Introduction
Today, American communities are increasingly divided than in the post-Civil War years. Against this backdrop, segregation in the church is as bad as it gets, if not worse than in society. However, this is not a blanket condemnation of the church since churches actively participated in antislavery campaigns during the 1960s. Instead, this paper seeks to reflect on the essence of white supremacy in American churches. The reflection will be based on previous assignments and readings, including conference sessions. Ultimately, the reflection will demonstrate that white supremacy has been ingrained in Christianity in the U. S. and has permeated the country’s moral fabric profoundly.
Understanding the Link between Christianity and White Supremacy
I did not understand the connection between Christianity and white supremacy. I interviewed two protestant pastors and now understand. The first pastor was the Reverend Roland Forbes. Pastor Forbes shared with me the history of the Southern Baptist and how the Northern Baptist split from the Southern Baptist because the south would use scripture to justify slavery and segregation. Some ministers and missionaries spread the gospel and simultaneously were enslavers and still considered good Christians. The evangelicals take the words of the Bible literally. They stress individuals to have a personal relationship with God and work on their interior. Forbes said, “Evangelicals see racial equality as a political issue and not a church issue.” This ideology was present; at the insurrection of the U.S. Capitol, with evangelicals justifying their actions.
Evangelicals believe that Jesus is only their savior and not the savior for all. The idea of Jesus and social justice is far from the minds of evangelicals. Forbes discussed how the priest should doubt some Bible passages since they were written to teach black folks to submit to institutional racism and white nationalism. Scriptures like “turning the other cheek” are an example. “People don’t bother other people who fight back!” Forbes shouted. No progress has been made in teaching forgiveness and turning the other cheek to African-Americans for more than four hundred years! He recalled how George Bush was reelected against John Kerry. President Bush met with some black pastors who returned to their pulpits and began preaching against abortion and homosexuality. Some Black people in their churches were in an uproar about abortion and homosexuality. George Bush only needed 10% of the black votes to win the presidency, and he received it. Forbes pointed out how evangelicals love to use people of color as optics and have forced people of color to leave their identities behind.
The second interview was with the Reverend Dr. Jasmin Sculark. Sculark shared some of the same views that Pastor Forbes shared about how evangelicals see racism as a political issue and not a church issue. She remembers being in an all-white Bible college in Binghamton, New York, and hearing how Black people were cursed because they were descendants of Ham and how God created men to hold positions of authority over women. The church submitted to it; they supported it and taught it. Her response to it was, “I’m not having it! “. The use of the Bible to justify racism, sexism and classism is what she described as “corrupted faith.” She recalled, early on in her ministry, not being able to preach upfront or in the pulpit because she was a woman. She got tired of people telling her that she would make a great teacher or missionary but not a minister.
These experiences caused her to become increasingly concerned about the evangelical’s tolerance for leaders who treated women with disrespect. She overheard a classmates’ parents saying that they do not believe that blacks should be treated and whites. Both Forbes and Sculark think that people of color see Jesus as Savior for all from the cradle to the grave. We acknowledge the meek and mild Jesus and the Jesus that spoke truth to power and was radical and stood up for social justice. As Pastor Forbes describes, being black is “not a curse but a blessing.”
Overall, they gave outstanding accounts of how white supremacy in Christianity would say that Black people are not going to heaven because of the curse and how they interpret the Bible word for word in telling us to turn the other cheek and not stand up for equality. Nevertheless, they both believe there is a place after death, whether heaven or hell, where all people will go and both practice open communion. We are not just saved from sin, but we are called to eradicate sin in our society related to racism and equality. Gradually, I started to find a connection between radical Christianity and emerging concerns about white supremacy trends in U.S. churches.
