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.
The most powerful thing about my childhood experience in church was its ability to generate a palpable feeling of living under a protective sacred and social canopy. Physically gathering for multiple meetings per week at the church tucked into the southeast corner of our neighborhood generated a strong sense of community. A vibrant weekly Sunday school program, for both children and adults, provided space for thinking through Christian beliefs in the context of everyday life; and, at least from my childhood perspective from the 1970s and 1980s, these discussions focused mostly on our personal lives—and not a small amount of gossip—mostly steering clear of national politics.
Even in my average-sized church of about three hundred people, there were committees for everything—including a “committee on committees,” the job of which was to ensure that the rest of the committees were chaired and filled. If people were sick or in the hospital, the visitation committee ensured they were called, prescriptions were picked up, and company was kept. When babies were born and people moved into the community, the hospitality committee organized showers and welcome baskets to be left on front porches. When someone died, the bereavement committee organized a food brigade to help families feed the influx of far-flung relatives and to avoid the need to cook while grieving after the funeral.
There were also social functions specific to our working-class, economically aspiring community. When someone lost a job, members were alerted to look for other opportunities in their networks. And when my friends and I graduated from high school and college, recognition banquets were organized, our names were printed in the church bulletins for special worship services at which the community ceremonially sent us out into the world, and our accomplishments were celebrated in the congregational newsletter. At church, I learned how to sing, write, date, give a persuasive public speech, and run an efficient meeting using Robert’s Rules of Order.
But I didn’t learn much about how my religious tradition, which had undeniably done so much good for so many people, including me, had also been simultaneously entangled in justifying unspeakable racial violence, bigotry, and ongoing indifference to African Americans’ claims to equality and justice. I believe the key to understanding this paradox is embodied in two words: protection and purity.
My church succeeded in generating a culture of protection for most of us in our white, working-class corner of southwest Jackson. One of the earliest Bible verses I was urged to memorize—and I can still quote it by heart, including chapter and verse—was Romans 8:28: “For we know that all things work together for good for those who love God and to those who are called according to his purposes.”1 And for most of my childhood and youth, this promise was a source of great comfort to me. I heard it cited in general conversations during lean economic times, preached at funerals, and my fellow teenagers and I certainly leaned on it after painful romantic breakups or when our adolescent hopes were dashed by parents or other powers beyond our control. I still believe there is something beautiful, admirable, and healthy here. This sensibility—that both God and the community had our backs—instilled in me a resiliency that has stayed with me throughout my adult life.
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. The problem was not that the community functioned to enhance the lives of those within it; all good communities do that. Rather, the problem was that it had developed in such a way that its main goal was protecting and improving white Christians’ lives within an unjust social status quo, which is to say a context of extreme racial inequality and injustice.
Because of the existing conditions of inequality, late twentieth-century white Christian theology didn’t necessarily need to actively work against African American civil rights (although it did this too). Rather, its most powerful tool was its ability to constrict radically the scope of whites’ moral vision. Martin Luther King Jr. singled out this dynamic in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” when he looked in vain for white Christian support for the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama. He lamented that white Christians “have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.”2 As I discuss in this chapter, white Christian theology has developed to play this role powerfully: to render black claims to justice invisible while protecting white economic and social interests, all the while assuring them of their own moral purity.
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. The mythology—really, the lie—that white Christians tell ourselves, on the few occasions we face our history, is that Christianity has been a force for unambiguous good in the world. No matter what evil Christians commit or what violence Christian institutions justify, an idealized conception of Christianity remains unscathed. This conviction is so deep that evidence to the contrary is simply dismissed.
The problem with this defensive posture is that it prevents us from seeing areas where the religion may have gone off course; where new bearings are needed. In Democracy in Black, theologian Eddie Glaude Jr. laid out the stakes clearly:
When Communists declare that Stalinism wasn’t really communism, or when Christians and Muslims claim that the horrific things some Christians and Muslims have done in the name of their religion isn’t really Christianity or Islam, what are they doing? They are protecting their ideology or the religion from the terrible things that occur in its name. They claim only the good stuff. What gets lost in all of this is that the bad stuff may very well tell us something important about communism, Christianity, or Islam—that there may be something in the ideology and in the traditions themselves that gives rise to the ugly and horrific things some people do in its name.3
One recent expression of Christian protectionism can be seen in the $400 million, 430,000-square-foot Museum of the Bible, which opened on November 17, 2017, two blocks from the National Mall in Washington, DC. The massive project was supported primarily by the Green family, the white evangelical owners of the corporate giant Hobby Lobby.4
When the museum was formed as a legal entity in 2010, it declared its mission was “to bring to life the living word of God, to tell its compelling story of preservation, and to inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible.” By 2012, that mission had been scrubbed to read, “We exist to invite people to engage with the Bible through our four primary activities: traveling exhibits, scholarship, building of a permanent museum in DC, and developing elective high school curriculum.” But this shift seemed to reflect more of a public relations move than a real change in mission. For example, even as late as the museum’s opening, all members of the board of directors were required to sign a statement of Christian faith.5 And despite its self-proclaimed nonsectarian approach, the museum is unmistakably presenting the Bible as the cultural object it is in the Protestant imagination—as an unmitigated force for good in human history.
Overall, the museum’s approach is to defend the Bible as an artifact that is responsible for the achievement of Western civilization and its virtues. For example, there’s abundant information on the Bible’s influence on William Wilberforce, the British evangelical abolitionist, including a staging of the Broadway musical Amazing Grace in the museum’s state-of-the-art 472-seat World Stage Theater. But the much wider influence the Bible had justifying European colonialism, chattel slavery, and white supremacy gets scant treatment.
To its credit, the museum added an exhibit featuring a “slave Bible” in November 2018, which is on loan from Fisk University in Nashville. The title page reads, “Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands.” The slave Bible, one of only three known still to exist, was constructed specifically to help white Christian missionaries emphasize passages demanding obedience to masters and to exclude passages suggesting equality or liberation. As a large wall display notes, the slave Bible excludes 90 percent of the Old Testament and about half of the New Testament. For example, the revised book of Exodus, which is named for the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian servitude, contains the story of their enslavement and of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, but it excises the story of the Israelites finding their freedom. While the existence of this display is important, nestled within the massive museum, it is the exception that proves the rule of the Bible as “the good book.” It shows the way a mutilated Bible could reinforce slavery, but it fails to cast light on the evil that an intact Bible could foster among whites.
After its opening, biblical scholars Candida Moss, Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at England’s University of Birmingham, and Joel Baden, professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School, toured the gleaming facilities and interviewed museum founder and Hobby Lobby president Steve Green and museum president Cary Summers. While they noted that the museum founder and leadership seem earnest and well intentioned, they also concluded that they betrayed “an interpretive naiveté” about the white Protestant assumptions they are importing into the museum and its collections.6 Baden summarized his central concerns this way:
The most troubling aspect is their seeming inability to distinguish between the Bible and American Protestantism. Their three-minute promo is a fascinating demonstration of this problem. At least half of it is a reenactment of American history which has no bearing on the Bible—the signing of [the]Declaration of Independence, for example, or the Revolutionary War. The worry is that the museum portrays a story of the Bible that culminates in Protestantism and America.7
Moss concurred, saying, “It’s not really a museum of the Bible, it’s a museum of American Protestantism. Their whole purpose is to show this country as a Christian country governed by Christian morality.”8 Ultimately, the museum is a monument to the Bible as cultural talisman, a fixed object of Christian purity that protects the positive story of a triumphant white Protestantism. The Greens are known as savvy business leaders, and their $400 million investment aims to pay large dividends. The museum attempts to shore up the reputation of the Bible at a time when old assumptions are slipping, and this whitewashed presentation of the Bible in turn provides something virtually priceless: the plausibility of white Christian innocence set against a backdrop of divinely ordained progress.
The concerted effort to protect the purity of Christianity is not just operative among Christian elites. This vigilance is also dramatically illustrated in a 2015 national survey conducted by PRRI.9 Respondents were asked the following question: “When people claim to be Christian and commit acts of violence in the name of Christianity, do you believe they really are Christian, or not?” Overall, 75 percent of Americans answered “no,” they did not believe such perpetrators were authentically Christian. Not surprisingly, high numbers of white Christians also rejected the possibility of real Christians committing violence, including 87 percent of white evangelical Protestants, 77 percent of white mainline Protestants, and 75 percent of white Catholics.
These sentiments were not just generally proreligion but also specifically about the necessary moral innocence of Christianity. When respondents were asked an identical question about self-proclaimed Muslims committing violence in the name of Islam, only 50 percent of Americans said they did not think such perpetrators were authentically Muslim. Fewer than half of white evangelical Protestants (44 percent) and white mainline Protestants (41 percent) said they did not think such violent actors were really Muslim; Catholics were more consistent across questions, with a majority (54 percent) of white Catholics saying they did not believe violent actors were authentically Muslim, but even here there was a 20 percentage point difference in their evaluations of the religious authenticity of self-proclaimed Christians and Muslims who kill in the name of their respective religion. Overall, white Christians are between 20 and 40 percentage points more likely to protect their own religion’s reputation from being marred by the bad actions of its members.
This double standard exists despite evidence that white supremacists account for far greater numbers of domestic terrorism than any other group and a growing proportion of extremist violence worldwide. A 2018 Anti-Defamation League report, for example, shows that 2018 was the fourth most violent year for domestic terrorism since 1970 and that nearly eight in ten of these attacks were motivated by white supremacy. And white supremacy, as it has developed historically in the United States, is typically tied to a concept of the superiority of Protestant Christian culture, motivating attacks not just on African Americans and immigrants but also on Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and other non-Christian religious minorities.10 Looking at global trends, the New York Times found that attacks by white extremists were growing and now represent nearly one in ten attacks worldwide. While certainly not all white supremacists identify as Christian, the analysis found that these extremists often included in their worldview the lost dominance of western Christendom. Experts described the typical profile of these attackers as men “who identify as white, Christian, and culturally European” and who feel their privileged position in the West is threatened “by immigrants, Muslims, and other religious and racial minorities.”11
The result of this double standard is that for Islam, particular examples of violence may offset literally billions of peaceful counterexamples. But with Christianity, centuries of dedication to the forceful preservation of white supremacy, and growing white Christian extremism today, aren’t enough to demand serious moral concern about the religion. The right-wing assertion that Islam is “not a religion” but a violent ideology could easily find traction if turned around and applied equally and honestly to Christianity. Even when it is no longer deniable that Christian theology underwrote and justified the white supremacist right to “[wring] their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, and thereafter the right to segregate African Americans into a permanent underclass by the force of law and lynching, white Christians point to a corrupt culture rather than a compromised Christianity.
Blame can be deflected virtually anywhere else, but the question of whether Christian theology and culture are implicated cannot be asked. Christian theological purity and innocence must be maintained at all costs. But if we white Christians are going to get any critical leverage on our past, and the distortions this past has brought into our present, we have to let go of both the quest for self-protection—that is to say, the advantages we hoard at unjust costs to others—and the insistence on our racial and religious innocence.
