A Reckoning for White Christians

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Voice-over: Listener-supported. WNYC Studios.

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. My next guest says he grew up in a Christian denomination founded on the proposition that slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ. From those morally dubious religious roots, Robert P. Jones grew into a religion scholar who is now CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, which studies religious and demographic change.

He is author of a book called White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, and maybe you saw his related article in The Atlantic last month. He argues that confronting their faith's legacy of racism, by doing that, white Christians can build a better future and not just as a matter of altruism, he uses that word, but self-interest for themselves and their children too. Robert, thanks so much for coming on to this. Welcome to WNYC.

Robert P. Jones: Oh, thanks. I'm really glad to be here.

Brian: Would you tell people what that denomination was that you grew up in that was founded on the proposition that slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ and what the origins of that founding story were?

Robert: Sure. Yes. What's remarkable is that it's not an obscure one. It is none other than the Southern Baptist Convention which is to this day the largest Protestant denomination in the country. It's lost few members in the last 10 years, but at its height, had 16 million members that [unintelligible 00:02:00]. I went to Southern Baptist seminary that had over 3,000 students. It was the largest seminary in the country. I think this is what one piece of this history, I think, that people don't know is that this was not a fringe thing at all, but was really part of white mainstream Christianity. While this is true, this evangelical Southern-based group, the threads of white supremacy run really all through white American Christianity, not just among evangelicals in the South.

Brian: You write that for yourself, it wasn't until you were a seminary student at the age of 20, that you began to realize the role that white Christianity generally has played in sustaining and legitimizing white supremacy. Can you talk about what led to that awakening in your personal case?

Robert: Yes, it's quite remarkable. Especially because I was that kid who was at church five times a week and then literally five times a week. From the time I was very, very young in elementary school all the way through high school and into college, I was there all the time and what was remarkable to me [unintelligible 00:03:12] now as a older adult looking back on it, is that I heard virtually nothing. Not only about civil rights or inequalities or injustices or the role that white persons played in supporting segregation, supporting slavery. Not a single sermon, not a single Sunday school lesson out of all that time on any of that, but I think in particular this origin story of our own denomination that in 1845, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed really over a dispute about whether missionaries could be slave owners.

The Southern churches maintained that they could, the Northern Baptist maintained that they couldn't and when they came to an impasse that really the Southern churches force and then the Southern churches broke off and formed their own convention. That was really the origins of that. That genesis story was never one that I learned growing up as a kid and it really wasn't until I was in a Baptist history course in our seminary that there was any real mention of this founding event for our denomination.

Brian: Fascinating. You described the history of not just the Southern versus the Northern Baptist, but most or all of the mainline Protestant denominations, the Northern and Southern Methodist, for example splitting in the 19th century over slavery. Just as troubling is the story you tell of how the Methodists reunited in the 1930s, obviously way after abolition, but in a way that still perpetuated white supremacy, you say. Can you tell us about that history?

Robert: Yes, that's really important. I think one of the key insights for me in doing the research for the book is that I think many of us were raised to think, "Oh well, the civil war settled the issue of slavery and along the way also settled white supremacy," but not at all. That even though the political issue of slavery and the moral issue of slavery was largely settled by this bloody war, the issue of white supremacy really survived and again not just among white evangelicals in the South. That's not surprising but among Presbyterians, among Episcopalians, among Methodists, as you mentioned.

Many of these who have northern bases for their membership and their organizations. The Methodist church, as you remember, yes, split like most denominations. Nearly all Protestant denominations split over the issue of slavery and white supremacy and then got back together when the Methodists were mending the fences in the early part of the 20th century. Even then, when the white and northern and white Methodists got together and they were admitting African-American churches into the fold as well, into this new integrated denomination except for the fact that they took pains to make sure that all of the African-American churches were basically segregated into one district.

Usually, the way this works for the Methodists is by geography, but they broke that rule and invented this thing called The Central Jurisdiction so that they would have somewhere to put all of the African-American churches and really this was an exercise in power. By putting them all there, they would have less influence in the other jurisdictions around the country. That's a mainline Protestant denomination among the Methodists.

