American religious history becomes uncomfortable when we stop asking what churches called themselves and begin asking what they actually defended. European colonization displaced Indigenous peoples from their land, American slavery turned human beings into property, and after emancipation new systems such as convict leasing and Jim Crow continued racial domination under different names.
The Southern Baptist Convention was born inside that world. For me, this is not merely history found in books. I grew up Southern Baptist and personally experienced racial exclusion during the late 1960s and 1970s. Decades later, I watched another Baptist congregation turn against a pastor who had served it for nearly fifteen years after one sermon directly challenged Donald Trump’s character and truthfulness.
I do not claim that these events are morally identical. I believe, however, that they expose a recurring spiritual danger: religion can become a means of defending the culture, economic system, or political leader that its followers have decided must not be challenged.
America Was Not an Empty Promised Land
The European colonists did not arrive on an empty continent. Indigenous nations already possessed communities, governments, languages, cultures, economies, and ancestral lands.
Christian imagery nevertheless became part of colonization. Some Puritans compared the New World with biblical Canaan, imagining themselves establishing a new biblical society. But European settlers were not ancient Israel, America was not biblical Canaan, and Native Americans were not Canaanites whom Elohim commanded European Christians to remove.
By the nineteenth century, dispossession had become federal policy. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 helped force or coerce approximately 100,000 Native Americans from their eastern homelands between 1830 and 1850. The National Park Service records that more than 16,000 Cherokee were forcibly removed and nearly 5,000 died in connection with the relocation remembered as the Trail of Tears. Removal opened millions of acres desired by white settlers. (National Park Service)
While Native people were losing their land, another population was being forced to produce wealth upon it.
We Need to Remember What Slavery Actually Meant
The word slavery can become dangerously abstract. American chattel slavery meant that another human being could legally claim ownership over your body, labor, children, and future.
Firsthand testimony preserved by the Library of Congress describes enslaved people kept scantily fed, thinly clothed, and driven to work from daylight until darkness. Formerly enslaved Henry Watson wrote that people could be whipped for trivial offenses and that punishment could become so severe that a person died from the beating. (Library of Congress)
The whip was not symbolism invented after slavery ended. One former slave remembered people being stripped to the waist and struck with a long leather strap about two fingers wide attached to a handle. Other narratives describe cowhide whips, bullwhips, paddles, and beatings that opened the skin. (Library of Congress)
Frederick Douglass remembered awakening at dawn to the screams of his aunt as an enslaver tied her up and whipped her naked back until she was covered in blood. He called witnessing that violence his entrance into the horror of slavery. (Library of Congress)
Some accounts describe whipping as so routine that it became part of daily life. One formerly enslaved woman recalled being whipped from morning until evening, with her attackers stopping to rest and then beginning again; she said salt, vinegar, and pepper were placed into the wounds to increase the pain. (Library of Congress Tile)
Not every enslaved person on every plantation experienced an identical punishment every day. The historical record does establish something horrifying enough without exaggeration: starvation, routine whipping, torture, family separation, and lethal beatings were real instruments of slavery.
Women and Children Faced Their Own Horrors
Enslaved women were also vulnerable to sexual exploitation by white men who possessed almost unlimited power over them. Virginia law eventually established that a child’s legal condition followed that of the mother. A child fathered by a free white man and born to an enslaved woman could therefore be born enslaved. (Library of Virginia)
The racial hypocrisy becomes difficult to comprehend. A white man could sexually exploit a Black woman whom the law treated as property, father her child, and then live within a society that could treat that child as property as well.
There is also archival evidence involving the deaths of mixed-race newborns. Researchers examining Virginia coroner’s records have noted cases in which such infants may have been killed to conceal the evidence of sexual relationships between white men and enslaved women. The records are incomplete, so it would be wrong to claim that murdering mixed-race babies was a universal plantation practice. It is nevertheless part of a disturbing documented history in which reputation, racial hierarchy, sexual exploitation, and infant death sometimes intersected. (UncommonWealth)
That qualification does not lessen the horror. It prevents us from turning an atrocity supported by evidence into a claim broader than the evidence allows.
Then Southern Baptists Defended the Slaveholder’s Place in Christianity
The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 amid a rupture in which slavery was central. The denomination’s own 1995 resolution eventually acknowledged that slavery played a role in its formation and that Southern Baptist predecessors defended the right to own enslaved people while participating in, supporting, or acquiescing in the inhumane system of American slavery. (SBC.net)
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s own historical investigation is even more candid. It acknowledges that its founders owned enslaved people and defended slavery, and that later seminary leaders defended segregation and white racial supremacy. (Southern Baptist Seminary)
This was not an abstract debate about constitutional theory.
