A color photograph of a Black man standing on the street with a suburban scene in the background. He os looking straight into the camera with his hands in his pocket. He is wearing sneakers, jeans, a T-shirt and a sweater.
The Rev. John Onwuchekwa, former pastor of the Cornerstone Church in Atlanta.Credit...Ruddy Roye for The New York Times

Black, Evangelical and Torn

With America’s white conservatives increasingly drawn to Christian nationalism, many Black believers feel caught between their faith and the long shadow of history.

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When I met the Rev. John Onwuchekwa, he wasn’t wearing the black suit or thick-knotted tie that I expected of a Baptist preacher. His far-more-casual attire — Jordans, hoodie, denim jacket and jeans — announced a man of a very different cloth. Jay-Z, Nas and UGK played from his car stereo as we drove together from Midtown Atlanta to the city’s West End, home to many of his parishioners at Cornerstone Church.

Cornerstone lacks many of the frills of the fast-growing, millennial-and-Gen-Z-appealing, Instagram-able, hyperprofessionalized churches. The building itself is moderately sized and not nearly as ornate as a traditional church, nor is it sleek enough to compete with places like Potter’s House, T.D. Jakes’s church in Dallas. The screens at Cornerstone are pixelated, not the most technologically sophisticated; the musicians, while talented, are unlike the sort of Grammy Award-winning and Billboard-chart-topping performers who appear at Elevation Church in Charlotte, N.C., or at Hillsong Churches around the world. “There’s no flair or glitz and glam,” said Onwuchekwa, who encourages people to call him John O. “It’s just ordinary, right? We just want to do the ordinary things extraordinarily well.” His church grew organically, starting with a small group of families who relocated to the area. As neighbors became congregants, the first meetings were in one another’s living rooms.

When he started his church, Onwuchekwa, the son of Nigerian immigrants, wanted to be in a neighborhood that needed what he called “Gospel-centered, community solutions.” While the American dream, in his telling, has persuaded people to prioritize the pursuit of security and comfort, to live in the safe places, he chose to locate his church in the predominantly Black West End, where residents’ median incomes were less than $40,000, because, he said, “our lives aren’t just meant to live the path of least resistance, but the path of service and sacrifice, like the Lord Jesus.” He challenged me too, as a fellow Christian. “If there’s nothing about your life at all that makes people that are not Christian say, ‘I wonder why they did that,’ then maybe, just maybe, there’s not a lot different in the way that you live.” Maybe I wasn’t living the committed Christian life like I thought I was, in other words. In this, he was channeling a message from Scripture: Christians should be in the world but not of the world. Put another way, a Christian life should not resemble an American ideal so much as one that is Christlike.

From its founding, in 2015, Cornerstone has been a member of the Southern Baptist Convention (S.B.C.). In fact, the convention, which spends nearly $64 million annually to “plant” churches, provided Cornerstone with $18,000 in seed funding, then lent it $175,000 in 2019 for renovations. (Onwuchekwa secured the funding in partnership with his college roommate, Richard Mullen, and a popular Christian rapper, Trip Lee.) Onwuchekwa quickly became a rising star within the S.B.C. He found himself speaking at its annual meetings, at its regional convenings, at its pastor conferences. He joined the board of one of the S.B.C.’s six seminaries, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he had preached and was enrolled in its doctoral program.

ImageA color photograph of a brick church.
Cornerstone Church, started by Onwuchekwa.Credit...Ruddy Roye for The New York Times

But his concerns about being affiliated with the S.B.C. came almost as quickly. By 2019, many things were troubling him about the convention: its yearslong lack of response to the killing of unarmed Black men; its initial failure to denounce the “alt-right” in 2017, when a fellow Black pastor, Dwight McKissic, put forward a resolution to do so (the denunciation eventually came after significant pushback); its invitation to Vice President Mike Pence to address the full S.B.C. in 2018 (which, Onwuchekwa says, felt “just like a Trump rally”); and the routine omission of its racist origins when it considers its own history. Onwuchekwa began to question whether he could truly help the S.B.C. diversify — confronting him with the classic challenge of trying to generate change from within an organization. While serving on a panel about race at the 2019 S.B.C. Pastors Conference, he offered attendees a sports metaphor to describe his congregation’s relationship with the S.B.C.: “We’re on a year-to-year contract with the S.B.C. So there’s no long-term deal. We’re fully in, but we’re ready to pull out.”

His presentiments only intensified in the pandemic-induced seclusion of his backyard shed-turned-study, where he wrote his sermons and devotionals and studied Scripture. At the height of that isolation, his disgruntlement boiled over following George Floyd’s murder. In the aftermath, he recommended to congregants what he considers some foundational books about racial injustice in America: “Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson, and “The Color of Money,” by Mehrsa Baradaran. Instead of reinforcement or encouragement from S.B.C. leadership, he received an email from its church-planting arm, the North American Mission Board, recommending a video series called “Undivided.” The series was supposed to be about racial reconciliation, but in Onwuchekwa’s view, it failed to account for how its own history directly influences race relations today. What he saw then and still sees today is a denomination out of step with where the country has been headed — Mississippi’s changing its state flag to remove the Stars and Bars, for example, or NASCAR’s abandoning the Confederate flag.

Onwuchekwa characterizes the S.B.C.’s approach to racial tensions as “Let’s not dig into the past” and “We just need to champion diversity, multiculturalism — we need to get along, right?” He also questions the denomination’s claims to be making progress and points out that as of a few years ago, only nine or so of the 3,000 international missionaries supported by the S.B.C. were African American. “If in one year they recruited another nine, then they could either say now we have 18 Blacks out of 3,000 missionaries, or we’ve increased African American involvement on the mission field by 100 percent,” he says. “The former sounds like an indictment. The latter sounds like progress.” True diversity, he believes, would express itself throughout the organization, not merely at the membership level. But he notes that almost every seminary president (and “every entity head”) has been white. (Willie McLaurin, a Black S.B.C. pastor, was an interim appointment to head the S.B.C.’s executive committee last year.)

In July 2020, Onwuchekwa’s church left the S.B.C. The decision, following a nearly unanimous vote by the congregation, was something of a relief for Onwuchekwa. “Writing and speaking theologically for the white gaze, in my mind, is exhausting,” he says. His departure shocked the S.B.C.’s president, J.D. Greear, who told me, “Just at the time that we’re seeing the most progress on this, we needed leaders, both Black and white, that would paint a picture of what could be.”

Others share Onwuchekwa’s disaffection with the S.B.C. Less than six months after his departure, the Revs. Charlie Dates and Ralph West, pastors of large, predominantly Black S.B.C. churches, exited the S.B.C. They left because of the way the denomination — and, above all, its six seminary presidents — responded to public outcries about critical race theory and the way that framework for examining the intersections of race and our legal, political and media systems has now become a catchall dog whistle on the right for nearly everything related to race. Even if McKissic, the founder and pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, isn’t quite ready to quit the S.B.C., he has been speaking out about his frustrations with the denomination.

Tensions have been rising in recent years as many white S.B.C. pastors and parishioners, like the pastors and parishioners of many evangelical churches, have had to contend with the impact on church politics of Christian nationalist rhetoric, which is seen by some to traffic in racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-immigrant fervor. The most recent S.B.C. presidential election, for example, mirrored the ongoing fights between establishment Republicans and pro-Trump culture warriors. While campaigning to lead the S.B.C. last year, the pastor Tom Ascol told an audience at CPAC that efforts to diversify workplaces, churches and schools, to grapple with America’s difficult record on race, amounted to a “new paganism” and was tantamount to a “cultural Marxism.” He repeated that perspective in barely coded terms: “White men or male heterosexual cisgendered males are the majority groups and therefore they are inherently oppressive.” He said that so-called diversity departments, if effective, would bring an end to “the Judeo-Christian worldview, which many of the older generations of Americans grew up with.” Ascol was defeated last June, but he was still the top choice of 40 percent of the voters (representatives from participating S.B.C. churches). And the pastor who was elected S.B.C. president, Bart Barber, secured his victory in the way that many establishment Republicans have won their primaries: by refusing to reject, or by obscuring any denunciation of, positions too extreme to endorse publicly.

These sorts of contests or debates — between a conservative pastor and an extremely conservative pastor — are not what generally threaten Black congregants. The S.B.C. and white evangelicals ought to be able to pitch a tent large enough to accommodate Black evangelicals like him. But for Onwuchekwa, the fissure lies in the inability of the S.B.C. and white evangelicals to confront and make up for in tangible ways their historical and ongoing treatment of their congregants of color, especially Black people. Instead of elevating Black ministers to permanent leadership positions within the financial and political power centers of the S.B.C., or instead of removing S.B.C. leaders who have actively supported what Onwuchekwa might consider anti-Black sentiments, the S.B.C. has been focused on “shallow solutions,” he says. Yet given how deep it needs to dive into both the past and the politics of the current moment, it should be “putting on scuba gear.”