One more example among Catholics and New York, for example. A very similar thing happened. In New York, there was basically one parish designated for African-Americans, and for Catholic school, there was one Catholic school designated for African-Americans in New York City. Really even as late as the '40s, where there were any mixed worshipping in Catholic parishes in New York, they were still requiring African-American members to sit in the back pews and were the last to receive the Eucharist.

Brian: Listeners, if you're a white Christian, have you thought of your own denominations in this respect? Does your church address the legacy of racism in your own denomination? For anyone, white, black Christian, or not, what would you like to ask Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity and maybe you saw his related article in The Atlantic last month. 646-435-7280. If you'd like to tell a story or ask a question, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280.

We're going to take a break in a second and then come back and take some phone calls for you. Robert, but I want to ask you one thing as we go to break which is, as you understand the history of American Christianity as a historian of American Christianity, why did African-Americans as enslave people in this country, take on the religions of their enslavers, becoming Baptists and Methodists and Catholics to take the examples that you've used so far themselves in such numbers?

Robert: It's interesting. There's a fairly simple reason. First of all, they had little choice certainly in the 18th and early 19th centuries when they were enslaved. It was fairly common practice for slave owners to take enslaved people to church with them. Again, the setting would be and you could still see this in some older churches built into the architecture. There would be certainly some churches still had these slave galleries built for enslaved people to sit there. Many times that's what the balconies were used for or sitting in the back of the pews, but here's one interesting thing that's happened.

The book is deeply grounded in history but it's also grounded in contemporary public opinion data and sociology. One of the interesting things that that shows up is that the African-Americans took this religion that they had inherited and was forced upon them by their white slave owners but they did something very different with it. Those white churches, just one example, you would hear very little for example about the book of Exodus and the freeing of slaves in Egypt which is straight out of the Old Testament, but those stories became very prominent and very prevalent among African-American Christians.

They intentionally took the materials of Christianity and particularly the ones that were neglected in white Christianity

and really may put them to the center of how they understood it to be Christian.

Brian: Bianca in Bed-Stuy. You're on WNYC. Hi, Bianca. Thanks for calling in.

Bianca: Hi, Brian. Thanks so much for taking my call. Just to preface my question, just for context. I'm a black woman. I grew up in rural suburban PA and I went to a fundamentalist Christian school for about eight years and then a Mennonite school and then for some reason, Christian college for two years. This question comes from the place of surviving the spaces and the community is that your guest book, documents and examines. My question is what reparations do white evangelicals owe the [unintelligible 00:10:40] Christian community and the [unintelligible 00:10:42] community as a whole and what part do white evangelicals in those [unintelligible 00:10:46] into those communities play in helping folks like me heal from the harm that institutionally caused? That's my question.

Brian: A great question. Robert, you do go into that in the book, don't you?

Robert: I do. Thank you so much for that question. I think this is a very serious and central question that we're facing at this moment of reckoning around racial justice in the country. It's been one that white Christians have frankly been very dismissive of and haven't really been willing to take up. Certainly, one of the things I hope the book does is to lay out the history in a way that I think makes the question of repair and restitution and really what's required to make things right. Very, very central.

I think one of the things that white Christians do, I talk about this at the end of the book, in the closing chapters of the book, the temptation. I think, even for many well-meaning white Christians is to want to just reach straight for reconciliation. The formula typically goes like this. White apology and lament plus black forgiveness equals reconciliation. I think that's the way the equation goes in many white Christians' minds, but if you pause from them, you'll notice what's missing from that equation is anything about justice and really anything about true repentance, if you want to put it in theological terms.

True repentance, the Bible is pretty clear if you want to take it from an internal Christian argument that two different places, Old Testament and New Testament to God's speaking saying, "Look if you've got something between you and your brother or your sister, don't come to the altar worshiping me. Go first and make things right with your brother and sister." The idea of repentance isn't just about lament and isn't just about admitting something or saying you're sorry, but it is about repairing the damage.

