The Myth of Colorblind Christians uncovers the little-known history of black and white evangelical encounters in the second half of the twentieth century. Amid the upheavals of the civil rights movement, black evangelicals insisted there must be no color line in the body of Christ. In an effort to preserve the credibility of their movement, white evangelicals discarded theologies of white supremacy and embraced a new theology of Christian colorblindness. But instead of using this colorblind theology for antiracist purposes, white evangelicals found new ways to invest in whiteness in the name of spreading the gospel. Through their churches, schools, and parachurch ministries, white evangelicals prioritized the interests and identities of the white majority while embracing the rhetoric of Christian unity. When black evangelicals demanded more concrete racial reforms, white evangelicals responded that these race-conscious efforts threatened the unity of the body of Christ. The Myth of Colorblind Christians shows that white evangelicals’ turn to a theology of colorblindness enabled them to create an evangelical brand of whiteness that occupied the center of American evangelicalism and shaped the American racial order from the 1960s to the 1990s. The claims of Christian colorblindness became key drivers of evangelical identity and infused the nation’s colorblind racial order with sacred fervor. At the center of colorblindness’s enduring appeal in American life was the vitality of evangelical religion.

During the 1950s and 1960s, conservative intellectuals in the United States described African decolonization and the civil rights movement as symptoms of a global threat to white, Western civilization. In the most influential conservative journal of the period, National Review, writers such as William F. Buckley grouped these events together as dangerous contributors to civilizational decline. In the crucible of transnational black revolt, some conservative intellectuals embraced scientific racism in the 1960s. These often-ignored features of conservative intellectual thought provided space for white supremacist ideals to continue to ferment on the American right into the twenty-first century.

This article begins with a simple question: How did white evangelicals respond to the civil rights movement? Traditional answers are overwhelmingly political. As the story goes, white evangelicals became Republicans. In contrast, this article finds racial meaning in the places white evangelicals, themselves, insisted were most important: their churches. The task of evangelization did not stop for a racial revolution. What white evangelicals did with race as they tried to grow their churches is the subject of this article. Using the archives of the leading evangelical church growth theorists, this article traces the emergence and transformation of the Church Growth Movement (CGM). It shows how evangelistic strategies created in caste-conscious India in the 1930s came to be deployed in American metropolitan areas decades later. After first resisting efforts to bring these missionary approaches to the United States, CGM founder Donald McGavran embraced their use in the wake of the civil rights movement. During the 1970s, the CGM defined white Americans as “a people” akin to castes or tribes in the Global South. Drawing on the revival of white ethnic identities in American culture, church growth leaders imagined whiteness as pluralism rather than hierarchy. Embracing a culture of consumption, they sought to sell an appealing brand of evangelicalism to the white American middle class. The CGM story illuminates the transnational movement of people and ideas in evangelicalism, the often-creative tension between evangelical practices and American culture, and the ways in which racism inflected white evangelicals’ most basic theological commitments.

White evangelical college campuses emerged in the late 1960s as key sites for the construction of Christian colorblindness. As many white evangelical colleges began to actively recruit black students for the first time, contested visions of what it would mean to create colorblind Christian academic communities flourished. On some campuses there was an atmosphere of crisis in the early 1970s as increasingly race-conscious black students demanded reforms and critiqued white evangelical racism. White administrators and students often responded with emerging rhetoric of Christian colorblindness. If only students would practice Christian love and focus on what they had in common as believers, brotherhood might flourish on the Christian campus. Just a few years before, black evangelicals had used the rhetoric of Christian unity to challenge racism. Now white evangelicals used the same language to urge black evangelicals to stop demanding racial reforms. By the middle of the 1970s, most recruitment programs had collapsed.