When the men who authored the constitution of Independent Presbyterian Church confidently invoked the Bible in support of segregation they defied a growing conviction among mainline Christians that the practice was “unchristian” and thus indefensible on religious grounds.
2Īvoiding any explicit reference to racial identity, this article of the IPC constitution was less overt than the policy adopted eight years previously at Second Presbyterian, which explicitly condemned “integrated meetings of the white and negro races in our local churches, camps and conferences, at all age levels.” However, by offering a “scriptural” rationale for segregation this statement ventured a claim that the authors of the 1957 policy had not deemed necessary. Thus, written into Independent Presbyterian’s constitution was this attempt to establish once and for all the church’s position on race:īelieving that the scriptures teach that the separation of nations, people and groups will preserve the peace, purity and unity of the Church, it is, therefore, the will of this Church that its members and those visiting the Church, its worship services, and all its activities, shall be compatible with the congregation. When members of the Session’s segregationist faction left Second Presbyterian in 1965 to establish their own congregation, they were determined to build a stronger theological foundation for racial homogeneity.
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It began, in fact, with the acknowledgement that since “many learned and devout Christian men have debated pro and con the question of segregation being Scriptural…this is a moot question.” Without a reliable biblical warrant for racial separation, the church’s Session established the continuing necessity of segregation on the Cold War maxim that the moving force behind integration was “godless communism.” 1 That statement, like most mainline ecclesiastical attempts to defend segregation during the 1950s, revealed theological diffidence. When the hardline segregationists who had dominated the Session realized their influence was eroding, they resigned their positions at Second Presbyterian and started their own congregation called Independent Presbyterian Church (IPC).ĭuring the course of this conflict, members of Second Presbyterian learned that behind their Session’s decision to bar integrated groups from worship was a 1957 policy that committed the church to racial segregation in all its activities. After months of internal and external efforts to pressure the Session to allow integrated groups to enter the church, Second Presbyterian’s pastors publically repudiated the Session’s stance and the majority of the congregation voted to make the longest-serving Elders inactive for a period of three years. The issue had been whether the church’s Session, its board of lay leaders, should admit groups of black and white students who had come to worship on about a dozen occasions between March 1964 and March 1965. Although the city had no shortage of churches, it became necessary to launch the congregation because racial conflict had precipitated a split at 3,500-member Second Presbyterian. In March 1965 a new church was founded in Memphis, Tennessee.