Historian Curtis Evans’s new guide, A Theology of Brotherhood: The Federal Council of Church buildings and the Drawback of Race (NYU Press, 2024), tells a forgotten story about Christian anti-racist organizing in the US. Nicely earlier than the Civil Rights Motion of the Fifties and Sixties and the work of spiritual activists like Martin Luther King Jr., progressive Christian excited about racism was formatively formed by the Federal Council of Church buildings (FCC). The FCC was an ecumenical group based within the early twentieth century to signify over thirty, predominantly white mainline and liberal Protestant denominations. Evans’s guide tells the story of how the FCC got here to be a nationwide chief within the motion for racial equality, together with the way it pushed church buildings to take extra progressive positions on race and helped to put the groundwork for later, extra well-known efforts like King’s.
Evans, Affiliate Professor of the Historical past of Christianity and Religions within the Americas at The College of Chicago Divinity College and College Co-Director of the Marty Middle, stated he was motivated to write down the guide as a result of he thinks the FCC represents an essential voice in American non secular excited about race, one typically ignored by students and the general public. “At a time when many white Christians, particularly Southern Protestants, have been utilizing the bible and Christian theology to justify and even additional entrench racial hierarchies, the FCC was doing exactly the other.”
The FCC was based in Philadelphia in 1908. It was a part of the broader Social Gospel Motion, a component inside liberal Protestantism that utilized Christian values and teachings to problems with social inequality, particularly these confronted by the poor and dealing class. The FCC referred to as for truthful wages for all, an finish to little one labor, and protected and sanitary circumstances for employees. It organized welfare campaigns and training for the working class and helped to mediate labor disputes, together with a number of main strikes, on the East Coast. It did so beneath the banner of what Evans calls a “theology of brotherhood”: the idea within the divine interconnectedness of humankind that emphasised equality, solidarity, and group.
It was not till the Nineteen Twenties, nevertheless, that the FCC’s theology of brotherhood was utilized to the difficulty of race. “The FCC noticed race and racism as a Southern downside,” Evans stated, “which it typically termed ‘the Negro Drawback,’ that means that the struggles of African People have been an issue primarily for Southern Christians.” The FCC represented primarily white Northern church denominations, which have been in a position to stay remoted from the circumstances Black People confronted.
Evans argues that two essential elements modified the group’s orientation on race. First was the Nice Migration, the large motion of African People from the South to the North and Midwest that started in 1910. The Nice Migration pressured white Christians to witness firsthand the mistreatment, degradation, and poverty many African People skilled, even in supposedly improved circumstances outdoors the South. Second have been the race riots of the “Purple Summer season” of 1919. Intense mob violence in opposition to African People broke out throughout twenty-six American cities, bringing into stark reduction the seriousness of “the issue of race.”
In response, the FCC established a Division of Race Relations in 1921. It was overseen by George Edmund Haynes, a Columbia-educated sociologist and social servant with a powerful historical past of advocacy on behalf of his fellow African People.
Evans spent years combing via archives in Philadelphia and Nashville to know the intricacies of the FCC’s try to discover a answer to “the issue of race” throughout the nation. He found that it used a singular mixture of biblical interpretation and tutorial analysis to argue that racism and racial inequality violated God’s wishes for humankind. Evans stated that, beneath Haynes’s route, the group crafted the message that “racial oppression had no divine sanction, that racial hierarchies have been a misreading of Christian scriptures.” That put them in direct battle with the views of conversative Protestants, notably these within the South, who used biblical justifications for white supremacy.
“Haynes was satisfied that you just couldn’t argue folks out of racism,” Evans stated. “You couldn’t simply present another principle to white supremacy folks had heard all their lives and anticipate them to be satisfied.” As an alternative, the FCC tried to construct interracial cooperation and group primarily based on common kinship between the races. It initiated a system of pastor swaps between white and Black church buildings and created social gatherings and different “pleasurable experiences” aimed toward lighthearted enjoyable. Haynes thought these constructive, pleasant experiences would construct belief between folks of various identities.
