The Limits of Literalism: Race, The Bible, and The Desegregation of Dallas Theological Seminary, 1950–1980

The desegregation of Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) offers a critical case study for scholars of American religious history, illuminating how white evangelical institutions responded to the racial transformations of the post-civil rights era. Unlike southern evangelical colleges that defended segregation on overt theological grounds, DTS never explicitly framed its exclusion of Black students within a scriptural mandate. Instead, the seminary’s shift from racial exclusion to intentional Black student recruitment in the 1970s reflects what Martin Luther King Jr. once described as a “more cautious than courageous” approach. Anchored in biblical literalism, DTS president John Walvoord’s reluctance to use scripture to justify segregation played a key role in the school’s transformation. This article fills a gap in the historiography by examining how institutional culture, theological commitments, and broader cultural pressures converged to produce a quiet and incremental model of desegregation—neither overtly racist nor actively prophetic—offering a more complex portrait of evangelicalism and race in the second half of the twentieth century.