Abstract
The issue of race underlies the great American experiment like nothing else, and because the US is still self-reportedly a majority Christian nation, race is manifest in our expressions of faith. During the civil rights era, American Christianity essentially split on the issue, with the prophetic voice of Martin Luther King Jr. lining up on one side and the various White Citizens' Councils (with their own verses from Scripture at the ready) lining up on the other, as those ever-present lukewarm Laodiceans lingered in the middle, just wishing it would all go away. Even in the twenty-first century, when most of us would like to pretend that racial inequality is a thing of the past, American Christians are still trying to work out their thinking on what is no longer just a black-white cultural divide.