"Among the forces of white liberalism the church has a special obligation.

It is the voice of moral and spiritual authority on earth. Yet no one observing the history of the church in America can deny the shameful fact that it has been an accomplice in structuring racism into the architecture of American society. The church, by and large, sanctioned slavery and surrounded it with the halo of moral respectability. It also cast the mantle of its sanctity over the system of segregation. The unpardonable sin, thought the poet Milton, was when a man so repeatedly said, "Evil, be thou my good," so consistently lived a lie, that he lost the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. America's segregated churches come dangerously close to being in that position.

Of course, there have been marvelous exceptions. Over the last five years many religious bodies - Catholic, Protestant and Jewish  - have been in the vanguard of the civil rights struggle, and have sought desperately to make the ethical insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage relevant on the question of race. But the church as a whole has been all too negligent on the question of civil rights. It has too often blessed a status quo that needed to be blasted, and reassured a social order that needed to be reformed. So the church must acknowledge its guilt, its weak and vacillating witness, its all too frequent failure to obey the call to servanthood. Today the judgement of God is upon the church for its failure to be true to its mission. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority. (96)

 -Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (King Legacy)