From “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America” by Joel Edward Goza
Of all the aspects of America’s racial project, none earned deeper scorn from Black America than white Christians and their ministers. When faced with the violence of white supremacy, with rare but notable exceptions, white ministers like the Rev. Durham supported the project through either their full-throated endorsements or their silent acquiescence. From experience, Frederick Douglass believed the main effect of white Christianity was to increase the violence of enslavers. “Of all forms of negro hate in this world,” Douglass lamented, “save me from that one which clothes itself with the name of loving Jesus.” For Du Bois, white Christianity was a “failure” rooted in an “utter denial of the first principles of the ethics of Jesus Christ.” The basic nature of Southern Christianity, wrote Du Bois, “is its heathenism.” In the works of both Black radicals and Thomas DIxon, the first step in national reconciliation “across the bloody chasm” was to position white supremacy at the foot of Jesus’s cross. Such racist reconciliation became part and parcel of the work of Christianizing American society.