Reimagining the Bible Belt

IF YOU'RE A Christian who cares about social justice, you can’t afford to ignore Texas.

In his book Rough Country, Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow puts it bluntly: “Texas is America’s most powerful Bible-Belt state.” Texas has the second largest population in the country, home to more than 26 million people. In 2014, Texans led six out of 21 congressional committees. And more than half of Texans attend church at least twice monthly.

No other state has more evangelical Christians than Texas. Many national Christian media companies, parachurch ministries, and influential megachurches are based in Texas. That’s why Texas is called the Buckle of the Bible Belt: It’s the most populous, wealthy, and politically powerful part of the country where evangelical churchgoing is still a dominant force.

But what if we reimagine the Bible Belt? In 2005, Texas officially became a “majority-minority” state, where traditional minority racial or ethnic groups represent more than half of the population. A majority of Texans under 40 in the pews are people of color. This creates an opportunity: Demographic change could lead to cultural change. What if we cast a new vision for faith in Texas public life that puts working families and people of color at the center?

But demographic change will not translate automatically into cultural change. The dominant historical Bible Belt narrative has influenced and shaped the identities of all Texas Christians, including in the African-American and Latino faith communities.

Christians and white supremacy

In Texas and most of the South, the dominant form of evangelical Christianity has been deeply complicit with white supremacy. During the ascendency of the Ku Klux Klan, many white Christians acted as if lynching was a legitimate defense of their white Christian civilization. In the 1920s, J. Frank Norris, pastor of a 10,000-member fundamentalist megachurch in Fort Worth, kept close ties with the Klan, according to author David R. Stokes. Norris, a powerful fundamentalist leader, even invited the Texas Klan’s Grand Dragon to lead prayer from the church’s pulpit one Sunday morning and later hired him to teach at the church.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the most powerful leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention—including W.A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, the nation’s largest Southern Baptist church at the time—opposed the civil rights movement. In 1956, Criswell denounced the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision that ruled racial segregation unconstitutional. “Let them integrate,” Criswell shouted before the South Carolina legislature, according to historian Andrew M. Manis. “Let them sit up there in their dirty shirts and make all their fine speeches. But they are all a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up.”

To reconcile racial apartheid with the Christian faith, white segregationists developed a theological defense system. If Christianity was about saving individual souls, they argued, then worrying about earthly injustice was an unspiritual distraction from the “gospel.” If individual sin was the only thing that mattered, then white Christians needed only to live upright personal lives—even within a racial apartheid system. Pro-segregation Christians viewed the idea of systemic sin as unbiblical—or worse yet, as godless communism.

This theological defense system allowed white Christians to reject the prophetic message of Christian leaders such as Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer. It was also used to marginalize the civil rights movement’s white allies who were within the evangelical tradition. Even after conservative white evangelicals accommodated to racial integration, they kept this theological defense system in place: Racism, they said, was only a problem of individual sin, not systemic sin. People who said differently were just “infidels, dying from the neck up.”

This dominant white evangelical tradition has clashed with a prophetic, social justice perspective in a series of historical struggles, including slavery, post-Civil War reconstruction, and the ongoing civil rights movement. During chattel enslavement in America, Africans and their descendants had to creatively construct an alternative theology that affirmed their own humanity, rejected the slave owner’s theology, and called for justice. Out of the “brush harbors,” where the enslaved would escape to worship the God they knew away from the watchful eye of the slave owner, an alternative theology emerged. This was the foundation for the prophetic tradition of the African-American church, a church rooted in a God who cared about both their body and their soul.

This prophetic theology recognizes sin at both the individual and systemic levels. African-American Christians have long known what it means to have one’s humanity stripped away by unjust systems, whether as enslaved persons or disenfranchised citizens under Jim Crow segregation. This theology demands that Christians dismantle systemic injustice that subjugates people. Any theology that justifies violence, enslavement, and oppression—that dehumanizes the Imago Dei (the image of God)—is idolatrous, not the work of the Creator. Theologian and mystic Howard Thurman wrote, “To speak of the love for humanity is meaningless. There is no such thing as humanity. What we call humanity has a name, was born, lives on a street, gets hungry, needs all the particular things we need. As an abstract, it has no reality whatsoever.”

The Accommodation

As Christian leaders based in Dallas, we know that most Southern Christians now reject the idea that racial segregation is God’s design. But many Southern Christians have not rejected the theological defense system that their forebears set up to maintain segregation and dismiss prophetic voices in the church.

In spring 2014, we launched Faith in Texas, a multiracial movement composed of African-American, Latino, and Anglo congregations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as an affiliate of PICO, a faith-based community organizing network with groups in more than 20 states. Our goal is to develop more than 10,000 new civic leaders from all ethnic and racial groups, all walks of life, and all income levels in the next decade, to keep pace with Texas’ growing population. Our first challenge, however, was to create a group culture where diverse faith leaders could talk openly about economic and racial justice.

