In 1667 the Virginia Assembly settled a question that was troubling some colonists: if an enslaved African was baptized and became a fellow Christian, did that change his status? The Assembly, which Dr. Jemar Tisby describes as a group of Anglican white men, ruled that it did not. Tisby, author of The Color of Compromise and president of the Witness, a Black Christian Collective, treats that law as a landmark. It shows American Christians helping to build a racial hierarchy, not just failing to stop one. Complicity, in his account, came afterward: generations of believers who harmed no one and still went along with what had been built.
The difference between those two charges matters. Saying the church failed to stop racism describes a bystander. Saying the church helped construct racial hierarchy describes a participant in the construction. Tisby makes both claims and assigns them to different people at different times. Keeping them apart is the first step toward reading this history honestly, without inflating it or shrinking it.
What exactly is the claim?
Arguments over this question usually break down because each side means something different. One person hears “the church was racist” and thinks of the kind, fair believers they know. Another hears that response as a refusal to look at the past. The first is talking about individuals today. The second is talking about institutions that shaped American Christianity over centuries.
Tisby’s claim is historical and institutional. His book surveys the period from the colonial era to the era of Black Lives Matter, and each chapter shows how Christians “reinforced or even created” a racially based caste system. The two verbs carry different weight. Reinforcing assumes something already existed. Creating means someone made it. He argues American Christians did both.
He also rules out the comfortable idea of one bad chapter: “there has never not been a time when racism wasn’t part of American expressions of Christianity.” The problem took different forms in different decades, he says, but it was always there.
What the 1667 law reveals
The law stated that baptism did not free an African, a Native American, or a person of mixed race. Tisby’s comment is short: “right there you’ve got religion, race, and politics all blended into one.”
The law’s existence tells us something. Legislatures don’t settle questions nobody is asking. A statute declaring that baptism leaves a person’s status unchanged suggests the question was live for at least some people. The lawmakers answered it in favor of the slaveholding order.
Set that beside what the New Testament says about baptism and belonging. Paul wrote to the Galatian churches, “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27), and went on, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In context, Paul is arguing that Gentile believers do not have to become Jews to be heirs of the promise. His subject is equal standing before God among God’s people. The letter is not a civil code for colonial Virginia. Still, the Virginia law ran directly against Paul’s argument. It made sure that the rite marking an enslaved person as a full member of Christ’s body would have no effect on how that person was treated.
That makes the case useful for the reader’s question. The 1667 law was an action, not a failure to act, taken by churchmen serving as lawmakers to keep the faith from disturbing a racial order. Tisby also stresses the date: more than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. His conclusion is that “these ideas of white racial superiority and black inferiority, they were baked into the very culture and society even before the political entity known as the United States came about.”
He won’t name one starting point, only landmarks. His second chapter begins with Columbus, who, Tisby says, saw indigenous people as fit to serve Europeans: “he conceived of them only as servants.” From the start, spreading the faith came paired with a judgment that the people receiving it were lesser. He points to 1619, when Africans were brought to British colonial Virginia. He is careful to say this was not the first time people of African descent were in North America, though it is widely seen as the beginning of what became race-based chattel slavery. He also points to the Constitution’s clause on escaped slaves, which in his reading meant no place in the country was safe for a person of African descent. The Constitution is a civil document. Tisby includes it because his argument concerns a culture where Christian conviction and civil power were tangled together, one where “we, the people was never all the people.”
If I never did anything, how am I complicit?
This is where many readers stop, and Tisby expects it. He grants that when people in the majority picture racism, they think of slurs, bombed churches, and burning crosses. He calls those acts racial terrorism and extremism, and he does not minimize them. He argues the people committing them were a minority. The larger story is about everyone else: “Most people though, they didn’t do those things, but what they did do is they sort of co-signed it by their silence.”
His definition moves the question from motive to effect: “they exercised complicity by cooperating with the status quo instead of resisting it.” A person can hold no malice and still keep an arrangement running. Tisby says having no malice is good. The issue is what the arrangement does on its own. He names politics, economics, healthcare, housing, and education, and argues that “the system has been deliberately set up” to advantage white people. “And that didn’t happen by accident.”
Tisby then uses a spectrum of racist, non-racist, and anti-racist. The racist actively promotes hostility. The non-racist means no harm but, by staying passive, helps uphold the existing order. The anti-racist works against it. His summary of the middle position is the hardest sentence in his argument: “simply by going along with things as they were set up and intended to do, you sort of perpetuate racial divides.”
