In the midst of the tumult of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s, the call for Christian unity was sounded in the United States by black and white evangelicals alike. But, as historian Jesse Curtis makes clear in this important book, black and white conservative Christians understood such unity to mean substantially different things. For black evangelicals, unity in Christ was intended as a rhetorical device to emphasize that black and white believers shared a common humanity and should therefore strive to eradicate white supremacy, especially from churches and Christian colleges and universities. Such eradication would mirror similar fledgling efforts taking root throughout American society by the early 1970s, the fruit of decades of civil rights activism. White evangelicals in this period likewise adopted a rhetoric of Christian unity but arrived at different ends. As Curtis notes, “the exact meaning of unity in Christ proved difficult to pin down” (15). Absent a shared definition of unity in Christ, white evangelicals were able to create a theology of unity that was dramatically different from that of their fellow black Christians. Whereas black Christians believed unity could be achieved by fighting racism, white evangelicals sought unity in Christ through an embrace of colorblindness, wherein addressing systemic racism was unnecessary because race itself no longer mattered at the foot of the cross where all believers had equal standing. Curtis contends, however, that this supposed colorblind equality was neither truly colorblind, nor did it produce equality. The “myth” of colorblind Christians indicated in Curtis's title refers to the fact that, far from being inattentive to race, white evangelicals in the wake of the civil rights movement used their ostensible “colorblindness” to reinforce white evangelicalism as normative (3). Furthermore, these white evangelicals even used colorblindness and its concomitant inattentiveness to structural inequities to define the boundaries of their identity as evangelicals (7). Ultimately, Curtis argues, by adopting colorblindness “whiteness was dethroned in name (within evangelicalism), but not decentered in practice” (213). Meanwhile, Curtis notes, “the avowed opposition to race consciousness, rooted in a colorblind interpretation of the Bible, became the primary defense of the American religio-racial hierarchy rather than a challenge to it” (8). Birthed over a half century ago, Curtis argues that this colorblindness continues to reign supreme within evangelicalism today because it “powered. . . a new theology of race that proclaimed equality while protecting implicit whiteness” (212).
Curtis unpacks his argument by tracking the rise of evangelical colorblindness in Christian colleges and parachurch organizations that wielded influence on evangelical churches. Curtis is particularly strong when recounting the rise of colorblindness on evangelical college campuses, and he devotes two of his book's chapters to this story. Curtis notes, “though the rapid social changes of the 1960s made recruitment of black students a matter of institutional self-interest, college leaders conceived of their efforts as expressions of Christian love” (57). Repeatedly, however, Curtis demonstrates that the Christian love that diversity initiatives on these evangelical campuses were supposed to engender was met with resistance and defensiveness from white faculty and students (133). Ultimately, these campuses remained places where white evangelical sensibilities were entrenched and reinforced as normative, thus becoming effective training grounds for future generations of colorblind Christians (137).
As Christian colleges and universities were forced to dial back overt diversity initiatives in acquiescence to the colorblind preferences of their constituents, Curtis argues that evangelical churches doubled down on their homogeneity. In one of the book's most powerful chapters, Curtis details how the church growth movement came to dominate the evangelical subculture by the 1980s and encouraged congregations to cater to “homogenous units” and avoid diversity (102). Curtis convincingly demonstrates that these congregations became engines of evangelical whiteness, shaping and forming the colorblind racial sensibilities of those sitting in their pews (108). When a nation-wide movement toward racial reconciliation within evangelicalism sprang up in the 1990s with the Promise Keepers (PK) organization, Curtis argues that the colorblind conditioning that so many white evangelicals experienced in their homogenous churches watered down the impact of PK's reconciliation efforts and even contributed to the organizations’ decline (205).
Curtis's thesis in this book is provocative and bold and demands substantial evidence to support his weighty claims. In this respect, The Myth of Colorblind Christians does not disappoint. One of the great strengths of this book is Curtis's adroit use of archival materials, culled from dozens of repositories across the country, to support his argument. Of course, finding sources is only half the battle; these sources do not speak for themselves. A second strength of The Myth of Colorblind Christians is Curtis's ability to weave his disparate sources into coherent narrative that is both convincingly argued and compellingly written.
Curtis's book sits squarely at the nexus of the sociology and history of religion, the history of higher education, and the history and sociology of race and makes important contributions to each of these fields. Scholars and students of these different disciplines and subfields will need to engage with this important and necessary book.
