In giving us a history of America and the Protestant church, Jemar Tisby has given us a survey of ourselves—the racial meanings and stratagems that define our negotiations with one another. He points courageously toward the open sore of racism, not with the resigned pessimism of the defeated but with the resilient hope of Christian faith. The reader will have their minds and hearts pricked as they consider just how complicit the church has been in America’s original sin and how weak a word complicit is for describing the actions and inactions of those who claim the name of Christ!

THABITI ANYABWILE, pastor, Anacostia River Church

With clinical precision, Jemar Tisby unpacks the tragic connection between the American church and the countless historic iterations of American racism. Readers are served well by Jemar’s refusal to minimize the horror of this history or sanitize the church’s hands from its complicity. For this reason and many others, The Color of Compromise is an appropriately discomforting volume for such a time as this. May it be referenced and heeded as a prophetic warning for decades to come.

TYLER BURNS, vice president, The Witness

If you want to understand why we remain mired in racial unrighteousness, you need to read this book. Its pages radiate not just historical but also moral insight, as Tisby shines a light on to the dark places of American church history. The Color of Compromise tells the truth—and only the truth will set us free.

HEATH W. CARTER, associate professor of history, Valparaiso University, author, Union Made

The Color of Compromise is essential reading for American Christians. By telling the brutal history of white Christians’ deliberate complicity in racial oppression, Jemar Tisby confronts the church with its own past. But his is not simply a story of condemnation. If racism can be made, it can be unmade, he reminds us. “There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote. Tisby’s book is a labor of love and, ultimately, a work of hope.

KRISTIN DU MEZ, professor of history and gender studies, Calvin College

Each individual and society is a compilation of what has come before them, whether they own this notion or not. Tisby’s thoughtful work reminds us that you can run from, deny, or remix it, but history will find you out. The American church’s history of wanting to hold holiness in one hand and racial stratification in the other has seeded a deeply corrupted tree. The book causes us to examine the implications of the historical trajectory of our theological influences. Yet this book, with the same intensity that it offers historical truth, provides grace. If race can be constructed, racism can be deconstructed. In Christ’s name, it must be!

CHRISTINA EDMONDSON, dean for intercultural student development, Calvin College

Christianity in the United States has had problems for centuries as it concerns racial injustice, and most American Christians need what can ...