Confronting racism was not the focus of Francis Grimké’s preaching ministry. He repeatedly made that clear throughout his 50 years of ministry, all of which, save four years, were as the pastor of Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C.
He understood that “the great function of the church is to minister to the spiritual needs of men” and that the means God has given to do that is “by the faithful preaching of the gospel, the pure unadulterated gospel, the gospel of the love of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, preached under the Spirit’s influence, the baptism from on high.” This gospel preaching should focus on Jesus as God’s remedy for the taint of sin.
However, Grimké also believed that the preaching of God’s Word needed to be directed toward developing “moral convictions” in the lives of individuals so that people might live the gospel “by exemplifying in our character and lives the principles of the religion that we profess, by letting our light shine, by growing up onto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”
In developing moral conviction and ethical behavior in his congregation, Grimké touched on several topics: family life, child training, manhood, and womanhood. But it was also in this context that he preached on racism and its attendant challenges and problems.
Grimké believed that the Bible declares, approves, and commands that Christians are not to show racial partiality and should in fact work for racial and social equality as the way of loving their neighbors. Further, when individuals, local governments, or even church courts demonstrate racial partiality and work against racial equality, reinforcing sinful structures, then the ministry of the Word must be used prophetically to confront that sin and reshape malformed consciences. This was what the Bible taught, he believed, and required of Christians in order to exemplify Christian character as they lived the gospel.
Grimké clearly saw his preaching on issues of race as prophetic. He observed in his diaries, “The work that I have been trying to do in dealing with race matters, has been largely of the function of the prophet.” He sought to call White Christians to account over “the white man’s Christianity as embodied in the church’s treatment of the Negro.” Especially, he reproved “the whites for their injustice and brutal treatment of the Negro.”
Every age, he believed, required prophets, “men who fear God and not man—men who speak, because impelled to do so by the great Power outside of themselves that makes for righteousness.” He sought to condemn sin and to call people to repentance because that was part of his calling as a minister of the Word.
Grimké denounced the sins of racism within the context of his own congregation, through the regular ministry of the Word, as a way of teaching his people what religious duty required. One representative example was a sermon preached on Sunday, May 29, 1910, and carried over to the following Sunday, on “Christianity and Race Prejudice.” Using John 4:9 as his text, Grimké observed the same race prejudice found in the first-century world was present in his time: “We who are living today, especially in this land—in America, in these United States of America, know, to our sorrow and regret, that there is such a thing as race prejudice.”
What was this prejudice? It was a feeling of antipathy that led to “uncharitableness of judgment” toward African Americans as a whole. Undergirding this antipathy was “the assumption of race superiority on the one side, and race inferiority on the other.”
Jim Crow laws were intended to communicate racial inferiority and to establish a stark segregation so that “there must be no mingling and intermingling on terms of equality.” Any attempts by Blacks to push back against this race prejudice “is bitterly resented, [and] intensifies the feeling of opposition” by the majority race. Such race prejudice “is the worst of evils,” Grimké declared. “I know of nothing that embodies so much of evil….It is Satan’s supreme device for keeping men apart, for setting up walls of separation, for encouraging animosities, for engineering strife, bitterness, hatreds, for the encouragement of everything that is evil, in this evil heart of man already too much given over to evil.”
Biblical Christianity stood opposed to race prejudice at every single point. Grimké forcefully preached, “There is absolutely nothing in the Christian religion upon which [race prejudice] can rest—nothing which even the bitterest Negro hater can find in it, if he is truthful.”
If one looked to God’s common creation of all persons and so his Fatherhood of all, one would see that “he, as Father, does not discriminate against any of his numerous children on account of race or color.” If one reasoned that all humans are sisters and brothers because of their common creation, then “how could race prejudice, with all of its meanness and offensiveness, be consistent with brotherliness?”
The Golden Rule and the second Great Commandment also ruled out racial injustice. And when one considered the church itself and its fundamental unity in Christ, “how is it possible for race prejudice which insists upon separate churches and pews, and separate presbyteries, and separate conferences, and separate cemeteries, and separate everything, to be reconciled with that kind of unity, that oneness of life?” It obviously should not be possible.
The point here, however, is that as he preached and in fulfillment of the church’s spiritual mission, Grimké held up the biblical demand for racial equality.
Grimké also prophetically rebuked racial inequality, especially among White Christians. “So far as the practice of churches or congregations is concerned, race prejudice is in almost absolutely control. In the whole southern section of our country it dominates absolutely the situation,” he observed. “In all that southern land there is scarcely a white church, be it said to the shame of those churches, where a colored person would be accorded anything like decent treatment.”
However, the situation was not much better in the North. “The simple fact is, colored people are not wanted in white churches, in white Sabbath schools, in white Endeavor societies, in white religious societies of any kind.” Indeed, the tragedy was that it was not simply unbelievers who harbored and acted upon race prejudice; “it is shared equally by so-called professing Christians.” Whether North or South, whether believer or non-believer, racial prejudice and injustice represented a national sin.
The only way forward, Grimké believed, was for the churches—White and Black—to teach and live out the gospel of Jesus. “The great principles of Christianity that are opposed to race prejudice, everything in the Word of God that runs counter to it, that tends to set it forth in its true light, as a thing hateful to God, and injurious to man, should be carefully set forth,” he held.
White pastors, as well as Black, needed to teach what the Bible said: “If race prejudice is wrong, if it is un-Christian, unbrotherly, then that fact ought to be declared.” Not only should this be taught from the pulpit, but in Sunday schools, Endeavor Societies, and even families.
Such teaching would do little good if White Christians failed to live it out. In the same way that Jesus was not afraid to do the unpopular thing when duty required, so “it is the testimony of the individual life, free from race prejudice, that is the important thing in this warfare that is to be waged in the interest of true brotherhood.”
If White Christian America would live out what the Bible taught, it would “lay the basis for a truer Christian civilization in this land; and would free it from the just imputation which now rests upon it, as an abettor, and encourager of race prejudice.”
What should be noted from this sermon—which is one example of many such sermons preached at Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church—is that Grimké believed that he held out the biblical mandates for Christian living in this world. He believed that he was approving what the Bible approved and condemning what the Bible condemned. In doing so, he was thoroughly committed to and acting in line with the church’s spiritual mission, which required racial justice and equality within the church as well as outside of it.
Of course, the question for us today is whether we will recognize that biblical norms require us to repent and rid ourselves of racial superiority and to live out the biblical mandates of racial unity. Our present moment views these biblical norms as somehow “cultural,” the results of secular theories about justice or the unwitting submission to the “woke virus.”
Listening to a Presbyterian and Reformed voice from the era that African Americans call the “nadir,” the result of Jim Crow laws and racial injustice, might resensitize us to the biblical requirement to love our neighbors – to empathize with them and treat them as we would desire to be treated, with justice and love. If we lived this way, we would heed the prophetic message of Francis Grimké.
Sean Lucas serves as senior pastor of Independent Presbyterian Church in Memphis, Tennessee.