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

by Robert P. Jones

While white evangelicals were providing Christian legitimization of the Confederate Lost Cause, white mainline Protestants in the pews were protecting their long-claimed title to the throne of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance. For their part, Catholics seized the moment to transform the terms of the conflict. Amid the turmoil, they ceased to perceive the fight as one between Irish and black or Italian and black ethnic groups. Rather, the flight out of their old parishes 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.