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Wednesday, 29 July 2020
Racism among white Christians is higher than among the nonreligious. That's no coincidence.
MUST READ:
White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots In U.S. Christianity
Biblical
Racism: When White Bible Translators Challenged God for calling his church
Black : The book of Song of Songs was included among the books of the bible
because it pictures the Love between Jesus Christ and his Church
For
most of American history, the light-skinned Jesus conjured up by white
congregations demanded the preservation of inequality as part of the
divine order.
By Robert P. Jones, CEO and founder PRRI
Over
the last several weeks, the United States has engaged in a long-overdue
reckoning with the racist symbols of the past, tearing down monuments
to figures complicit in slavery and removing Confederate flags from
public displays. But little scrutiny has been given to the cultural
institutions that legitimized the worldview behind these symbols: white
Christian churches.
In
public opinion polls, a clear pattern has emerged: White Christians are
consistently more likely than whites who are religiously unaffiliated
to deny the existence of structural racism.
A
close read of history reveals that we white Christians have not just
been complacent or complicit; rather, as the nation's dominant cultural
power, we have constructed and sustained a project of perpetuating white
supremacy that has framed the entire American story. The legacy of this
unholy union still lives in the DNA of white Christianity today — and
not just among white evangelical Protestants in the South, but also
among white mainline Protestants in the Midwest and white Catholics in
the Northeast.
This disparity in attitudes about systemic
racism between white Christians and whites who claim no religious
affiliation is important evidence that the common — and catalyzing —
denominator here is religious identity. This consistent perception gap
was the central research finding that launched the work on my new book, "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity," out on Tuesday.
When
confronted with unsettling results such as these, many of my fellow
white Christians tend to explain them away with two objections. First,
they assert that it is not white Christian identity itself but other
intervening variables that account for such correlations. Second, they
argue that even if white Christian identity is implicated, the results
are muddied by the inclusion of people who have no real connection to
actual churches, folks who are "Christian in name only."
For
more than two decades, I've studied the attitudes of religiously
affiliated Americans across the country. And year over year, in question
after question in public opinion polls, a clear pattern has emerged:
White Christians are consistently more likely than whites who are
religiously unaffiliated to deny the existence of structural racism.
For example, surveys conducted by PRRI in 2018
found that white Christians — including evangelical Protestants,
mainline Protestants and Catholics — are nearly twice as likely as
religiously unaffiliated whites to say the killings of Black men by
police are isolated incidents rather than part of a pattern of how
police treat African Americans.
And white
Christians are about 30 percentage points more likely to say monuments
to Confederate soldiers are symbols of Southern pride rather than
symbols of racism. White Christians are also about 20 percentage points
more likely to disagree with this statement: "Generations of slavery and
discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for
Blacks to work their way out of the lower class." And these trends
generally persist even in the wake of the recent protests for racial
justice.
As a white Christian who was raised Southern
Baptist and shaped by a denominational college and seminary, it pains me
to see these patterns in the data. Even worse, these questions only
hint at the magnitude of the problem.
To
determine the breadth of these attitudes, I created a "Racism Index," a
measure consisting of 15 questions designed to get beyond personal
biases and include perceptions of structural injustice. These questions
included the three above, as well as questions about the treatment of
African Americans in the criminal justice system and general perceptions
of race, racism and racial discrimination.
Even at a glance, the Racism Index reveals a
clear distinction. Compared to nonreligious whites, white Christians
register higher median scores on the Racism Index, and the differences
among white Christian subgroups are largely differences of degree rather
than kind.
Not surprisingly, given their
concentration in the South, white evangelical Protestants have the
highest median score (0.78) on the Racism Index. But it is a mistake to
see this as merely a Southern or an evangelical problem. The median
scores of white Catholics (0.72) and white mainline Protestants (0.69) —
groups that are more culturally dominant in the Northeast and the
Midwest — are not far behind. Notably, the median score for each white
Christian subgroup is significantly above the median scores of the
general population (0.57), white religiously unaffiliated Americans
(0.42) and Black Protestants (0.24).
This disparity in attitudes about systemic
racism between white Christians and whites who claim no religious
affiliation is important evidence that the common — and catalyzing —
denominator here is religious identity. This consistent perception gap
was the central research finding that launched the work on my new book, "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity," out on Tuesday.
When
confronted with unsettling results such as these, many of my fellow
white Christians tend to explain them away with two objections. First,
they assert that it is not white Christian identity itself but other
intervening variables that account for such correlations. Second, they
argue that even if white Christian identity is implicated, the results
are muddied by the inclusion of people who have no real connection to
actual churches, folks who are "Christian in name only."
But even when controls are introduced in a
statistical model for a range of demographic characteristics, such as
partisanship, education levels and region, the connection between
holding racist attitudes and white Christian identity remains stubbornly
robust.
The results point to a stark conclusion: While most white Christians think of themselves
as people who hold warm feelings toward African Americans, holding
racist views is nonetheless positively and independently associated with
white Christian identity. Again, this troubling relationship holds not
just for white evangelical Protestants, but also for white mainline
Protestants and white Catholics.
The
legacy of this unholy union still lives in the DNA of white
Christianity today — and not just among white evangelical Protestants in
the South.
Moreover, these statistical models refute the assertion that attending church makes white Christians
less racist. Among white evangelicals, in fact, the opposite is true:
The relationship between holding racist views and white Christian
identity is actually stronger among more frequent church attenders than
among less frequent church attenders.
I
suspect many of my fellow white Christians will be appalled by these
findings, asking with genuine dismay: "How can this be?" Haven't white
Christians created charities of all kinds, built the infrastructure of
much of our civil society and provided leadership on a host of social
reforms, including the abolitionist movement, which was led in part by
Christians moved by their faith?
But when we allow ourselves to cast our gaze
beyond the rosy stories we tell about ourselves as champions and
representatives of all that is good in America, a terrifyingly troubled
alternative history emerges.
While it may
seem obvious to mainstream white Christians today that slavery,
segregation and overt declarations of white supremacy are antithetical
to the teachings of Jesus, such a conviction is, in fact, a recent
development for most white American Christians and churches, both
Protestant and Catholic.
The unsettling
truth is that, for nearly all of American history, the light-skinned
Jesus conjured up 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.
Consider
the cultural context in which American Christianity, both Protestant
and Catholic, was born. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as Protestant
churches were springing up in newly settled territories after Native
American populations were forcibly removed, it was common practice —
observed, for example, at the Baptist church that was the progenitor of
my parents' church in Macon, Georgia — for slaveholding whites to take
enslaved people to church with them.
The practice had it that whites sat in the front while enslaved Blacks sat in the back
or in specially constructed galleries above. In late 18th-century
Maryland, one-fifth of those included in a Catholic census were enslaved
people owned by white Catholics or white Catholic institutions. And as
late as the 1940s, urban Catholic parishes in major cities such as New
York still required Black members to sit in the back pews and approach
the altar last to receive the bread and wine of the Eucharist.
Moreover,
the content of what was preached confirmed that white supremacy was
part of the Christian worldview. Sermons, by necessity, tended to be
light on the themes of freedom and liberation in Exodus, for example,
and heavy on the mandates of obedience and being content in one's social
station from the New Testament writings of Paul.
In
these seedbeds of American Christianity, an a priori commitment to
white supremacy shaped what could be practiced (a slave master could not
share a common cup of Christian fellowship with his slaves) and
preached (white dominance and Black subservience were expressions of
God's ideal for the organization of human societies). Such early
distortions influenced how white Christians came to embody and
understand their faith and determined what was handed down from one
generation to the next.
Our
fellow African American citizens, and indeed the entire country, are
waiting to see whether we white Christians can finally find the humility
and courage and love to face the truth.
