From “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future” by Robert P. Jones Particularly in the wake of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) takeover of the Republican Party, our two political parties are increasingly animated by two starkly different visions of the nation’s past and future. Is America […]
Two starkly different visions Read More »
From “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future” by Robert P. Jones The juxtaposition of our forty-fourth and forty-fifth presidents – and the new identity politics of white Christian nationalism that has emerged across these last dozen years – exposes the heart of the conflict. Obama’s election in
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To be sure, most white denominations, and most white Christians, have today taken pains to distance themselves from slavery, the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation, and overtly racist attitudes openly espoused in the past. But in survey after survey, white Christians stand out in their negative attitudes about racial, ethnic, and religious minorities
The earliest phase of the Christian Right movement didn’t bridge the Protestant-Catholic divide. But when Protestant Christian Right leaders such as Jerry Falwell Sr. followed the advice of Catholic political activist Paul Weyrich to include opposition to abortion as a leading issue for the nascent movement in the late 1970s – as white Protestants were
by Robert P. Jones https://robertpjones.substack.com/p/the-sacred-work-of-white-discomfort
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The new American Values Survey from PRRI also shows that 60% of white evangelicals believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. No other religious group comes close. https://religionnews.com/2021/11/01/study-most-white-evangelicals-dont-want-to-live-in-a-religiously-diverse-country/
Study: Most white evangelicals don’t want to live in a religiously diverse country Read More »
As blacks began to pour into northern cities to escape oppression in the South as part of the “great migration” in the early nineteen hundreds, the Catholic Church responded by modifying its long-standing policy of assigning Catholics to parishes based on where they lived. In his 1970 book Black Priest, White Church:Catholics and Racism, Father
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. Whilte they disagreed
They refused to integrate Read More »
This book puts forward a simple proposition: it is time – indeed, well beyond time – for white Christians in the United States to reckon with the racism of our past and the willful amnesia of our present. Underneath the glossy, self-congratulatory histories that white Christian churches have written about themselves is a thinly veiled,
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It would not be until I was well into a PhD program at Emory University in my thirties that I was confronted with the brutal violence that white Christians deployed to resist black enfranchisement following the Civil War. The theologically backed assertion of the superiority of both “the white race” and Protestant Christianity undergirded a
The link between political leaders and prominent white churches was not just incidental Read More »
After decades of regional tensions at the Triennial Conventions, where Baptists gathered to coordinate their church and missions work in the early eighteen hundreds, Baptists in the South brought the issue of the compatibility to slaveholding and Christianity to a head. The lead architect of these efforts was Reverend Basil Manly Sr., president of the
Secessionist Religion Read More »
