January 20, 1999
Carter: Informal segregation remains
___ATLANTA (ABP)--While few churches today are formally segregated, most Americans still choose to worship with people of their own race and class for reasons of comfort and "aloofness," former President Jimmy Carter told an international Baptist gathering in Atlanta.
___Carter, a lifelong Southern Baptist, suggested fellow Baptists further integrate their worship services by establishing church partnerships across ethnic andracial lines.
Jimmy Carter
___Carter made brief remarks Jan. 11 at the Carter Presidential Center during a session of an International Summit of Baptists Against Racism before departing to attend the inauguration of Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes.
___Carter said America has not realized the dream of racial equality he articulated in the speech he delivered at his own inauguration as governor of Georgia in 1971.
___While official segregation has ended, "there is still too much separation of the races," Carter said. He added there also has not been "adequate compensation or corrective action because of years of slavery and legal discrimination against" African Americans.
___Carter described Christian churches in the South as "the last rampart of segregation," even though few white churches today still have policies against accepting black members that once were the norm in Baptist churches in parts of the South.
___"There is some remaining discrimination against others: 'We don't want you in our church,' but I would say that is a minor factor these days," Carter said. "I'd say a major factor is the natural human inclination to build communities that are very small."
___People tend to "cocoon" in churches with people "who look like us" and "don't put a burden of Christian action on us," Carter said. "We don't want the responsibility of learning about people who put a burden of responsibility on us."
___Carter urged congregations to take initiative to "form a partnership with a nearby church that has a different racial and ethnic composition."
___Another speaker, however, took a dimmer view of the progress made in race relations.
___C.T. Vivian, a leader in the civil rights movement, said racism is deeply ingrained in America's faith structures. "If you're black in the United States, you become a Christian in spite of Christianity, not because of it," said Vivian, a former Nashville, Tenn., pastor who is now board chairman for the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal.
___Even today, Vivian said, churches have "never dealt with the depth of (the) sin" of racism. "Racism destroys more people in more places of the world than any other single factor," he said.
___After sending missionaries to Africa for centuries, European and American Christians need to receive black missionaries to "help them face their most atrocious sin," he said.
___Racism is the greatest barrier to missions in a world that is three-fourths "dark to black," Vivian said, identifying the "symbol of the white Jesus" as both a symptom and cause of racism.
___Noting that Jesus was from the Middle East and undoubtedly had dark skin, he observed: "We're so racist we can't even tell the truth about God. We have to make him white to even live with him. Why can't the church stand to have God as anything else than white?"
___Vivian said while seeing Jesus as a person of color would mean a lot to blacks, it raises a serious question: "Could white people remain Christian if they had to bow down to a black Jesus?"Frontpage / Contents/ Masthead / Why We're Here / Links / Archive / E-mail us/ SUBSCRIBE!