The FCC’s most essential celebration of this type was an annual Race Relations Sunday. One Sunday of every February starting in 1923, collaborating church buildings devoted their providers to spreading what they referred to as “the gospel of goodwill.” They preached that segregation and racial division didn’t should be the legislation of the land. In response to Evans, “their final aim was to create bonds of Christian affection that may break down obstacles of racial distinction and result in concrete motion towards a extra simply, built-in society.”
The FCC additionally made large efforts to interrupt down structural obstacles to African People’ social and financial standing. A method it did this was via training and political advocacy. It grew to become a clearinghouse for a large variety of educational supplies that it circulated throughout the nation, together with informational pamphlets and Sunday college curricula. Many of those centered on the dear contributions of individuals of African descent to American tradition and on biblical explanations for why the races ought to stay in group. The FCC additionally sponsored conferences, workshops, and clinics that taught attendees about essentially the most cutting-edge tutorial analysis on race, which it argued was an essential consider discrediting the pseudo-science utilized by proponents of segregation and Black inferiority.
Evans stated the FCC’s most public try to deal with the issue of race was its decades-long battle for laws to outlaw lynching. This public, vigilante homicide of African People had reached a harrowing peak within the early 1900s. “Lynching was essentially the most brutal, most violent type of racism in opposition to Black People,” Evans stated. By the tip of the nineteenth century, a median of a couple of hundred African People was being hanged, shot, or in any other case murdered by white supremacists annually.
Together with the Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Folks (NAACP), the FCC provided in depth logistical and ideological assist for federal laws in opposition to lynching. However in contrast to the NAACP, Evans writes, the FCC “had a particular message for church buildings, calling them out for his or her silence, hypocrisy, and sometimes occasions their refusal to deal with lynching as a criminal offense and an ethical fallacious.” It urged its member church buildings to vote for political candidates who supported anti-lynching legal guidelines and to press native and nationwide officers on their stance on the difficulty at any time when potential. “Few at this time are conscious of the FCC’s anti-lynching marketing campaign,” Evans writes. But the FCC was the writer of a whole bunch of “detailed studies that described at size the brutality of lynching, that stared evil and injustice within the face, calling down judgment upon the nation and the church buildings for his or her failure to eradicate this evil.”
Some students criticize the FCC for not reaching extra apparent success. “It’s correct to say that they didn’t get anti-lynching laws handed or totally remodel society of their picture of Christian group,” Evans stated. However a part of his aim in Theology of Brotherhood is to keep away from defining “success” by twenty-first–century requirements. “I actually wished to know what the FCC was up in opposition to,” Evans stated. “Within the guide, I attempted to chart a course between apologetics—mainly, portray one of the best image of the FCC potential—and criticism that’s not acceptable to the realities of the time.” To judge the importance of the FCC, Evans argues, we now have to think about the group in its historic context. “Now we have to know its work within the context of segregation, rampant inequality, and racial prejudice. Any success was significant beneath these circumstances, even when we additionally acknowledge that extra wanted to be completed.”
Evans thinks the legacy of the FCC’s work may be seen within the Civil Rights Motion, together with the theology of Benjamin Mays. Mays was vp of the FCC within the Forties and Martin Luther King Jr. King’s mentor at Morehouse Faculty. The language of brotherhood and Christian group that King and his collaborators embraced has its roots within the work of Mays and the FCC. The identical is true of “the taken-for-granted notions of a symmetry between God’s imaginative and prescient of the world and considered one of racial equality that many superior in the course of the Civil Rights Motion,” Evans stated. “That type of universalistic conception of Christianity was laborious received.”
Evans hopes that A Theology of Brotherhood will give readers new perception into American Protestantism, even past its significance in African People’ lengthy and ongoing wrestle for racial equality. “The FCC has a type of renewed relevance in mild of our present political second. With the rise of Christian ethnonationalism, many People are excited by points just like the separation of church and state, the right place of faith in authorized reform, and the function of church buildings in political motion. The FCC speaks to that, and in addition to questions concerning the historical past and viability of the non secular Left.”
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