As a result, evangelical pastors who were once outspoken about the need to confront racism have gone silent, or in some cases, been driven from the movement altogether.
Some black Christians—including Tisby and his colleagues at the Witness, as the former Reformed African American Network is now known, have left the evangelical world, sometimes quietly and other times loudly.
Some, like Tisby, have found it harder to leave—finding their ties to the evangelical world difficult to unwind even when they are told they are not wanted. Last year, the board of Grove City College, a Christian school in Pennsylvania, apologized for a 2020 sermon Tisby gave at a campus chapel session after an online petition accused him of promoting critical race theory.
White evangelical institutions have recognized a need in recent years to become more diverse in order to prosper as the country’s demographics change. But their donors often bridle as schools and churches change, causing a backlash that drives away people of color.
Anthea Butler, religious studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “White Evangelical Racism,” a 2021 book about the racial divides of the evangelical movement, said evangelicals have a long history of welcoming Christians of color into their movement and then ousting them if they ask too many questions about race.
She said college leaders, like those behind the report at Grove City, or other Christian leaders who have denounced Tisby want to make an example of him as a warning to others.
“They want to punish him,” she said.
A native of Waukegan, Illinois, Tisby found Christianity while in high school when a friend invited him to a church youth group meeting. Attending the University of Notre Dame, he began to think about a call to ministry. In South Bend he also discovered Calvinist theology after a friend sent him a copy of Piper’s 1986 book “Desiring God.”
After graduating in 2002 and a year working for Notre Dame’s campus ministries, he joined Teach for America and was sent to teach sixth graders in impoverished Phillips County, Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta.
The experience changed the direction of his life.
“This is cotton country—the land of slavery and sharecropping,” said Tisby. “You can see it in the landscape, you can see it in the generational poverty.”
The predominantly Black community was marked by a lack of jobs, poor medical care, food deserts and a struggling school system.
“The thing that struck me was that there are churches on every corner,” said Tisby. “Not only were they racially divided, it also didn’t seem like they were having much impact in the community. That’s where I started thinking about the relationship between faith and justice.”
