Where do we go from here? One of the most common responses I hear when this question is raised is that time will take care of most of our racial problems—a euphemism for the extinction of older whites who hold racist views. I’ve heard variations of this argument from a wide array of sources: from young people who have tried unsuccessfully to raise these issues within their churches, to progressive political operatives doubling down on the inevitability of the “New America.”
I even witnessed a visceral expression of this sentiment during my visit to Richmond to conduct research for this book. As I was leaving the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, where I had been doing archival research, four demonstrators who looked to be in their sixties or seventies had set up five ten-foot staffs topped with large Confederate battle flags on the sidewalk near a busy intersection, accompanied by a placard that read “Save our Monuments.” During the ten or fifteen minutes I observed, most passing motorists ignored them. A few honked their approval but at least three times as many yelled objections, such as “No racism in Richmond!” or “Go home and take that flag with you!” But one incensed younger white man put his gray minivan in park at the light, stormed around the front of his car to the sidewalk, and stood in front of them, yelling, “I can’t wait ’til all you old human pieces of shit just die, so I can piss on your grave.” With that, he returned to his car, put it into gear, and sped off.
While it’s tempting, especially faced with the enormity of the problem, to believe that the oldest generation of whites will take white supremacy with them to the grave, finally removing it from our religious and political lives, such blind hopes misunderstand the nature of white supremacy, particularly its tenacious ability to endure from generation to generation. Contrary to the assertions of white Christian theology’s freewill individualism, the hosts of white supremacy are not just individuals. Even after the last white American who grew up in Jim Crow America has died, the legacy of white supremacy will survive because, after hundreds of years of nurturing and reinforcement, it has become part of our culture and institutions. Sometimes it lies dormant, but until it is excised, it remains potentially active in overt and subtle ways.
If we get past denial, if we get past the magical thinking that time will settle our moral obligations for us, the next challenge for white Christians today is to deal with the paralyzing notion that the weight of this history is so enormous that meaningful action is impossible. At one early meeting between the white and black members of the two First Baptist Churches in Macon, a white member confessed that she was simply overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do. After a painful pause, an African American woman responded calmly, “Of course you are.”1 This reply was a palpable moment of compassion and accountability. While giving the white woman permission to feel overwhelmed, the African American woman’s response also gently affirmed that this discomfort was not an excuse for inaction.
Several common defense mechanisms protect the place of the white supremacy gene in Christianity. Once we acknowledge its presence, these tactics become more apparent. Southern Baptist Seminary president Al Mohler, for example, insists that “we must repent of our own sins, we cannot repent for the dead”—while refusing to have even a cursory conversation about financial reparations related to the seminary’s slaveholding past.2 In stark contrast, Virginia Theological Seminary, affiliated with the Episcopal Church of America, announced in 2019 the creation of a $1.7 million endowment fund, the annual proceeds of which will be allocated to the descendants of enslaved people who worked at the seminary and to African American alumni who are working at historically black churches. The Very Reverend Ian S. Markham, president of the seminary, noted in a statement, “This is a start. As we seek to mark [the] Seminary’s milestone of 200 years, we do so conscious that our past is a mixture of sin as well as grace. This is the Seminary recognizing that along with repentance for past sins, there is also a need for action.”3
Popular white evangelical author John MacArthur Jr.—in a statement that has garnered more than eleven thousand approving signatures—denies that “one’s ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular sin” and rejects “critical race theory” or “any teaching that encourages racial groups to view themselves as privileged oppressors or entitled victims of oppression.”4 And US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, having declared that America has mostly dispensed with the “sin of slavery” by electing Barack Obama as president, dismisses any serious discussion of slavery reparations because “it’d be pretty hard to figure out who to compensate.”5
Each of these responses, from the theological to the practical, is actually evidence of the moment of reckoning that is upon us. They are the desperate seizures of white consciences, squirming to escape the convicting evidence and protect their own innocence. In a 2019 interview with Religion News Service, Eric Metaxis—white evangelical author, radio host, and strong Donald Trump supporter—illustrated the tortured self-deception such defensiveness produces. Asked about the relationship between Christianity and racism, Metaxis responded as follows:
You always hear about slave-owning Christians, or you hear about people using the Bible to justify slavery. Well, even though that’s true, do you hear about the fact that it was what we would today call “Evangelical Christians” who led the battle for the abolition of the slave trade? They were in the front lines of saying that slavery is wrong—and you can look to the civil rights movement. It’s very similar. The churches were the place where you found that.… I can tell you most Christians that I know, if they really see racism or injustice, they get more angry about it than any secular people I know. They would rightly get outraged by it. The idea that being a white evangelical means you are sort of comfortable with white privilege is deeply offensive to people—because not only do they disagree with it, but their whole lives are meant to represent the opposite of that.6
As incredulous as such assertions are against the plain witness of history and current public opinion, this sort of knee-jerk defensiveness is understandable, even predictable, as a first response. Mercer University history professor and FBC of Christ church member Doug Thompson witnessed firsthand the challenges the evidence of the church’s racist past had created, especially for its most faithful and long-standing members. Thompson noted that the church’s self-perception was, like most, self-congratulatory: “We were good people who did good things.”
It took time, courage, and relationships with African American fellow Christians for the church to finally admit, in a spirit of honesty and repentance, that while that self-perception contained some truth, “it’s not an accurate depiction.”7 FBC pastor Scott Dickison vividly described his personal experience with the process this way: “It is painful and at times humiliating, and in the end requires nothing less than the death of a vision of ourselves that we may be surprised to learn is so deeply rooted within us.”8
Allowing this discomfort—and at times extreme anguish—to come, allowing the waves of the past to crash on the shore of the present until the rhythm is familiar enough to ring in the ears, is a critical step toward healing and wholeness. It is also perhaps the biggest challenge for us white Christians, who have been conditioned to move through our lives preoccupied with personal sin but unburdened by social injustice. The moral call now before us is not to solve an insurmountable problem but to begin a journey back to ourselves, our fellow citizens, and God.
The etymology of the word reckoning highlights two branches of historical meaning: one more narrative and one more transactional. On the Old English side, reckoning means to give a full verbal account of something, but its Dutch and German roots connote notions of economic justice, a fair settling of accounts. In religious terms, these meanings could be translated to confession and repair, and sustained forms of both will be necessary to move toward health.
As they emphasized in conversations with me, Reverend Goolsby and Reverend Dickison, the pastors of the two First Baptist Churches in Macon, don’t pretend to have figured it all out, nor do they have a grand master plan for the future. But they have learned a few important lessons that can help us understand what an honest reckoning looks like. The earliest work they did together, their first tentative steps along a murky path, focused strictly on building community. As they built trust, they were able to begin moving toward a fuller accounting. They were able to start asking some hard questions, trying to understand the ways in which racism and the ideology of white supremacy had shaped their relationship to each other—and, for the members of the white church, how it had distorted their own self-understanding and their faith. These conversations have led them through some initial, deliberate work of confession.
One of the most impressive things about the journey of the two First Baptist Churches in Macon is that FBC of Christ has not succumbed to a mistake that most white Christians make when they engage in this work: reaching too directly for reconciliation. Dickison had this to say about the challenges of the reconciliation paradigm:
I’ve stopped using the word reconciliation… for what we’re doing. I’ve started using justice work more, not saying racial reconciliation, but really talking about racial justice. When we throw around the word reconciliation, especially as white Christians, white people, we’re betraying our desire to just kind of move through all of the hard stuff just to get to the happy stuff. So, when we’re talking about justice work, for me we’re getting into these much stickier questions of what has been lost, what is owed.9
And justice, rather than reconciliation, takes white Christians into difficult terrain indeed. Even with all of the work done at FBC of Christ to come to terms with the church’s history, Dickison says, “We have lamented that, we have confessed that to a degree, but what we haven’t done is repented for that.” That next step, repentance, involves the difficult question of restitution and repair.
Dickison also indicated that the inevitable destination on his church’s journey will be the question of restitution:
When I look down the road and think what would it look like for us to have really done the work that I believe we’re called to do, it has to be a measure of restitution and accounting—a tangible economic accounting for what was taken and what is owed. The gospel lesson this past Sunday is, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” and I think what Jesus means there by “treasure” is a pretty broad definition of everything that is meaningful to us. But unless we really account for our possessions, our economic possessions, resources, if we leave that out of it, we are leaving a huge part of our heart behind. That has to be a part for us.10
Such conversations are bound to be difficult. But one thing Goolsby and Dickison have discovered is that people are capable of changing along the way. What sounds like an impossible demand now may seem like a natural next step flowing from an expanded perspective at a later point in the journey.
Inside both the National Memorial for Peace and Justice visitor center and the Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery, there is an installation composed of rows and rows of glass jars on wooden racks, containing soil samples from lynching sites. These samples were collected as part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project, which seeks to place historical markers at lynching sites, while bringing back soil to a central location as a tangible way of documenting and memorializing these victims of racial violence. The jars are labeled with the names, dates, and locations of the victims in uniform white letters, which contrast with the different colors and textures of the soils. Some hold the sand of coastal regions, while others contain dark-black Delta cotton soil, the red clay of Alabama and Georgia, or the mossy loam of the low country. While these are contemporary soil samples that do not literally contain human remains from the lynchings, the way they bridge space and time is affecting.
