Decolonizing Christianity Quotes

“In the midst of governors trying to get the federal government to provide assistance, the president instructed his vice president to ignore blue-state leaders (such as Governors Whitmer of Michigan and Inslee of Washington), who failed to show sufficient gratitude.48”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“68 percent of those who support Trump agree with this statement: “Today, discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”47”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“For those with darker skin pigmentation, belonging becomes nearly impossible to achieve. None belong until their words and deeds demonstrate a sufficiently colonized mind, best verified by how passionately they defend the structures maintaining white supremacy. Democracy in the United States will not be overthrown by an invading foreign army. Heavy artillery need not roll down Fifth Avenue. Democracy’s demise will be due to white nationalist Christians wishing to openly and publicly impose a dominion theology upon lethargic electors.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“Democracy functions in this country because of popular faith in the electoral system and the custom of losing an election with grace and dignity, as befitting a statesperson. Following the loss of an election, the candidate voluntarily vacates their office for the winner and goes home to prepare for a future campaign. Our government is expected to peacefully and summarily change elected leaders without protest because we accept that losing an election is part of our democratic process. Trump, breaking with these norms, warned his supporters and detractors alike of riots if he did not win the Republican nomination in 2016,40 warned of a rigged election,41 called for “Second Amendment people” to stop Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court appointments if she were to win the presidency;42 warned evangelicals that violence would occur if Republicans lost the 2018 midterm election (fortunately no violence materialized);43 and warned in a September 29, 2019, tweet of a civil war if he were to be impeached.44 If Trump is true to form, it is only a matter of time before he or his base voices threats of violence concerning the 2020 election.45”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“Dehumanizing opponents creates an atmosphere in which violence becomes acceptable and desirable in order to right perceived wrongs. The caudillo stance, which dismisses any tolerance of political dissent, helps us understand why Trump fawns over Putin, Orban, and Erdoğan,”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“Trump, early in his regime, labeled his opponents as enemies of the state, depicting them as “traitors” and “scum.” During an October 2019 interview, referring to the “Never Trumper Republicans,” he warned, “Watch out for them, they are human scum!”37 Kicking off his reelection campaign at a rally in Orlando, Florida, in June 2019, he whipped up the crowd with these words: “Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage. They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.”38”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“President Trump, in a refreshing moment of honesty and transparency, confessed that if voting was made easier, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”36”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan become case studies on how the foundations of democracies are shaken to their roots by elected officials, who establish themselves as czars, emperors, and sultans masquerading as democratic presidents. Yes, they continue to reign over countries that are democracies in name only. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is weaponized against those who dare challenge the ruling establishment. The rise of white Christianity during the second half of the twentieth century was purposely designed to be nondemocratic. Paul Weyrich, known as the “founding father of the conservative movement,” the architect of the Heritage Foundation, and a leader of the Moral Majority, made it perfectly clear he was against the democratic principle of one person, one vote. During his address at the seminal Religious Right gathering in Dallas during the fall of 1980 he said, “I don’t want everybody to vote…. As a matter of fact, our leverage in elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”34 In other words, when nonwhites vote, white Christians lose, so we do not want those people voting.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“This white God of death will continue reigning because “his” devotees are quick to vote for a lower quality of life rather than sharing the goods and benefits of society with fellow citizens of color.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“Maybe once, decades ago, the US was the leader in healthcare and education, but now the United States, according to a study conducted for the World Bank, ranks twenty-seventh in the world.29 In education, the US placed twenty-eighth out of seventy-one countries in math scores and twenty-fourth in science.30 As reported by the CIA, according to the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality while ignoring other well-being qualifiers, the US ranks fortieth among 150 countries.31 We are the only country in the Western hemisphere without a national paid parental leave benefit. The United States is the only industrial country without universal healthcare, spending more than any other country on substandard care”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“Nationalist Christianity praises God for ordaining Trump. They see God’s hand moving in US history and rejoice in the fusion and confusion of their political victories as God’s victories. But the God who anointed Trump is the God of capital and the hand that is moving US history is the hand of the 1 percent.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“Separated from his liberative teachings, Jesus became a mascot for white Christianity, merchandised as a spiritually impotent but commercially potent symbol.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“On May 18, 1981, the Council for National Policy (CNP) was founded when 160 of the nation’s leading conservatives gathered in the backyard of Richard Viguerie. Viguerie previously was the CEO of a right-wing fundraising company that had secured millions for George Wallace’s failed race-based 1968 presidential bid.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“Lee Atwater, an advisor to Reagan who would go on to become George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign manager, best articulated during an interview how Republicans could win elections in the future: “You start in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites…. ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ ”19”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“the self-proclaimed born-again Christian president Jimmy Carter. Carter’s problem was being the wrong type of Christian: a liberal who in retirement helped to build houses for the poor by hand.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“a cult of nationalist Christianity jelled and gained strength, which merged political power with the need to protect the wealth and privilege given by God to the few. This was a strategic move away from focusing on those whom Jesus called the least of these in favor of the chosen few.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“Christianity and capitalism, in their minds, were both merit-based. If you are good, heaven is your reward; if you are bad, then hell is your punishment. If you are good, you turn a profit; if bad, then bankruptcy is your punishment. Wealth becomes a blessing from God. This ordained order was threatened by the New Deal, an evil that made government a false idol that needed to be banished.12 Fifield prepared fertile ground for visionaries like Billy Graham, Abraham Vereide, and Doug Coe, who went on to merge US anxieties over the Cold War and an atheist Soviet Union with the already established crusade against New Deal policies.13 They sought to more aggressively take back their country for Christ, creating a vast nationalist Christian conspiracy to make converts in high places. They cemented a nationalist Christianity that merged the state with the growing power of a group of wealthy, white male capitalists who were steadfastly opposed to the Social Gospel. Their goal was the Christianization of government, business, education, media, family, entertainment, and religion through the creation of a quasi-democratic theocracy. Since 1953, with the establishment of the National Prayer Breakfast (called, until 1970, the Presidential Prayer Breakfast), under the theme “Government under God,” a cadre of powerful, white capitalists viewed themselves as wolves chosen by God to create national, and then international, Christian power centers where the white Christianity of the powerful defined faith.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil, along with his brother Joseph N., despised Roosevelt and their former business competitor John D. Rockefeller, whose brand of ecumenism, interdenominationalism, and an internationalist Protestantism that prioritized science and reform, was leading the nation, they believed, toward secularism. Committed to Christian libertarianism, they became patrons of Fifield’s work by the mid-1940s, outsourcing the task of persuading citizens to embrace capitalist ideology to the church. Later, they would back an obscure tent-revivalist preacher and fiercely pro-capitalist named Billy Graham. Called by Pew, not God, Graham railed against all liberal social programs—the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society—during his crusades. Social ills such as racism would not be remedied by government, Graham preached.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“This watershed moment made Christianity and capitalism soulmates in white America’s imagination under the phrase “under God,” which they then set out to popularize. Moving forward, the United States would henceforth be known as a Christian nation.9”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“December 1940 when more than five thousand titans of industry (the heads of such companies as Standard Oil, General Motors, Sears, General Electric, and Mutual Life) gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City for the annual meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). They gathered as the nation was emerging from the Great Depression, resentful of powerful labor unions and government regulation of their industries. Until this meeting, these leaders and the nation at large had been told that the greed of capitalists was the cause of the 1929 economic collapse. The NAM tried to counter this narrative throughout the 1930s with appeals to Americans’ self-interest, but this strategy had little effect or success. President Franklin Roosevelt shrewdly used religious jargon to sell his New Deal, which was picked up by liberal ministers throughout the nation and preached from their pulpits. During the 1940 NAM conference, however, one of the speakers—Rev. James W. Fifield—preached against the sins of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the salvation that could be found in US free enterprise and deregulation. The titans of industry were not the cause of the Great Depression, Fifield proclaimed, they were the saviors. During his talk, Fifield—nicknamed “The Apostle to Millionaires”—suggested clergy would be the key to regaining the upper hand in the capitalist struggle against Roosevelt’s liberal policies and dictatorial tendencies. This watershed moment made Christianity and capitalism soulmates in white America’s imagination under the phrase “under God,” which they then set out to popularize. Moving forward, the United States would henceforth be known as a Christian nation.9”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“during the sixty-eighth National Prayer Breakfast, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, gave a moving tribute to Jesus’s entreaty to “love your enemies” in the midst of the current “crises of contempt and polarization.” Trump, speaking after Brooks, began his incendiary remarks by saying, “Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you. But I don’t know if Arthur’s going to like what I’m going to say.”7 As some cheered and whistled, he proceeded to lambaste, defame, and threaten his enemies with retribution for supporting the impeachment procedures. Vengeance is mine, saith Trump. Not surprisingly, some of his most sycophantic allies, like the Reverend Robert Jeffress, embraced Trump’s tantrum. Rather than offering a humbled response on the difficulties of keeping Jesus’s command to love your enemies (something all of us can relate to), Trump went on to repudiate the central teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. So, when 89 percent of white Christians believe the Bible should influence the laws of this country,8 they are not referring to the Bible read by the disenfranchised, where the command to “love your enemies” is not up for negotiation. White Christian exegesis is instead based on a white, cisgender male perspective that constructs a religion ready and able to defend their unearned profit, privilege, and power. The domestication and domination of white Christianity by the Trump presidency did not come about ex nihilo. There is a history to how this country arrived at this juncture. Likewise, ignoring this history only ensures the eventual rise of some future Trumpish president. The triumph of white, conservative, so-called family-values Christianity did not come about coincidentally. We can trace the current Trump Christian Age back to the 1940s movement that developed as a response to the New Deal and Social Gospel. The white Christianity of the mid-twentieth century sought to move the needle from the Social Gospel (Christianizing a savage capitalism that was crushing humanity) to the prosperity gospel (blessed are the faithful because they will be given health and wealth).”