I’ve dedicated this book to my spouse, Jodi Kanter, a writer, artist, and professor of theatre at George Washington University. Through four books and thirteen years of marriage, she has been my partner in every sense of the word. As I’ve accompanied her on her own academic journeys—especially the one leading to her most recent book, Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush—she’s taught me how to see the world through a performance-studies lens. This perspective has deepened my understanding of the ways public memorials preserve and transmit social memory and communal values over time. It has fundamentally changed the way I see monuments, museums, flags, and other markers in public space. I am also grateful to Jodi for believing in this project, which was often challenging because of its personal nature, and helping protect time for writing amid our family’s busy schedules. Jodi read every page and every revision, often on the same day it was drafted; I’m grateful to her for always being my earliest sounding board and my first and best editor.
I’ve also dedicated this book to the people of the two First Baptist Churches in Macon, Georgia: one predominantly black and one predominantly white. Together with their leaders—Reverend James W. Goolsby Jr., pastor of First Baptist Church (on New Street), and Reverend Scott Dickison, pastor of First Baptist Church of Christ—these congregations have begun to heal 170 years of racial injustice and division by courageously reckoning with the history of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, segregation, and continued resistance among whites to full equal rights for African Americans. Beyond their example, I am grateful to both pastors for talking to me honestly about this challenging journey and to Reverend Dickison for hosting me in Macon for an additional set of conversations about the changes this deepening relationship was creating among his white congregation. These congregations are signs of hope in our fractured time and witnesses to the truth that racial healing and reconciliation, while possible, can only be realized as the mature fruits of repentance and reparative justice.
Books are always team projects, and I have been blessed to be a part of a vibrant intellectual community at Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) for a decade now. The PRRI senior leadership team—Director of Research Natalie Jackson, Senior Director of Communications and External Affairs Jioni Palmer, and Chief of Staff Sean Sands—each read portions of the manuscript and gave me invaluable feedback. Melissa Deckman, PRRI board chair and the Louis L. Goldstein Professor of Public Affairs at Washington College, talked with me about the central ideas long before they coalesced into a book and helped me think through how to present the technical results of statistical models to a general audience.
I am deeply grateful to two other political scientists in the PRRI orbit for their assistance with the statistical modeling and analysis in chapter 5: Juhem Navarro-Rivera, a former PRRI research associate and the current political research director and managing partner at Socioanalitica Research, and Paul Djupe, associate professor of political science at Denison University. Juhem helped develop and test an early round of statistical models, and Paul independently helped develop and test the final set of models and graphics. While I am deeply indebted to Paul and Juhem, any shortcomings or errors in the analysis are of course my responsibility. Finally, Tim Duffy, PRRI’s graphics design consultant, expertly produced production-ready versions of all the tables and charts in the book; and Drew Keavaney, a former PRRI intern, provided rigorous and efficient copyediting for the manuscript.
I have had the good fortune of working with Bob Bender, vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, for both The End of White Christian America and White Too Long. Over these two projects, Bob has helped me adapt technical writing for a general audience, and he has an exceptionally steady hand as an editor. I’m also grateful for the efficiency and attentiveness of associate editor Johanna Li, who has kept the project moving on a tight timeline. My book agent, Roger Freet, has also gone above and beyond the call of duty, serving as a sounding board, strategist, and even occasional cheerleader when I’ve needed it. In-depth, early conversations with Roger helped shape the project, and I’m grateful to him for encouraging me to allow my personal stake in the research to show up on the page.
Funding for the PRRI surveys that informed the book was generously provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the New World Foundation, and the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock. Additionally, the principal survey for the analysis in chapter 5, PRRI’s 2018 American Values Survey, was part of a decade-long partnership between PRRI and the Brookings Institution. Brookings senior fellows E. J. Dionne Jr. and Bill Galston have been amazing partners on this annual survey and were instrumental in creating, analyzing, and releasing the initial report at a public event at the Brookings Institution in October 2018.
Intellectual debts are always difficult to discern fully. I am especially indebted to a number of African American scholars, religious leaders, reporters, and writers who have shaped my thinking and my work, particularly on the question of how the Christian church has been complicit in abetting white supremacy: Adelle Banks, Charles M. Blow, James H. Cone, Jonathan Capehart, Kelly Brown Douglas, Lenny Duncan, Michael Eric Dyson, Eddie Glaude Jr., Obery M. Hendricks Jr., Willie James Jennings, Jacqui Lewis, Bryan N. Massingale, Toni Morrison, Joy Reid, Howard Thurman, Jemar Tisby, and Cornel West. And there are also the rarer white voices who have helped me deepen my insights into the problem that whiteness presents for Christians: Will Campbell, Gary Dorrien, Carolyn Renée Dupont, Michael O. Emerson, Jennifer Harvey, Paul Harvey, Richard Hughes, Bill Moyers, Walter Shurden, Christian Smith, Ted A. Smith, Jim Wallis, and James Wilson-Hartgrove.
I owe a particular debt to James Baldwin, from whose writing the title of this book is taken. I came to his work only in the last few years, but I was immediately captivated by how clearly he perceived the roots of racial strife and violence in America, flipping the script from the common parlance of “the Negro problem” to “the white problem.” While it’s perhaps surprising that the writing of a black, gay author hailing from Harlem a generation before my time would resonate with me—a white, straight southerner—I was moved that his unflinching perceptiveness, coupled with his own life experiences, did not fill him with hate and despair. I also found familiar his own deep wrestling with a Christianity that both attracted and disappointed him. Throughout the writing process, I was haunted by his call to whites in America, and particularly to white Christians, to wake up from their self-induced white supremacist nightmare. White Christians were plainly unprepared to heed this call to repentance a generation ago, and we still may be incapable today. But one way of reading this book is as an attempt to begin a white Christian response to Baldwin’s invitation.
Finally, I am deeply grateful for my parents, Pat and Cherry Jones. My parents were both raised in Jim Crow–era Macon, Georgia. And the church in which they grew up and in which they were married was founded as a mission of the white First Baptist Church of Christ. While they inherited the Christian and southern culture of their time, handed down from four previous generations of our Baptist family who lived in Bibb and Twiggs Counties, Georgia, they made intentional decisions to shield me and my siblings from the overt prejudices that accompanied that legacy. While our family and our home church were comfortably apolitical in ways that only white families can be, my parents taught us everyone was equal, and—what is most important for children—they lived in a way that convinced us they believed it. This book is my attempt to understand and reckon with the power white supremacy continues to hold within white Christianity, even when there are good-faith efforts to resist it. While that work remains in process, without those consistent parenting decisions, both big and small, I would not have found the light to assess it critically.
My hope is that this book sheds more light on that path for my own children. The truth is—and this makes me more optimistic about the future—that I’m often catching up to them. While I was working on this book, my daughter was wrapping up her senior year at a public high school named after a member of President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, and one of her favorite classes was an African American literature class. My fourth-grade son, Jasper, already knows the names of civil rights leaders, gleaned from school lessons that were not just conducted during Black History Month; and when we visited Harpers Ferry, he wrestled with the moral questions raised by John Brown’s raid, sympathizing particularly with the story of Dangerfield Newby, one of Brown’s men who was killed while trying to free his enslaved family. Their diverse friendship circles and their worldviews indicate that they are carrying far less baggage from our white supremacist past; but they also know enough of our history to realize that an ongoing diligence is needed, since people whose families have thought of themselves as white and Christian can still be blind to these dynamics. Thankfully, they are demonstrating that the same light that reveals the painful ugliness of the past also points the way to a more healthy future for white Christians and a more just future for us all.