The
plain testimony of history is that, alongside what good we white
Christians have done, white Christian theology and institutions have
also declared the blessings of God on the enslavement of millions of
African Americans, the construction of a brutal system of racial
segregation enforced by law and lynchings, the resistance to the civil
rights movement and the mass incarceration of millions of African
Americans. When the patterns in the current public opinion data are seen
in this light, they seem unsurprising and, indeed, inevitable.
As
monuments to white supremacy are falling all across America, a great
cloud of witnesses is gathering. Our fellow African American citizens,
and indeed the entire country, are waiting to see whether we white
Christians can finally find the humility and courage and love to face
the truth about our long relationship with white supremacy and to
dismantle the Christian worldview we built to justify it.
Author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity
This is your last free article.
Don Cravens / The LIFE Images Collection / GettThe
Christian denomination in which I grew up was founded on the
proposition that slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus
Christ. Its founders believed that this arrangement was not just
possible, but divinely mandated. Yet many white Christians, like myself,
came of age in churches and communities where we seldom heard anything
substantive or serious about the white-supremacist roots of our faith.
I
was raised in a Southern Baptist family, participated actively in my
Southern Baptist church, and graduated from Mississippi College, a
Southern Baptist institution. But it wasn’t until I was a 20-year-old
seminary student that I began to grasp the central role that my
denomination, and white Christians generally, have played in sustaining
and legitimizing white supremacy. I knew that there had been a split
between Northern and Southern Baptists, but the narrative was vague.
Baptists in the South, I was taught, were caught in larger cultural and
political fights that were rending the country in the mid-1800s.
And—just as I had learned from my Mississippi public-school
education—the true causes of the Civil War were “complicated.” Slavery
was not the central issue but merely one of many North-South conflicts
precipitating the split. As the prominent Baptist historian Walter
“Buddy” Shurden has pointed out, it wasn’t until the last quarter of the
20th century that white Baptist historians confronted the
denomination’s pro-slavery, white-supremacist origins.
The
Baptist denominational history is not unique in American Christianity.
Virtually all of the major white mainline Protestant denominations split
over the issue of slavery. For example, Northern and Southern
Methodists parted ways in 1845, the same year as the Baptists, producing
an additional spark for the tinderbox of Southern political secession.
While they disagreed about slavery, both Southern and Northern
Methodists agreed that Black Methodists should hold a subservient place
not just in society but also in Christian fellowship. When the branches
reunited in 1939, they segregated Black congregations into a deceptively
named “Central Jurisdiction,” thereby limiting their influence in the
denomination for three decades, until this system was finally abolished
in 1968. And while the national United Methodist Church publicly
supported the civil-rights movement, most white Methodists in the pews
rejected or simply ignored national denominational directives and
actions. In the South, white Methodists and other mainline Protestants
were hardly distinguishable from white Baptists in their support of a
white-supremacist social order during the civil-rights era.
The
history of white supremacy among white Catholics is more complex, but
the connection to white supremacy is equally clear. With its roots in
Western Europe, Roman Catholicism has a long history of colonialism,
particularly in Africa and the global South, where centuries of
atrocities against Black and brown peoples were justified by the
conviction that white Christians were God’s chosen means of “civilizing”
the world. In the United States, Catholics and Catholic institutions
were prominent slaveholders in the 18th and 19th centuries and forced
enslaved people to convert to the religion. In late-18th-century
Maryland, for example, one-fifth of Catholics were enslaved people owned
by white Catholics or white Catholic institutions. This post was adapted from Jones’s recent book.Given
this pervasive history, it is well past time for white Christians to
reckon with the racism of our past and the willful amnesia of our
present. For most white Christians, this journey will be challenging
because, as I have found, it is deeply personal. My 1815 family Bible
gives witness to ancestors from middle Georgia who were Baptist
preachers, slave owners, and Confederate soldiers. My family moved from
Virginia to Georgia after receiving land grants as a reward for military
service in the Revolutionary War. This occurred while the government
was forcibly removing Native Americans from Georgia and supporting the
growth of white settlements.
