White Evangelical Racism by Anthea Butler

What might have been a breakthrough or a public deferral to a fellow pastor’s wisdom on racial terror and Christianity became something else - a defensive move, it seems, over perceived turf. This was Billy Graham’s response, in 1963, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech.

While studiously noting the apologies, the walk-backs, and the alleged changes of heart among the popular icons of evangelicalism over the decades, Butler chronicles the missed opportunities and the racist flexes performed by beloved figures along the way and invites us to register the damage done.Ĭonsider this statement: “Only when Christ comes again will little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.” Butler notes the side-step toward individualized salvation and the pious sounding appeal to Christ alone as the only viable answer to white supremacist terror. She believes a reckoning is underway: “Evangelicals are not being persecuted in America. As someone who once claimed evangelicalism herself, Butler knows the moves, the way the phantom of perceived persecution serves as cover for a verifiably racist agenda. According to her breathtakingly thorough analysis, the powerful voting bloc pollsters refer to as “evangelical” - seemingly commandeered by a network of pundits, performers, and pastors - “has become a religion lodged within a political party.” Assessing the damage it’s doing to our nation and the watching world requires clear-eyed consideration of a publicly available history of weaponized whiteness. Keep going as if the human future depends on it, because it does: This appears to be the moral summons issued in Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. What do we do when we feel all historied out? Photo: Torrence L. Are things really as bad as they seem? The thought of following up on the facts of where we are and where we’ve been can feel like a dispiriting task when so many of us feel stupefied already. When religion and politics, the twin abstractions, seem to come at us with endless, depressing news of fury and failure, it’s easy to want to reach for comforting caricatures in our common American history.

White Evangelical Racism by Anthea Butler