BHM Reading #2: The Color of Compromise

Have you been trying to decide which book to take off your to-read list and to actually read? I am here to help. You need to read The Color of Compromise. If it was not on your to-read list, it should have been. If it is still on your to-read list, then take it off. You need to read it. I do not mean that you need to read it in a decade or two. I do not mean that you need to read it when you finish the six other books that you are currently reading. I mean that you need to read it now. You need to read it before you read The Iliad or Shakespeare or The Tale of Genji or One Hundred Years of Solitude or Institutes of the Christian Religion or anything else that is clamoring on your to-read list. You could easily check the book out of a library, but if you have to purchase the book, just the Foreword by Lecrae is worth the price. Each subsequent chapter is an invaluable add-on that you could never pay for sufficiently. Read this book. In fact, you should buy this book for others and make them read it as well. I have read this book, and I am currently incentivizing my 11-year-old son to read it. You need to read this book. Buy it, borrow it, listen to it, but one way or another read this book.

This is not a review of the book, and I have less to say about it than I have shared about Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, because this book is a historical survey, not a theoretical work. It covers all of the major periods of U.S. history that American Christians would be familiar with. But it rounds out most of that history in ways that we choose to whitewash or ignore: “Historically speaking, when faced with the choice between racism and equality, the American church has tended to practice a complicit Christianity rather than a courageous Christianity. They chose comfort over constructive conflict and in so doing created and maintained a status quo of injustice” (p. 17). 

This is a timely diagnosis and history of complicit Christianity, because the same watered-down, morally relativistic and pragmatic Christianity has been insidiously at work in the Trump era, when staggering numbers of evangelical Christians have stood for political party and a wicked leader (i.e., Donald J. Trump) over truth and morality. And before anyone takes issue with Tisby’s diagnosis of complicit Christianity as too harsh, I should probably mention that Tisby goes on to say, “Given the history, complicit is a weak word for describing how American Christianity has often interacted with race. [...] In reality, white Christians have often been the current, whipping racism into waves of conflict that rock and divide the people of God” (p. 17).

Please read this book.