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Special Edition White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (A Ferris and Ferris Book) with FREE MOBI EDITION Download Now!
The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power.Butler reveals how evangelical racism, propelled by the benefits of whiteness, has since the nation's founding played a provocative role in severely fracturing the electorate. During the buildup to the Civil War, white evangelicals used scripture to defend slavery and nurture the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, they used it to deny the vote to newly emancipated blacks. In the twentieth century, they sided with segregationists in avidly opposing movements for racial equality and civil rights. Most recently, evangelicals supported the Tea Party, a Muslim ban, and border policies allowing family separation. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism's racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now.
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Special Edition White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (A Ferris and Ferris Book) with FREE MOBI EDITION!
I am a white woman who immigrated to this country some forty years ago. I have witnessed American politics since the election of Ronald Reagan. I remember his welfare queens, purportedly black women who have child after child with different men and live off of welfare. I remember Bill Clinton’s ‘welfare reform’ that imposed work requirements on people unable to obtain work. The constant blaming of the poor for their plight, the allegations of laziness and sloth. I remember the differing punishments for crack and regular cocaine use, which ended up filling our prisons with scores of young, black men who had never committed any violent offences. I watched the casual stinginess and airy cruelty the Republican party displayed toward people of color and poor people, while giving tax breaks and advantages to the rich. I watched the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police, and the careless, casual killings of black people by police everywhere (in this context, an Aha! Moment happened to me recently when I learned that the white supremacists in this country actively recruit among the ranks of the police). Over the years I have watched the growing alliance of the evangelical community with the Republican party and the party doing more and more of their bidding as the party became more and more captured by right wing Evangelicals. I have watched the Evangelicals’ steadily growing political power and influence.I grew up in an evangelical family and was taught as a child that Evangelicals are good, God-fearing people. Growing up I knew, watching my own family and church, that this was not true. But beyond that, American Evangelicals always seemed to me to be different somehow. I saw with dismay the vilifying of black and brown people coming from the Republicans and their evangelical supporters over the years. My eyes were not closed to these realities. But nothing could have prepared me for the election of Trump, a man who called all Mexicans rapists, who cruelly made fun of a disabled reporter’s facial expressions and mannerisms, a man who sexually assaulted numerous women and ten bragged about it and called them dogs, a man who separated children coming here for asylum, including babies at the breast, from their desperate parents as a matter of national policy. But none of this seemed to shake the Evangelicals. I should have known.After the 2016 election, in full cognitive dissonance, I began a long quest for explanations. I read everything I could get my hands on, including articles in a wide variety of publications and several dozen books. Initially the explanations were centered around the displacement of the people in the coal mining regions of the Appalachians. This was disputed by JD Vance’s book. Or the disrespect that people living in the middle, fly-over part of the country, or the “real Americans” as they liked themselves to call, were purportedly experiencing at the hands of coastal elites. Other theories followed. Shocked and disoriented public thinkers ranged far and wide for explanations. I was captured by some of these explanations and considered them seriously for a time. But I eventually concluded that at the root of all this was the shock to the nation of the election and popularity of its first black President, Barack Hussein Obama, the man whose Christianity and American citizenship racist right-wingers cast doubt upon because a black man, especially a black man in power, is never really legitimate. Hence, I concluded, simple racism. When I voiced this theory to my all-white book group, I was met with silence and then statements like, “well maybe, but it’s probably more complicated than that.” I watched members of my evangelical family in Europe succumb to the same weird siege mentality as that voiced by the American evangelical community, which now enjoyed the support of the most powerful man in the world. And I concluded that the inexorable demographic trends towards greater numbers of black and brown people making up our population were the likely cause of this mentality. The feeling that whiteness itself was threatened.I was not wrong. But reading this book was the final eye opener and cemented for me, once and for all, that racism, in particular the racism of the evangelical community, is at the root of all of this. Ms. Butler carefully and brilliantly details the development of evangelism over the course of American history, and how racism has always undergirded it from the beginnings. She describes the theological explanations, espoused by the Evangelicals, for slavery and for the support of Jim Crow, hostility towards integration, voting rights laws, voting rights, and any form of equality of people of color. She allows us into her experience in the white, evangelical church where she realized that, despite a show of meetings with black churches and welcoming black church members, black people were always simply regarded as visitors, regardless of how hard they worked to belong. She describes the evangelical community’s single-minded focus on obtaining political power and prestige, by aligning itself with the Republican party. She shows how prominent figures in the church, such as Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and others, were always more invested in reaching the highest echelons of the power elite: The courting of Presidents and powerful figures; the mega church pastors who became immensely rich. She describes the events of the late 20th century that all of us have witnessed: The powerful figures of the church who were discovered soliciting prostitutes; the pastors railing against homosexuality who were found engaging in gay sex; the sordid extra marital affairs, the lies and fake apologies and tears, the abject hypocrisy of it all. And throughout all of it runs the evangelical church’s racism, the utter unwillingness or inability to take itself to task, once and for all, instead of engaging in futile performative gestures and window dressing and the never-ending quest for more political power.This book cleared the last cobwebs from my eyes and affirmed for me what I have known for a while. This country is racist and the evangelical community is racist to its core and is engaged, first and foremost, in defense of whiteness. It explains clearly how Trump could have been elected, how nothing this terrible man had done and did, no matter how inhumane and immoral and sinful, could shake the support of the evangelical community for him. The book describes clearly how Trump was a means to an end for the evangelical church and how the supreme moral maxim, that the end never justifies the means, no longer resonates among Evangelicals, those ends being: The end of abortion, gay marriage, gay adoptions, and women’s rights, the suppression of people of color, the imposition of their rules on an entire country, the turning of America into a theocracy through wholly immoral means, and throughout it all the maintenance of white supremacy. And, of course, lots of rulings from the Supreme Court that privilege so-called religious freedom over people's right not to be discriminated against - maybe the worst twisting of the meaning of the first amendment imaginable.This is a very important book that explains much of what is wrong at the root of the American project. You don’t have to agree with all of it but you absolutely should seriously engage with it if you have any interest in improving our country. Please don’t be one of these people who write one-star reviews without having read the book because your fragile Christian ego feels threatened by any criticism, because you’re so set in your convictions that you are never willing to engage a different viewpoint or engage in a bit of thinking. If you can’t write an honest review, please don’t lob bombs from the shadows.After reading this review, you may think that I have given up all hope for this country, but you would be wrong. Trump decisively lost the last election (although a horrifyingly large number of people decided that this terrible man was right for this country – chiefly among them the Evangelicals). More people are revulsed by police brutality towards young, black and brown men and by the misogyny that men like Trump have openly engaged in with impunity for centuries. Millions of whites have seen George Floyd die gasping for air and were horrified by it. Young people are leaving the ranks of the Evangelicals in droves. The younger generation is no longer as beholden to racist and homophobic ideologies as the older generation of whites, and that generation is slowly dying out. We have made a new start in compassion towards the poor and the unprotected instead of continuing to engage in open and proud cruelty towards them. Maybe we will make some strides in overcoming racism as well.Two days later: I add this comment after having also read Jesus And John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. Du Mez's book brilliantly traces the history of violent male masculinity that is at the core of the evangelical movement in America. Racism is in there but not her main focus. Butler's book focuses more on tracing the terrible history of racism and white supremacy in the evangelical movement, which has culminated with the open support of the openly racist Trump. You should read both books. They are complimentary and shine a light on both of these underpinnings of white evangelicalism in America.
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