ARE AFRICAN-AMERICANS SAFE IN EVANGELICAL CHURCHES?

A reckoning with silence, history, and the distance between what the American church preaches and how it treats its African-American congregants.

Illustration by Zion McGregor

A Black woman I know, a faithful churchgoer for the whole of her adult life, who joined a white evangelical church once told me why she stopped raising her hand in Sunday school. It was not that she lacked an answer. It was that the room had made clear, gently and without a single cruel word, that her answer was not the kind…