This chapter is an invitation to that journey. It describes the historical roots of the theological world of white Christianity, illustrating how white supremacy not only drove the actions of white Christian leaders, churches, and denominations, but also how white Christian theology was diligently constructed to protect and justify it. While white Christian theology evolved in response to the changing environment, it responded primarily by shifting from more overt to more subtle expressions of white supremacy rather than a wholesale reexamination of its racist roots. A close examination of key theological doctrines such as the Christian worldview of slaveholders, sin, and salvation, the centrality of a personal relationship with Jesus, and the use of the Bible reveals how each was tailored to resist black equality and protect white superiority, and how this legacy dramatically limits the moral and religious vision of white Christians today.
One window into the worldview of Christian white supremacy is the ardent defense of slavery and the Confederacy that was proffered by Reverend Basil Manly Sr. As founder of Southern Baptist Seminary and chaplain to the Confederacy, Manly was one of the most prolific and tireless Christian defenders of slavery. While Manly was one of the most prominent purveyors of white supremacist theology, he was not unique among Southern Baptists, and he had counterparts in the southern branches of the other major Protestant denominations, such as William Capers, a Methodist, and James Henley Thornwell, a Presbyterian. Like his fellow defenders of slavery, Manly grounded his arguments with generous citations from the Bible.12
Manly’s most systematic defense of slavery was encapsulated in one of eight “Sermons on Duty,” a series he honed and preached at various venues across the South. Notably, his discussion of slavery was embedded in a larger theological framework of the patriarchal family, which he saw as central to God’s plan for human society. Different members of the family have divinely ordained differentiated roles, he argued, and the practice of slavery should be understood within this hierarchical context. Thus, the divine order for accomplishing social needs “naturally lead to different occupations—some to labor, some to plan, and to direct the labor of others.”13 Like a symbiotic ecosystem, genders and races had their roles to play, and when all parts functioned as designed, the ecosystem thrived, and individual members—whatever their lot—were content, since they were fulfilling their created purpose.
Having established the principles of social hierarchy and role differentiation as divine mandates, Manly then turned to other sources, such as history and science, to drive home his point. The history of human civilizations, he argued, made God’s intentions clear: “In all times, in all countries not excepting his own,” the African “race has been in a state of servitude.”14 Drawing on new entomological studies, Manly developed a popular “Lecture on Ants,” in which he marveled at a species of slave-making ants that “have become tired of the drudgery of their own labor, it seems, and by a strange and astonishing instinct, resort to violence to obtain laborers of a difference species than their own.”15
Manly sees two lessons to be gleaned from the ants. First, they demonstrate a benevolent paternalism, since the smaller ants, who are enslaved by the larger ants, “are scarcely equal to their own protection against any other troop that chose to attack them.” Furthermore, Manly notes the wisdom of their instinctive tactics: the ant slave-master species, which is “wiser than the African kings,” steals eggs and hatches them in its own nest rather than capturing adults. Manly concludes, “So they grow up with an affection for their captors, when otherwise they would have shared in all the instinctive horror, and hatred for the slaveholders which reigns throughout the separate nest of negroes.”16 He concluded with a message for his northern listeners: “It surely ought to comfort the abolitionists to know that although the ants do hold slaves, the masters are humane and gentle, and the slaves are contented, industrious, and happy.”17
The implications of these examples, of course, were clear to his readers: that in all times, in all countries, whites have been naturally in a state of dominance fulfilling their God-given role to direct the labor of others. As the superior human species, whites are protecting blacks from likely worse fates by enslaving them in a benevolent environment. Finally, at least one major source of resentment among enslaved Africans in America was the result of a purely tactical error that could be corrected: that the slave traders made the mistake of abducting teenagers and adults rather than small children and babies who would not recall a previous state of freedom.
But Manly had admonishments for his fellow white Christians as well. Within this hierarchical worldview, those at the top have their own duties and responsibilities. Just as fathers had a duty to govern their families with benevolence, masters had a similar duty toward their slaves. In a sermon entitled “Duties of Masters and Servants,” Manly admonished slave owners, “God has made you their masters—placed them under your protection, made you their guardians, the conservators of their lives and happiness.”18 While Manly admitted that current slave owners did not meet this ideal, he was convinced that Christianity and the Christian churches were the key to achieving it.
In Manly’s reading of history, the frequent downfall of slave-owning societies was that masters did not heed their duties to treat their slaves well. Christianity, Manly argued, was the perfectly calibrated religion, and southern American culture was the ideal setting, to bring the natural system of slavery into sustainable balance. Given that many Africans were destined for enslavement, being enslaved by Christian nations “meliorated the condition of a portion of them.”19 Therefore, even enslaved Africans could be grateful for American slavery, since the benevolence of Christianity moderated the cruelty of the institution. Operating in this harmonious way, Manly argued, both masters and slaves would see that “mutual advantage and satisfaction arises out of the relation, and the proper discharge of its duties.” Moreover, following these duties would put masters and slaves alike on the path to “possessing in common, the inheritance and dwelling place of Heaven.”20 Manly conjured a powerful depiction of a harmonious hierarchical system where knowing one’s place and doing one’s duty lead to an idyllic social life and mutually advantageous individual rewards, not just in this life but also for eternity.
It was an impressive theological achievement. Manly spread this gospel of white supremacy in his own pulpit, writings, public forums, and other speaking engagements. In the 1850s, the newly formed Southern Baptist denomination also sponsored essay contests for clergy and laypeople alike “on the duties of Xtn [sic] masters,” for which Manly served as a judge.
