Race and Restoration: Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle by Barclay Key

Abstract

Reviewed by: Race and Restoration: Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle by Barclay Key Joseph L. Locke Race and Restoration: Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle. By Barclay Key. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 272. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Barclay Key’s Race and Restoration examines the complicated racial politics of the Churches of Christ in post-World War II America. Imagining itself as a purer, “primitive” form of Christianity, the Church of Christ eschewed much of the entrenched bureaucracy or advanced hierarchies of its fellow Protestant sects. The book therefore offers a remarkably unmediated look at the ways in which every-day Christians—White and Black—grappled with segregation, civil rights, and the shifting racial norms of postwar America. The resulting portrait, which Key deftly reconstructs through a critical examination of printed sermons, church bulletins, school papers, and a series of manuscript collections, especially at Abilene Christian University in Texas and Harding University in Arkansas, captures both the terrible banality of an entrenched White supremacy and extraordinary moments of exceptions, protests, and possibilities. Throughout Race and Restoration, Key offers particular insights into the racial world of postwar Texas. He makes no overt grand gestures toward Texas as playing any specific or clearly differentiated role in the racial history of the Churches of Christ, but those churches were—and are—exceptionally strong and concentrated in North Texas and the Panhandle. Key’s narrative, therefore, necessarily returns to the state again and again. Much of the book, for instance, focuses on Abilene, and especially the segregation and desegregation of Abilene Christian College (now Abilene Christian University). While Key works to show how “relationships between churches and individual members sometimes operated apart from conventional racial customs both within and outside the South” (40), his broader narrative perhaps most usefully illustrates how theological commitments submitted to the social realities of the United States’ racial hierarchy. A folk culture of White supremacy, the inertia of political expediency, financial dependence on wealthy donors, concerns over student enrollments, and fears of alienating parishioners all conspired to prevent the Church of Christ’s abstract theological commitment to full equality from manifesting itself [End Page 144] in the form of racial justice. One Harding College professor, for instance, could proclaim in the 1940s that “the racial prejudices which are abroad in our land today are un-Christian” (28), but could also actively resist integration by privileging social stability over racial justice and, arguably, theological consistency. Others gave themselves over fully to White supremacy. When some White church members began attending Black churches to hear Marshall Keeble—not only a popular Black preacher, but for a time perhaps the most popular preacher in the entire denomination—church leaders such as Texan Foy Wallace Jr. were indignant that White women, in particular, had not only attended, but had actually shaken the popular evangelist’s hand afterward. By capturing the voices of Black leaders and church members, Key further exposes the contradictions of the Church of Christ’s theological commitments to spiritual equality. Key, for instance, provides a fascinating comparison of O. B. Porterfield, a White Montgomery pastor who ardently defended White supremacy, and Fred Gray, a Black civil rights attorney and Church of Christ pastor who worked with civil rights activists in Montgomery. Gray’s spiritual commitments sustained his civil rights activism, but, in Porterfield’s hands, the denomination’s restorationist theology only served to chastise activists, who, Porterfield argued, should have given up their freedom songs, marches, and criticisms of White politicians and not troubled themselves with worldly matters. They should have simply prayed, privately. “The Church of Christ deals with Godly things in Godly ways,” he preached (115). By critically yet empathetically examining a religious world committed to both spiritual equality and worldly segregation, Barclay Key has written not only a valuable denominational history, but also a useful entry point into the long and tangled history of race and religion in the United States. Joseph L. Locke University of Houston-Victoria Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association