Can "White" People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission (Missiological Engagements Book 12)

by Willie James Jennings

We are convinced that the current moment of demographic change, manifest concretely in the election of the first African American president in 2008 and 2012, represents a similar moment of rising White fear and backlash against what is perceived as an imminent loss of White social dominance.20 In other words, the open bigotry of “Trumpism” is not so much a disease that is resurrecting xenophobia’s dark and bitter past; rather, it is a symptom of the disease pathology of racism. Thus, evangelical fear of Larycia Hawkins and broad evangelical support for the present Republican administration—whether consciously or unconsciously animated by Hawkins’s social location and the president’s openly racist rhetoric and governing agenda21—can both be seen as of a piece. Both responses are congruent with the ebb and flow of civil rights advances and reactive bias retreat, and both function to discredit evangelical witness among people of Color and other outsiders.22 This is not to label all evangelicals so implicated as bigots or racists, but it is to worry aloud about how fear of living in a radically multiethnic country is strong enough to drive members of the body of Christ to embrace profoundly un-Christian behaviors and actors. It is to worry that racism is tightening its grip on the evangelical psyche, resulting in idolatry of the first order.23 It is our hope that this book can help inoculate our beloved evangelical church from such viral strains of fear of the other.