other human beings who are suffering because of racism and white supremacy; that hurts me like it hurts them; when one part of the body hurts we all hurt—until we get to that point, we can’t really make progress.

How to Fight Racism Part 2: Personal Testimony

Often, [personal testimony] is a good entryway into conversation. So many people, especially the folks who are sort of most adamantly opposed to any idea of racial justice, they’re not going to read the book. They’re not going to read the article. They’re gonna call CNN fake news. They might believe, or at least listen, to you. When you tell your story of why and how racial justice became important to you, you’re essentially sharing a testimony, and a testimony of one’s experience.

You could even call it a conversion to racial justice and opening up to this form of being a disciple of Jesus in the world.

Why I Stay

By God’s grace, no, I’ve never thought seriously about leaving the Christian faith because I knew Christianity was much more than what white people made it.

There’s wonderful scholarship being done now, on the early African origins of Christianity.

So what we have to realize is that Christianity was around a lot longer and before “whiteness.” Even many of the earliest Africans who were forcibly brought to North America were Christians themselves. Christianity has also been the motivation for liberation among lots of different marginalized groups and specifically black Christians. And so I look at people like that—Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Medgar Evers who were all devoted Christians. [Christians] also dedicated their time and energy and even sacrificed their lives for the cause of justice—not in spite of, or as an addendum to their Christianity, but as core and central to their Christianity. So that makes me say we have this “great cloud of witnesses.” How could I abandon the faith because a few white people want to, in the name of ungodly, sinful ideas, corrupt and co-op, the Christianity that Christ taught?

JEMAR TISBY, MDiv, is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Color of Compromise, and the new book How to Fight Racism. His non-profit organization, The Witness, seeks to train young, black Christian leadership in the black, prophetic tradition.