Color-Blind Christianity:
Tracing It’s Historic Roots in
order to Remove Them
By D.A. Horton
Historic Considerations
In wake of the Culture War between the “Moral
Majority” (Evangelical Right) and the Liberal
Left of the 1980’s an ironic shared practice from
both sides has become normal. The groups
who stand polarized on abortion, economics,
gun control, and immigration actually default
to color-blindness as a preferred reasonable
response to issues regarding ethnicity. When
history is considered this reality isn’t too
shocking.
The color-blindness and neutrality of the law
ideologies were merged through the Supreme
Court rulings on Dred Scott v Sandford
(1857) and Plessy v Ferguson (1896). It was a
professed belief of those who held power in
the 19th century that all court-based decisions
were neutral, color-blind and provide genuine
equal opportunity for all people regardless
of; gender, race, and social class. We now
know if this were indeed true, then Civil Rights
legislation for Women and later People of Color
would not be necessary and amendments to
the Constitution not added.
Relating to the church, since the pre-Civil war
era, Galatians 3:28 has been used as a pre-
text for a philosophy in my book Intensional:
Kingdom Ethnicity in a Divide World, I call ‘color-
blind Christianity’. Caroline Shanks addresses
how pro-slavery Christians interpreted
Galatians 3:28 through a lens that identified
African slaves as the recipients of the Curse of
Canaan in Genesis 9, 1 and although they could
be Christian, their position in the American
caste system must remain as a chattel slave.
After the Civil War African American pastors and
scholars began to interpret this text through the
lens of not only freedom in Christ but also their
ability to develop ecclesiastical leadership in a
new organism known as the Black Church. 2
As the Civil Right era dawned the aggressive
rise of Feminist Theology coerced evangelicals
to give exclusive treatment Galatians 3:28 with
gender as the focus while ethnicity and socio-
economic nuances remained secondary at
best. The arguments for complementarianism
strongly opposed the egalitarian view
projected by those who sympathized with
11