"Because their acts of racism often have been so violent and blatant, discussions of racism over the years have centered on conservatives and hardcore racists. But as these few paragraphs have attempted to show, although they have not been publicly associated with acts of physical violence acts, Christian liberals are little different than their conservative counterparts when it comes to embracing the twisted Protestant theological ideas first planted by the Puritans. The one glaring difference between the two groups is that liberals throughout American history have learned to be more sophisticated with their antiblackess. From the Puritan era to the present, their sophistication often has been in the form of an eerie silence regarding the matter of race and racism. For example, the writings of heralded American theologians stretching from Jonathan Edwards through H. Richard Niebuhr, and Paul Tilich are conspicuously empty of any critical analysis of the interplay between Christian ideas of racism. While all of these “giants” wrote volumes analyzing the finer points of theology and showing how theology relates to human enterprises, none raised a question about how Protestants repeatedly have corrupted theology in order to justify antiblackness as God-ordained. As we seek to not only understand but also to find solutions to the persistent problem of racism, the silence of these revered liberal Protestant thinkers is most troubling. Troubling because their writings – void of any critique of Protestantism’s racist history – are the very ones that seminaries and graduate schools of religion continue to lift up as standard reasoning for all who would learn and embrace the Protestant faith. Free of any critique of Protestant history in shaping racist attitudes, these writings give the false illusion that this faith is colorblind. But as these pages have attempted to demonstrate, skin color has always been one of the key embraces of many who embrace this tradition. Indeed, as Kyle Haselden said, Protestanism in the hands of bigoted Christians has long been the “other of racial patterns, the purveyor of arrant sedatives, and the teacher of moral moralities” as it relates to black people (Haselden, 1964:14)."
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Racism
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