Narrator: On a Sunday morning in September 1963, four young girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—were in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. They were excitedly preparing for the annual Youth Day service, adjusting their white dresses. But their lives were cut short when a bomb, planted by white supremacists, ripped through the church, killing them and injuring twenty others. In the aftermath, a young white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. stood before an all-white business club and asked a searing question: "Who did it?" His answer was not a single name, but a collective indictment: "We all did it." He argued that every person who remained silent, who told a racist joke, who tolerated injustice, was complicit. This horrific act of terror did not happen in a vacuum. It was the brutal consequence of a culture of compromise.

In his book, The Color of Compromise, historian Jemar Tisby argues that this very complicity—the quiet, consistent, and often "respectable" choice to prioritize comfort over confrontation—is the hidden truth behind the American church's long and troubled history with racism. The book provides a historical survey to reveal not just the overt acts of racism, but the subtle compromises that created the environment for them to flourish.

Narrator: The central argument of The Color of Compromise is that racism in the American church is not primarily a problem of a few hateful extremists, but a problem of widespread complicity among otherwise good people. Tisby uses the 1963 Birmingham church bombing as a powerful illustration. Such a monstrous act of violence, he explains, could only occur within a broader social context of indifference and compromise. The failure of the majority of white Christians to actively oppose the daily injustices of segregation created an environment where racial hatred could fester and ultimately explode into violence.

Tisby points to the speech by Charles Morgan Jr., the white lawyer who, just a day after the bombing, accused his own community of collective responsibility. Morgan’s words, “We all did it,” capture the book’s core thesis. It wasn't just the bombers who were guilty, but also the ministers who preached passivity, the business leaders who benefited from a segregated system, and the ordinary citizens who remained silent. Tisby frames this as the difference between "complicit Christianity" and "courageous Christianity." He argues that true reconciliation cannot begin with feel-good platitudes; it must start with telling the hard truth, just as Martin Luther King Jr. argued that an infection must be exposed to air and light before it can be cured.

Narrator: Tisby traces the roots of this complicity back to the very beginning of the American experiment. In the colonial era, race was not a fixed, biological reality but a social construct that was actively "made" to justify economic exploitation. A pivotal moment came in 1667, when the Virginia General Assembly, composed of Christian men, faced a dilemma. Missionaries wanted to evangelize enslaved Africans, but slave owners feared that baptism would grant them freedom, as was the custom in England.

Their solution was a devastating compromise. The Assembly passed a law declaring that "the conferring of baptism does not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom." In a single stroke, they severed spiritual salvation from physical liberation. This law allowed enslavers to promote a version of Christianity that saved souls while keeping bodies in chains. It was a foundational act of complicity, embedding the idea that one could be a Christian and a slave, and that the church's mission was compatible with a system of race-based chattel slavery. This decision set a precedent that would echo for centuries, allowing the church to accommodate and even defend racial oppression.

Narrator: The late 18th century brought both the American Revolution and the Great Awakening, two movements seemingly centered on liberty and spiritual equality. Yet, Tisby reveals how both were deeply compromised by slavery. The Declaration of Independence, with its soaring rhetoric that "all men are created equal," was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, a man who enslaved hundreds. An early draft of the Declaration even included a clause condemning the slave trade, but it was removed to appease delegates from Georgia and South Carolina, a "dirty compromise" to ensure colonial unity.

Simultaneously, the Great Awakening saw the first mass conversions of enslaved Africans to Christianity. Preachers like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards emphasized a personal "new birth" and the spiritual equality of all believers before God. However, this spiritual equality did not translate to social or physical freedom. Whitefield, a celebrated evangelist, eventually became a slave owner himself, arguing it was necessary to fund his orphanage in Georgia. Edwards, considered America's greatest theologian, also owned slaves, reconciling the practice with his faith. They represent a moderate, yet complicit, view that the Bible regulated slavery rather than condemned it, allowing white Christians to feel pious while perpetuating a brutal system.

Narrator: As the nation hurtled toward the Civil War, the compromises of the past hardened into theological dogma. The central conflict, Tisby argues, was not just political but profoundly theological. Both the North and the South read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, yet came to radically different conclusions about slavery. This led to schisms in the nation's largest Protestant denominations—the Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians—long before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.

In the South, defending slavery became a test of biblical orthodoxy. Theologians like Robert Lewis Dabney and James Henley Thornwell constructed elaborate arguments to justify race-based chattel slavery as a "positive good." They twisted scripture, most notably the "curse of Ham" from Genesis 9, to argue that people of African descent were divinely destined for servitude. Thornwell developed the doctrine of the "spirituality of the church," which argued that the church should remain silent on "political" matters like slavery. This doctrine provided a theological cover for inaction, allowing the Southern church to bless the Confederate cause and the institution of white supremacy.

Narrator: The period of Reconstruction after the Civil War offered a brief, hopeful moment for black equality. African Americans voted, held political office, and established schools. But this progress was systematically dismantled by a white supremacist campaign of terror and the creation of the "Lost Cause" mythology. This narrative romanticized the antebellum South, portraying the Confederacy as a noble, heroic, and Christian society fighting for states' rights, not slavery.

This myth was actively promoted by Christian organizations. Confederate Memorial Day was celebrated in churches, and leaders like Robert E. Lee were deified as Christian saints. The Ku Klux Klan, first formed to resist Reconstruction, was reborn in 1915, fueled by the film The Birth of a Nation. This second Klan explicitly fused white supremacy with a distorted vision of Protestant Christianity, seeing itself as a religious order defending a white, Christian America. This era saw the rise of Jim Crow laws, which were legally cemented by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, establishing the "separate but equal" doctrine that would define American life for the next sixty years.

Narrator: Tisby argues that in the 20th and 21st centuries, the church's complicity with racism did not disappear; it simply adapted. While the Civil Rights Movement dismantled legal segregation, racism found new, more subtle expressions. The rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s and 80s provides a key example. While often framed as a response to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, Tisby, citing the work of other historians, argues the movement's true catalyst was the IRS's decision to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially segregated private schools.

The case of Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist school that prohibited interracial dating based on its religious beliefs, became a rallying cry. For many white evangelicals, this was not an issue of race, but of government overreach and religious freedom. This political mobilization aligned white evangelicalism with the Republican Party and its "Southern Strategy," which used racially coded language—like "states' rights" and "law and order"—to appeal to white voters' racial anxieties without using overt slurs. This political alignment, Tisby contends, has made it difficult for many white Christians to recognize and confront systemic racism, as it is now intertwined with their political identity.

Narrator: Ultimately, The Color of Compromise delivers a powerful and unsettling diagnosis: the American church does not have a "how-to" problem when it comes to racial justice; it has a "want-to" problem. The tools for reconciliation—confession, repentance, and repair—are readily available in Christian scripture and tradition. The primary obstacle, Tisby concludes, is fear. It is the fear of losing social standing, of alienating friends and family, of disrupting the comfortable status quo.

The book's final challenge is a call to move from a complicit faith to a courageous one. It asks readers to confront the uncomfortable truths of history, not to be paralyzed by guilt, but to be motivated by a "godly grief" that leads to repentance and action. The question it leaves is not what should be done, but whether the American church and its people will finally find the courage to do it.