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.
Through the entire American story, white Christianity has served as the
central source of moral legitimacy for a society explicitly built to
value the lives of white people over Black people. And this legacy
remains present and measurable in the cultural DNA of contemporary white
Christianity, not only among evangelicals in the South but also among
mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast.
In
my day job, I am the CEO and founder of Public Religion Research
Institute (PRRI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts
research on issues at the intersection of religion, culture, and
politics. I’m a social scientist by training and have always been
fascinated by the ways in which beliefs, institutional belonging, and
culture impact opinions and behaviors in public space. I strive to
conduct research and write as an impartial observer. In our work at
PRRI, we’ve found that white Christian groups—including evangelicals,
mainline Protestants, and Catholics—consistently hold views that are at
odds with African American Protestants’ views. The attitudes of
nonreligious white Americans, conversely, tend to be more aligned with
African Americans’. For white Americans, the data suggest that Christian
identity limits their ability to see structural injustice, and even
influences them to see themselves, rather than African Americans, as a
persecuted group.
For
example, attitudes about what the Confederacy symbolizes today are one
of the most noticeable differentiators among these groups. Last year, in
a national survey of more than 2,500 Americans, PRRI found that 86
percent of white evangelical Protestants, along with 70 percent of white
mainline Protestants and 70 percent of white Catholics, believe that
the Confederate flag is more a symbol of southern pride than of racism.
By contrast, only 41 percent of white religiously unaffiliated Americans
and 16 percent of African American Protestants agree; approximately six
in 10 religiously unaffiliated white people and three-quarters of
African American Protestants see the Confederate flag mostly as a racist
symbol.
Similarly,
nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of white Christians see the killings of
African American men by police as isolated incidents rather than part of
a broader pattern. There is some daylight here among white evangelicals
(71 percent), white Catholics (63 percent), and white mainline
Protestants (59 percent), but the differences are more a matter of
degree than kind. And there is a 26-percentage-point gap between white
Christians overall and religiously unaffiliated whites (38 percent agree
they are isolated incidents) and a nearly 50-percentage-point gap
between white Christians and African American Protestants (15 percent
agree).
These
patterns—of nonreligious white people holding attitudes closer to
African American Protestants’ than white Christians’ of all
stripes—persist in question after question on issues of racial justice.
In order to see this more clearly, I developed a Racism Index comprising
15 separate questions that cover four broad areas: attitudes about
Confederate symbols; racial inequality and African American economic
mobility; racial inequality and the treatment of African Americans in
the criminal-justice system; and general perceptions of race and racism.
Analysis
of the composite Racism Index confirms the general pattern: White
Christians are more likely than white religiously unaffiliated Americans
to register higher scores. The median scores reveal similar attitudes
among white Christian groups. Not surprisingly, given their history and
strong presence in the former states of the Confederacy, white
evangelical Protestants have the highest median score (0.78) on the
Racism Index. But the median scores of white Catholics (0.72) and white
mainline Protestants (0.69) are not far behind. These numbers stand out
compared with the median scores of the general population (0.57), white
religiously unaffiliated Americans (0.42), and Black Protestants (0.24).
Even
when employing more sophisticated statistical models that control for a
range of demographic characteristics, holding more racist attitudes is
independently predictive of identifying as a white Christian and vice
versa. The results of these models lead us to some remarkable and
damning conclusions:
White Christians think of themselves as
people who hold warm feelings toward African Americans, while
simultaneously embracing a host of racist attitudes that are
inconsistent with that assertion.
Holding more racist views is a positive independent predictor of
white Christian identity overall and for each of the three white
Christian subgroups individually. By contrast, holding more racist views
has only a very weak effect on white religiously unaffiliated identity,
and that effect is in the negative direction.
