As I did recently with Sarah Posner's new book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, I'd like to share with you some excerpts from Robert P. Jones's book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2020), which I recently read. This book is very important, as Jones's Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) issues a report today entitled, "Summer Unrest over Racial Injustice Moves the Country, But Not Republicans or White Evangelicals." This reports summarizes recent PRRI polling findings which show that, even as other white Americans are gradually coming to see and admit the depths of racial injustice everywhere in American society, Republicans and white evangelicals — who are to a great extent one and the same — refuse to budge. These groups continue to want to claim that white citizens are the real victims of injustice.
Here are passages that struck me as worth paying careful attention to in Jones's book White Too Long:
“The Christian denomination in which I grew up was founded on the proposition that slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ. Its founders believed that this arrangement was not just possible, but divinely mandated” (p. 1).
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“While the South lost the war, this secessionist religion not only survived but also thrived. Its powerful role as a religious institution that sacralized white supremacy allowed the Southern Baptist Convention to spread its roots during the late nineteenth century to dominate southern culture. And by the mid-twentieth century, the SBC ultimately evolved into the single largest Christian denomination in the country, setting the tone for American Christianity overall and Christianity’s influence in public life” (p. 2).
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“The theologically backed assertion of the superiority of both ‘the white race’ and Protestant Christianity undergirded a century of religiously sanctioned terrorism in the form of ritualized lynchings and other forms of public violence and intimidation. Both the informal conduits of white power, such as the White Citizens' Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, and the state and local government offices, were populated by pastors, deacons, Sunday school teachers, and other upstanding members of prominent white churches. The link between political leaders and prominent white churches was not just incidental; these religious connections served as the moral underpinning for the entire project of protecting the dominant social and political standing of whites” (p. 5).
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“Underneath the glossy, self-congratulatory histories that white Christian churches have written about themselves—which typically depict white Christians as exemplars of democratic principles and pillars of the community—is a thinly veiled, deeply troubling past. White Christian churches have not just been complacent or complicit in failing to address racism; rather, as the dominant cultural power in the U.S., they have been responsible for constructing and sustaining a project to protect white supremacy. This project has framed the entire American story" (p. 6).
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“American Christianity’s theological core has been thoroughly structured by an interest in protecting white supremacy. While it may seem obvious to mainstream white Christians today that slavery, segregation, and overt declarations of white supremacy are antithetical to the teachings of Jesus, such a conviction is, in fact, recent and only partially conscious for most white American Christians and churches. The unsettling truth is that, for nearly all of American history, the Jesus conjured by most white congregations was not merely indifferent to the status quo of racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordained order of things” (p. 6).
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“The historical record of lived Christianity in America reveals that Christian theology and institutions have been the central cultural tent pole holding up the very idea of white supremacy. And the genetic imprint of this legacy remains present and measurable in contemporary white Christianity, not only among evangelicals in the South but also among mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast” (p. 6).
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“To be sure, most white denominations, and most white Christians, have today taken pains to distance themselves from slavery, the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation, and overtly racist attitudes openly espoused in the past. But in survey after survey, white Christians stand out in their negative attitudes about racial, ethnic, and religious minorities (especially Muslims), the unequal treatment of African Americans by police and the criminal justice system, their anxieties about the changing face of the country, and their longing for a past when white Protestantism was the undisputed cultural power. Whatever the explicit public proclamations of white denominations and individual Christians, the public opinion data reveal that the historical legacy of white Christianity lives on in white Christianity today” (p. 10).
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“By activating the white supremacy sequence within white Christian DNA, which was primed for receptivity by the perceived external threat of racial and cultural change in the country, Trump was able to convert white evangelicals in the course of a single political campaign from so-called values voters to ‘nostalgia voters.’ Trump's powerful appeal to white evangelicals was not that he spoke to the cultural wars around abortion or same-sex marriage, or his populist appeals to economic anxieties, but rather that he evoked powerful fears about the loss of white Christian dominance amid a rapidly changing environment” (p. 15).
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“A dizzying array of resources across multiple fields of human inquiry has been deployed to defend this belief. By far, the strongest were theological arguments that presented white supremacy as divine mandate. Particular readings of the Bible provided the scaffolding for these arguments. Black Americans, for example, were cast as descendants of Cain, whom the book of Genesis describes as physically marked by God after killing his brother, Abel, and then lying to God about the crime. In the white Christian version of this narrative, the original ancestor was a Black criminal, and modern-day dark-skinned people continue to bear the physical mark of this ancient transgression. This story implied that Blacks likely inherited both their purported ancestor’s physical distinctiveness and his inferior moral character. These teachings persisted in many white Christian circles well into the 20th century” (p. 17).
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“Perhaps the most powerful role white Christianity has played in the gruesome drama of slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and massive resistance to racial equality is to maintain an unassailable sense of religious purity that protects white racial innocence. Through every chapter, white Christianity has been at the ready to ensure white Christians that they are alternatively — and sometimes simultaneously — the noble protagonists and blameless victims.
And the dominant white supremacist culture that American Christianity has sustained has returned the favor by deflecting any attempt to trace the ideology to its religious source. White Christian ministers and churches can assert inerrant biblical teachings that people of African descent are, a few thousand years removed, the descendants of Cain in the Old Testament who was punished by God for disobedience with a physical mark; that the God of the universe has chosen whites to civilize and dominate the earth; and that the separation of the races, particularly white and black in this middle part of North America, is unquestionably God ordained. And when the arc of history finally reveals these Christian teachings on which so many of us were raised for what they are — that is, racist — the culture rather than Christianity takes the fall" (pp. 20-1).
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“Much of the recorded history of slavery, segregation, and racism gives scant treatment to the integral, active role that white Christian leaders, institutions, and laypeople played in constructing, maintaining, and protecting white supremacy in their communities. Writing in the midst of these upheavals, even historians critical of racism and segregation often depicted white Christians as being merely complacent. They were guilty of committing sins of omission by ignoring the post-Civil War turmoil of Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow and the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and beyond. Even those who went further accused white churches only of complicity, of being unwitting captives of the prevailing segregationist culture. Both treatments are essentially protectionist, depicting the struggle over Black equality as external to churches and Christian theology. More recent scholarship, however, has begun to document the ways in which white churches, religious leaders, and members aggressively defended segregation and ‘worked with the same enthusiasm for white supremacy inside the sanctuary as out’” (pp. 32-3, citing Carolyn Renée Dupont, Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975 [NY: NY Univ. Press, 2013], p. 7).
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“At a pragmatic level, white churches served as connective tissue that brought together leaders from other social realms to coordinate a campaign of massive resistance to black equality. But at a deeper level, white churches were the institutions of ultimate legitimization, where white supremacy was divinely justified via a carefully cultivated Christian theology. White Christian churches composed the cultural score that made white supremacy sing” (p. 33).
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“The stances of white churches on the issue of integration were seen by civil rights activists and segregationists alike as the keystone holding the entire Jim Crow edifice together” (p. 43).
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“But Mohler's approach represents what I've dubbed ‘the white Christian shuffle,’ a subtle two-steps-forward-one-step-back pattern of lamenting past sins in great detail, even admitting that they have had pernicious effects but then ultimately denying that their legacy requires reparative or costly actions in the present. It’s a sophisticated rhetorical strategy that emphasizes lament and apology, expects absolution and reconciliation, but gives scant attention to questions of justice, repair, or accountability” (p. 56).
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Jones notes that some mainline and Catholic white Christian leaders supported the Civil Rights movement. But he then states: “However, the pro–civil rights orientation of white mainline Protestant and white Catholic leaders is not an accurate barometer of the influence of white supremacy among white Christians sitting in the pews. Declarations on racial justice by national institutions and hierarchies were more often than not ignored or actively flouted by local clergy and their congregations” (p. 63).
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In a 1925 letter to Reverend Joseph B. Glenn, who was the priest in charge of St. Joseph’s mission in Richmond, W.E.B. DuBois states, “The Catholic Church in America stands for color separation and discrimination to a degree equaled by no other church in America, and that is saying a great deal” (p. 65, citing W.E.B. DuBois, The Correspondence of W.E.B. DuBois, vol. 1, ed. Herbert Aptheker [Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts, 1997]).
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First meeting of the National Black Clergy Caucus in 1968 issued the following statement: “The Catholic Church in the United States is primarily a white racist institution, has addressed itself primarily to white society and is definitely a part of that society” (p. 67, citing Lawrence E. Lucas, Black Priest, White Church [NY: Random House, 1970], pp. 45-6).
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“We could easily continue to pile up examples, but the pattern is clear: white Christians and their institution, especially at the local level, were not just passively complicit with but also broadly and actively resistant to black Americans’ claims of equality. This massive religious resistance was happening even as white Protestant mainline denominational offices and the American Catholic Bishops, at the national level, were issuing statements calling for their constituents to support aspects of the civil rights movement” (p. 68).
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1989: Bishops’ Committee on Black Catholics issued a statement about “Brothers and Sisters to Us” (1979), which said, “The pastoral on racism had made little or no impact on the majority of Catholics in the United States” (p. 69, citing Bryan N. Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church [NY: Maryknoll, Orbis, 2018], p. 68).
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“If white supremacy was an unquestionable cultural assumption in America, what does it mean that Christian doctrines by necessity had to develop in ways that were compatible with that worldview? What if, for example, Christian conceptions of marriage and family, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, or even the concept of having a personal relationship with Jesus developed as they did because they were useful tools for reinforcing white dominance?” (pp. 70-1).
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“White Christianity has been many things for America. But whatever else it has been — and the country is indebted to it for a good many things — it has also been the primary institution legitimizing and propagating white power and dominance" (p. 71).
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“Growing up inside Southern Baptist churches in Texas and Mississippi, I never once wrestled seriously with our denomination's troubled racist past. Staring at those words on the page now, it seems impossible that I can write that sentence. But it's true. And it seems that understanding just how this could be — that I and so many of my fellow white Christians were never challenged to face Christianity's deep entanglement with white supremacy — will help explain why we still have such limited capacities to hear black calls for equality” (p. 73).
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“I think the fact that white churches produced such a strong sense of safety and security for those of us who were inside the institution Is why it is so hard for white Christians to see the harm it did to those who were outside it, particularly African Americans, and the other kinds of damage it did to us, numbing our own moral sensibilities and limiting our religious development” (p. 75).
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“While white Christianity was protecting the interests and consciences of those under its canopy, white Christians were also staunchly defending the purity and innocence of the religion itself. They accomplished this principally by projecting an idealized form of white Christianity as somehow independent of the failings of actual white Christians or institutions” (pp. 75-6).
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“Through impressive growth from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, evangelical Christianity, although anchored in the South, became the dominant, most dynamic expression of American Christianity. Leading church historian Charles Marsden estimates that in the late nineteenth century, over half of the general population and more than eight in ten Protestants were evangelical. When southern Methodists rejoined their northern brethren in denominational reunification in the late 1930s, they brought their Lost Cause theology with them into what was at the time the largest Protestant denomination. By the second half of the twentieth century, Southern Baptist had become the largest single denomination in the country, claiming more than sixteen million followers at their apex. And beginning in the late 1970s, white Catholics received a powerful infusion of this theology through their involvement with the Christian right movement, which fortified their own existing streams of colonialist theology. As I show in chapter 5, even though white evangelical Protestants have begun to shrink as a proportion of the population in the last decade, the diffusion of their theology into white Christianity generally has meant that their particular cultural worldview, built to defend their peculiar institution, holds influence far beyond their ranks today” (p. 92).
