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

by Robert P. Jones

public uses of the Confederate battle flag increased as black demands for justice advanced and white supremacy was threatened.

in 1956, two years after the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling that ordered public schools must be desegregated, the legislature replaced the more subtle red and white horizontal bars with a full version of the Confederate battle flag to the right of the blue canton. This flag flew until 2001, when Governor Roy Barnes led a move to replace it with a new flag containing a large state seal in the center on a field of blue, with a small homage to the previous state flags, flanked by two American flags, embedded in a narrow ribbon below the seal. This shift away from Confederate symbols was short-lived, however. In a 2004 referendum, voters approved by a margin of three to one a new design that even more closely resembles the Stars and Bars than the original pre-1956 flag, featuring, for example, a circle of thirteen stars that represent the states of the Confederacy.47

Smh GA

But his murderous acts did begin to open the eyes of many white religious and civic leaders across the country, rekindling tabled conversations and pushing them out of a sleepy status quo and into action.

Doubtful

Roof was a baptized member in good standing at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Columbia, a church associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), a white mainline Protestant denomination. According to his stepmother, Roof regularly went to church growing up, including catechism classes.55

the most accurate term for him is a “white Christian terrorist.” Certainly law enforcement officials, politicians, and the public would have easily labeled him a “radical Islamic terrorist” if the notebook had been filled with crescent images, a portrait of Muhammad, and reflections on Islam as a “warrior’s religion.”

“As Lutherans, we have been trained to search for reconciliation. Like the person clearing their throat when I pause during the confession and forgiveness [portion of the liturgy], we don’t like waiting in between repentance and reconciliation. That silent pause is a moment for us to see ourselves for who we really are, and it’s scary as fuck.”65

“In South Carolina, we honor tradition, we honor history, we honor heritage, but there’s a place for that flag, and that flag needs to be in a museum, where we will continue to make sure people will honor it appropriately. But the statehouse, that’s an area that belongs to everyone. And no one should drive by the statehouse and feel pain. No one should drive by the statehouse and feel like they don’t belong.”

Honor?

In the end, a single African American contractor agreed to remove the larger monuments—provided that the city provide extra police protection—and another contractor agreed to remove the smaller White League obelisk. Even then, a contractor’s car was torched, sand was put in the gas tank of one of the cranes, and drones were flown into the construction site to thwart the work.86 The necessary security precautions rivaled a war zone and, indeed, ultimately required the city to hire an outside security firm with experience doing military and civil construction in conflict areas around the world.

Thugs

“These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for. After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.”88

large-scale national survey of the American electorate conducted by nearly forty universities, they find that whites residing in areas that had the highest levels of slavery in 1860 demonstrate significantly different attitudes today from whites who reside in areas that had lower historical levels of slavery: (1) they are more politically conservative and Republican leaning; (2) they are more opposed to affirmative action; and (3) they score higher on questions measuring racial resentment.

Religiously unaffiliated whites are far less likely than their Christian counterparts to perceive demographic and cultural changes as negative or to support policies designed to protect the country from such perceived external threats.

The largest gap between the frequent and infrequent church attenders is among those with the highest (most racist) scores on the Racism Index. It’s the opposite pattern that anyone thinking of the church as a moderating force on race relations would expect. Among Americans holding the most racist views (Racism Index = 1), frequent church attenders are 31 percentage points more likely than infrequent church attenders to identify as white evangelical Protestant.

there is no evidence that going to church every week, at least at the churches white Christians are currently attending, makes a white Christian any less likely to be racist.

The relationship, then, between the Racism Index and white Christian identity is a broad two-way street: an increase in racist attitudes independently predicts an increase in the likelihood of identifying as a white Christian, and identifying as a white Christian is independently associated with an increased probability of holding racist attitudes.

Even as Jim Crow laws have been struck from the books in the political realm, most white Christian churches have reformed very little of their nineteenth-century theology and practice, which was designed, by necessity, to coexist comfortably with slavery and segregation. As a result, most white Christian churches continue to serve, consciously or not, as the mechanisms for transmitting and reinforcing white supremacist attitudes among new generations.

For centuries, through colonial America and into the latter part of the twentieth century, white Christians literally built—architecturally, culturally, and theologically—white supremacy into an American Christianity that held an a priori commitment to slavery and segregation. At key potential turning point moments such as the Civil War and the civil rights movement, white Christians, for the most part, did not just fail to evict this sinister presence; history confirms that they continued to aid and abet it.

4,400 cases of African American men, women, and even children who were “hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs” during this period.

1877-1950

the massacre of African American worshippers by a Lutheran white supremacist is not an isolated incident perpetrated randomly by a madman; it is, rather, the harvest from the seeds of racism that white Christians allowed to flourish within a culture that saw itself as God’s ideal civilization, even while condoning and theologically underwriting white Christian terrorism.

The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long;