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“Winning outweighs virtue when white Christians embrace a consequentialist ethics where the ends justify the means—as opposed to the prescriptive ethics they have previously confessed based on ideal truths or principles. Unlike Jesus, who refused Satan’s temptations in the desert—the temptations of profit (bread), privilege (celestial protection), and power (all the kingdoms of this world)—nationalist Christians made a Faustian pact with Republicans for access to the very things Jesus rejected. Unchristian acts can be supported, or the core of Jesus’s teaching can be rejected, so long as the white Christians are winning.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“Nothing has become more important to white Christians than the transactional relationship of crying, “Caesar is lord” and in return having a space carved out for them within the political sphere from which they can exercise power. Winning becomes everything. Virtues and common decency are sacrificed on the altar of expedience. Two-thirds of white evangelicals believe their side is winning politically with Trump, according to a survey published by the Pew Research Center in March 2020. More than eight in ten believe Trump “fights for what I believe in,” and 61 percent said the phrase “morally upstanding” best describes the president.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“virtually all white evangelicals (99 percent) and Republicans who watch Fox News (99 percent) opposed Trump’s impeachment and removal from office.4”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“The magnitude of this president’s statement, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters”1 begins to be grasped.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“This white God of empire may be appropriate for global conquerors who benefit from all that has been stolen and through the labor of all those defined as inferior, but such a deity can never be the God of the conquered.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“The current spiritual leaders of Trump’s political party don the religious garb of the persecuted and martyred while at the same time drinking from golden goblets filled with the abominable filth of spiritual adulteries.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“This is a Christianity that has failed to detect evil even though the faithful are staring directly into its eyes.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“This, of course, is nothing new. Eurocentric Christianity, since the days of Constantine, has predominately served as an apologist for authoritarian regimes, be they emperors, kings, crusading popes, or military dictators. In the last century alone, Eurocentric Christian jargon sustained and supported brutal regimes guilty of unimaginable human rights violations. Think of how the Catholic Church, fearing the loss of power during Spain’s Second Republic, threw its support behind the right-wing politics of the usurper Francisco Franco, who cloaked himself as a defender of religious liberties. The church stood by him as he ignited a civil war against the seculariziation of society, turning a blind eye to the Spanish killing fields. Or recall how, earlier, the Catholic Church in Portugal supported the right-wing regime of Estado Novo, whose coup d’état against the democratic First Republic ushered in a reign of terror, again justified because he advocated family values. We also cannot forget that the rise of Hitler was aided by conservative Protestant Christians calling for Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. This is not to say all conservative Christians are fascists, nor that the left is innocent of harboring those who exploit secularism to impose intolerance. Multiple leftist dictatorships around the world are as oppressive as right-wing dictatorships. Still, the point is that conservative Christians have maintained a tolerance for family values promoted by authoritarian rulers who have engaged in all sorts of heinous injustices in Christ’s name. If indeed Christ is the head of the church, and man is the head of his wife, then why be surprised when Euro-American Christianity celebrates patriarchy? What many of us find damnable is that proclamations of “family values” become the basis for a populist movement that is defining its family values by separating Brown families at the border. White Christianity is now and has historically been an apologist for white nationalism.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

“2 The Day of Judgment For centuries, a white nation was built on stolen land, with stolen labor, using stolen resources. The people of this white nation believe themselves to be self-made, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, ignorant of how the wealth of the nation exists because of all that has been taken from communities of color. To maintain this oppressive system legitimized by laws, upheld by courts, normalized by schools, and ordained by Christian churches, people of color had to be defined as inferior, created by God to domestically serve those on the higher stages of the evolutionary scale. But it was never enough to simply relegate nonwhites to the role of servants. Structures needed to be created and violence committed to maintain the superiority of whiteness. Consequently, white Christianity became numb to the unacceptable suffering visited upon those who, in its opinion, fall short of whiteness. Historically, the unscrupulous have been self-identifying as Christian, and more recently as evangelical, to mask all manner of death-dealing policies. Proclaimers of family values transgress against their professed ideals to embrace their worst impulses instead. The unraveling of safety nets—children locked in cages, the fortification of what Michelle Alexander calls the new Jim Crow, or the choice families face between medicine costing thousands of dollars and financial stability—demonstrates that “family values” is a meaningless bit of rhetoric serving as cover for unchristian commitments that glorify whiteness. Pontificating about the virtues of family values may feel satisfying and supportive of the good Christian life, but in fact it contributes nothing toward creating a more just social order.”
― Miguel A. de la Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers