God created the different races and set their bounds and habitation. God commanded, demanded and taught segregation from the Flood right on down until the Bible was written....[214]
The aged and gravel-voiced Dr. Bob Jones, fundamentalist par excellence, founder of the Bob Jones University in Greenville, and one of the state’s best known Baptist clergymen, objected to making segregation a Christian issue when Christianity was not involved. Like Patrick, he said that any plan for “the intermingling of the races” was the work “of the devil.” The Christian educator criticized “agitators from outside the South and demagogue politicians” who were “only interested in the colored vote.” Christians of both races should “tell the folks who come in with all this foreign influence to get back where they came from.”[215] In like manner, the Reverend Edward B. Guerry, Rector of the lowcountry St. James’ and St. John’s Episcopal Parishes, denounced the Supreme Court desegregation decision as “unrealistic,” “unfortunate,” and conducive to “discord, confusion, and ... sharp conflict” among the American people. Integration would simply “deepen” any “sense of inferiority” the Negro might have. The rector did not believe it was “in keeping with the mind of our Lord Jesus Christ to force the Kingdom of God on people either by judicial edict, or legislative action, or ecclesiastical pressure.”[216] Still another proponent of segregation, the Reverend E. R. Mason, a retired Columbia Methodist cleric, decried integrationist assaults on “those institutions that we must have or we perish,” e.g., “God, your church, home and schools.” Integration’s “true motive,” he declared, was “infiltrating the Black race into the White race.”[217] The Reverend M. A. Woodson of the Bethel Baptist Church of Olanta told the Lake City Citizens Council that the connection between the Communists and the NAACP had been “conclusively established.” The Citizens Councils, he said, were the right hands in the fight for constitutional government and states rights. “We must strive to leave our children a constitutional form of government and a segregated society that works in harmony.”[218]
Pro-segregation clergymen have not evolved a systematic theological basis for defense of their position. Rather each minister has developed his own. Sermons and statements upholding traditional Southern race patterns abound with quotations of Biblical authority. In a sermon that might well have been delivered in the 1850’s in defense of slavery, Dr. E. E. Colvin, pastor of the Immanuel Baptist Church of Orangeburg, asserted that
... the Old Testament scriptures recognize the existence of things as they are. We find that also in the New Testament. Jesus did not attempt to change or reform society in his day by the use of force. There was slavery in his day. There were many other civil and social ills in his day but never did Jesus attempt to use force or advocate force. In the centuries that have passed since then the teachings of Jesus have brought to pass tremendous changes.
Paul sent Onesimus, the slave, back to his former owner, Philemon. Paul didn’t write to Philemon and say, “You have no right to own this man.” Not at all. Paul respected the law and the right to private property back in that day.
In the New Testament we find instructions given to slaves and to masters telling them what to do. “Servants, be obedient unto them that according to the flesh are your Masters, and ye masters do the same things unto them, and forbear threatening; knowing that He who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no respect of persons with Him.” Ephesians 6:5,9.
We find no attempt whatever to overthrow slavery suddenly and by force. “Let each man abide in that calling wherein he was called. Wast thou called being a bondservant? Care not for it: nay, even if thou canst become free, use it rather. For he that was called in the Lord being a bondservant, is the Lord’s freeman: likewise, he that was called being free, is Christ’s bondservant. Ye were brought with a price; abide with God.” I Corinthians 7:20-24. The light of the Scriptures shows that we know by experience, that social changes take time.
The solution offered by the Doctor was for “our Negro friends” to “listen to reason and continue the practice of segregation on a voluntary basis” so that “peace and harmony” might prevail. Should “the spirit of hatred” induce them to seek integration, they would create a condition which would “do as much damage in the long run as the War Between the States did a hundred years ago.”[219]
Similar opinions are frequently expressed by others—from both the clergy and laity. In a letter to the editor of the Independent, James B. Davis of Anderson found scriptural sanction for opposition to integration in Leviticus 19:19: “Ye shall keep my statutes, Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind, thou shalt not sow thy field with a mingled seed.” Citing this authority he wrote: “Oh yes, we are careful about our pure cattle, poultry, dogs, etc., but we have advocates in our government who would crossbreed the people, whom God has put definite marks of color, build and features into, for their own glory. I have seen a few half breed Negro and white, that is mingled seed, and God pity an unfortunate child that must face the world a bastard, with a mingled color in his skin and hair. And he is a bastard because God has designated nations and languages, and directed us to go to our father’s people for a husband or wife.” Davis felt that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was a “malignant growth on a righteous document.” The Constitution should never have been amended. “Like our Holy Bible, it was good enough” in its original form.[220]
Another letter writer, Margaret L. Bostwick of Charleston, believed that a cardinal message of the Bible was “that Israel—ALL Israel, not just Judah” had been punished and was still being punished “for having disobeyed the many severe injunctions against the mixing of races.”[221] Similarly Lawrence Neff of Atlanta noted in the Morning News that “even the very elect may sometimes be deceived, or deceive themselves.” According to Neff, “Jesus was the most consistent and the most inflexible segregationist the world has ever known.” As “proof” he asserted that Jesus, “in commissioning the 12,” had said to them, “Go not to the Gentiles and into any city of the Samaritans enter not....”[222]