Human beings were being beaten.
People were being kept hungry.
Families were being sold apart.
Women were being sexually exploited.
Children inherited enslavement.
Yet Southern Christians were arguing that ownership of those human beings remained compatible with representing the Gospel as missionaries.
For me, that is not merely a theological mistake. It is an abhorrent and demonic corruption of everything the Messiah teaches about mercy, justice, truth, and love of neighbor.
Emancipation Did Not End Forced Black Labor
The Civil War ended legal chattel slavery, but freedom did not produce an immediate end to racial exploitation.
Black Codes and discriminatory criminal laws helped funnel newly freed Black people into prisons. Southern states then leased prisoners to private companies for work in mines, railroads, farms, and industry. Because prisoners could be replaced, companies sometimes had even less economic incentive to preserve their lives than slaveholders had possessed before emancipation.
This system became known as convict leasing, and here I believe an important question must be asked:
Where were the Southern Baptists?
The honest answer is that some Southern Baptists opposed the system, but some extremely powerful Southern Baptist figures were not merely watching it happen.
They were participating in it.
A Southern Baptist Leader Was Leasing the Convicts
One of the clearest examples was Joseph E. Brown, former governor of Georgia and one of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s most important financial benefactors.
Brown became chairman of the seminary’s Board of Trustees. At the same time, his business empire relied heavily upon convict leasing.
Southern Seminary’s own investigation reports that Brown’s Dade Coal Company received state prisoners and that the overwhelming majority working in its mines were Black. In 1880, 340 of 371 convicts working in the Dade mines were Black. By Brown’s death in 1894, his company was using about 550 convicts, more than any other Georgia lessee. Brown personally netted about $98,000 from Dade Coal in 1880 alone. (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)
Brown also gave Southern Seminary $50,000 at a time when the institution desperately needed financial help. Southern Seminary itself now acknowledges that Brown’s wealth involved what it describes as Black convict labor that functioned as a continuation of race-based slavery. (Southern Baptist Seminary)
So the answer to “Where were the Southern Baptists during convict leasing?” cannot simply be that they were standing outside the system condemning it.
Some of the most powerful people in Southern Baptist institutional life were among the men profiting from it.
That distinction matters. I am not claiming that the Southern Baptist Convention itself operated every convict camp. I am saying that the denomination’s own historical research establishes that major Southern Baptist benefactors and leaders participated financially in the system.
Slavery Became Convict Leasing, Then Jim Crow
This history did not move neatly from slavery to equality.
Slavery ended, but Black Codes emerged.
Convict leasing followed.
Jim Crow segregation became law and custom.
Black political participation was suppressed.
Racial violence and lynching enforced the social order.
Southern Seminary’s own historical investigation admits that racial supremacy and segregation remained part of its history long after emancipation. Its president now acknowledges that the institution cannot separate its story from slavery, Jim Crow segregation, racism, and explicit white racial supremacy. (Southern Baptist Seminary)
The name of the system changed.
The racial hierarchy survived.
I Experienced Part of This History Myself
For me, Southern Baptist racial history is not something confined to 1845.
I grew up Southern Baptist in the late 1960s and 1970s. I had Black friends whom I wanted to bring to Sunday school. I was a child, and I was not thinking about denominational politics or the history of segregation. They were simply my friends.
The preacher told me I could not bring them because “they have their own church.”
Even then, I knew something was wrong. The church preached the Creator’s love while telling me that my Black friends belonged somewhere else because of their skin color.
I have already recorded that experience in my testimony on RickMcElderry.com. It became one of the experiences that taught me that a preacher can stand behind a pulpit, carry a Bible, and still defend injustice. (Rickey A McElderry)
That was not before the Civil War.
It happened during my lifetime.
Then Came the 1995 Apology
The Southern Baptist Convention finally issued its landmark racial reconciliation resolution in 1995—150 years after its founding.
The SBC acknowledged slavery’s role in its formation, admitted that its predecessors defended slave ownership, acknowledged individual and systemic racism, and admitted that Southern Baptists had sometimes opposed legitimate efforts to secure African American civil rights. (SBC.net)
Those words belong in the historical record.
But the resolution itself was an apology expressed in words. It did not itself restore generations of stolen labor or undo slavery, convict leasing, segregation, or exclusion. Whether an institution has genuinely repented is ultimately a theological and moral judgment that must be tested by what follows its words.
The Messiah did not tell us merely to read resolutions.
He told us to examine fruit.
