Theology, Thoughts & Coffee
Reading and Class Schedule:
Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity
- Chapter 1, Seeing: Our Current Cultural Moment
- Chapter 2, Remembering: Christianity as the Conductor of White Supremacy
- Chapter 3, Believing: The Theology of White Supremacy
- Chapter 4, Marking: Monuments to White Supremacy
- Chapter 5, Mapping: The White Supremacy Gene in American Christianity
- Chapter 6, Telling: Stories of Change
- Chapter 7, Reckoning: Toward Responsibility and Repair
Chapter Summaries:
Chapter 1 - Seeing: Our Current Cultural Moment
The founding of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in May 1845
The SBC was “founded on the proposition that chattel slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ. Its founders believed this arrangement was not just possible but also divinely mandated.”
The SBC fully supported the Confederacy and after the South lost the Civil War, its secessionist brand of religion not only survived but thrived.
“Its powerful role as a religious institution that sacralized white supremacy allowed the SBC to spread its roots during the late nineteenth century to dominate southern culture. And by the mid-twentieth century, the SBC ultimately evolved into the single largest Christian denomination in the country, setting the tone for American Christianity overall and Christianity’s influence in public life.”
While northern white Christians clashed with southern Christians over the issue of slavery, it became clear that these convictions did not translate into commitments to black equality.
“This shared commitment to white supremacy, and black inferiority, was the central bridge that fostered the rather swift reconciliation between southern and northern whites overall, and southern and northern white Christians specifically.”
“This book puts forward a simple proposition: it is time—indeed well past time—for white Christians in the United States to reckon with the racism of our past and the willful amnesia of our present. Underneath the glossy, self-congratulatory histories that white Christian churches have written about themselves is a thinly veiled, deeply troubling reality. White Christian churches have not just been complacent; they have not only been complicit; rather, as the dominant cultural power in America, they have been responsible for constructing and sustaining a project to protect white supremacy and resist black equality. This project has framed the entire American story.”
For nearly all of American history, the white Jesus of white congregations “was not merely indifferent to the status quo of racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordained order of things.”
Chapter 2 - Remembering: Christianity as the Conductor of White Supremacy
The Colfax, Louisiana Massacre, 1873
Two monuments, both erected by whites, cast the occupation of the courthouse by black elected officials as a “riot” rather than as a defense of the results of a lawful election.
The town cemetery contains a white marble obelisk erected shortly after the event with the following inscription: “In loving remembrance, erected to the memory of heroes…who fell in the Colfax riot fighting for white supremacy.”
Protestant Christianity and racial violence: the lynching of Samuel Thomas Wilkes in 1899.
The embeddedness of white supremacy was so deep in the psyches of white Christians that they saw no conflict with attending a lynching on the way home from church while the most respected white civic and religious leaders either turned a blind eye or actively participated in the murder.
James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree
This caused W. E. B. Dubois to alter his career path from a scholar to an activist, writing, “I realized one could not be a calm, cool, detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.”
“Much of the recorded history gives scant treatment to the integral, active role that white Christian leaders, institutions, and laypeople played in constructing, maintaining, and protecting white supremacy in their local communities.”
Southern Baptists and the Confederacy
White Worship and Civil Rights in the South
Racial Desegregation in Jackson, Mississippi
The White Christian Shuffle: Contemporary Efforts to Address White Supremacy among Southern Baptists
Understanding White Supremacy beyond Southern Evangelicalism: Catholicism and Mainline Protestantism
Chapter 3 - Believing: The Theology of White Supremacy
This chapter aims to describe 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.”
Thesis: “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.”
Rev. Basil Manly Sr. and the compatibility of slavery and the White Christian worldview in sermons preached throughout the South. His understanding of slavery is set in a larger patriarchal theological framework of divinely ordained roles for persons.
Fredrick Douglas and the Confounding Influence of Christianity on White Supremacy: “I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which everywhere surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members.”
The Religion of the Lost Cause in the aftermath of the Civil War and in the contemporary setting.
Eschatology: shifting conceptions of history and human responsibility in the theology of premillennial dispensationalism. Billy Graham’s response to MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “Only when Christ comes again will little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.”
Individualist conceptions of sin and salvation through a personal relationship with Jesus served to restrict the moral vision of many white Christians to the personal and interpersonal realms while screening out institutional or structural issues.
The Bible and the Social Status Quo: Christianity is primarily about redeeming people for life in the next world rather than about changing the present.
Chapter 4 - Marking: Monuments to White Supremacy
This chapter examines the monuments to white supremacy that have been erected in the United States and their significance in the current cultural moment as well as the challenge they represent for the deconstruction of white supremacy and the establishment of an antiracist society.
The cultural influence of the United Daughters of the Confederacy: its legacy remains “not just in granite and bronze, but also in the ways its past educational efforts continue to shape American culture and religion, limiting white vision and hindering black equality.”
The production of lectionaries and catechisms aimed at embedding and extending the values of white supremacy into future generations. In these theological and doctrinal framings, the intuitions, assumptions, and values of white supremacy seamlessly intertwine with those of Christian faith.
Stained Glass monuments to white supremacy: the most prominent of these are four large windows honoring Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the nave of the National Cathedral in Washington, D. C., the most important religious space in the country because of its deep connection with national civic life.
