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

by Robert P. Jones

A Summary of the Statistical Findings We’ve covered a lot of statistical ground in this chapter. Below is a summary of the main findings: White Christians think of themselves as people who hold warm feelings toward African Americans while simultaneously embracing a host of racist and racially resentful attitudes inconsistent with those warm feelings. The Racism Index provides a more accurate reading of white Christians’ views toward African Americans. Harboring more racist views is a positive independent predictor of white Christian identity overall and for each of the three white Christian subgroups individually: white evangelical Protestant, white mainline Protestant, and white Catholic. By contrast, holding more racist views has only a very weak effect on white religiously unaffiliated identity, and that effect is in the negative direction. Attending church more frequently does not make white Christians less racist. On the contrary, there is a positive relationship between holding racist attitudes and white Christian identity among both frequent (weekly or more) and infrequent (seldom or never) church attenders. And for white evangelical Protestants, holding racist views has nearly four times the power to predict the likelihood of identification among frequent church attenders than among infrequent church attenders. The relationship between racist attitudes and white Christian identity is even stronger for each white Christian subgroup within the region in which they ar...

In his remarks at the unveiling, Read noted how the postcard image of that night had frozen that awful racial violence in time, and he expressed his hopes that the day’s event would provide an alternative image of accountability and reconciliation: “I stand here today as a representative of [my great-grandfather’s] legacy, and I willingly place that responsibility on my shoulders.”38 Read continued, “As a family, we have used the discovery of this as a tool for continued discovery of ourselves. This means our past, present, and future selves, and a lesson that true shame is not in the discovery of a terrible event such as this, but in the refusal to acknowledge and learn from that event.”39

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.

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.