On the rare occasions that African-American, Latino, and Anglo faith leaders gathered at the same table in Dallas, it was generally assumed that the white leaders owned the table; the unspoken norm was that African American, Latino, and faith leaders from low-income communities must never talk about how systemic sin was hurting their flock.

These “norms” are partly a result of Dallas’ unique history. Our city never had a civil rights movement the way that Atlanta or Montgomery, Ala., did. Instead, during the 1960s a closed circle of white Dallas elites cut a deal with African-American pastors: The white leaders would tamp down their anti-African-American terrorism and move slowly toward integration, if African-American leaders would renounce sit-ins, marches, boycotts, and other powerful public tactics. Prominent African-American pastors accepted the deal, thus creating a regime that former Dallas Morning News columnist Jim Schutze calls “The Accommodation” (in his book by the same name). As a result, Dallas faith leaders never learned how to negotiate openly about racial inequality or systemic injustice.

Breaking dysfunctional patterns

Before our movement could leap into action, we had to break these dysfunctional patterns. More than a year was spent meeting with diverse leaders in one-on-one and small group settings. In the one-on-one settings, Latino evangelical pastors often shared painful experiences about undocumented people in their church who were trapped within a broken immigration system. But they rarely shared these stories with white evangelical pastors because they only encountered anger or avoidance. One Latino Pentecostal pastor described these anti-immigrant reactions as “demonic possession” and said it was jarring to hear them coming from godly people.

To break down these dysfunctional patterns, a diverse vision team was established to engage in risky conversations in a larger group setting. One turning point was when a young Latina Catholic leader revealed that she was undocumented. For her, the word “illegal” was dehumanizing, analogous to the n-word. She anticipated a negative reaction; instead she was warmly embraced by both African-American and Anglo pastors. Another turning point came when a white evangelical pastor publicly apologized to immigrant pastors for failing to walk alongside them in the struggle for immigration reform. These first steps started us on a path of talking openly about racial and economic inequality—and casting a truly multiracial faith vision for Texas.

When we publicly launched Faith in Texas in 2014, we were overwhelmed by the diversity of people who responded: young Latino Catholics, middle-aged Anglo evangelicals, African-American Protestants, United Methodists, Muslim civic leaders, blue-collar workers, folks with a thick Texas twang, and folks who moved here from the Northeast.

Often people assume that social justice voices are marginal in Texas because Texans don’t care. More often, we find that Texans have never been asked. Our first training took place in the middle of an ice storm that shut down schools and workplaces all over the region. Texas cities have few snow plows, so Texans usually respond to winter weather by hunkering down until it melts. More than 100 people came anyway, driving 10 miles per hour over solid ice to get to the training.

Here’s an example of putting the kind of faith-based organizing we’re describing into practice. In 2010, an auto title loan business opened near Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas. The church’s senior pastor, Frederick D. Haynes III, was alarmed at the proliferation of predatory lenders popping up in the community. The Bible Belt, especially Texas, leads the nation in predatory lenders. With as much as the Bible says about usury, it’s surprising that legalized loan sharks are able to operate so freely in such a strong evangelical culture.

Friendship-West Baptist decided to take action. First, the church joined city- and statewide coalitions to advocate for regulations against predatory lending. These efforts were successful in passing both lending and zoning ordinances—and resulted in a 27 percent drop in the number of payday lenders in Dallas. We are also fighting predatory lending at the state level, where we are pushing to close legal loopholes that allow Texans to get caught in a debt trap.

Another way to address the issue locally is to create an alternative to the predatory lending industry. Under the leadership of Haynes, Friendship-West acquired St. John’s Credit Union, a historic African-American-owned credit union, and relaunched it as the Faith Cooperative Federal Credit Union. Operated separately from the church, the financial institution offers small-dollar loans to counter predatory lenders and economically empower its members.

Building power from the margins

There are certainly unique challenges to organizing faith communities in our context. For example, leading as a woman is more difficult in our context, because many powerful churches in Texas still oppose having women in ministry. But we’ve also discovered that Texas has some unique strengths. In the words of Flannery O’Connor, “[W]hile the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.” We are not naive about the failures of Texas organized religion. And yet our state is full of people who earnestly seek to follow Jesus. We dare to re-imagine the Bible Belt, because God is faithful.

These basic principles of multifaith, multiethnic organizing can be applied far beyond Texas and the South. Start by getting real about the sinful religious history of your context. Lift up the forgotten stories of faithfulness that were left out of the dominant narrative. Create new tables to practice conversations that bridge lines of race, class, religion, and gender. Forge a new public theology that affirms the humanity of all people. Raise up a new generation of faith leaders to build power from the margins.

In the words of Jesus, we find that “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few” (Matthew 9:37-38). Confronted by the deep dysfunction of Texas politics, we are moved to pray to God to send more laborers into the harvest. Then the Bible Belt can be known as a place where people honestly search the scriptures to pursue God’s justice on earth as it is in heaven—and perhaps history can be redeemed.