Attending church more frequently does not make white congregants
less racist. On the contrary, there is a positive relationship between
holding racist attitudes and white Christian identity among both
frequent (weekly or more) and infrequent (seldom or never) church
attenders.
When we reverse the analysis to predict racist attitudes, being
affiliated with each white Christian identity is independently
associated with an approximately 10 percent increase in racist
attitudes. By contrast, there is no significant relationship between
white religiously unaffiliated identity and holding racist attitudes.
Putting
this in plain language, our models reveal that the more racist
attitudes a person holds, the more likely he or she is to identify as a
white Christian and vice versa.
Today,
400 years after the first enslaved African landed on our shores, and
more than 150 years after the abolition of slavery in America, a
combination of social forces and demographic changes has brought the
country to a crossroads. We white Christians must find the courage to
face the fact that the version of Christianity that our ancestors built,
“the faith of our fathers” as the hymn celebrates it, was a cultural
force that, by design, protected and propagated white supremacy. We have
inherited this tradition with scant critique, and we have a moral and
religious obligation to face the burden of that history and its demand
on our present. Inaction is a tacit blessing on white supremacy’s
continued presence as a Christian habit and virtue. Doing nothing will
ensure that, even despite our best conscious intentions, we will
continue to be blind to the racial injustice all around us. Members
of West Point Baptist Church pray during a service at Pleasant Valley
Elementary School in Jacksonville, Ala. (Calla Kessler / The New York
Times / Redux)White Christians must seek
justice, rather than reconciliation, as the goal. Even when white
Christians try to engage in this work, too many reach immediately for
racial reconciliation, which they believe can be achieved through a
straightforward transaction: white confession in exchange for Black
forgiveness. For example, when the Southern Baptist Convention’s leaders
issued a formal apology for defending slavery, opposing civil rights,
and “condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our
lifetime” at their national convention in 1995, they coupled it with a
piece of contrived cultural theater that seemed to imply that a kind of
magical reconciliation had instantaneously occurred. Reverend Gary
Frost, a Black minister, rose to the podium to accept the apology and
issued this brief declaration: "On behalf of my Black brothers and
sisters, we accept your apology, and we extend to you our forgiveness in
the name of our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ." The overwhelmingly
white delegates erupted into applause. In less than 15 minutes, 150
years of Southern Baptist white supremacy was seemingly absolved. While
some African Americans supported the apology, others were skeptical
that it reflected meaningful change. This approach is really a strategy
for making peace with the status quo, since it allows white Christians
to move past the thornier issues of repair and restitution that real
repentance requires.
If
we are finally going to live into the fullness of the promise of
liberty and justice for all Americans, we will have to recover from our
white-supremacy-induced amnesia. Confronting historical atrocities is
indeed difficult, and at times overwhelming. But if we want to root out
an insidious white supremacy from our institutions, our religion, and
our psyches, we will have to move beyond forgetfulness and silence.
Importantly, as white Americans find the courage to embark on this
journey of transformation, we will discover that the beneficiaries are
not only our country and our fellow nonwhite and non-Christian
Americans, but also ourselves. We will understand that this project is
not an altruistic one, but rather a desperate life-and-death struggle
for our own future.
As
James Baldwin provocatively said in a speech nearly 50 years ago, the
genesis of the civil-rights movement was when an oppressed and despised
people began to wake up collectively to what had happened to them. The
question today is whether we white Christians will also awaken to see
what has happened to us, and grasp once and for all how white supremacy
has robbed us of our own heritage and of our ability to be in right
relationships with our fellow citizens, with ourselves, and even with
God. We have to accept, given the way in which white supremacy has
burrowed into our Christian identity, that refusing to address this
sinister disorder in our faith will continue to generate serious
negative consequences not just for our fellow Americans but also for
ourselves and our children. Reckoning with white supremacy, for us, is
now an unavoidable moral choice.
