By Jesse Curtis
Originally published April 15, 2019
The
black evangelist Tom Skinner has often been portrayed as a kind of radical
figure who challenged white evangelicals to confront racism. His speech at the
1970 Urbana Conference is particularly famous (that is, famous in the small
world of black evangelical history).
It
seems to me this reputation glosses over significant changes over time and
evolution in Skinner’s thought. When he burst on the scene in 1966, he was a
more complicated figure than the radical image implies. His views in 1970
should not be retroactively applied to the 1966-1968 period. Here’s an excerpt
from an in-progress draft of a dissertation chapter:
Skinner
represented a new kind of bridge figure between white evangelicalism and
African Americans. It had long been the case, as Bob Harrison complained, that
black Christians were encouraged to minister among their own people and steer
clear of challenging white entitlement to spiritual authority. But white
evangelicals did not imagine Skinner’s evangelistic crusades through the
traditional parameters of segregated ministries. In fact, when Skinner came to
town for a crusade, local white evangelical college students were encouraged to
help out. Simply by supporting Skinner they were doing something meaningful
about the nation’s racial troubles. He was less an outcast from white
evangelicalism, as Harrison had sometimes felt himself to be in the 40s and
50s, and more an ambassador. Said Christianity Today, “Skinner has created a
great deal of interest among evangelicals who worry vaguely that they might be
missing the boat.”[1] In this project Skinner’s blackness was crucial and
revealing of the ways the civil rights movement had upset racial norms in
evangelicalism. Bob Harrison’s blackness had made him an outsider. Skinner’s
blackness enabled him to act as a liminal figure, a provisional insider in two
religio-racial communities at once. By the summer of 1967, Christianity Today
was telling its readers that Skinner deserved their “fullest support.”[2]
Skinner
was not afraid to make white evangelicals uncomfortable. They were “almost
totally irresponsible” in their avoidance of their black brethren, and it was
only the pressures of the civil rights movement that had belatedly stirred them
from their complacency. He blasted white evangelicals who piously intoned that
“Jesus was the answer” while refusing to get involved in the problem. Skinner
believed Jesus was the answer too. But he had skin in the game, and he expected
other evangelicals to join him. Yet it was precisely this supplicatory
undertone that made Skinner’s criticisms manageable. For all the discomfort his
words could cause, he did not doubt that white evangelicals had the correct
theology on the point that mattered most, and he asked them to help him bring
their theology to the ghetto. Christianity Today approvingly noted that Skinner
“plays down social insurgence in his sermons because he feels that reform may
take ‘sixty years’ but that regeneration through Christ can help now.”[3] To
put it baldly, converted Negroes were not rioting Negroes.
Remarkably,
Skinner’s criticisms of white evangelicals were tame compared to his open
contempt for the black church. He described most black churches as bastions of
excessive emotionalism and spiritual immaturity, led by ministers given over to
sexual immorality and hypocrisy.[4] As a result, he claimed, “There is hardly
any Christian witness in the ghetto.”[5] There’s little reason to suppose
Skinner’s hostility toward the black church was anything but sincere, but it
also proved useful. It flattered white evangelical assumptions of
religio-racial superiority….
[1] “The Gospel
with Candor,” Christianity Today, October 14, 1966, 53-54.
[2] “Summer of Racial
Discontent,” Christianity Today, July 21, 1967, 27
[3] “The Gospel
with Candor,” Christianity Today, October 14, 1966, 53-54.
[4] Skinner, Black
and Free, 45-53.
[5] Skinner, Black and Free, 32.