The Color of Compromise
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Things I Highlighted is a bulleted list of particular sentences in a book that stuck out to me. These cannot be viewed as general summaries of books, but rather parts of books that struck me in a way that demanded more of my attention. Typically I share one thing I highlighted from each chapter, so they will appear in the same order they appear in the book. This version of Things I Highlighted will cover The Color of Compromise, a book that reveals the truth about the American church's complicity in racism.
The Color of Compromise
Chapter 1: The Color of Compromise
Reading The Color of Compromise is like having a sobering conversation with your doctor and hearing that the only way to cure a dangerous disease is by undergoing an uncomfortable surgery and ongoing rehabilitation. Although the truth cuts like a scalpel and may leave a scar, it offers healing and health. The progress is worth the pain.
Chapter 2: Making Race in the Colonial Era
There is no biological basis for the superiority or inferiority of any human being based on the amount of melanin in her or his skin. The development of the idea of race required the intentional actions of people in the social, political, and religious spheres to decide that skin color determined who would be enslaved and who would be free.
Chapter 3: Understanding Liberty in the Age of Revolution and Revival
Harsh though it may sound, the facts of history nevertheless bear out this truth: there would be no black church without racism in the white church.
Chapter 4: Institutionalizing Race in the Antebellum Era
Whether some Christians felt conflicted or remorseful about their support of slavery matters little. The practice continued, as did the suffering.
Chapter 5: Defending Slavery at the Onset of the Civil War
Two facts about the Civil War are especially pertinent to our examination of race and Christianity in America: that the Civil War was fought over slavery and that countless devout Christians fought and died to preserve it as an institution.
Chapter 6: Reconstructing White Supremacy in the Jim Crow Era
The cross helped me to deal with the brutal legacy of they lynching tree, and the lynching tree helped me to understand the tragic meaning of the cross.
At the same time, the cross provided comfort because black people knew for certain that in his life and death, Christ identified with the oppressed.
Chapter 7: Remembering the Complicity in the North
Compromised Christianity transcends regions. Bigotry obeys no boundaries. This is why Christians in every part of America have a moral and spiritual obligation to fight against the church's complicity with racism.
Chapter 8: Compromising with Racism During the Civil Rights Movement
One of the best-known and most respected evangelical leaders of the time, the Reverend Billy Graham, was a racial moderate when it came to segregation.
Ultimately, Graham made it clear that his primary goal was evangelism. He took measured steps to desegregate his crusades and strongly encouraged Christians to obey the Brown vs. Board decision, but he assiduously avoided any countercultural stances that would have alienated his largely white audience and his supporters.
Chapter 9: Organizing the Religious Right at the End of the Twentieth Century
An honest assessment of racism should acknowledge that racism never fully goes away; it just adapts to changing times and contexts.
Chapter 10: Reconsidering Racial Reconciliation in the Age of Black Lives Matter
Activists have deployed the phrase black lives matter because the cascade of killings indicated that black lives did not, in fact, matter.
Black lives matter does not mean that only black lives matter; it means that black lives matter too. Given the racist patters of devaluing black lives in America's past, it is not obvious to many black people that everyone values black life.
Chapter 11: The Fierce Urgency of Now
Injuries to the church body, as Jesus teaches, are so important that one should interrupt worship to go address the problem. Much of the American church has not yet considered racism to be a serious enough sin to interrupt their regularly scheduled worship, at least not much beyond conversations and symbolic gestures, to repair the relationship.