Lightly edited copy of a blast email Debi and I sent out to participants in Sundays@6, our online adult faith formation group at Peace Lutheran Church, Springfield, for the fourth session in a book study on “The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism” by Jemar Tisby. We also discussed Manifest Destiny and supplemented the readings with information about the Rev. Jehu Jones, pastor of a Lutheran church in Philadelphia during the 1830s and 40s.
This week we’re reading Chapter 4 of “The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism” by Jemar Tisby. In this chapter, he outlines how race and white supremacy were institutionalized in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) period. We’re supplementing it with links to: (a) two short bios of the first African American pastor in the Lutheran Church; and (b) a video and a summary of the basically political doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which claimed it was God’s will for white settlers to bring the perceived benefits of European Christianity to people of other races and/or cultures from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Link here for the supplemental material:
- https://www.facebook.com/digitalpastordavid/posts/pfbid02km8jawkyxWVFwz34t8AVsNnbkKoS9uUvzGQXdBQPMqiu7Q9aEqskUPy1q7YkuD5jl – A short bio of the Rev. Jehu Jones Jr. by Pastor David Hansen on his Facebook feed. Jones, the first African American Lutheran pastor in the US., founded a Black Lutheran church in Philadelphia in 1834, but didn’t receive promised funding from the Pennsylvania Ministerium of the General Synod; the building’s mortgage was foreclosed, and the congregation only lasted another 15 or 20 years.
- https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/jones-jehu-jr-1786-1852/ – Another short bio of Jehu Jones in the African American History Timeline on the BlackPast website, with more detail on his background and the church in Philadelphia, as well as its financial difficulties, in which Jones said race played a part.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLmUhT9QOlE – “Manifest Destiny,” a 3-minute video by the Kansas Historical Society, which shows how countless American Indians faced the end of a traditional way of life as white settlers satisfied a thirst for land.
- https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/manifest-destiny – A brief explainer by the History Channel on Manifest Destiny and its relation to the Doctrine of Discovery, settler colonialism and other historical trends that have influenced the churches’ complicity with white supremacy in America up to the present.
All of this brings together a wide range of history, but it’s all related to white supremacy and the notion that Anglo-American culture was superior to all others. One logical consequence was that American Indians could be displaced and herded onto reservations where Christian ministers could teach their children how to fit into white society at institutions like the Shawnee Indian Manual Labor Boarding School (which also served as the capital of Kansas Territory, when the legislature was controlled by pro-slavery advocates in the summer of 1855). Another was the paternalistic assumption that Black people were not sufficiently civilized to handle their own affairs.
“The negro [sic] race is inferior to the white race,” said antebellum Virginia lawyer George Fitzhugh, for example, “and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of competition” (Tisby 66-67). Growing up in the 1950s, Pete remembers ladies of the White Citizens Council claiming it wouldn’t be fair to Black students to put them in the same schools as whites. Racist assumptions, as Tisby notes throughout his book, don’t go away; they merely adapt to changing times.
Similar assumptions dogged Pastor Jones’ career as a minister. He was “ordained by the New York Synod in 1832 as a missionary to Liberia to help the freed slaves in that country, according to BlackPast, but when he returned to his home in Charleston, S.C., he was “briefly jailed for violating a law prohibiting freed blacks from returning to a state they had left” and moved to Philly instead. There he was appointed “to labor as a Missionary … among the colored people in Philadelphia under the direction of our Ministers.”
In Philly he was pretty much on his own. He and his congregation weren’t able to pay off the mortgage, and St. Paul’s was sold at a sheriff’s auction in 1838, but he had what in other circumstances would be considered a successful career. His Wikipedia profile notes:
Jones remained active in the Philadelphia African American congregation, as well as Pennsylvania politics and the national Colored Conventions Movement through at least 1851, the year before his death. In 1845, he helped organize a convention to unite freed blacks to petition for civil rights. He and the St. Paul’s congregation were also active in the Moral Reform and Improvement Society, a group of African-American churches whose goal was to improve the social conditions for blacks in Philadelphia. Jones also founded Lutheran Churches (with congregations of all races) in Gettysburg and Chambersburg.
But when he tried to organize a congregation in New York, he got a slap in the face. BlackPast tells the story:
Jones tried to start a Lutheran church in New York City in 1849, but the New York Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church barred him from doing so because of what they charged as the mismanagement of finances at St. Paul’s Church. Jones responded in a pamphlet arguing that the unpaid debts were beyond his control because of racial prejudice against the congregation.
Pastor Hansen, in his Facebook post, has perhaps the best summary of Jones’ career when he says he “was denounced by the church he had faithfully and tirelessly served. It was not until 1995 that his contribution to the Lutheran Church in this country was recognized and celebrated.”
[Uplinked Feb. 28, 2024]
Ordinary Time 