I was nodding my head along as I read. As a pastor’s son, none of this surprises me, even though my dad was that good kind of trouble-making Christian who worked (back in the 70s) to fight back against church racism.

Having grown up among Baptists, I experienced attitudes against interracial dating as being entrenched and religiously based. I sometimes write about the great controversy of the 1970s and early 80s with Christian universities like Bob Jones insisting on barring interracial dating on campus for religious reasons. (I write about it because it’s analogous to what Christian universities today to hurt LGBTQ students.)

Anyway, I was nodding along unsurprised until I got to the bit about two decades ago.

Are you kidding me? This was only two decades ago? I’m frankly a little shocked. I guess I shouldn’t be, but having been out of the church world for a very long time, I just presumed that attitudes against interracial dating had died out long before the turn of the millennium.

I know most Christians today hate people like me. I know they work their asses off to hurt LGBTQ people. There’s nothing I can do about that but suck it up, stay away from most Christians to protect my own mental health, and expose how their institutions work to hurt innocent people.

But I honestly thought American Christian racism, at least the overt kind that opposes interracial dating, was dead and forgotten.

I’m honestly just blinking in shock here.