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...