This is a complex, loaded question, but it is one that must be addressed if the church is to openly and honestly dialogue about the issues of race and about racial reconciliation. The two main contributing factors to the racialized nature of evangelicalism are slavery (and the aftermath thereof) and the disestablishment of religion.
The first slave ship arrived on the shores of Jamestown, VA in 1619. For its inception, the American version of slavery has been rooted in race. Counter to earlier forms of slavery in which slaves were treated as indentured servants, enslaved to pay debt and then released, race based chattel slavery was established to profit off the free labor of “the other.” Yet wrapped up ever so tightly in the issue of …show more content…
However, the disestablishment of religion worked to hinder the unity God’s people are called to. In their work Divided By Faith, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith detail America’s eventual deconstruction of the centralization of religion. Emerson and Smith begin Chapter 7 of their work by highlighting how much of European culture during the 1600 and 1700s was marked by an overlap of church and state to the point where the two were virtually inseparable. One’s faith was determined by community in a sense. There was no real freedom of choice. A person would have the faith their parents possessed, which would simultaneously be the faith of their neighbors, uncles, cousin, etc. Church and state were interictally interwoven. When the settlers arrived in America, the same could be said for them, as there was not much of a differentiation between ideas of church and state. However, religious disestablishment began to come about in the late 1700’s and particularly during the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening. In 1785, Virginia passed the Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom, thus creating a space in which a “religious marketplace” could flourish, working to meet places religious needs and perpetuating group identities. Then, when the Founding Father’s passed the Bill of Right, the First Amendment established the principle of religious liberty, which eventually trickled down into local government and produced a plethora of new denomination and ideas about religion. Because of this, people were now free to associate with or create spaces in which they found moral identity and that met their needs. The differences along these lines, as well as socio-economic lines, gender lines, and other divisive lines, paved the way for racialization in
The first slave ship arrived on the shores of Jamestown, VA in 1619. For its inception, the American version of slavery has been rooted in race. Counter to earlier forms of slavery in which slaves were treated as indentured servants, enslaved to pay debt and then released, race based chattel slavery was established to profit off the free labor of “the other.” Yet wrapped up ever so tightly in the issue of …show more content…
However, the disestablishment of religion worked to hinder the unity God’s people are called to. In their work Divided By Faith, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith detail America’s eventual deconstruction of the centralization of religion. Emerson and Smith begin Chapter 7 of their work by highlighting how much of European culture during the 1600 and 1700s was marked by an overlap of church and state to the point where the two were virtually inseparable. One’s faith was determined by community in a sense. There was no real freedom of choice. A person would have the faith their parents possessed, which would simultaneously be the faith of their neighbors, uncles, cousin, etc. Church and state were interictally interwoven. When the settlers arrived in America, the same could be said for them, as there was not much of a differentiation between ideas of church and state. However, religious disestablishment began to come about in the late 1700’s and particularly during the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening. In 1785, Virginia passed the Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom, thus creating a space in which a “religious marketplace” could flourish, working to meet places religious needs and perpetuating group identities. Then, when the Founding Father’s passed the Bill of Right, the First Amendment established the principle of religious liberty, which eventually trickled down into local government and produced a plethora of new denomination and ideas about religion. Because of this, people were now free to associate with or create spaces in which they found moral identity and that met their needs. The differences along these lines, as well as socio-economic lines, gender lines, and other divisive lines, paved the way for racialization in