White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

by Robert P. Jones

While the South lost the war, this secessionist religion not only survived but also thrived. Its powerful role as a religious institution that sacralized white supremacy allowed the Southern Baptist Convention 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.

“Slavery was the main issue that led to the 1845 schism; that is a cold historical fact.”2

The theologically backed assertion of the superiority of both “the white race” and Protestant Christianity undergirded a century of religiously sanctioned terrorism in the form of ritualized lynchings and other forms of public violence and intimidation.

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.

the Jesus conjured by most 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.

following the election of our first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, in 1960, a number of forces have led to the mainstreaming of white Catholics.

To many well-meaning white Christians today—evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, and Catholic—Christianity and a cultural norm of white supremacy now often feel indistinguishable, with an attack on the latter triggering a full defense of the former.

The last year that WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) comprised a majority was 1993.

By activating the white supremacy sequence within white Christian DNA, which was primed for receptivity by the perceived external threat of racial and cultural change in the country, Trump was able to convert white evangelicals in the course of a single political campaign from so-called values voters to “nostalgia voters.”

Because of this radical narrowing of our understanding of white supremacy, the term paradoxically functions to soothe rather than trouble most white consciences.

The opportunity and the possibility of becoming white, and thereby being admitted to the privileged class, existed uniquely here; as immigrants landed on this country’s shores, the real prize in the land of opportunity was not economic success but the possibility, for some, of becoming white.

Urban Catholic parishes in major cities such as New York were, as late as the 1940s, still requiring black members to sit in the back pews and approach the altar last to receive the Eucharist,

whites ruthlessly clawed back power in the southern states, and the federal government largely withdrew, abandoning former slaves to fend for themselves.

For African Americans, the years immediately following the war were first elating and then devastating. W. E. B. DuBois famously described the period as one where “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”5

As DuBois was on his way to confront the editor of the Atlanta Constitution about its role in promoting Wilkes’s lynching, he was stunned to see the victim’s fingers and toes proudly on display in the window of the local meat market between his house and the newspaper offices.14 The gruesome, menacing sight literally stopped him in his tracks. DuBois reversed his steps and returned to his office at Atlanta University. Realizing that facts and knowledge could not reach whites capable of such brutality in the bright light of a Sunday afternoon, he often recalled this event as one that “pulled me off my feet” and caused him to switch his career from scholar to activist. As he put it, “[I realized] one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.”15

One of the principal reasons white Christians fought so staunchly to ensure that their own churches remained segregated was because they understood the critical role these institutions played in the protection, production, and proliferation of white supremacy.

One of the most blatantly white supremacist statements came from FBC deacon and assistant to the state attorney general Alex McKeigney, who asserted that “the facts of history make it plain that the development of civilization and of Christianity itself has rested in the hands of the white race.” He went on to declare that integration of any kind would ultimately result in racial intermarriage, “a course which if followed to its end will result in driving the white race from the earth forever,

Great replacement

For the next 15 years, we here in Mississippi are going to have to do a lot of shooting to protect our wives, children, and ourselves from bad niggers.”

M. Evers assassin

“On behalf of my black brothers and sisters, we accept your apology, and we extend to you our forgiveness in the name of our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ.” Enthusiastic applause erupted from the overwhelmingly white delegates. In less than fifteen minutes, 150 years of Southern Baptist white supremacy was seemingly absolved.

Using a black face to absolve white guillt

“the white Christian shuffle,” a subtle two-steps-forward-one-step-back pattern of lamenting past sins in great detail, even admitting that they have had pernicious effects, but then ultimately denying that their legacy requires reparative or costly actions in the present.

Declarations on racial justice by national institutions and hierarchies were more often than not ignored or actively flouted by local clergy and their congregations.

Six years after Reverend King praised the National Council of Churches for its leadership on civil rights, and in the same year that the Christian Century published his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Atlanta’s Lovett School, affiliated with the New York–based Episcopal Church, notified Reverend and Mrs. King that their six-year-old son, Martin Luther King III, was being denied admission on the basis of his race.

Marist would never, jk

“Construction of a low-cost housing project in the vicinity… for the colored people… would mean utter ruin for many people who have mortgaged their homes to the FHA, and not only that, but it would jeopardize the safety of many of our white girls.”

Ppl display the same energy today

While the bishops often did not immediately close the original parish churches and schools, now populated by black Catholics, they did shift resources away from them to the new white parishes.

Same energy today

in the wake of black encroachment was the critical moment when the Irish and Italian and other European Catholics—who each had long thought of themselves as an immigrant group with a distinct ethnic heritage from a specific country of origin—discovered that they could be white.

Inhumanity to black ppl = admission into whiteness

white Christians “have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.”

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.

white supremacists account for far greater numbers of domestic terrorism than any other group and a growing proportion of extremist violence worldwide.

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.

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 wi...

F. Douglass thrashing white christian hypocrisy

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

the theological blessing of slavery paradoxically lobotomized white Christian consciences,

the Confederacy, even if not the practice of chattel slavery itself, will rise again.

I never connected the religious theme

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.

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.”

Like spiritual nihilism

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

Lol, absolve whites of any responsibility

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.

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

MLK calling out hypocrisy

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.

White Christians and racism pro black ppl and gays

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.

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.

“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

More hypocrisy

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,

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.

Good luck

Across the South, in large cities and small towns, UDC women preserved oral histories and Confederate relics; policed public school history textbooks for anti-South bias and produced their own alternatives, such as a white supremacist primer for schoolchildren entitled The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire, which was written in 1914 by UDC historian-general Laura Martin Rose and subsequently adopted by the state of Mississippi as a supplemental text for public schools; placed thousands of portraits of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis in public schools, where they could be displayed next to existing portraits of George Washington; and secured Confederate Memorial Day as a public school holiday so that schoolchildren could attend celebrations and help place miniature Confederate flags on the graves of soldiers.

Elite indoctrination

Although it didn’t make it into the final design, Plane made an early suggestion to the sculptor that the KKK be included, explaining, “I feel it is due to the Klan[,] which saved us from Negro dominations and carpetbag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain. Why not represent a small group of them in their nightly uniform approaching in the distance?”21 The park finally opened on April 14, 1965, on the exact one hundredth anniversary of the assassination of President Lincoln. Today Stone Mountain Park is Georgia’s most popular attraction, receiving more than four million visitors each year.

It is a testimony to their power, and to the success of groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, that as late as the 1980s, these symbols could escape Christian or moral interrogation.

as of July 2019, there were 1,747 documented Confederate monuments, place names, holidays, and other symbols still in public spaces. Among this number were 780 monuments to the Confederacy, 300 of which were in the three states of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia alone.

In contemporary debates, the primary argument for preserving Confederate monuments rests on the assumption that these symbols are simply surviving markers that date from the time of the old Confederacy and therefore should be preserved as history. But the comprehensive database compiled by the SPLC, illustrated in Figure 4.1 on the next page, confirms that few Confederate monuments in public spaces were put in place in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Rather, more than nine in ten of the public monuments were erected after 1895. Fully half of them were erected between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1920s, with another boomlet of intense activity between 1955 and 1970.24 In other words, the Confederate monument phenomenon was no innocent movement to memorialize the dead; it was primarily a twentieth-century declaration of Lost Cause values designed to vindicate white supremacy and bolster white power against black claims to equality

Both Easter and Confederate Memorial Day—which remains an official state holiday in Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina—are celebrated in the spring within weeks of each other, and the Christian theological emphasis on resurrection during this liturgical season strongly reinforces the Lost Cause hopes of a defeated white South flowering into new life.