Is the White Church Inherently Racist?
By Jemar Tisby
NY Times Sunday Book Review, Aug. 18, 2020
*WHITE TOO LONG
**The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity*
By Robert P. Jones
306 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28.
In 1968, James Baldwin wrote in The New York Times: “I will flatly say
that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has
so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable
hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it,
too long.” Robert P. Jones, who leads the Public Religion Research
Institute, a polling firm focused on the intersection of politics and
religion, draws on Baldwin’s quote for the title of his book “White Too
Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.” Jones
calls on his fellow white Christians to extricate themselves from what
he asserts has defined their religion for too long: the imagined
superiority of white people and anti-Black racism as its inevitable
corollary.
Jones sets out to prove that “American Christianity’s theological core
has been thoroughly structured by an interest in protecting white
supremacy.” According to him, white Christianity has not merely been a
passive bystander in the construction of this nation’s racial caste
system, it has been the primary cultural and religious institution
creating, promoting and preserving it.
Jones builds his case with evidence, drawing on an eclectic blend of
history, theology, sociology and memoir. His use of autobiography works
especially well. Before the cascade of data can turn his narrative into
a detached analyst’s clinical dissection of the problem, Jones gets
personal, writing about his family’s slave-owning ancestors or his own
teenage years sporting the Confederate battle flag on his car’s license
plate.
The book reaches its apex of evidence around its midpoint, when Jones
draws on his extensive experience with polling about religion to
introduce a “racism index” — a set of 15 survey questions designed to
assess attitudes toward white supremacy and Black people. The findings
are clear: “The more racist attitudes a person holds, the more likely he
or she is to identify as a white Christian.” The results hold true for
regular and infrequent churchgoers, across geographical regions and for
white evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. It’s hard
to argue with his conclusion that white supremacy is somehow genetically
encoded into white Christianity in the United States.
“White Too Long” is part of a dynamic and growing field of contemporary
nonfiction that calls the white church to task for its failings when it
comes to racism. Recent works that pair well with this one include
“Jesus and John Wayne,” by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, “Taking America Back
for God,” by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, and
“Reconstructing the Gospel,” by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. These books
reflect what may be a critical pivot point in the direction of white
Christianity in the United States.
Events of the past decade and especially recent months have pushed
conversations about race to the forefront of the national consciousness.
It is a cultural moment that is forcing white Christians to declare
their allegiances — whether to a religion that reinforces white
supremacy or to one that dismantles it. Jones’s book challenges people
of faith to chart a new path forward.
But that is where the real trouble begins. “White Too Long” convincingly
reveals the myriad ways that white Christianity has cultivated the
religious, political, economic and social superiority of white people
despite all efforts, modest though they may have been, to fight these
tendencies. If everything he says is true, there remains then a chilling
question to address: Is there anything worth salvaging?
White Christians have to face the possibility that everything they have
learned about how to practice their faith has been designed to
explicitly or implicitly reinforce a racist structure. In the end,
“White Too Long” seems to present a stark choice: Hold onto white
Christianity or hold onto Jesus. It cannot be both.
Jemar Tisby is the author of “The Color of Compromise: The Truth About
the American Church’s Complicity in Racism.” He is a Ph.D. candidate in
history at the University of Mississippi and the founder and president
of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective. Follow him on Twitter
@JemarTisby.
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