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“Writing and speaking theologically for the white gaze, in my mind, is exhausting,” says Onwuchekwa, who was once a rising star within the Southern Baptist Convention. Credit...Ruddy Roye for The New York Times

Like the history of America, the history of the S.B.C. is inextricably tied to race, no matter how much evangelicals try to overlook that connection. In a 2017 article in the journal Baptist History and Heritage, Mandy E. McMichael, a religion professor at Baylor University, gives an account of how slavery divided Baptists. In 1840, Basil Manly Sr., the University of Alabama’s president, co-wrote a resolution on behalf of the state’s Baptists in which they “threatened to withhold their funds from the Board of Foreign Missions and the American and Foreign Bible societies until they were assured that these organizations had nothing to do with abolitionists,” McMichael writes. Georgia’s Baptists followed this lead.

The national organization, called the Triennial Convention, tried to maintain calm among its Southern members by splitting the difference when, McMichael notes, it issued a statement: “Although individuals could do as they felt necessary before God, they, as an organization, had no right to do or say anything in regard to the issue of slavery.” That did little to quell Manly’s qualms. His goal, as the owner of some 40 enslaved people on a plantation, was to make sure that his Baptist peers and governing elders didn’t infringe upon his or anyone else’s right to be a slaveholder and preacher. Ensuring that no Baptist would have to choose between preaching and enslaving is what led to the creation of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, when Manly and many Southern Baptists seceded from the Triennial Convention. The move foretold not only his influence over Alabama’s decision to secede from the Union 16 years later, but also the lingering legacy of the S.B.C.’s attachment to Confederate sentiments that some would claim to see long afterward.

V.S. Naipaul, in his 1988 travelogue “A Turn in the South,” recounts the time when he met Barry McCarty, a 33-year-old firebrand in his sixth year as a professor at Roanoke Bible College. One of his office walls, in Naipaul’s rendering, featured a picture of the North Carolina senator Jesse Helms. Helms, a committed Baptist, once helped compose an ad for a candidate’s Senate campaign in 1950 with this warning for voters: “White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories?” McCarty proudly called himself a “Jesse-crat,” which he defined for Naipaul as “a conservative North Carolina Democrat who votes for Jesse Helms and people like Jesse Helms. They represent the conservative values of the Old South. Faith in God. A belief in limited government.”

For McCarty, whose training was in theology and debate, the popular understanding of why the Civil War was fought was a fiction. Slavery wasn’t the real crux of the conflict, he told Naipaul; it was “the same distrust of a central power, the same jealousy over individual rights that moved the founding fathers to demand the Bill of Rights.” At one point, McCarty gestured proudly to his flag: the Stars and Bars, the first flag of the Confederacy. Today McCarty is the chief parliamentarian of the S.B.C., a position he has held almost since he met with Naipaul. His “Parliamentary Guide for Church Leaders,” which was published 35 years ago, is a widely used manual for conducting church business.

McCarty is not an outlier. In 2009, Basil Manly’s writings (along with those of his son) were anthologized by several seminary and history professors in the book “Soldiers of Christ”; the Rev. R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who has often been described as one of the country’s most influential evangelicals, wrote the book’s foreword. It does not mention Manly’s embrace of slavery. Instead, Mohler, who has been outspoken in his denunciation of critical race theory and in his support of barring women from the pastorate, writes, “We learn from their piety and convictions, even as we stand in a very different place and live in a very different time.”

A high regard for the Confederacy and its era is not, of course, shared by all 14 million Southern Baptists — or by evangelicals more broadly, who number roughly 80 million. Nor has the S.B.C. remained frozen in time. From 1961 to 2011, it claims to have adopted 11 resolutions stating a desire for “greater ethnic participation.” In 1995, it passed the Resolution on Racial Reconciliation on the 150th Anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention. This included, among other things, an apology to Black people for condoning or perpetuating individual or systemic racism. (The resolution was reaffirmed in 2021.) In 2009, the executive committee of the S.B.C. — the organization’s power center, ultimately responsible for its decisions — undertook a Review of Ethnic Church and Ethnic Church Leader Participation; in 2011, the review affirmed a desire for greater diversity among its membership, unity among them and support for “non-Anglo congregations.” In 2012, the S.B.C. elected the Rev. Fred Luter of New Orleans to serve as its first Black president. And in 2021, the S.B.C. released its Report on Ethnic Diversity and Participation, which found that since 1990 “ethnically and racially diverse S.B.C. congregations had increased from 3.9 percent to 22.3 percent.” The denomination proclaimed this result as “the most diversity that the Southern Baptist Convention has experienced in its 175-year history.” From 1995 to 2018, Black congregations had the largest growth: 289.3 percent.

And yet it’s still possible to ask: Has all this been a true reckoning over race within the S.B.C. or has the effort been an attempt to look past race altogether? How meaningful was Luter’s election to the presidency if it was symbol more than substance — if, as McKissic says, it’s a ceremonial position with “zero budget, zero staff”?

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Parishioners at the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas.Credit...Ruddy Roye for The New York Times

Worse, for Onwuchekwa, are the manifestations of what he considers those familiar Confederate ideals. They have caused him to question whether he can be a Black citizen in a Christian nation. Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, in their 2020 book, “Taking America Back for God,” define Christian nationalism as a kind of creed that “idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture.” That particular Christian identity and culture has little do with Christ and a lot to do with, as Whitehead put it to me, “conservative, Christian, but also white, natural-born citizens.” It is about muscularly articulating a narrow vision for an America led by white Christian men and political positions that favor them.

The split that is opening up between Black and white evangelicals is reflected in polling released last month by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan organization founded by Robert P. Jones, an S.B.C. seminary graduate. The survey found that only 32 percent of Black Protestants agreed with the statement that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” When the same prompt was put to white evangelical respondents, 56 percent agreed.

Some of the same impulses of Christian nationalism, with its almost-antiquated, almost-fundamentalist views, revealed themselves recently in conflicts over the role of women in the church. Last month, the S.B.C.’s executive committee expelled — “disfellowshipped” — Rick Warren and his Saddleback Church for ordaining a woman as pastor. Warren may have been the S.B.C.’s most well known pastor; his 2002 book, “The Purpose Driven Life,” is one of the best-selling nonfiction books ever published. But the denomination felt comfortable removing his church — along with four others that had ordained female pastors — from its fold.

To some extent, I’m living proof of the promise found in Proverbs: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” I still attend church and Bible studies; my Sundays remain sacred, my plans to watch football often deferred as I wait for services to conclude. Church is probably where I still feel most comfortable. And though neither I nor my family are members of the S.B.C., it has had an indelible impact on my life. When I was growing up, some of my teachers belonged to the S.B.C.; the occasional Sunday-evening youth groups I attended — because church was a locus for fun too — were at South Tulsa Baptist Church, an S.B.C. church; and I recall with fondness watching the sermons of Billy Graham, Charles Stanley and countless other S.B.C.-ordained ministers. What little we knew of Tulsa before we moved there when I was a child was influenced by the town’s world-famous evangelical preachers like Oral Roberts and Carlton Pearson, whose broadcasts played on my pastor grandfather’s bedroom television.

My family left New York to settle in Tulsa because, in part, it was a bastion of evangelical life, a place many call the Buckle of the Bible Belt. We imagined that nearly everyone there — teachers, politicians, average residents — framed their engagement with the world through a distinctly Christian perspective. Though school-sponsored prayer in public schools was outlawed in 1962, Tulsa seemed to have enough Christian schools to counterbalance our country’s growing distance from its supposed Judeo-Christian roots. (In fact, many Christian academies were founded to provide white families with a nearly all-white alternative to the secularizing and integrating of school systems after Supreme Court decisions against segregation and prayer.) Culturally, there seemed to be less spiritual and moral peril in the flat, brown predictability of Oklahoma than in multihued, cosmopolitan New York. Tulsa was the place where we could freely be our full Christian selves, more than we had to be our Black selves or our Jamaican selves. And I still feel that our commitment to our evangelical tradition and our move to Oklahoma were steppingstones to feeling more American.

I started school at Victory Christian School, which was founded by a Roberts protégé, Billy Joe Daugherty, and his wife, Sharon. We pledged allegiance to the Christian flag (mostly white, with a red cross on a blue patch) and to the Bible every morning before pledging allegiance to the American flag. In the summer before sixth grade, however, my parents found a different school for me, St. Augustine Academy, whose evangelical bona fides seemed even stronger. St. Augustine, which had fewer Black kids than Victory — I was one of two Black students in my graduating class — and therefore fewer examples showing me how I could belong. Cultural transformation was embedded in its mission: It was training students to reclaim our culture for Christ.

It seemed to me then that there was a war going on for America’s soul. (I still think so, though I see its contours much differently now.) I was taught that our country had backslid from its aspirations to godliness, which this school believed had been designed into its founding. The courses we took were meant to make us warriors: In history classes we were taught that the world started with Creation and that God’s hand was demonstrably active in the development of Western society; our Worldview instruction (now called Understanding the Times) focused on public policy and cultural topics ranging from Islam to abortion; rhetoric equipped us with the skills to serve as able apologists for the Christian faith.

By the end of sixth grade, I was convinced that Christopher Columbus was akin to a missionary and that his impact on the people in his employ — we never acknowledged their enslavement — was of a Christianizing and modernizing sort. I was a proud and polemical Christian nationalist, who happily engaged in debates about the moral decay of America and the world. I was meant to reclaim our culture for Christ, to help our country live up to its calling as a Christian nation.

In my U.S. history class, I watched videos and read material based on the work of David Barton, regarded by many as a pseudo-historian for espousing that the separation of church and state is nothing but an intentional misreading of the Constitution, a modern folly; the Southern Poverty Law Center considers him an extremist. I was certain that our nation’s greatness required believing that our country’s Christian founders had established this nation to be a Christian city on a hill.

Barton wasn’t the only font of my childhood and teenage ideologies. My school’s curriculum included textbooks from two publishers, Abeka and BJU Press (short for Bob Jones University), whose books “portray Black Americans in the antebellum period as happy,” according to Kathleen Wellman, a professor at Southern Methodist University. Black people are presented as receiving the great benefit of being Christianized, notwithstanding their enslavement. Robert E. Lee is heroic. Wellman, the author of “Hijacking History,” points out that Abeka’s latest edition “is not as adamant in emphasizing the biblical division of the races, but it still refers to it, and it’s clear that Africa has always been backward.”

Wellman’s characterizations underscore for me how the importance of my Black identity was diminished every day I spent at St. Augustine’s (which has since changed its name to Augustine Christian Academy). But at the time, I took its curriculum as a challenge to become more like someone I could never become — a white person, or at least white enough to accept a Christian nationalist tale of America’s origins and purpose. And because my options as a kid were either to be ostracized as too Black to fit in or to be slightly less ostracized by trying to be like the white children, I took the latter path. The Christian nationalism that my school was built on, and for which it hoped to produce champions, insisted on the same kind of colorblindness within the evangelical movement that resists the calls by Onwuchekwa and others to reflect on its racist past and troubled present.

As a teenager, I thought I could accept that colorblindness because, in a technical sense, being Black and being evangelical are not mutually exclusive. According to the four-pronged definition of evangelicalism by the British historian David Bebbington, which has been used by the National Association of Evangelicals, I qualify as evangelical. I believe that the ultimate spiritual authority is the Bible (Biblicism). I am what many Christians call “born again,” an identity gained after confessing belief in God (Conversionism). I believe that Jesus’ death on the cross is critical to the salvation story (Crucicentrism). And I accept that I must commit my life to bettering the world through service (Activism). But defining evangelical without including a strong consideration of culture is “ahistorical,” according to Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of “Jesus and John Wayne.” For her, and now for me, evangelicalism is a cultural expression — and “predominantly a white movement in American history,” a movement that, no matter how much I tried to belong to it, would never accept all of me and the history that my skin represents in America.

The austerity of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, led by McKissic, is accented by its tall steeple in the front and its sleek, curved beige exterior walls. Though it shares a name with Onwuchekwa’s Cornerstone Church, its auditorium could hold the latter’s congregation many times over. These two Cornerstones have little in common. McKissic’s church is situated in an area that isn’t as economically challenged as Onwuchekwa’s. McKissic’s church members remind me of how my family would show up to church — their attire ranging from business casual to their Sunday best, suits and dresses, whereas the Rev. John O.’s parishioners embrace a more modern Sunday best, but one that still reflects numerous passages from Scripture: come as you are. Chief among the many differences between the two pastors is that McKissic and his congregation are still in the S.B.C. But what they share is perhaps a greater bond: They each have had their tussles with the very denomination that gave them their starts — theological training, seed funding for their churches and the public platform that Onwuchekwa abandoned and that McKissic keeps criticizing but can’t seem to leave.

