Interpreting Race and Racism: Young Woman’s Auxiliary of the Southern Baptist Convention Read Scripture

• In Event: The Seductive Power and Harm of Religious Rhetoric in Literacy

Abstract

Historically, White evangelical Christians have significantly impacted U.S. educational policy (Bindewald, 2015), and Christian beliefs about how individuals interact with texts have had an outsized influence on instructional practices (Lohr, 2020; Skerret, 2014, 2020). Concurrently, evangelicalism has influenced how race and racism are addressed in U.S. schools from segregationist theology in the US South (Dupont, 2013; Hawkins, 2021; Sokol, 2007) to the recent rise of White Christian nationalism (Burke, Juzwik, & Prims, 2023; Whitehead & Perry, 2022). Thus, investigating how evangelicals employ religious literacy practices in relation to understandings of race and racism is critical for understanding the historical and current contexts of American education.
We explore how members of the Young Woman’s Auxiliary (YWA) of the Southern Baptist Convention employed interpretive rules to biblical texts to negotiate understandings of race and racism. YWA was a missionary organization for unmarried women between 16 and 25 whose purpose was to study and advance missions. The organization’s magazine, The Window of the YWA, included program guides for planning local meetings. We used archive analysis (Stanley, 2017) to explore the scriptural practices encouraged in 13 program guides published between 1945-1965. We selected excerpts that addressed race and racism in America and included interpretations of biblical passages.
The most common interpretive rules employed were what we call (following Holtz, 2003) personalization, which considers the text and how it speaks to the reader in the current moment, psychologically, politically, and/or spiritually; and Bible leads to action, which asks how this biblical text leads readers to particular ethical behaviors. For example, a 1947 program note reads:

Many people who are criminally unfair to Negroes are wholly sincere, believing that God intended black men to be inferior, etc. The only way we can uproot such wrong from our minds as well as other people’s is actually to devote time to finding out the truth. (p. 30)
This paragraph lays out the interpretive rule that a single truth can be gleaned from biblical text. The program note continues:
For scripture reading pick out well-known verses and add “except Negroes,” as in John 3:16 after “whosever” insert the phrase; to Mathew 7:12a add “except to Negroes.” Are you sure we have “one Father” (John 14:1-3)? What does that imply about our treatment of others? What common practice towards Negroes are not in keeping with this truth?
This exercise teaches that “good” Christians are not following biblical Truth if they discriminate against Black Americans.
While these findings highlight the transformative potential of YWA’s interpretive practices, our full paper shows how interpretive moves were often couched within tropes of segregationist theology (Hawkins, 2021) and Christian nationalism (Gorski & Perry, 2022), such as individual liberty and America as a Christian nation, and “lost cause” ideology. The YWA’s biblical interpretations simultaneously took progressive stances against racial discrimination and conformed to ethnoreligious values. These findings highlight the historical foundations of current tensions between White evangelical Christians and U.S. schools around issues, such as banning books that discuss race and racism.

Authors

• Carolyn Hunt, Illinois State University

• Ziva Reimer Hassenfeld, Brandeis University