The idyllic portrait painted by Manly, however, was at serious odds with the experience of white Christianity by enslaved people themselves. In the same year the Southern Baptist Convention was founded under Manly’s leadership, Frederick Douglass published the first of his three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.21 Written when Douglass was in his late twenties, the book gained a wide American and transatlantic audience and served as an important spark to the growing abolitionist movement and to Douglass’s prominence as a leader. At the end of the book, Douglass has an entire appendix dedicated to a scathing description of his experience of American Christianity. This passage, which has not received as much public attention as it deserves, is worth quoting at length:
I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where [sic] surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families—sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers, leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! All for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.22
Not only was Douglass incensed at the deep hypocrisy within white Christianity but also his own lived experience had convinced him that Christianity’s central contribution to chattel slavery was to make it less, not more, humane. When Douglass came to live with his owner Thomas Auld at St. Michaels, Maryland, in 1832, he described him as a man without religion and without kindness. He was arbitrary in his demands, quick to punish, and, worst of all, he and his wife did not provide his slaves with enough to eat despite the presence of abundant food in the household. The couple was, as Douglass put it bluntly, “well matched, being equally mean and cruel.”23 In the fall of that year, Auld attended one of the many Methodist camp meetings that were common rural events of the period and had a conversion experience. He became a zealous Christian, praying three times a day, and soon became a Sunday school class leader and an “exhorter” at revival meetings, where, Douglass reports, “he proved himself an instrument in the hands of the church in converting many souls.”24 His home even evolved to become known as “the preacher’s house,” where itinerant ministers would regularly visit as they made their rounds.
Douglass notes that he initially welcomed the news of Auld’s conversion with some “faint hope” that these newfound Christian beliefs would lead his master to emancipate him and his fellow slaves or at least to treat them more humanely. But Douglass was quickly disappointed, finding that the addition of Christian faith into the household actually made conditions worse; for what Auld found in Christianity was not a prick of conscience leading to moderation or benevolence but rather sturdier support for his cruelty. Douglass saw this perverse dynamic clearly: “Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.”25
Douglass notes that a frequent target of Auld’s Christian-infused cruelty was a young woman and fellow slave named Henny, who had been disabled after falling into a fire as a young child and suffering massive burns. As Douglass perceived it, Auld singled her out because of her inability to work and her general helplessness. Douglass described the scene as follows:
I have seen him tie up a lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy cowskin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip; and, in justification of the bloody deed, he would quote this passage of Scripture—“He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.” Master would keep this lacerated young woman tied up in this horrid situation four or five hours at a time. I have known him to tie her up early in the morning, and whip her before breakfast; leave her, go to his store, return at dinner, and whip her again, cutting her in the places already made raw with his cruel lash.26
Douglass is also clear that his experience of the impact of Christian piety on Auld was not an exception but rather the rule among slaveholders. When Auld found Douglass to be insufficiently servile, he was sent as punishment to live with Edward Covey, who was known in the area for two things: as the area’s “nigger breaker” and as “a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church.” A frequent visitor to Auld’s house was Reverend Rigby Hopkins, an ordained minister in the Reformed Methodist Church, who boasted frequently of his slave management tactic of issuing regular, preemptive whippings of his slaves. He had such a fierce reputation that his household was known among slaves as the worst in the area. Yet, as Douglass notes, “there was not a man any where round [sic], who made higher professions of religion, or was more active in revivals—more attentive to the class, love-feast, prayer and preaching meetings, or more devotional in his family—that prayed earlier, later, louder, and longer—than this same reverend slave-driver, Rigby Hopkins.”27
Reflecting back across his life, Douglass concluded solemnly: “Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.”28
In his first piece of public writing, Douglass eloquently cut to the heart of the problem with white Christianity. The “garb of Christianity” and the church covered the injustices of slavery in the social realm, and Christian theology gave “religious sanction” to punishment and cruelty in the personal realm. The churches conferred respectability, and even elevated esteem, on white Christian slaveholders; and the theological blessing of slavery paradoxically lobotomized white Christian consciences, severing what natural moral impulses there may have been limiting violence and cruelty.
Manly’s theology was developed in the heady days of Southern secessionism and optimism that victory in the war, a vindication of God’s favor, would be swift. After the South’s military defeat, and the dissolution of the slaveholding system on which his wealth depended, Manly, too, was a defeated and ailing man. In September 1865 he took an oath of loyalty to the Union and received a pardon signed personally by President Andrew Johnson. Despite his offer to pay them for their labor, most of his nearly forty slaves—whom he had thought of as members of the family under his paternalistic rule—left his Alabama plantation, and he was forced to suspend operations and auction off the farm implements.29 This defeat also chastened Manly’s theology. Although he never abandoned his racial paternalism or his conviction that slavery was neither morally nor religiously wrong, in a sermon delivered late in his life, entitled “Our Brother in Black,” he conceded pragmatically, the “only way… to deal with the black man whom we find in America—is to give him his rights.”30
But as Manly was attempting to make peace with a disappearing world in the closing chapter of his life, the next generation of church leaders was struggling to shore up the tottering white Christian worldview in the face of decisive military defeat. As noted southern historian Samuel S. Hill summarized it: “Many southern whites have regarded their culture as God’s most favored. To a greater degree than any other, theirs approximates the ideals the Almighty has in mind for mankind everywhere.”31 Even after the war, this fundamental conviction was questioned by few. The central question was a theodicy dilemma: how to square the ideas of providential power and white Christians as God’s chosen people with military defeat. Finding Confederate political ambitions foreclosed, the new battle was transposed from the political arena, where disputes were settled with military violence, to the cultural arena.
This new cultural project has become widely recognized by scholars as “the religion of the Lost Cause,” a term derived from an 1866 book with this name by a Richmond editor named Edward Pollard, who called explicitly for a “war of ideas” to sustain southern identity.32 All cultural movements need a core organizing idea. Ideally, this idea is widely shared, legitimized by authoritative institutions, grounded in a moral worldview, and connected to other values and interests. And if it is seen to be under threat and in need of urgent defense, all the better. The Confederate political project may have run aground, but its animating core commitment to white supremacy survived and fit these criteria well.
From its beginning, the Lost Cause was more than the plain meaning of those words might indicate. To white southerners, it did not imply a fatalistic embrace of defeat. Refracted through the prism of their Christian theology, through “Amazing Grace,” the lost could be found, and resurrection meant that even physical death was not the final chapter in the story. White southerners solved their theodicy dilemma a number of ways. Some accepted that they had not lived up to their duties as benevolent slave owners and that defeat was a punishment for this shortcoming. Toward the end of the war in 1865, as Confederate armies were experiencing a series of crushing defeats, the editor of the Christian Index, for example, admitted that the losses in “this unjust and cruel war” might be connected to southerners neglecting their “parental obligations” toward their slaves.33
Others attempted to disconnect the outcome of the war from divine judgment, arguing that military victory is not necessarily connected to righteousness. Speaking more than thirty years after the war before a Nashville church service connected to the yearly Confederate Veterans’ Reunion in 1897, Presbyterian minister Reverend James I. Vance told those gathered, “Truth is truth, whether it have a conquering army at its back or wear the chains of imprisonment, like Paul in his cell at Rome.… His enemies could nail Christ to the cross, but they could not quench the ideals he embodied. He seemed to be a lost cause as the darkness fell on the great tragedy at Calvary, but out of what seemed Golgotha’s irretrievable defeat has come the cause whose mission it is to save that which is lost.”34
Reverend Vance and countless other white ministers helped their audiences map Confederate defeat in the Civil War onto the New Testament stories of the wrongful imprisonment of an apostle and even the crucifixion of the Messiah. The future implication is clear: just as Jesus was resurrected from the dead and will ultimately come again to rule the earth in righteousness, there will yet be a time when the noble ideals of the Confederacy, even if not the practice of chattel slavery itself, will rise again.
The religion of the Lost Cause proved to be a powerful form of cultural civil religion. Charles Reagan Wilson, in his classic text, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920, summarized the connection to white Christianity and church leaders:
“… Christian clergymen were the prime celebrants of the religion of the Lost Cause. They were honored figures at the center of Southern community, and most of them had in some way been touched by the Confederate experience.… These ministers saw little difference between their religious and cultural values, and they promoted the link by constructing Lost Cause ritualistic forms that celebrated their regional mythological and theological beliefs.”35
Notably, this new theological move allowed white Christian leaders to reenlist the support of many who had been active in the abolitionist cause. Though it strains contemporary moral sensibilities, many white Christian abolitionists could simultaneously oppose the specific practice of chattel slavery while still maintaining core white supremacist attitudes. As Michael Emerson and Christian Smith point out in their landmark book Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, even the leading evangelical revivalist Charles Finney, who was a moderate abolitionist during the war, nonetheless defended segregation and race-based prejudice. He made this distinction in a letter reprimanding a close friend who was supporting integrated seating in their church: “You err in supposing the principle of abolition and amalgamation are identical. Abolition is a question of flagrant and unblushing wrong. A direct and outrageous violation of fundamental right. The other is a question of prejudice that does not necessarily deprive any man of any positive right.”36 Thus, with the question of slavery off the table, the distance between many southern and northern white Christians actually closed, bridged by the continued shared commitment to white supremacy and segregation.
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.37 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 Baptists 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.
The Lost Cause shift from politics to culture held major implications for evangelical eschatology, particularly thinking related to the idea of the millennium, a thousand-year reign by Christ that is referenced in the book of Revelation. While the shift did not happen overnight, white evangelicals’ new cultural situation created the conditions for a theological sea change, with profound implications for evangelical ethics.
Prior to the Civil War, it was generally popular for white Christians to be what theologians call postmillennialist: to believe that Christ will return for this victorious period only when society has advanced sufficiently toward the ideal of a Christian civilization. The role of Christians, in this model, is to work for the salvation of souls and to participate in reform efforts to help build this model society. The optimism and enthusiasm expressed by Manly and others at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis, for example, tapped this sensibility. The establishment of the Confederacy represented progress toward God’s ideal for human society.
After a humiliating and decisive Civil War defeat, however, such an optimistic vision of imminent political realization of Christian ideals held less attraction. By the late nineteenth century, the Lost Cause generation began to adopt a premillennialist theology that held the opposite: the present world represents the work of a sinful and fallen humanity, it will continue to decline, and it will be redeemed only by the second coming of Christ. This view was widely spread by the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible, which Reverend C. I. Scofield, a Confederate war veteran from Tennessee, first published with Oxford University Press in 1909.38 By the end of World War II, the Scofield Reference Bible had sold two million copies. Today it has been in print for more than a hundred years.39
The most significant outcome of this shift is that the logic of premillennial theology undercuts calls to social justice, since it proceeds from the presumption that the world is evil and in continual decline. The presence of injustice is the unsurprising outcome of a fallen world, not a call for action. Major human intervention is futile, since the world is beyond anything but divine redemption. In due time, Christ will return and set things right. In the meantime, rather than reforming the world, Christians should focus on spirituality and the care of souls: deeper Christian discipleship for themselves and salvation for others who are not “saved.”
The reorientation of religious faithfulness, with its radical contraction of human social responsibility, has been a hallmark of white evangelical theology ever since, influencing white evangelical thought not just on race but on other social problems as well. In a 2014 PRRI survey focused on climate change, for example, this correlation between this premillennial end-time thinking and lower support for human intervention in social problems was striking. More than three-quarters of white evangelicals, compared with less than half of Americans overall, agreed that the severity of recent natural disasters was a sign that we were living in “the end times.” And while approximately six in ten Americans overall believed climate change was a major problem or a crisis to be addressed, only 44 percent of white evangelicals agreed.40
Sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith noted a striking example of the social apathy this theological worldview evoked even in white evangelical leaders who were racial moderates. When Billy Graham was asked about Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he evoked a vision of his children playing with white children, Graham replied with resignation: “Only when Christ comes again will little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.”41
Sin and salvation were ever-present in the white Christian world in which I grew up. If there was a Bible verse I knew as well as Romans 8:28, it was Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”42 Every church service, both Sunday morning and Sunday night, ended with an “altar call.” Although Baptists officially eschewed liturgy, the invitation was a highly choreographed ritual with an order and set of expectations that rivaled a Latin Mass. As the worship service closed, the pastor would come down the three steps of the stage and stand below the pulpit in front of the center aisle, typically with outstretched arms. He would then issue “the invitation” for anyone present to walk down to the front of the church to give his or her life to Christ. The pastor would emphasize the universal tendencies toward sin and the need for forgiveness through a personal relationship with Jesus, all in more conversational and hushed tones than he used with the sermon.
The music minister would signal the congregation to rise and sing one of the informally designated invitation hymns, usually one with a slow, repetitive stanza cycle designed to enhance contemplation and to give the Holy Spirit time to bring a sense of conviction in individual hearts. “Just as I am” was a favorite selection. The choir would sway gently to the swelling organ accompaniment as they led the congregational singing: “Just as I am without one plea, / but that thy blood was shed for me. / And that thou bidst me come to Thee, / Oh Lamb of God, I come. I come.”
Despite my participating in this ritual thousands of times growing up, its power was not fully impressed upon me until my seminary days. During spring break one year, I accepted an appointment to preach a set of five “revival” services at a small church in rural southern Illinois. I was greeted by an enthusiastic pastor who was splitting his time among multiple churches in the small towns that dotted the area’s cornfields. When he picked me up from the airport, I noticed he had taken the initiative to blow up my seminary yearbook picture to fill a grainy 8" x 10" black-and-white page, which he had prominently taped to both the left and right backseat car windows, complete with the words “Robert Jones—Evangelist.”
I knew the liturgical formula—I had been trained on “issuing the invitation” in homiletics (preaching) classes in seminary—but when I saw that the revival service was attended by only a dozen regular members, all seemingly over the age of seventy, I felt justified in skipping the invitation at the end of the service. As I greeted the members who filed out of the back door of the church after the service, several politely commented that they had missed the invitation and hoped I would consider issuing one the next night. The pastor was more admonishing, telling me, “You never know what the Lord will do.” For the next four nights, I dutifully issued the invitation to these same attendees to ask forgiveness for their sins and enter into a personal relationship with Jesus. No one responded, but everyone was content that the familiar formula for individual repentance of sin and acceptance of salvation had been followed.
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. African American observers of white Christianity, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr., have been utterly mystified at this paradox. As I noted above, Douglass raged against the “horrible inconsistencies” of a religion that had “men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members.”43 Nearly 120 years later, King issued a similar exasperated lament from a Birmingham jail cell:
On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings, I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over, I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor [George] Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”44
This confounding contradiction points to the remarkable power of white Christian culture and the theology that undergirds it. As sociologist Ann Swidler has noted, all groups have what can be thought of as a kind of “cultural tool kit”: a repertoire of shared ideas and behaviors that allow them to organize and interpret reality.45 This tool kit necessarily acts like a filter, allowing some things to come sharply into focus while blurring other things into an indistinguishable background field. Through the workings of this cultural filtering, some things seem like common sense, while others are less comprehendible or appear obviously nonsensical.
In a groundbreaking 2000 study, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith applied these insights to the results of thousands of quantitative and qualitative interviews with black and white Christians. Particularly on questions related to race, they found that white evangelicals’ cultural tool kit consisted of tools that restricted their moral vision to the personal and interpersonal realms, while screening out institutional or structural issues. Specifically, Emerson and Smith discovered that the white evangelical cultural tool kit contained three main tools that are all interconnected by theology: freewill individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism.46
Spelled out, freewill individualism means that, for white evangelicals, “individuals exist independent of structures and institutions, have freewill, and are individually accountable for their own actions.”47 Relationalism means that white evangelicals tend to see the root of all problems in poor relationships between individuals rather than in unfair laws or institutional behavior. Finally, antistructuralism denotes the deep suspicion with which white evangelicals view institutional explanations for social problems, principally because they believe invoking social structures shifts blame from where it belongs: with sinful individuals.48
Emerson and Smith summarized the blind spots this cultural tool kit creates for white evangelicals as follows: “Absent from their accounts is the idea that poor relationships might be shaped by social structures, such as laws, the ways institutions operate, or forms of segregation.… As carpenters are limited to building with the tools in their kits (hammers encourage the use of nails, drills encourage the use of screws), so white evangelicals are severely constrained by their religio-cultural tools.”49 Moreover, the broader premillennialist theological context in which these individualistic conceptions of sin and salvation are embedded further reinforces this constriction of moral vision, both in terms of perceived problems and solutions.
Over the last two decades, there is increasing evidence that this cultural tool kit, developed primarily in the context of white evangelicalism, has become embedded across white Christianity more generally. In a follow-up study published a dozen years later, in 2012, for example, Emerson and coauthor Jason Shelton found stark differences between African American Protestants on the one hand and both white evangelical Protestants and white mainline Protestants—the latter group that historically embraced a more structuralist theology—on the other.50
For example, when asked about the underlying causes of racial inequality in jobs, income, and housing, only about four in ten black Protestants agreed that these inequalities exist because “African Americans just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty.” By contrast, nearly six in ten (59 percent) white evangelicals agreed, as did half of white mainline Protestants.51 When asked about structural solutions, while 71 percent of black Protestants agreed that the government should do more to help minorities increase their standard of living, a mere 32 percent of white evangelicals and only 38 percent of white mainline Protestants agreed.52
Overall, the pattern Shelton and Emerson identified was that while differences were greater between black Protestants and white evangelical Protestants (registering major differences on ten of twenty-one racial identity politics items measured), there were also significant differences between black Protestants and white mainline Protestants on seven of twenty-one items. Notably, there were significantly fewer differences (four of twenty-one) between black and white non-Protestants.53
So, these findings indicate that there are still significant differences of degree between white evangelical and white mainline Protestants. This makes cultural sense. White mainline Protestants historically received a strong dose of theological structuralism via the social gospel movement and the social justice work of the National Council of Churches. For example, white mainline Protestantism’s magazine Christian Century has steadily focused on social justice and was the place where King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was originally published.
Given this divergent institutional history, however, we would expect larger differences between the evangelical and mainline expressions of white Christianity. Instead, we see that white Protestant affiliation generally is correlated with an individualist rather than structuralist cultural tool kit. In other words, the cultural tool kits of white mainline Protestants increasingly contain the individualist tools of their white evangelical cousins. Although Shelton and Emerson’s 2012 analysis was limited to Protestants, as I’ll demonstrate in chapter 5, more recent research from PRRI confirms these findings but also reveals that this cultural creep has now extended even into the theological world of white Catholics. Through the twin pathways of white racial identity and the increasing relevance of Republican partisanship in each of these groups, the freewill individualism of white evangelicals has been diffused throughout white American Christianity.
Finally, these cultural tools—freewill individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism—coalesce powerfully in white evangelical Christology, which centers on having a personal relationship with Jesus. The personal Jesus paradigm represents, in compressed form, the entire conceptual model for white evangelicals’ individualist cultural tool kit.
Jesus is conceived of as a savior figure because he does what individual humans cannot: he reconciles human beings to God by sacrificing his life to atone for human sin. So, the only way to human salvation is through this connection between a person and Jesus. And this relationship is understood to have been initiated two millennia ago by Jesus through his death on the cross. Hence, the logic of the model begins with an invitation to a relationship already in motion, a point expressed in hundreds of hymns, such as this popular one: “I will sing the wondrous story / Of the Christ who died for me, / How He left His home in glory / For the cross of Calvary.”
In the personal Jesus paradigm, Jesus did not die for a cause or for humankind writ large but for each individual person.54 Responding positively to this invitation, entering into this relationship, is an intimate decision that must be made freely by each person as an accountable act of the will. In popular language, this act of human agency is articulated as answering a “knock at the door,” “letting Jesus come into your heart,” and as reciprocating a gift, such as “giving your life to Jesus.” Because the most fundamental religious act is one that takes place in the interiority of an individual’s emotional, psychological, and spiritual life, it naturally fuels an antistructuralist mind-set. There’s nothing in this conceptual model to provide a toehold for thinking about the way institutions or culture shape, promote, or limit human decisions or well-being.
And, notably, in the white evangelical conception of Jesus, though not often interrogated, Jesus is white, or, as in the late nineteenth-century racial classifications, an Aryan Caucasian.55 There are no descriptions of Jesus’s physical characteristics in the gospels, and what we do know—that he was Jewish and from the Middle East—easily makes nonsense of any claims that Jesus shared with white American Christians a European heritage. But from the white European point of view, shot through with colonialist assumptions about racial hierarchies and white supremacy, there was no other possible conclusion. The story of human salvation had to find expression in a divinely ordained, hierarchical universe. As the exemplar of what it meant to be perfectly human, Jesus by definition had to be white. Whites simply couldn’t conceive of owing their salvation to a representative of what they considered an inferior race. And a nonwhite Jesus would render impossible the intimate relationalism necessary for the evangelical paradigm to function: no proper white Christian would let a brown man come into their hearts or submit themselves to be a disciple of a swarthy Semite.
White evangelicals have generally claimed that their worldview and theology are derived directly from a straightforward reading of an inerrant Bible, and thus, by extension, a direct reflection of God’s will. But the evidence suggests that it is more accurate to say that white evangelicals, like everyone who engages the text, read their worldview back into the Bible. In human hands, the Bible is as much a screen as a projector.
While their fellow black Christians were reading liberation stories from Exodus and prophets such as Amos and Hosea who were calling for social and economic justice, white evangelicals stayed focused more narrowly on the gospels and the writings of Paul to early Christian churches, which were interpreted more easily to be about salvation, right relationships, maintaining order, and keeping the peace. In the hands of clergy committed to white supremacy, cultural selectivity was as effective as the actual redactions in the slave Bible on display at the Museum of the Bible. This piecemeal approach—which might as well have been captioned with the parallel inscription “Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the slave owners, in the United States”—had the effect of neutralizing calls for racial justice and social change. White Christian selectivity harnessed the Bible in service of maintaining the current status quo, which, conveniently, was structured to maintain white supremacy.
