The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism
In The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, author Jemar Tisby uncovers the roots of sustained injustice in the American church, highlighting the cultural and institutional tables that need to be turned in order to bring about real and lasting progress between black and white people. Tisby walks the reader through a historical journey, starting at America’s early colonial days through slavery and the Civil War, covering the tragedy of Jim Crow laws and the victories of the Civil Rights era, and ending at today’s Black Lives Matter movement. Through these time periods, he reveals the subtle and not-so-subtle ways the American church has compromised what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality.
However, Tisby does not just diagnose the persistent problem of racism within the church, he proposes a way to solve it. Through The Color of Compromise, he charts a path forward with intriguing ideas that further the conversation as he challenges us to reverse these patterns and systems of complicity with bold, courageous, and immediate action.
Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:
“In giving us a history of America and the Protestant Church, Jemar Tisby has given us a survey of ourselves-the racial meanings and stratagems that define our negotiations with one another. He points courageously toward the open sore of racism-not with the resigned pessimism of the defeated but with the resilient hope of Christian faith. The reader will have their minds and hearts pricked as they consider just how complicit the Church has been in America’s original sin and how weak a word ‘complicit’ is for describing the actions and inactions of those who claim the name of Christ!”—Thabiti Anyabwile, Pastor, Anacostia River Church
“With the incision of a prophet, the rigor of a professor, and the heart of a pastor, Jemar Tisby offers a defining examination of the history of race and the church in America. Comprehensive in its scope of American history, Tisby presents data that provides the full truth and not a sanitized version that most American Christians have embraced. Read this book. Share this book. Teach this book. The church in America will be better for it.”—Soong Chan Rah, North Park Theological Seminary
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