Lord, when did we see you? The ethical vision of white, progressive Baptists in the South during the civil rights movement

For white, southern Christians, the civil rights movement was a dramatic public confrontation of their complicity with systemic injustice underwritten by spiritual complacency. Some had the ethical vision to see the societal problem racism posed; some did not. White Christians were reticent to act for social change, a reticence that amounted to preserving the status quo. As the historical distance from the civil rights movement increases, the multiple levels and nuance of white response to Jim Crow segregation is potentially lost in favor of simplistic narratives, leading to a binary and incomplete categorization of white involvement as that of either segregationist or activist. White, progressive Baptists, a rather small group, did not fall neatly within these categories and challenged the racial status quo of southern Christianity.;I examine the ethical vision of three moral exemplars, so as to glean the particular variables that shaped their character. My focus centers on itinerant activist, preacher and writer Will D. Campbell, one who eschewed institutional solutions to racism in favor of an individualistic approach. In contrast to Campbell, Southern Baptist ethicists, T.B. Maston and Henlee H. Barnette, sought to reform their respective seminaries and denomination through personal and systemic means.;Studying only individual responses, however, is inadequate given the complexity of societal problems like racism. Therefore, particular communities must also be examined due to the highly contextual nature of character formation. Of specific importance is how communities shape individuals who might even witness prophetically against dominant societal norms. Therefore, I examine theologically the ethos of the Southern Baptist-dominated South, during the civil rights movement era, so as to show how the courageous stances of those progressive Baptists were more noticeable given the deep racism endemic to their cultural and religious traditions. To explore these aims I utilize Glen Stassen and David Gushee's Holistic Character Ethics methodology, detailed in their work Kingdom Ethics.