History 494 Senior Thesis Seminar

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Browsing History 494 Senior Thesis Seminar by Subject "Fife, Robert O."

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    Breaking the Silence: Robert O. Fife’s Work to End Racism
    (2022-04-22) Messner, Emily; Messner, Emily
    Dr. Robert Oldham Fife, who lived from 1918 to 2003, was an influential member of the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ during some of its most formative years. He began as a pastor and became a professor of church history at multiple Stone-Campbell institutions. Fife always emphasized the importance of the unity and role of the Church even as the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ completed its split from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). As part of these emphases, Fife, who was white, talked repeatedly and publicly during the 1960’s about the role that he thought the Church should play in ending the cycle of racism in the United States. He especially focused on this issue as it related to the Stone-Campbell Movement. While his interpretations and solutions often stood at least somewhat in contrast to both the nonviolent and violent movements for civil rights taking place at the time, Robert Fife’s voice was in and of itself an anomaly when compared to the general reaction of the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ. The majority of this constituency was white and generally remained silent throughout the course of the Civil Rights Movement. Fife was able to break this silence through his efforts to tie the theological importance of ending racism through reconciliation to the work of the Church, an institution especially critical for both him and the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ movement as a whole. In his works, Fife advocated for the Church to end racism by emphasizing the necessity of white Christians’ empathy for Black Americans through an understanding of their circumstances, the necessity of the removal of racism to create true unity in the Church, and the importance of ending racism as a key part of the work of the Church.