FORGIVE US OUR SINS

AND LO, IT CAME TO PASS LAST WEEK THAT 219 YEARS after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, 132 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, 41 years after the Supreme Court struck down segregation and three months after Mississippi ratified the 13th Amendment, the Southern Baptist Convention finally got around to admitting that slavery is sinful and asked forgiveness from blacks for its historic role in defending segregation.

That's mighty white of them.

Forgive me for being underwhelmed by this astonishingly belated act of contrition from the nation's largest Protestant denomination. Like most African Americans, I would have been more impressed if the revelation had come a generation ago, when prominent Southern Baptists like George Wallace were standing in the schoolhouse door and never-miss-a-Sunday Ku Klux Klansmen were murdering fellow Christians who believed in civil rights. Instead the message from many Southern Baptist pulpits was that God himself had ordained the separation of the races and that to tamper with it was to go against his will. "Just think of all the violence and bitterness we might have been spared if the Southern Baptists had repudiated racism sooner," says C. Eric Lincoln, a retired professor of religion at Duke University. "The country would have been 100 years ahead of where it is today in race relations."

In fact, the Southern Baptists had plenty of chances to reverse their backward stand on racial issues but passed them by, even though many courageous members of the church and some maverick pastors protested in vain against the policies. In his famous "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. responded to a group of "liberal" Southern church leaders who had criticized his nonviolent demonstrations as "unwise and untimely" acts of outside agitation. Wrote King: "In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sidelines and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, 'These are social issues with which the Gospel has no real concern.'" But for the most part, King's powerful appeal to his fellow pastors to act like Christians fell on deaf ears. Even today, there are few more segregated places than the average Baptist church on Sunday morning.