This connection became clearer as I engaged with the primary readings on the topic. Notably, the rise of “right-wing evangelicals” among American Christians is extensively explored in the book Christians Against Christianity: How Right-Wing Evangelicals Are Destroying Our Nation and Our Faith by Obery M. Hendricks Jr. From the book’s title, one is left wondering if Hendricks is asking for Christians to oppose what qualifies for Christianity in contemporary America, or if he is merely alleging that most people who claim to be Christians are actively fighting against the essential doctrines of the church. However, as I read through the book, it became apparent that Hendricks argues for both claims. Principally, Hendricks seems to suggest that Christians in the U.S. have misused the word “evangelical,” describing it as too toxic following years of prejudiced distortions.1 For the author, “right-wing evangelicals” must be called out for who they are, and genuine Christians must stand firm and defend the fundamental evangelical principles and teachings.
Typically, conservative religious leaders have developed ways of denying such accusations, including invoking the first amendment provisions. In my opinion, this adds to the confusion of separating freedom of speech from the radicalization of Christianity. Accordingly, Hendricks dismisses the attempts of conservative evangelicals to separate their religious beliefs from the influence they have on others. He critiques their preoccupation with Jesus’ persona as a spiritual redeemer instead of the ideals for living righteously in the world that he proclaimed and died for. Hendricks reveals the political immorality of what frequently masquerades as Christian politics, from homosexuality to contraception, mistreatment of foreigners to dehumanizing Muslims, supporting racism to teaching hyper-capitalistic selfishness.
Hendricks harshly criticizes the church leaders who aided Donald Trump’s ascent to power, comparing them to court jesters and dishonest clergy flatterers of ancient ages who blindly backed their rulers’ every deed, regardless of how terrible or damaging to people they were meant to serve.2 Donald Trump, he argues, was only the apex of the conservative evangelical campaign’s profanity and not the root of the issue. When its leaders agreed to support Trump’s torrent of falsehoods, hateful rhetoric, gross moral depravity, and direct assaults on the constitutional laws of the land, Hendricks asserts, they were fully possessed by a spirit of antichrist.3
Hendricks’s conviction of America’s moral decadence has been consistent. This is evident in his 2006 publication, “The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of the Teachings of Jesus and How They Have Been Corrupted,” from which he borrows the main ideas in his recent book. In this book, Hendricks compares Jesus to a political revolutionary whose message called for personal reform and profound and extensive changes in his time’s social, political, and economic systems: colonial Israel.4 Hendricks believes that like Jesus, who fought for exploited people, Americans should fight for the oppressed in society. He gives examples of Christians who pretend to practice Jesus’ teachings but turn their backs on gay people.
Hendricks also discusses what he sees as the evangelists’ emphasis on abortion at the detriment of the ethical dimension of other significant problems affecting individuals’ lives, such as the U.S. government’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina’s consequences. According to Hendricks, the church has grown more preoccupied with the embryo may not be birthed with the already-born. Furthermore, he thinks that the Bible invalidates people opposing pro-choice abortion. He cites Exodus, which makes it very apparent that an unborn baby, or fetus, is different from a human being. Thus, he opines that the Bible’s prohibition against hurting a pregnant mother is considerably tougher than the prohibition against harming her unborn fetus.
Based on my understanding, both books base their value hierarchy on two significant bible verses: Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor” and Matthew 25’s story of the sheep and goats, in which individuals serve Jesus unknowingly. Hendricks desires that Christians use these texts to concentrate and reflect all public policies and deeds in the larger society through the lens of the ethics conveyed by these scriptures. In my opinion, he does not consider evangelicals as less Christian; instead, he desires that they grasp and practice the biblical principles to which he devoted his existence.
The recent political turmoil in the country supports Hendricks’s concerns about radical Christianity. My research led me to an interesting article published in The Atlantic by Emma Green to contextualize this problem better. The article, A Christian Insurrection, begins by emphasizing the weight of the problem stating, “Many of those who mobbed the Capitol on Wednesday claimed to be enacting God’s will.”5 Like Hendricks, Green links the events at Capitol Hill to previous patterns of unethical conduct that have emerged among the so-called American evangelists. Green notes that the crowd waved placards and raised a flag proclaiming, “Jesus saves! And because God, guns, and guts created the U.S., let us retain all three.”6 She traces this radical ideology to the Christian movement, the Jericho March. The group is an informal, Judeo-Christian group that prays, fasts, and marches for election transparency and honesty due to Donald Trump’s allegations of vote-rigging in the 2020 presidential race.7
During their march at Capitol Hill, members of the Jericho March could be heard proclaiming their love of Jesus and Donald Trump. Some were carrying the flag of Israel, possibly suggesting that they were captives but would be free by Trump. The Jericho March demonstrates how Donald Trump has distorted American Christianity to his whims and how many Evangelicals have willingly reinvented their spirituality in his likeness. Angry crowds practically destroyed government barriers as a way of showing their determination. Nonetheless, many thought they were marching behind Jesus’ shield to fulfill God’s will and retain Trump in office.