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“It's nothing short of astonishing that a religious tradition with this relentless emphasis on salvation and one so hyperattuned to personal sin can simultaneously maintain such blindness to social sins swirling about it, such as slavery and race-based segregation and bigotry” (p. 96).
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“Through the twin pathways of white racial identity and the increasing relevance of Republican partisanship in each of these groups [i.e., white evangelicals, white mainline Christians, white Catholics], the freewill individualism of white evangelicals has been diffused throughout white American Christianity” (pp. 99-100).
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“When white supremacy was still safely ensconced in the wider culture, white evangelicals argued that the Bible mandated a privatized religion. This was a powerful way of delegitimizing the work of black ministers working for black equality. But as these forces gained power, white evangelicals discovered a biblical mandate for political organizing and resistance” (pp. 103-4).
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“It is true that old-school Lost Cause theology is rarely aired in mainstream white churches today. But its direct descendant, the individualist theology that insists that Christianity has little to say about social injustice — created to shield white consciences from the evils and continued legacy of slavery and segregation — lives on, not just in white evangelical churches but also increasingly in white mainline and white Catholic churches as well” (p. 105).
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“To be sure, this theological worldview has done great damage to those living outside the white Christian canopy. But what has been overlooked by most white Christian leaders is the damage this legacy has done to white Christians themselves. To put it succinctly, it has often put white Christians in the curious position of arguing that their religion and their God require them to aim lower than the highest human values of love, justice, equality, and compassion” (p. 105).
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Jones notes that more than 9 in 10 of the public monuments commemorating the Confederacy were erected after 1895, half between 1900 and the 1920s, with “another boomlet of intense activity between 1955 and 1970.” “In other words, the Confederate monument phenomenon was no innocent movement to memorialize the dead; it was primarily a twentieth-century declaration of Lost Cause values designed to vindicate white supremacy and bolster white power against black claims to equality and justice. These Confederate monuments, strategically placed in public spaces, are deposits left by the high tide of white supremacy” (p. 120).
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“There are five southern states that continue to include Confederate symbols in their flags. Notably, four of the five (Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Georgia) are also among the top ten states containing the highest percentage of white evangelical Protestants in the country” (p. 134).
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“Although it received little press and was rarely incorporated into explanations of his motivations, Dylann Roof's identity as a white Christian was central to his worldview” (p. 139).
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“It's vital, if we are to properly understand the problem, that we not flinch from the clear evidence that Roof’s Christianity wasn’t incidental to his motivations and his racial views. It was integral to his identity and helped fuel this horrific violence. He understood himself as a white Christian warrior who consciously launched this attack on sacred ground, targeting a historic black church in the hopes of encouraging his fellow white Christians to rise up and ‘become completely ruthless to the blacks’” (pp. 141-2).
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“In a rigorous statistical analysis linking county-level slave ownership from the 1860 US census and public opinion data collected between 2016 and 2011 by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a large-scale national survey of the American electorate conducted by nearly forty universities, they [i.e., Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen in Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics] find that whites residing in areas that had the highest levels of slavery in 1860 demonstrate significantly different attitudes today from whites who reside in areas that had lower historical levels of slavery: (1) they are more politically conservative and Republican leaning; (2) they are more opposed to affirmative action; and (3) they score higher on questions measuring racial resentment” (p. 156).
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“Even as Jim Crow laws have been struck from the books in the political realm, most white Christian churches have reformed very little of their nineteenth-century theology and practice, which was designed, by necessity, to coexist comfortably with slavery and segregation. As a result, most white Christian churches continue to serve, consciously or not, as the mechanisms for transmitting and reinforcing white supremacist attitudes among new generations” (p. 186).
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“Not only in the South but nationwide, higher levels of racism are associated with higher probabilities of identifying as a white Christian; and, Conversely, adding Christianity to the average white person's identity moves him or her toward more, not less, affinity for white supremacy. White supremacy lives on today not just in explicitly and consciously held attitudes among white Christians; It has become deeply integrated into the DNA of white Christianity itself” (pp. 186-7).
