Unless and until more white evangelicals and their same-colored critics come to grips with how institutional racism gives rise to sexual abuse scandals like the present one, no one can credibly claim that some new era is upon us; both whites and people of color will continue to be victimized within and beyond white evangelical spaces.
The SBC, as many are now reminding, was founded in 1845 to protect the institution of chattel slavery; its leaders proclaimed that such a racial caste system was ordained by God and revealed by scripture. But theology was never the Southern Baptists’ sole means of upholding racial violence. Sexual purity rhetoric was also deployed to protect the status quo, especially in the years following the Civil War.
Reminiscent of the Catholic Church’s centuries-long efforts to cast Jews as a danger to innocent Christian children, white evangelicals in the South fantasized that newly freed Black men had but one thing on their mind: the desire to rape their (white) women. Like the antisemitic conspiracy with preceding origins, this was a blatant projection of the community’s own violent tendencies. Just as it was the church itself that had long persecuted Jews—including by falsely blaming them for Jesus’s death—it was white Christian slaveholders who had earned the notorious reputation for making trails to backyard cabins with sexual violence on their minds. They raped Black women to further emasculate Black men, force Black women into submission, and impregnate those women, thereby increasing the number of people in bondage. But for all its farce, the white evangelical belief that Black men embodied sexual menace flourished.
D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, famously depicted a Southern Belle jumping off a cliff to evade a Black man (a white actor in blackface), prompting the Ku Klux Klan to chase down and kill her assailant. Over the next few decades, Klansmen and other racial terrorists lynched thousands of Black men, often on the basis of false accusations or for such offenses as addressing white women with less formality than observers thought proper. As Ida B. Wells reported in the early decades of the century, white society was utterly uninterested in protecting Black women, who were viewed as dirty by nature and who were themselves the victims of lynching. This society was equally uninterested in protecting white women from the predations of white men.