I think we're clearly in a place in this country where if we're honest about our history, the question of repairing the damage, I think, can't go unanswered. One of the things I've said is that I've been calling on white Christians to stop about reconciliation and just talk about repair and justice and let our African-American brothers and sisters tell us when we're reconciled, and we've done enough work and repaired enough damage to get there.

Brian: Do the denominations that you study get specific or are there any emerging particular elements of repair that are growing as dominant?

Robert: Yes, there's some concrete things going on. One that I cite in the book is that-- They're all very recent done. I should say that these are very, very recent considerations and they're just getting started, but I do think they're going to have to be central if white Christians are going to take this seriously, but there's an Episcopalian seminary in Virginia, for example, that built within slave labor, benefited from plantation ownership money, also built on slave labor.

Great beneficiaries of this wealth and decided to set aside a multimillion-dollar set of scholarships that were specifically for descendants and these white people that were involved in building the seminary and for the training of African-American priest as well. That's just one small example, but I think there's a real opportunity here. Also, it's true that many white-- My Christian churches are closing, consolidating. Many of them sit on very expensive property. There's old downtown churches sitting on a property worth tens of millions of dollars.

I think there's a real question that as many of them are closing due to declining membership, that's an opportunity. When those buildings are liquidated, that land is liquidated to, at least think about at the very least, tithing some of that money back as a way of-- Even that would be a drop in the bucket, but it would be a concrete step and a recognition of the damage that's been done and some real attempt at repairing the present.

Brian: Bianca, thank you for such an interesting call and prompting such an interesting response. Call us again. Phyllis in Somerset. You're on WNYC. Hello, Phyllis.

Phyllis: Oh, hi. Thanks for taking my call, Brian. I listen to you every single day [chuckles]-

Brian: Thank you.

Phyllis: -from my office. I'm a black Catholic. I grew up in Chicago and attended an all-black elementary school in parish. Then in my young adult years, attended a mission parish in Southern Indiana that was established because blacks had to sit in the back pews. Actually, today it's very well racially mixed interestingly, but you actually answered my original question with the last call, but since then I've thought of a couple more so I'll ask one.

One of the issues that I have is the images, for example, in the Catholic church. Images of angels and saints, and Jesus even, that are all white. Even when you go to many Baptists, a black Baptist and AME churches, the same exists. We never see ourselves. As black Catholics, you never see yourself in the story. I have to say that a trip to the Vatican many years ago it was very disappointing because you look up at all the paintings in the ceilings, et cetera.

Let me get to my question. I'm wondering, what do you think that Christianity should do, maybe Catholicism specifically, about correcting a lot of that and at least of making people feel welcome who are already in the church if it's a predominantly white?

Robert: I think this is a really great question. I think it goes directly to the different ways in which white supremacy frankly gets embedded into Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic. While I think Catholicism is much more rich in terms of imagery and so you see a lot more icons and statues, those groups of things than you do in the Protestant situation. It's even more important I think in that setting that the images of Jesus, the images of angels that they reflect the diversity of humanity.

Just a couple of weeks ago there was an evangelical theologian that very seriously was arguing on Twitter that Jesus was white. This is not by not just a fringe person, the supreme mainstream evangelical author, and pastor and that idea was really central to the way that Christianity was melded onto this idea of white supremacy. I should clarify that when I'm using the word white supremacy, I don't just mean violent extremists like the KKK. What I'm meaning is a system, something that's less exotic and also closer to home and more insidious, I think. That is really a commitment to the way that society is organized to benefit white lives at the expense of black, brown indigenous lives.

For most of our country's history, that has been the way that society has been set up and the church was complicit in that setup and it was reflected even in the churches' own symbol. I think telling a new story about who we are, how we understand ourselves to be Christian, and if we take just seriously the humanity of Jesus, for example, and even just read the Bible [unintelligible 00:18:52] literally, Jesus wasn't from Europe. He was from the Middle East.

