The Bible Told Them So

"""How is possible that Southern White Christians could employ their faith to oppose racial equality and opportunity? Dr. Russell Hawkins shows us how with piercing clarity. This deeply-researched work reads like a novel, yet is at the same time packed with page after page of insight and revelation. A true eye-opener."" -- Michael Emerson, co-author of Divided by Faith and United By Faith ""Hawkins convincingly demonstrates how religion framed, informed, and bolstered South Carolina whites' resistance to racial equality. He further shows how, once the raw biblical justification of segregation acquired a bad reputation, the rhetoric of color-blindness and anti-identity politics carried this resistance forward under a more respectable but deceptive guise."" -- Carolyn Renée Dupont, author of Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975 ""Increasingly scholars of evangelicalism in the United States are telling more complex stories about the interplay of race and politics within its faithful ranks. The Bible Told Them So generates an important new ripple forcing us to consider the ubiquitous nature of disparate white evangelical Christian denominations in their stance against black racial progress and desegregation. Stylistically unflinching while managing to remain approachably delicate, Hawkins has produced a tour de force that tells an unsettling tale of certain white evangelicals' efforts to maintain a dominant social order"" -- Derek S. Hicks, author of Reclaiming Spirit in the Black Faith Tradition"