From the earliest times that I can remember, I was a believing Christian. My father is a devout Christian who taught me the salvation that Jesus Christ offers and about His lessons for living. Father was never dogmatic about his faith, and over the years he led my family to different churches without worrying about the denomination. At one time or another, we were members of Presbyterian, Methodist, and Church of Christ congregations. The only important consideration for Father was the quality of the minister and the congregation. When I was in grade school, my family joined the Elysian Fields Methodist Church where Father taught Sunday school. When we traveled we would almost always try to attend Sunday school and church in whatever city we happened to be in. The new perspectives we received from the different Sunday school teachers and preachers were like shots of adrenaline for our Christian faith.

At thirteen, I went to Clifton L. Ganus school, a strongly fundamentalist Church of Christ school in New Orleans. At this same time, my family and I began to attend services at the Carrollton Avenue Church of Christ, which had strong ties to the school. Although I had had an infant baptism in the Presbyterian church, my new teachers and friends convinced me that the Bible taught that a conscious decision about salvation was needed before baptism. I prayed about it and gave myself to Christ as I was lain back in the waters of the baptismal pool in our church's sanctuary. Not long after my baptism, after much pleading from me, my father found his way to the baptismal pool as well.

My experience of being a renewed Christian had a profound impact not only on my Christian beliefs, but also on my secular ones, for it seemed I saw everything in a fresh light. When a man has confidence in his own beliefs, he is unafraid to joust with contrary opinions. Being "saved" gave me a sense of security that made me more open to different ideas. When someone has doubts about the underlying validity of his beliefs, he feels threatened by challenges to them. The feeling of being "right with God and the world" gave me freedom to explore challenging ideas. It was only a few months after my baptism that I read Race and Reason,¹ the book that began my intellectual journey toward racial understanding.

In the early '60s, most churches in the South were still segregated, and even the Catholic church had segregated parochial schools and separate seating during Mass for Whites and Blacks. Accepting racial differences posed no moral dilemma for organized Christianity for its first two thousand years, but after only 50 years of an egalitarian-dominated media, racial attitudes began to change in the Christian establishment. Ironically, the source of this new "Christian" viewpoint came primarily from people who were, in fact, anti-Christians. At first, Christians were told that recognition of racial differences and segregation was inappropriate. When I graduated from college in the mid-1970s, increasing numbers of churches were maintaining that racism was a "sin." By the 1980s, some churches that had been totally segregated just 20 years earlier even began to consecrate mixed marriages between Whites and Blacks.