Although I didn’t find any biblical references near the Community Remembrance Project exhibits, for those familiar with the Bible, the jars of soil powerfully evoke a story from the book of Genesis about the first set of brothers, Cain and Abel, born to Adam and Eve. In the ancient story, Cain becomes jealous of his younger brother, Abel, and, in a fit of anger, murders him in a field, far from the eyes of his parents. Afterward, God confronts a defiant and indignant Cain, who lies about the murder:
Now Cain talked with Abel his brother; and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?”
He said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”11
The LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”12
Notably, this story is “the mark of Cain” narrative that has served (in tandem with the “curse of Ham” story) as the most prominent theological justification of white supremacy.13 When Cain complains that his punishment is too harsh and that he will be killed if he is driven from his homeland, God agrees to mark him in some way as a visible sign of God’s protection, even while he remains under the curse. For generations, white Christians have interpreted this passage to describe the origins of dark-skinned humans, whom they understood as a race created not from the nobility of divine breath but from human acts of jealousy, murder, and deception.
In the reflections of these glass jars of dirt dug from lynching site grounds, however, a different understanding materializes, one that inverts the traditional white interpretation of this story. I’ll be blunt: it is white Americans who have murdered our black and brown brothers and sisters. After the genocide and forced removal of Native Americans, the enslavement of millions of Africans, and the lynching of more than 4,400 of their surviving descendants, it is white Americans who have used our faith as a shield to justify our actions, deny our responsibility, and insist on our innocence. We, white Christian Americans, are Cain.
And despite our denials, equivocations, protests, and excuses, as the biblical narrative declares, the soil itself preserves and carries a testimony of truth to God. Today God’s anguished questions—“Where is your brother?” and “What have you done?”—still hang in the air like morning mist on the Mississippi River. We are only just beginning to discern these questions, let alone find the words to voice honest answers.
These queries are, of course, rhetorical, even in the biblical story. God certainly knows the answers, and, if we’re honest with ourselves, so do we. I’ve always found it puzzling that God asks these questions of Cain. When I was younger, I thought perhaps God was playing a divine game of “gotcha” with Cain, laying a trap and testing him to see if he would lie. But I think the better interpretation, and one that is relevant for us, is that God is giving Cain the opportunity for confession, for honesty, knowing that this would be the best path for Cain to begin reckoning with the traumatic experience of having killed his own brother, the pain he has unleashed for himself and others, and the consequences that will inevitably come. God’s questions were a compassionate invitation to Cain, giving him an opportunity to avoid the twisting of his personality that this trauma, and the perpetual deception required to cover it up, would inevitably bring.
But just as we have, Cain doubles down. Throwing his own rhetorical question back at God—“Am I my brother’s keeper?”—Cain not only indignantly denies any knowledge of his brother’s fate but also rejects the very idea that he should be expected to answer God’s questions. Here, it’s clear that Cain’s decision to lie about his hand in the murder and to deny responsibility makes his future harder, just as our denials threaten our own future. The challenge for white Americans today, and white Christians in particular, is whether and how we are going to answer these questions: “Where is your brother?” and “What have you done?”
As we contemplate our answers, there are certainly important pragmatic considerations. Continued racial inequality, injustice, and unrest harm our ability to live together in a democratic society. Racial prejudice and divisions provide weapons for our enemies who wish to weaken us. White supremacy is sand in the gears of the economy and a source of life-threatening conflict in our communities.
But another important consideration, and one that we white Americans have given very little thought to, is the ways in which our complicity in this history, and our unwillingness to face it, have warped our own identities. Just as Cain was separated from his natural family, we have allowed white supremacy to separate us not just from our black brothers and sisters but also from a true sense of who we are.
We are Cain. It is white Christian souls that have been most disfigured by the myth of white supremacy. And it is we who are most in need of repentance and restoration, not just for the sake of the descendants of those whom our ancestors kidnapped, robbed, whipped, murdered, and oppressed; not just for those who today are unjustifiably shot by police, unfairly tried, wrongfully convicted, denied jobs, and poorly educated in failing schools; but for the sake of our children and our own future. And there’s hope here in the Genesis story. Even for the guilty and unrepentant Cain, God acts to preserve the possibility of a new future.
This brings us to the crux of the matter; what James Baldwin powerfully articulated as “the white problem.” Writing just months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, which precipitated violent protests in more than 120 cities in tumultuous and bloody 1968, Baldwin penned the following in a New York Times op-ed:
I will flatly say that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect on their personalities, their lives, their grasp of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.14
These are sharp words from a man who, despite his own experiences with racial bigotry and injustice and his extraordinary perceptive abilities, consistently held out hope for change in his writings, refusing to dip his pen in the well of racial hatred. When he was young, and a black minister told him that he should, under no circumstances, give his seat to a white woman on public transportation, Baldwin reported that his response was this: “But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me?” When he was gaining recognition as a writer, he was recruited by the founder and leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad. But Baldwin wrote that he knew an insurmountable barrier stood between him and that movement: that, whatever white people’s sins, which were many, he could not sign on to the idea that whites were literally “devils.”15
But even with his stubborn orientation toward love, Baldwin saw that any progress could come only if whites, and white Christians, specifically, could wrestle with the difficult truths of the intertwined histories of blacks and whites in America. “If we are going to build a multiracial society, which is our only hope,” Baldwin said in his 1968 testimony before a US House Select Subcommittee that was considering a bill to establish a National Commission on Negro History and Culture, “then one has got to accept that I have learned a lot from you, and a lot of it is bitter, but you have a lot to learn from me, and a lot of that will be bitter. That bitterness is our only hope. That is the only way we get past it.”16
For Baldwin, this bitterness, of coming into fuller acknowledgment of the harm we have done, is the beginning of the path to freedom. Far from believing in the inevitability of oppression, he declared, “I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are.”17 In the end, Baldwin appeals to his fellow white citizens, arguing that love is the thing that can ultimately resolve the racial dilemma we currently face. “Love,” Baldwin writes, “takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” Love requires us to see who we really are and to respond to the voices still crying out to us from the ground.
Four hundred years after the first African slave landed on our shores, and more than 150 years after the abolition of slavery, a combination of social forces and demographic changes has brought the country to a crossroads. We white Christians must find the courage to face the fact that the version of Christianity that our ancestors built—“the faith of our fathers,” as the hymn celebrates it—was a cultural force that, by design, protected and propagated white supremacy. We have inherited this tradition with scant critique, and we have a moral and religious obligation to face the burden of that history and its demand on our present. And we have to accept, given the way in which white supremacy has burrowed into our Christian identity, that refusing to address this sinister disorder in our faith will continue to generate serious negative consequences not just for our fellow Americans but also for ourselves and our children. Inaction is a tacit acceptance of white supremacy inhabiting our Christianity. Doing nothing will ensure that, even despite our best conscious intentions, we will continue to turn deaf ears to calls for racial justice.
The disruptive experience of current trends—particularly demographic change and the exodus of younger white adults from Christian churches over the last few decades—may provide motivation for change. But at this late point in our history, real reforms may arise only from the ashes of the current institutional forms of white Christianity.18 One thing is clear: any lasting changes will necessarily involve extreme measures to detect and eradicate the distortions that centuries of accommodations to white supremacy have created.
Perhaps the most important first step toward health is to recover from our white-supremacy-induced amnesia. It is indeed difficult—and at times overwhelming—to confront historical atrocities. But if we want to root out an insidious white supremacy from our institutions, our religion, and our psyches, we will have to move beyond the forgetfulness and silence that have allowed it to flourish for so long. Importantly, as white Americans find the courage to embark on this journey of transformation, we will discover that the beneficiaries are not only our country and our fellow nonwhite and non-Christian Americans, but also ourselves, as we slowly recover from the disorienting madness of white supremacy.
This last point is only beginning to dawn on us white Christian Americans, who still believe too easily that racial reconciliation is the goal and that it may be achieved through a straightforward transaction: white confession in exchange for black forgiveness. But mostly this transactional concept is a strategy for making peace with the status quo—which is a very good deal indeed if you are white. I am not trying to be cynical here, but merely honest about how little even well-meaning whites have believed they have at stake in racial reconciliation efforts. Whites, and especially white Christians, have seen this project as an altruistic one rather than a desperate life-and-death struggle for their own future.
What few whites perceive, and this is a truth that has come late to me, is that we have far more at stake than our black fellow citizens in setting things right. As Baldwin provocatively put it, the civil rights movement began when an oppressed and despised people began to wake up collectively to what had happened to them.19 The question today is whether we white Christians will also awaken to see what has happened to us, and to grasp once and for all how white supremacy has robbed us of our own heritage and of our ability to be in right relationships with our fellow citizens, with ourselves, and even with God. Reckoning with white supremacy, for us, is now an unavoidable moral choice.