White Too Long Quotes

“It's nothing short of astonishing that a religious tradition with this relentless emphasis on salvation and one so hyperattuned to personal sin can simultaneously maintain such blindness to social sins swirling about it, such as slavery and race-based segregation and bigotry.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“But if we white Christians are going to get any critical leverage on our past, and the distortions this past has brought into our present, we have to let go of both the quest for self-protection—that is to say, the advantages we hoard at unjust costs to others—and the insistence on our racial and religious innocence.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“In other words, the Confederate monument phenomenon was no innocent movement to memorialize the dead; it was primarily a twentieth-century declaration of Lost Cause values designed to vindicate white supremacy and bolster white power against black claims to equality and justice. These Confederate monuments, strategically placed in public spaces, are deposits left by the high tide of white supremacy.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“To be sure, this theological worldview has done great damage to those living outside the white Christian canopy. But what has been overlooked by most white Christian leaders is the damage this legacy has done to white Christians themselves. To put it succinctly, it has often put white Christians in the curious position of arguing that their religion and their God require them to aim lower than the highest human values of love, justice, equality, and compassion.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“To be sure, most white denominations, and most white Christians, have today taken pains to distance themselves from slavery, the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation, and overtly racist attitudes openly espoused in the past. But in survey after survey, white Christians stand out in their negative attitudes about racial, ethnic, and religious minorities (especially Muslims), the unequal treatment of African Americans by police and the criminal justice system, their anxieties about the changing face of the country, and their longing for a past when white Protestantism was the undisputed cultural power. Whatever the explicit public proclamations of white denominations and individual Christians, the public opinion data reveal that the historical legacy of white Christianity lives on in white Christianity today.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“The historical record of lived Christianity in America reveals that Christian theology and institutions have been the central cultural tent pole holding up the very idea of white supremacy. And the genetic imprint of this legacy remains present and measurable in contemporary white Christianity, not only among evangelicals in the South but also among mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“Underneath the glossy, self-congratulatory histories that white Christian churches have written about themselves—which typically depict white Christians as exemplars of democratic principles and pillars of the community—is a thinly veiled, deeply troubling past. White Christian churches have not just been complacent or complicit in failing to address racism; rather, as the dominant cultural power in the U.S., they have been responsible for constructing and sustaining a project to protect white supremacy. This project has framed the entire American story.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“This last point is only beginning to dawn on us white Christian Americans, who still believe too easily that racial reconciliation is the goal and that it may be achieved through a straightforward transaction: white confession in exchange for black forgiveness. But mostly this transactional concept is a strategy for making peace with the status quo—which is a very good deal indeed if you are white. I am not trying to be cynical here, but merely honest about how little even well-meaning whites have believed they have at stake in racial reconciliation efforts. Whites, and especially white Christians, have seen this project as an altruistic one rather than a desperate life-and-death struggle for their own future.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“For more than two decades, as the temperature climbed in Mississippi race relations, Reverend Hudgins built brick by brick a theological bulwark of personal and individual salvation, designed to protect white Christian power and white Christian consciences from black demands for justice.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“white Christian convictions about the evils of slavery more often than not failed to translate into strong commitments to black equality.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“White Christianity has been many things for America. But whatever else it has been -- and the country is indebted to it for a good many things--it has also been the primary institution legitimizing and propagating white power and dominance.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“While the South lost the war, this secessionist religion not only survived but also thrived. Its powerful role as a religious institution that sacralized white supremacy allowed the Southern Baptist Convention to spread its roots during the late nineteenth century to dominate southern culture. And by the mid-twentieth century, the SBC ultimately evolved into the single largest Christian denomination in the country, setting the tone for American Christianity overall and Christianity’s influence in public life.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“Then it takes some digging with enough conviction and curiosity to overcome the inevitable defensiveness that rears its head as the veneer of innocence encasing treasured family lore begins to chip away. But while there is anxiety, and even some shame and terror, in recovering a truer narrative about ourselves, there is also something far more valuable: the possibility of a return to health, with these painful revelations serving as the first signposts marking the path out of what can only be called a kind of self-induced insanity.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“If white supremacy applies only to the KKK and its ilk, the logic runs, even an abstract condemnation of these extremist groups is the equivalent of a rejection of white supremacy. White responses to the problem of white supremacy too often begin with “Of course.” But this inoculation of white consciences is actually as big a problem as the documented rise of fringe white supremacist groups. It creates within mainstream white Christians moral antibodies that preemptively neutralize thornier questions about the current power of white supremacy in our institutions, culture, and psyches.