This idea that Jesus was white or European, I think, is a great myth that's going to come down through the portraits of white Jesus hanging in Protestant churches, statues, and icons in Catholic churches is definitely something that's got to be rethought. It is a representation of racial dominance mapped onto Christian theology.

Brian: Phyllis, thank you so much for your call. Please call us again. To your point that white supremacy isn't only perpetuated with a KKK mindset, to me, one of the most striking findings of your studies that you report in the book is that you cite that many 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. We're going to run out of time very soon, but can you describe very briefly both sides of that, the attitudes and also the self-perception of warm feelings?

Robert: One quick example is for white evangelical Protestants, which is the world from which I come that if you ask about on survey, these are contemporary public opinion surveys, you ask about, "Do you have warm feelings toward a bunch of people groups and you list African-Americans?" White evangelicals score one of the highest scores. They score very, very high on a question like that of feeling warmly toward African-Americans.

If you ask a different set of questions that are about structural injustice, that are about holding other racist attitudes, or about Confederate symbols, about treatment of African-Americans in the criminal justice system. Yes, those questions. Evangelicals also score among the highest scores on those questions I've put together in the book under the umbrella I've called it a Racism Index. They also score the highest there. These two things can be simultaneously true. Personally, warm feelings toward African- Americans, while holding a whole host of other attitudes, just two examples to give you the flavor of this.

White Christians, for example, on the issue coming right out of the murder of George Floyd by police, is they're nearly twice as likely if you compare them to religiously unaffiliated whites. Just Christian whites versus non-Christian whites. They're nearly twice as likely to say that the killing of unarmed black men by police are isolated incidents rather than a pattern of how police treat African-Americans.

On the Confederate flag, if you take the same two groups, white Christians are about 30 percentage points more likely than religiously unaffiliated whites to say the Confederate flag is more a symbol of southern pride than a symbol of racism. You can multiply this survey, every survey question, every question. What it really boils down to is that white Christians in the country have a very difficult time seeing anything around structural injustice or structural racism in the country. At the same time, they think, "Oh, I'm not personally prejudiced," but at the same time hold a whole host of attitudes that really are about rendering structural injustice invisible.

Brian: To wrap this up in the context of this election year, I saw you wrote an article in The Atlantic last year called The Electoral Time Machine That Could Reelect Trump that pointed out how over-represented white Christians are in the electorate. For example, in 2016, white Christians were 43% of the US population, but 55% of voters and also as you broke it down, white Christians were the only white group that voted in the majority for Trump. White Jews did not, white Muslims did not, white unaffiliated did not. Now, of course, that was all before the events of this year with the pandemic and the racial justice protest movement. How do you see that shaping up for this year? Then we're out of time.

Robert: Yes. I think this is really worth noting that the big divide among white Americans today, one of the sharpest divide is really between white Christians and everyone else among whites. In fact, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say since Reagan, if you want to describe the American religious landscape, it is that white Christians vote majority for Republican candidates. Everyone else, votes majority-- Non-religious whites, like you said, whites who identify as Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, any other thing, tend to vote for Democratic candidates. That's the shape of our politics.

I do want to point out that we get that shape of our politics really because of an issue around race. The two parties that we have today are really organized and from the energy around the civil rights movement. When the Democratic Party became the party of civil rights in the mid-1960s, there was a white flight. A white Christian flight from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Today, the Republican Party is about 70% white and Christian and the Democratic Party is about 30% white and Christian.

That cleavage, which has gotten larger over time, I think, is one serious way of understanding our current dynamics today and that we see Trump doubling down on Confederate monuments, Confederate flags, that kind of thing. How you can understand, given this history, given what the attitudes are, you can understand how that's actually not driving folks away from President Trump. In fact, when we've gone back in the field to ask about these underlying issues about Confederate symbols, about the criminal justice system, we see very little movement, even after all these protests among white Christian groups.

Brian: Robert P. Jones. I guess if you have a common name like Robert Jones, it's good for the sake of Google searches to include the middle initial. Robert P as in Peter Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, which studies religious and demographic change, and author of the book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.

 

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