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The Rev. Dwight McKissic at Cornerstone Church in Arlington. McKissic chose to stay in the Southern Baptist Convention and try to work for change from within.Credit...Ruddy Roye for The New York Times

When reflecting on this distinction — remaining in the S.B.C. and looking for solutions within versus leaving to criticize from without — Gregory Perkins, a Black S.B.C. pastor and board member of the National African American Fellowship, an S.B.C. entity that consists of about 4,000 predominantly African American churches and pastors, says, “I believe that there is more opportunity being part of the family than there is critiquing by looking through the window.”

When I relayed Perkins’s statement to Onwuchekwa, he became more animated and direct: “I didn’t mince my words or hold my tongue when I was on the inside.” His sense is that denomination insiders are uninterested in any reckoning. “After a decade of being on the inside, I watched Ahmaud Arbery. I watched Breonna Taylor. I watched George Floyd. I watched the collective conscience of America wake up.” He continued, “I saw for the first time in my 38-year-old life where it seemed like, in the United States, the collective country said, ‘Hey, we all should speak out and do some stuff about this.’” He says that rather than add its voice to the calls for America to “wake up,” the S.B.C. was content to, as he puts it, “argue over C.R.T.”

McKissic, unlike Onwuchekwa, grew up surrounded by the trappings of the S.B.C. The tone and timbre of his voice, his attire and his countenance evoke the sermons of my childhood. “My daddy was a pastor,” McKissic told me. “My mother, in today’s culture, would probably be considered a minister.” She was very much involved in Baptist denominational life, he adds, “primarily National Baptist, which is Black Baptist” and which is the largest predominantly Black Christian denomination in the United States. He has always been an avid reader, he says, and much of what he read “came out of Southern Baptists.” He went to predominantly white Baptist camps in Arkansas. When older, he attended Ouachita Baptist University, which was connected to the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, an affiliate of the S.B.C.

At Ouachita, McKissic became chaplain intern at a prison in Arkansas. It was in this summertime role that he was noticed by S.B.C. representatives, which led to a scholarship that covered part of his seminary training at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. Just 16 miles from there, in Arlington, is where he planted his Cornerstone Church, in 1983. Since then, his congregation has grown to roughly 4,000 members. His biography, though it differs from Onwuchekwa’s, represents another pipeline within the S.B.C. as it has sought to cultivate diverse talent. Touchpoints include summer camps, internships for those enrolled in an S.B.C. college and recruitments to the pastorate through church planting immediately after graduating from an S.B.C. seminary.

While starting out in the S.B.C. as a Black pastor may appear to be a frictionless choice, for someone like McKissic, as his experience suggests, continuing to remain within the fold as a Black pastor can amount to finding enough technicalities to stay. The first such occasion for McKissic came in the early 1990s, after he was appointed to the Missions Funding Committee of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, which was responsible for greenlighting the seed funding for pastors to start new churches. This financing was made available with interest rates. But in practice, it wasn’t administered as fairly as McKissic thought it should be.

“Why are some churches getting 6 percent interest rates and other churches are getting 0 percent interest rates?” he says he asked during a meeting of the Missions Funding Committee. The immediate response was deafening silence. It was broken only when someone said, “Our white churches get 0 percent interest rates, and the Black and Hispanic churches get 6 percent interest rates” — a policy that reminded him of redlining. Three months later, at the next committee meeting, he told me, he did something that has become characteristic of his actions during these tense, race-based S.B.C. struggles: “I solely objected to race-based interest rates.” He added: “I insisted they put it in the minutes that I was opposed to that.” His protest was logged, but so was his intention to remain.

McKissic has many reasons to stay in the S.B.C. Some of the castigations that Onwuchekwa levels at the denomination don’t bother McKissic as much. The claim by Onwuchekwa that the S.B.C. is “too closely aligned with the Republican Party,” for example, would not dismay McKissic. During the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, in fact, McKissic publicly endorsed the former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, a fellow S.B.C. pastor and a onetime classmate of his. McKissic has been willing to say — and to be criticized for saying — that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment directed at the people of New Orleans. “New Orleans flaunts sin in a way that no other places do,” he said. “You can’t shake your fist in God’s face 364 days a year and then ask, ‘Where was God when Katrina struck?’”