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“On a broader level, white supremacy involves the way a society organizes itself, and what and whom it chooses to value.… And that’s white supremacy without all the bluster: a set of practices informed by the fundamental belief that white people are valued more than others.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“Trump’s powerful appeal to white evangelicals was not that he spoke to the culture wars around abortion or same-sex marriage, or his populist appeals to economic anxieties, but rather that he evoked powerful fears about the loss of white Christian dominance amid a rapidly changing environment.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“While many have scratched their heads wondering how white Christians could support a candidate who has made white supremacy a foundation of his campaign and presidency, knowing how deeply racist attitudes persist among white Christians today makes this unorthodox political marriage less mysterious. Trump’s own racism allowed him to do what other candidates couldn’t: solidify the support of a majority of white Christians, not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“during the national anthem to protest the killing of African Americans by police; and has consistently avoided unequivocal condemnations of violence perpetrated by white nationalists.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“As the Democratic Party came to be identified as the party of civil rights, white Christians increasingly moved to the Republican Party—a migration that political scientists have dubbed “the great white switch.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“The unsettling truth is that, for nearly all of American history, the Jesus conjured by most white congregations was not merely indifferent to the status quo of racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordained order of things.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“The theologically backed assertion of the superiority of both “the white race” and Protestant Christianity undergirded a century of religiously sanctioned terrorism in the form of ritualized lynchings and other forms of public violence and intimidation. Both the informal conduits of white power, such as the White Citizens’ Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, and the state and local government offices, were populated by pastors, deacons, Sunday school teachers, and other upstanding members of prominent white churches. The link between political leaders and prominent white churches was not just incidental; these religious connections served as the moral underpinning for the entire project of protecting the dominant social and political standing of whites.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“As prominent Baptist historian Walter “Buddy” Shurden has pointed out, it wasn’t until the last two decades of the twentieth century that white Baptist historians directly faced up to the proslavery, white supremacist origins of their denomination.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“To many well-meaning white Christians today—evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, and Catholic—Christianity and a cultural norm of white supremacy now often feel indistinguishable, with an attack on the latter triggering a full defense of the former.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“In a rigorous statistical analysis linking county-level slave ownership from the 1860 US census and public opinion data collected between 2016 and 2011 by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a 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.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“It's vital, if we are to properly understand the problem, that we not flinch from the clear evidence that Roof’s Christianity wasn’t incidental to his motivations and his racial views. It was integral to his identity and helped fuel this horrific violence. He understood himself as a white Christian warrior who consciously launched this attack on sacred ground, targeting a historic black church in the hopes of encouraging his fellow white Christians to rise up and "become completely ruthless to the blacks.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“Although it received little press and was rarely incorporated into explanations of his motivations, Dylann Roof's identity as a white Christian was central to his worldview.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“There are five southern states that continue to include Confederate symbols in their flags. Notably, four of the five (Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Georgia) are also among the top ten states containing the highest percentage of white evangelical Protestants in the country.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“It is true that old-school Lost Cause theology is rarely aired in mainstream white churches today. But its direct descendant, the individualist theology that insists that Christianity has little to say about social injustice — created to shield white consciences from the evils and continued legacy of slavery and segregation — lives on, not just in white evangelical churches but also increasingly in white mainline and white Catholic churches as well.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“Growing up inside Southern Baptist churches in Texas and Mississippi, I never once wrestled seriously with our denomination's troubled racist past. Staring at those words on the page now, it seems impossible that I can write that sentence. But it's true. And it seems that understanding just how this could be — that I and so many of my fellow white Christians were never challenged to face Christianity's deep entanglement with white supremacy — will help explain why we still have such limited capacities to hear black calls for equality.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“If white supremacy was an unquestionable cultural assumption in America, what does it mean that Christian doctrines by necessity had to develop in ways that were compatible with that worldview? What if, for example, Christian conceptions of marriage and family, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, or even the concept of having a personal relationship with Jesus developed as they did because they were useful tools for reinforcing white dominance?”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity