Racism has been a significant part of the Southern Baptist denomination for 150 years. Racism can no more be separated from the history of Southern Baptists than it can be from the history of the South.

The Southern Baptist Convention, however, seemed to take a giant step forward when it met last week. It passed a resolution to “denounce racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin,” to “apologize to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systematic racism,” and to ask African-Americans for forgiveness.

It looks good on paper.

There is, though, a definite relationship between southern culture and the beliefs of many conservative Southern Baptists: the latter being an embodiment of the status quo inherent in the former.

During the Civil War, the South chose to emancipate itself from the North and to defend the rights of its citizens to own African-Americans. During the same period, Southern Baptists chose to emancipate themselves from the Baptists in the North, and to defend the rights of its missionaries to own African-Americans.

Then, following the Civil War, the South gave birth to the extremely violent Ku Klux Klan. A number of Southern Baptists played integral roles in this organization.

Up until the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, many southerners were overtly racist. This was most notably characterized in the existence of segregation laws. Many Southern Baptist ministers served as apologists for these laws, even daring to openly oppose civil rights activists in their attempts to bring about reform.

This description of how Southern Baptists, in general, have treated African-Americans is not to be questioned. In fact, the Resolution for Racial Reconciliation presumes the truthfulness of the description.

The problem with the resolution is that it makes the Southern Baptist Convention an embodiment of the southern status quo.

Today, African-Americans in the South (and to a lesser degree in the North) face clandestine racism. Society’s false preconceptions, unspoken fears and unwillingness to deal with cyclical economic and social ills are the means by which racism is manifested nowadays as opposed to the blatantly repugnant Jim Crow laws of the past.

By amounting to nothing more than rhetoric, the Southern Baptists’ anti-racist resolution embodies this clandestine form of racism.

If the Southern Baptist Convention had actually considered racism a problem it would have confronted the problem with the same vigor as it has homosexuality. In 1993, the convention approved an amendment which states that member congregations “which act to affirm, approve, or endorse homosexual behavior” will be deserted. There is no escaping the conclusion that the convention views homosexuality as a real social problem, and racism as a marginal one at worst.

This does not mean that congregations belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention are necessarily racist. Nearly seven percent of the convention’s 40,000 congregations are comprised predominately of ethnic minorities.

However, their convention’s inability to go beyond the status quo indicates that their stand against racism is less than sincere.

Tyler Roach is a senior in English, philosophy and religious studies from Des Moines.