The only time McKissic has withdrawn from anything S.B.C.-related was when he left the more conservative of the S.B.C.’s two Texas conventions in 2020. But there was an extended time in 2021 — amid the country’s and his denomination’s combative preoccupation with the meanings and merits of C.R.T. — when it seemed he might join Onwuchekwa and others in leaving the S.B.C. altogether. In 2019, long before the arguments about C.R.T. were generating headlines, a committee that included a Black chairman and several Black pastors and Baptist scholars, among many others, put together Resolution 9 for the S.B.C. It highlighted elements of C.R.T. worthy of consideration. McKissic calls the Baptist scholars behind the resolution “the best and brightest minds, Black and white, in the S.B.C. life, who came up with a very biblical and balanced view of critical race theory.” Their thrust was that it had elements that could help people “understand multifaceted social dynamics” — yet C.R.T. had been “appropriated by individuals with worldviews that are contrary to the Christian faith, resulting in ideologies and methods that contradict Scripture.” The resolution was adopted at the time almost without fanfare or controversy.

But according to McKissic, President Trump’s lambasting of C.R.T. and diversity-training programs within the federal government shifted the S.B.C.’s stance. In near lock step, the presidents of the S.B.C.’s six seminaries jointly denounced C.R.T., along with several state conventions and a bevy of well-known S.B.C. pastors.

For the next two years, McKissic recalls, “momentum was shifting and moving toward the convention itself denouncing C.R.T.” He penned a blog post in the lead-up to the 2021 convention titled, “Why I will leave the S.B.C. if they Rescind Resolution 9.” In the end, however, McKissic found a technicality. As he remembers it, “They denounced all and any racial theories period, without naming any one racial theory.” For McKissic, that was enough of an adjustment — a negotiated one, the type that Black leaders must make if they choose to continue to accept the label of “evangelical.” McKissic identified the technicality that enabled him to stay: “They did not denounce C.R.T. Therefore, I remain.”

Though Onwuchekwa still preaches periodically, the church he founded continues under the day-to-day management and leadership of several other pastors, including his co-founder, in whose living room the church had its earliest start. Different tasks fill his days now. He has been promoting a book he wrote about overcoming the grief he experienced following the death of his brother in 2015. As part of an effort to revitalize his neighborhood, he created a coffee brand that made more than $1 million in 2022. He’s trying to complete the doctoral degree he was so close to finishing when he left the S.B.C. (and his seat on the board of Southeastern Seminary). Now at Emory, he is studying how churches and religious groups can be the fulcrums for the sort of advocacy and social change that would probably cause friction within the S.B.C.

Perhaps the activity most related to his pastoral training is a group he founded in 2020 with other pastors of color who have also left or felt distanced from their conservative evangelical denominations. Their goal is to plant more race-conscious, race-forward churches across the country. The organization, called the Crete Collective, has already helped plant seven churches, with as many as 10 ministers waiting for their chance to do the same. When I asked Onwuchekwa why he couldn’t do this work inside the S.B.C., he said that such efforts would be cast as “advocating for critical race theory and Marxism.” He added that doing the work outside the S.B.C. ensures that the Crete Collective doesn’t have to spend time “giving an apologetic or a defense for what we’re trying to do.” That is, establish Gospel-driven churches in distressed Black and Brown communities.

It appears to me, however, that Onwuchekwa has traded one exhausting career for a more intense, multihyphenate career. But, he told me, referring to his days pastoring in the S.B.C.: “You don’t know how tired you are. You don’t know how emptying and discouraging it is until you get out of that world and realize, Oh, wait a minute. You don’t know how draining it is on your dignity and creativity until you get outside of that world.”

It is not just pastors who tire of trying dutifully to maintain their citizenship in a Christian nation. It wasn’t until I abandoned my evangelical identity that I realized how much of my Black identity I had had to sacrifice. When you’re Black and evangelical, as the religion scholar Anthea Butler put it to me, “you’re killing your own soul. You’re not just killing yourself; you’re killing your ancestors.”


Caleb Gayle is a professor at Northeastern University, a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the author of a book about Black Creeks, “We Refuse to Forget.” Ruddy Roye is a Cleveland-based documentary photographer specializing in environmental portraits with a focus on grass-roots struggles, especially in his homeland, Jamaica.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 44 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Black, Evangelical and Torn. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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