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

by Robert P. Jones

Just weeks after “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, the Reverend Jerry Falwell gave this response in a sermon: “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