Even as social norms gradually changed in favor of recognizing greater rights and equality for black Americans, white evangelicals called on this individualist reading of the Bible to distance themselves from fully embracing these changes. During the debates over the morality of slavery, its white evangelical defenders typically held the upper hand when debates were restricted to biblical arguments; they could straightforwardly outquote the abolitionists, citing examples of explicit support for slavery and numerous places where the Bible notes the existence of the practice and fails to condemn it. And more fundamentally, they pointed to verses that they claimed legitimized the racial supremacy of whites over blacks as the divinely ordained form of relationships between the races.
Abolitionists had a more complicated task. At the most basic level, they concentrated on drawing awareness to the brutality of slavery as it was practiced. This allowed them to avoid direct biblical debates by distinguishing between what were perhaps more benign instances of slavery in the Bible and harsher contemporary realities. If they went further, and many did not, they had to make more general arguments about the centrality of principles of love and equality to Christianity; and then argue further that these principles should apply to social and political life as well as personal life. But white evangelicals, with their individualist tool kits, were primed and well equipped to reject both lines of argument. The brutality of slavery they dismissed as acts of particular individuals rather than broad patterns; and the broad application of love and equality was denigrated as a move that illegitimately brought “politics”—by which they meant anything social or structural—into religion.
A century later, during the civil rights movement, this template was still functioning. When Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. began to gain traction on American consciences by citing the prophetic tradition of the Bible, praying with the prophet Amos that God would “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” white evangelical leaders tried to undermine his work as illegitimate. Just weeks after “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, the Reverend Jerry Falwell gave this response in a sermon:
“Believing the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else—including the fighting of Communism, or participating in the civil rights reform.… Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners.”56
Of course, Falwell eventually reversed himself, founding his own political organization, the Moral Majority, in 1979 and becoming a major player on the political right. The precipitating event that changed his tune? Falwell was enraged that Bob Jones University, a conservative white Christian institution, had lost its tax-exempt status in 1976 because it refused to rescind its racially discriminatory policies.57 Shortly after that decision, Falwell preached: “The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.”58
While this sentiment is a complete repudiation of his former declaration, the about-face is consistent if it’s understood as a mere tactical change to an underlying commitment, defending a white supremacist status quo. 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.
The historical contradictions between the various confident declarations about biblical teachings on race by white Christians are head spinning. As a social consensus coalesced around the immorality and sinfulness of slavery following the Civil War, white evangelicals retreated from the previously unflinching claims of biblical support for slavery. And only just recently, as Americans are beginning to name white supremacy as a social sin, white evangelicals have also repudiated their previous, and equally confident, claims that the separation of the races was an obvious biblical dictate. Having reluctantly conceded these points, with concessions coming only after they have become socially untenable, white evangelicals, incredibly, continue to assert that their current theological conclusions are derived directly from an inerrant Bible.
There is stronger evidence that it is the other way around: that white Christians’ cultural worldview, with an unacknowledged white supremacy sleeping at its core, has been read back into the Bible. And if this is true, a deeper interrogation of our entire theological worldview, including our understanding and use of the Bible and even core theological doctrines of a personal relationship with Jesus, is in order. Until we find the courage to face these appalling errors of our recent past, white Christians should probably avoid any further proclamations about what “the Bible teaches” or what “the biblical worldview” demands.
This theological worldview—Lost Cause theology, premillennialism, an individualist view of sin, an emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus, and the Bible as the protector of the status quo—has created a mutually reinforcing, closed habit of thought among white evangelicals. The system protects white Christian interests on the one hand and white consciences on the other. In return, white Christians defend the system from external critique, relying on the cultural tool kit it provides.
Lost Cause theology, with its underlying commitment to preserving white supremacy, has proven remarkably durable, even as it has adapted to new times. Its main contours are still discernible in dynamics driving our politics today. Paul Harvey, historian at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, summarized the Lost Cause narrative this way: “Ultimately… white spiritual leaders preached that a sanctified, purified white South would rise from the ashes to serve as God’s ‘last and only hope’ in a modernizing and secularizing nation.”59 Writing in the mid-1960s, cultural anthropologist Anthony Wallace described Lost Cause religion as a revivalist movement aiming “to restore a golden age believed to have existed in the society’s past,” terms eerily close to contemporary calls by President Donald Trump to “Make America great again.”60 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.
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. As antebellum Presbyterian preacher Donald Frazer argued emphatically, many abolitionists had the shoe on the wrong foot by pretending to be “more humane than God.”61 It was God’s law, not human conscience, that set the limits on the treatment of blacks by whites, he argued. Moral discomfort, even moral horror or outrage, has no place in this theological worldview. But surely it should give white Christians pause to continue to pledge allegiance to a theological system that contracts rather than expands our moral vision; that anesthetizes rather than livens up our moral sensitivities.
These contradictions are not just theoretical. Increasing anxieties around the perceived decline of white identity and white Christian culture are driving right-wing extremism both at home and abroad. What these movements get right is that those who have assembled under the banner of whiteness have lost something vital in this centuries-long struggle for power. Their hope is that they will regain a secure identity by reenthroning white Christian dominance through xenophobic politics and a culture war based on violence and terrorism. But there is a better, more realistic path forward. Confronting a theology built for white supremacy would be a critical first step for white Christians who want to recover a connection not just to our fellow African American Christians but also to our own identity and, more importantly, our humanity.