Nearly Fifteen Years as Pastor—Then One Sermon About Trump
That brings me to Pastor William Kopp and Stuarts Draft Baptist Church in Virginia.
Kopp had led the congregation for about fourteen years—nearly fifteen years—before delivering an outdoor sermon on May 31, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Records place him serving the church as far back as 2008 and still officiating there in late 2019. (Wondering Eagle)
Then came one sermon about Donald Trump.
Kopp confronted Trump’s truthfulness and argued that Christians were excusing behavior they would condemn in others. He used exceptionally strong theological language, calling Trump’s behavior demonic and invoking the antichrist. He argued that Christians could not claim allegiance to Christ while embracing what he regarded as systematic deception. (Crosswalk.com)
I believe Kopp went too far if his argument is understood to mean that casting a ballot for Trump automatically determines whether someone is a Christian. No American election determines salvation.
But what happened afterward remains extraordinary.
CNN later reported nationally that Kopp faced a congregational backlash after the sermon. Accounts of the dispute say the deacons met with him after the service and that within approximately 48 hours he was being asked to resign. His nearly fifteen-year ministry at the church ended within days. (YouTube)
Nearly fifteen years as their pastor.
Hundreds of sermons.
Years of funerals, worship services, counseling, ministry, and relationships.
Then one sermon directly confronting Donald Trump, and the relationship collapsed almost immediately.
That raises a question I believe American Christians should consider seriously:
How does a politician become more protected inside a church than the pastor who served that congregation for nearly fifteen years?
The Pattern Is What Concerns Me
I am not saying slavery and the firing of a pastor over Donald Trump are equivalent events. They are obviously not.
What connects these histories for me is something deeper.
Colonists could use religious language to justify possession of Native land.
Southern Christians could use Scripture to defend slavery.
Southern Baptist leaders could participate in convict leasing after emancipation.
Churches could maintain racial separation through the Jim Crow era.
My own preacher could tell me my Black friends belonged in another church while preaching Christianity.
And a modern congregation could turn against a longtime pastor almost immediately after he challenged a political leader deeply admired by members of the church.
The historical circumstances change, but the spiritual temptation remains recognizable:
Religion can be reshaped until it protects what people already want to protect.
Evil Can Carry a Bible
That may be the most important lesson I have drawn from this history.
Religious appearance does not guarantee righteousness.
A man can hold a Bible while another human being is being whipped.
A minister can preach salvation while defending slavery.
A Baptist benefactor can finance theological education with wealth produced through coerced Black labor.
A preacher can speak about God’s love while telling Black children they belong in another church.
And Christians can become so loyal to a politician that criticism of that politician begins to feel like an attack upon their faith.
The Messiah gave us another standard:
Look at the fruit.
That is why neither churches, denominations nor politicians should be exempt from examination.
I began learning that lesson as a child when I wanted my Black friends to sit beside me in Sunday school.
More than half a century later, I still believe the child understood something that many religious adults had forgotten:
If our religion requires us to treat another human being as less worthy than ourselves, or to excuse evil in order to protect power, something has gone terribly wrong with our religion.
Sources and Further Reading
The Southern Baptist Convention’s 1995 Resolution on Racial Reconciliation acknowledges slavery’s role in the SBC’s creation, Southern Baptist participation in and defense of slavery, systemic racism, and later failures concerning civil rights. (SBC.net)
Read the official SBC resolution
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Report on Slavery and Racism documents slaveholding founders, segregation, white racial supremacy, Joseph E. Brown’s convict-leasing operations, and the financial relationship between Brown and the seminary. (Southern Baptist Seminary)
Read Southern Seminary’s historical report
The Library of Congress preserves firsthand narratives describing scant food, leather-strap and cowhide whippings, severe physical punishment, and deaths resulting from beatings. (Library of Congress)
Frederick Douglass at the Library of Congress
The National Park Service documents federal Indian Removal and the forced or coerced displacement of approximately 100,000 Native Americans between 1830 and 1850. (National Park Service)
National Park Service — Indigenous removal history
The Library of Virginia discusses coroner’s records involving infant deaths, including mixed-race infants and the possibility that some deaths concealed white men’s sexual exploitation of enslaved women. (UncommonWealth)
Library of Virginia — Infanticide in historical records
My published testimony on RickMcElderry.com records my childhood experience of being told that my Black friends could not attend Sunday school because they had their own church. (Rickey A McElderry)
Read My Testimony
CNN’s report on Pastor William Kopp revisits his removal following the 2020 sermon confronting Donald Trump. (YouTube)
CNN: Congregation replaced pastor after controversial Trump sermon
Discover more from Rickey A McElderry
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