“The historical witness is clear: as Confederate symbols migrated from cemeteries and veterans’ parades, they became less about honoring the past and more about upholding white supremacy in the present. The further the distance from the cemetery and the past, the more nakedly obvious their role is asserting white supremacy becomes.”
A corollary conclusion also extends to religion: as symbols of white supremacy “were intentionally installed is sacred spaces, where they were enmeshed with Christian symbols and justified by white Christian theology, they became religious weapons in the service of baptizing white supremacy.”
The examples of resistance to these monuments and memorials of white supremacy “are best understood as initial tremors” which are only beginning to disturb their entrenched foundations. “Ultimately, the construction of a new foundation will require white Americans to do something we have never been willing to do: reanimate our own histories and confirm a violent and unflattering past.”
Chapter 5 - Mapping: The White Supremacy Gene in American Christianity
This chapter seeks to answer three central questions:
1) “How prevalent are racist and white supremacist attitudes among white Christians today?”
2) “To the extent that they exist, are these attitudes merely incidental to, or have they come to be, over time, actually constitutive of white Christian identity?”
3) “Is this relationship limited the white evangelicals or white Christians in the South, or do these attitudes also persist among white mainline and white Catholic Christians outside that region?”
The ongoing legacy of slaveholding among white Americans: when people think about the contemporary effects of slavery, they tend to think of the external effects such as continuing economic and social inequalities between black and white Americans. However, research has also demonstrated the remarkably enduring impact of slavery on how contemporary white people think, feel, and act today.
Distinctive racial attitudes of white Christians: the conclusions of sociological research suggest that Christian affiliation remains a powerful force among whites on their attitudes to racism, with white Christians being more likely to hold racist viewpoints than unaffiliated whites by 20 to nearly 40 percentage points.
“In every case, it is religiously unaffiliated whites who stand closer than white Christians do to their African American Christian brothers and sisters.” In addition, we find similar negative attitudinal patterns related to immigrants.
The Racism Index median scores: white evangelical Protestants (0.78); white Catholics (0.72); white mainline Protestants (0.69); general population (0.57); white religiously unaffiliated Americans (0.42); black Protestants (0.24)
Disturbing conclusion: “Not only in the South but nationwide, higher levels of racism are associated with higher probabilities of identifying as a white Christian; and conversely, adding Christianity to the average white person’s identity moves him or her toward more, not less, affinity for white supremacy. White supremacy lives on today not just in explicitly and consciously held attitudes among white Christians; it has become deeply integrated into the DNA of white Christianity itself.”
Chapter 6 --Telling: Stories of Change
This chapter explores the ways in which Americans, “at both the national and local levels, are attempting to tell a more truthful story about our racist past, to understand how this past is manifesting itself in our fraught present, and to begin to shape a better future.”
“Through these recent stories of transformation, we can see how white Christian Americans might begin to face our own personal and family stories and wrestle with the ways in which white supremacy has distorted our sense of reality and ourselves.”
The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, MS (opened in December 2017): “The mere existence of the MCRM, with its unflinching portrayal of the terror and violence whites unleashed to protect their dominance and thwart black equality is a testament of hope.” It took sixteen years of lobbying and legislative efforts to win state approval and financial support.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama: The Equal Justice Initiative, the organizational force behind the memorial, also established a Legacy Museum and local civil rights markers throughout the town as well as documenting every know lynching that occurred in the country between 1877 and 1950 (only counting those that can be verified by two independent sources).
They documented more than 4,400 cases of African American men, women, and children who were “hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs” during this period.
Two First Baptist Churches in Macon, Georgia: The story of two churches, First Baptist Church of Christ (historically and predominantly white) and First Baptist Church (historically and predominantly black)
A Memorial to Lynching Victims outside the South in Duluth, Minnesota: a public monument of “Duluth’s Lingering Shame”—a lynching in June 1920 after which photographs were taken and sold as postcards.
While each of these stories is modest, “they serve as examples of contemporary wakefulness in the face of centuries of white apathy and slumber.”
Chapter 7 - Reckoning: Toward Responsibility and Repair
Where do we go from here? One of the most common responses to the question is that time will take care of most racial problems. While this response is tempting, especially when faced with the enormity of the problem, “such blind hopes misunderstand the nature of white supremacy, particularly its tenacious ability to endure from generation to generation.”
Responses of Southern Baptist Seminary and Virginia Theological Seminary
Reckoning with White Supremacy in American Christianity: etymology of the word reckoning highlights two branches of historical meaning: 1) to give a full verbal account of something (Old English) and, 2) notions of economic justice, a fair settling of accounts, confession and repair (Dutch and German).
The focus on racial justice rather than racial reconciliation takes white Christians onto difficult terrain. This is because the notion of justice involves repentance and the difficult questions of restitution and repair. (Luke 19:1-10, Zacchaeus)
Rethinking the “Mark of Cain”
Baldwin testimony before US House Select Committee (1968): “If we are going to build a multiracial society, which is our only hope, 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.” This bitterness of coming to further acknowledgement of the harm we have done is the beginning of the path of freedom.
“And we have to accept, given the way 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 out Christianity.”
“One thing is clear: any lasting changes will necessarily involve extreme measures to 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.”