The standard objection targets that middle category. Critics argue that a scheme like this is too binary: it leaves no room for neutrality, so anyone who isn’t actively resisting is counted as part of the problem, and no evidence could ever clear them. That is a fair concern about the labels. Tisby’s argument, however, does not depend on the labels. It depends on a historical premise: that laws and institutions were deliberately arranged to favor one group. If that premise is false, the charge of passive complicity falls with it. If it is true, then going along with those arrangements has effects whatever anyone intends. The spectrum is only as strong as the history underneath it, and the history is something readers can check.
Lisa Fields frames the same point in terms of benefit rather than guilt: “you might not have done anything, but you benefit from those who have done something.” No one is being charged with acts committed before they were born. They are being asked to be honest about where they stand in relation to what those acts produced.
Is Christianity itself the problem?
Tisby’s own account answers this. The history he describes concerns what American Christians and their institutions did with the faith. He states his motive simply: “I wrote the book because I love the church, but I hate racism.” He came to faith in high school through a white evangelical youth group, and he credits the people there with giving him a love of the Bible. He writes from inside the church, aiming to make it healthier.
That position holds two things together. The blame cannot be shifted onto a few bad individuals, because the Virginia Assembly was not a handful of rogue believers. It was a governing body acting in the open. At the same time, the record does not show that the gospel requires a racial hierarchy. It shows a faith being bent to serve one. That bending had to happen through laws like the one in 1667, which is evidence that the hierarchy did not come from the faith itself.
Tisby makes the contrast himself when he describes what he hopes for. He reaches for Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple and speaks of driving the racism out of God’s house to “really make this a house of prayer for all people.” The words come from Isaiah, where God says, “for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people” (Isaiah 56:7). In its setting, the oracle promises welcome to foreigners and eunuchs who held fast to God’s covenant, people who might have expected to be shut out. Tisby isn’t claiming the passage was written about America. He is using its picture of who belongs in God’s house as the standard the American church failed to meet.
What this evidence can and cannot settle
One conversation offers landmarks and summaries. The documentation is in Tisby’s book and the records it cites, and the details deserve checking there. Tisby is open about where his expertise ends. When he turns to the economic effects of the GI Bill and earlier New Deal programs, he says, “I’m not an economist, I’m just speaking from a historical standpoint.” His statement that some New Deal benefits excluded domestic and agricultural workers, and that most of those workers were Black, is his historical claim for readers to test.
The strongest objection is that the record contains more than complicity. Black Christians who formed their own churches, and others besides, used the same Bible to resist slavery and segregation. That is true, and Tisby’s framing does not deny it. His claim is about which pattern prevailed in the institutions that held power. Resistance shows the faith could be read another way, which supports the distinction above. It does not undo what the dominant institutions did.
Tisby also names a limit that evidence alone can’t overcome. He once felt the case for racial justice was airtight, yet many people stayed defensive. He concluded that “you could pile facts from the floor to the ceiling, and it won’t do anything if hearts are not softened.” For people open to learning, though, he finds history useful, especially among younger believers who want to leave behind inherited culture-war habits. History shows that arrangements people assumed were natural were in fact “intentionally shaped by people.” Whatever was shaped by people can be examined by people.
What taking the record seriously asks of a church
Asked what repentance looks like for people who benefited without taking part, Tisby starts small. Speaking of Black church folk, he says, “It’s just acknowledgement.” That means affirming that what Black Christians describe is real, instead of dismissing or sidestepping it because one has not lived it. He calls that dismissal one of the most painful things of all.
He does not stop there. He would almost rather pastors say nothing about race than raise it only on Martin Luther King Jr. Day or during Black History Month. His standard is ongoing: “racial justice is, is not an occasion, it’s a disposition.” He means a lasting readiness to address racial issues as they come up, built through experience and mistakes. He also argues that change has to reach systems and institutions, not stop at handshakes, coffee, and shared worship. Among his practical steps is reparations, which for many Christians, he suggests, could mean giving to minority-led ministries whose work they trust rather than writing a check to an individual.
The opening distinction is what gives these steps their shape. A church that only failed to stop racism might answer with a change of heart. A church whose forebears helped write racial hierarchy into law has something more specific to do. It has to find what was built, in its own institutions and the ones around it, and decide whether it will keep going along with it.