The Christian denomination in which I grew up was founded on the proposition that slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ. Its founders believed that this arrangement was not just possible, but divinely mandated. Yet many white Christians, like myself, came of age in churches and communities where we seldom heard anything substantive or serious about the white-supremacist roots of our faith.
I was raised in a Southern Baptist family, participated actively in my Southern Baptist church, and graduated from Mississippi College, a Southern Baptist institution. But it wasn’t until I was a 20-year-old seminary student that I began to grasp the central role that my denomination, and white Christians generally, have played in sustaining and legitimizing white supremacy.
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