Forefront Conversations with Rusty Hawkins

In 1954, something happened that changed the Southern evangelicals forever - and not in a good way. When the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, Baptist and Methodist churches in the south found that public sentiment echoed the court's calls for integration and suddenly their stance on segregationist theology had to change. So, it changed for the worst. In "The Bible Told Them So: Southern White Christians’ Fight against Racial Equality," Professor Rusty Hawkins detailed how segregationist theology twisted over the years into private schools aimed at "protecting the family" and a dehumanizing colorblind theology that ignored systemic racism with alleged biblical support. ABOUT RUSTY Professor Rusty Hawkins is a professor of Humanities and History at Indiana Wesleyan University and has published on race and religion before with "Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith" drawn from papers commemorating the tenth anniversary of "Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America." Born and raised in Kansas, Professor Hawkins is a diehard Kansas City Royals and Chiefs fan and is currently working on a manuscript about the conversion of George Wallace.