Was Jesus a Segregationist?

Speaking of Jesus and intolerance, recently I had a post about how wrong southern Bible-quoting Christians were about slavery. Today in the Arkansas Times there is an interesting piece written by Rob Marus, a 1993 graduate of Little Rock Central High School. He lives in the nation's capital, where he has served since 2001 as the chief Washington correspondent for Associated Baptist Press. He writes:

Jesus and Little Rock Central High School made me a moderate.

The tortured history of white Christianity and the civil rights movement captured my imagination when I first became a student at Central in 1990, and provided the most important revelation of my budding political development — Conservative Christians sometimes came out (gasp!) wrong on a major public-policy issue.

Woefully, sinfully, Bible-quotingly wrong.

Moreover, moderate and liberal Christian leaders (as well as leaders of the city's small but prominent Jewish community) were heroes of the 1957 story. They spoke rationally, even prophetically, for tolerance and integration. ...

One of the first personalities I discovered in my study of the Central High desegregation crisis struck the first, and still most discordant, note of my early political development: Wesley Pruden, who in 1957 was pastor of the now-defunct Broadmoor Baptist Church. Probably better known to historians as the chaplain of the segregationist Capital Citizens Council, Pruden became one of the group's most prominent spokesmen.

In an October 1957 issue of the Arkansas Democrat, the Baptist pastor took out an advertisement under the headline, “Can A Christian Be A Segregationist?” In it, he repeated the dire predictions that many segregationists of the era made — school integration was a plot that would usher in racial intermarriage, soon to be followed by communism. The ad closed with a pseudo-hermeneutical justification: “Our Lord was born into the most segrated [sic] race the world has ever known. Under this system He lived and died. Never did He lift his voice against segregation. Segregation has Christian sanction, integration is Communistic.” ...

It just needs to be said over and over... The same mentality that once led Bible-quoting Christians to endorse slavery and then segregation is now being used to justify anti-homosexual views. They were wrong then and they are just as wrong today.