We Must Transform the World!

In “The White Christian and His Conscience,” Lillian Smith breaks down the ways that religion, specifically Christianity, works to maintain power and how it causes individuals to lose their conscience, causing them to live, ostensibly, with the warring teachings of Jesus and the white supremacist society they exist within. Smith, also, presents readers with analogies between Southern white Christians and Nazi Germany, at one point writing, “nowhere is hatred of the German Nazi worse than in the Deep South.” Smith notes that this hatred arises because Nazi Germany scratches at the white Southerner’s conscience and the hurt it endures due to white supremacy because it holds up a mirror to the white Southerner, showing him what he does to African Americans in his own nation.

Smith continues by stating that as white Southerners “[o]ur conscience has never let us rest,” and she compares the issues of race, what many dubbed “the Negro problem,” as a millstone around our necks. With the use of millstone, Smith pulls on Matthew 18:6 when Jesus tells those gathered around him that “it would be better for [someone] to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” than to lead a child into sin. Smith argues that we have burdened Blacks with “the millstone that our conscience has hung around our own soul.” Through this, Smith points out that instead of taking…