The events at Capitol Hill point to a political ideology that some scholars term Christian nationalism. This ideology combines American identity with a hyper-conservative Christian component. Christians who follow such beliefs think that America has an oath with God and that if it is violated, the country would be destroyed completely.8 Undoubtedly, this is consistent with the siege of Jerusalem in the Holy Scriptures. However, in the perspective of many followers, that covenant is jeopardized by societal shifts such as the removal of prayer from public schools and the legalization of abortion and same-sex union.
As a law-abiding citizen guided by high ethical values, I share the concerns of many scholars mentioned in this essay that America is losing its ethical Christian identity. It is nearly impossible to examine modern American churches without identifying one or more aspects of Christian nationalism. For example, in 2015, Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, opened fire on the churchgoers of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in South Carolina, killing nine people.9 Investigators would later determine that the attack was racially motivated. What I find surprising is that such an atrocious act was committed in the house of the Lord. There is no doubt this was a planned attack since Roof spared one of the congregants, telling her, “I’m going to leave you here to tell the story.”10 It is possible that Roof felt offended that black members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church worshiped the same God he worshipped. That, to me, translates to entitlement and affirms the idea that the lives of black people and other minority groups in America are worthless.
Jones details this in the “Monuments to White Supremacy” and Christianity the Conductor of White Supremacy and how these Confederate monuments are a celebration of white supremacy.11 Day shares about white supremacy from her experience at Princeton Theological Seminary. She said, “This seminary envisioned producing white male clergy who not only led their respective parishes but also offered leadership in the social and political matters of a young nation, including social issues such as slavery…. The seminary had a patriarchal understanding of who it was producing as leaders: white men of character and sound mind who would lead their communities and nation into God’s truth” (Day 40).12 If she wanted to be taken seriously, she would have to learn how to demonstrate intellectual mastery inside institutions of higher learning that are mostly white. While doing so, she was often forced to give up aspects of her black and Pentecostal identities that do not fit neatly with academic rigor and validity techniques.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Christianity has played a significant role in sustaining white supremacy and opposing black equality. Radical Christianity will persist regardless of which party is in power. Ideologies such as Christian nationalism and white supremacy are not about to vanish into oblivion. They have lingered for generations and permeate a large portion of people’s civic life and society. Their consequence is violence and extremism against minority groups, which will always be unleashed when leaders such as Donald Trump ascend to power.
Bibliography
Dinulescu, Iulian. “Religion and Politics in the Context of the 6 January 2021 Assault on the US Congress.” Strategic Impact 2, no. 79 (2021): 78-92.
Green, Emma. “The Atlantic.” The Atlantic. theatlantic, 2021. Web.
Hendricks Jr, Obery M. Christians Against Christianity: How Right-wing Evangelicals are Destroying Our Nation and Our Faith. Beacon Press, 2021.
Hendricks, Obery M. The politics of Jesus: rediscovering the true revolutionary nature of the teachings of Jesus and how they have been corrupted. New York: Three Leaves Press, 2006.
Romero, Dennis, Anthony Cusumano, and The Associated Press. “Death Sentence Upheld for Dylann Roof, Who Killed 9 in South Carolina Church Shooting.” NBC News. NBC News, 2021. Web.
Stanton, Zack. “It’s Time to Talk about Violent Christian Extremism.” POLITICO. POLITICO, 2021. Web.
White Supremacy Culture – Still Here – dRworksBook. Web.