The U.S. was just beginning to come to terms with the effects of racial injustice when the “great white Christian freakout” ushered in the era of Donald Trump and empowered religious nationalism, said Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research Institute.
“This is all about losing control of the narrative. And what’s at stake in losing control of the narrative for those who look like me is that we’re going to be held responsible,” Jones told the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Advocacy breakfast June 26.
The event was held in St. Louis during the CBF General Assembly. Jones is founder of Public Religion Research Institute and author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity and The End of White Christian America.
Robert P. Jones (CBF photo)
Jones’ comments were part of a question-and-answer session led by author and Martin Luther King scholar Louis Brogdon, associate professor of preaching and Black church studies at the BSK Seminary and executive director of the school’s Institute for Black Church Studies.
Brogdon noted Jones’ research and writing has illuminated how the denial of white Christian violence against Native and African Americans has brought the U.S. to the point of moral and political collapse: “I argue we are in a kairos moment that demands prophetic clarity, and your work highlights how buried history distorts our present.”
So, the conversation hosted by CBF Advocacy comes at a pivotal time in American history and theology when moral courage and Christian witness are needed to confront the continuing adaptation and evolution of white supremacy, Brogdon added. “We are living through a national unraveling. We are witnessing the erosion of meaning, trust and moral vision — a collapse not just of systems, but of the soul of this country.”
But for a time, it looked as though the country was moving in the opposite direction, Jones responded.
“We were getting there, right? We were having a real conversation about repair. We were having a real conversation about restitution. We were having a real conversation about land-back with Native Americans.”
“We are living through a national unraveling.”
But demographic realities sparked increasingly organized and panicked opposition to that progress, he explained. During Barack Obama’s first term, the nation transitioned from a white Christian majority of 54% to a white Christian minority of 47%. “And that number today is 41% and the trend continues,” he said.
The “great white Christian freakout” gained momentum with the murder of George Floyd, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic. It found expression in tragedies such as the 2015 Mother Emanuel AME Church massacre in Charleston, S.C., the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., and the January 6 insurrection. And it continues to manifest in ongoing efforts to undermine higher education, dismantle the federal government, subvert democracy and eliminate the separation of church and state, he explained.
Lewis Brogdon (CBF photo)
The influence of white Christian nationalism is further demonstrated in the administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion practices and in the take-down of government inclusion policies, websites and public displays that promoted inclusion, Jones said.
“This administration is really about, no, no, no, no, no, we can and we are going back to holding on to that white supremacist narrative. It is that sense of losing power that is at the heart of so much of the ugliness and the cruelty and the desperation that we’re seeing.”
The current assault on higher education and public schools is part of a campaign to erase Native American genocide, slavery and systemic racism from the nation’s curricula and collective memory, he asserted. “We are going to literally rewrite our history because if we lose control of that white supremacist history, we’re going to be responsible. That is what is being threatened by all kinds of means. We are going to defund it, we are going to erase it, we’re going to take it down.”
Efforts to tell the truth, meanwhile, are viewed as attempts to wrestle “narrative from white Christian hands. And what we are living through right now is the unseen power to grab it back.”
Recalling a sermon he preached following Trump’s re-election, Brogdon lamented the “pernicious danger” Christian nationalism poses to the faith itself.
“The word ‘Christian’ is not just a religious term in this country. My sermon was based on the passage out of Matthew where Jesus talks about ‘not everyone that says, Lord, Lord’ is of the kingdom. And my sermon was not everything that’s called Christian is Christian. And you don’t get Christian nationalism without decades of Christian nominalism, where the name Christian almost means absolutely nothing.”
“We’re the ones who have been disfigured by this awful, craven, satanic theology.”
The lies, the cheating and the killing driven by Christian nationalism and white supremacy also have seriously damaged white souls, Jones responded. “This has distorted us. We’re the ones who have been disfigured by this awful, craven, satanic theology. We are the ones who are going to have to ultimately benefit from remembering who we are.”
White Christian congregations concerned about these issues can begin by rewriting church histories to include how white supremacy shaped their communities, Jones added. “Let’s go back and tell the real story of what happened here and if you begin with the land, you have to tell a different story. It has to go back not just to the challenging history of African Americans and white Christians, but indigenous people and white Christians.”
And it is time for White Christians to address racial injustice by developing the spiritual discipline of confronting white supremacy, he said. “If there is a reflex we are going to have to find that is not been built into the white church, it is being willing to make people uncomfortable and angry. And it’s going to take that because what’s coming at us is really ugly, it’s violent and it could be the end of our democracy.”
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