Robert P. Jones is founder and president of Public Religion Research Institute, a vital resource for anyone interested in religion, race, politics and justice, and also the New York Times bestselling author of a new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy. Robby also is a dear friend. I’m so grateful to offer this curated version of our long conversation on Substack about the new book and his essential work.
Greg Garrett: We lost a couple of saints this week, Dolly Parton and Wendell Berry. I wonder if you have any thoughts about what either or both of those folks might have to teach us about the underlying premise of Backslide.
Robert P. Jones
Robert P. Jones: The first thing that comes to mind is just the word “goodness.” And decency. And beauty, really, with music, art, poetry they brought into the world. Thinking about others, right? Community, the things that hold us together and things that pull us apart. I think about Dolly, raised in a kind of backwoods evangelicalism and funding vaccine research and sending books to children.
And Wendell Berry offering these reflections on beauty and community in the world. And talking about some of the themes I think do animate the MAGA movement, people who’ve been left behind in agrarian America. These are real serious problems.
Both of us grew up in that world. Not exactly Appalachia, but I did grow up in Mississippi. And I will say that, you know, even in the world where I grew up, which was shot through with white supremacy and racism and all that, there was a way in which overt meanness and overt cruelty were frowned upon, right? And you wouldn’t be talking about empathy as a sin, even in those worlds.
It’s kind of a marker of how things have shifted, even from the very problematic place that the evangelical world was, you know, for me in the 1970s and ’80s to now. So it’s already problematic but it still had some guardrails up against outwardly embracing cruelty. The guardrails have come down. One of the things that lent itself to the urgency of this book is realizing we have really turned the corner where cruelty and meanness are virtues and things like empathy and compassion are vices.
“We have really turned the corner where cruelty and meanness are virtues and things like empathy and compassion are vices.”
GG: Against this gleeful hatred, the concept you write about at the beginning, which flows through the whole thing is this idea of future regret. You pull in the references to 1933 and wrestle with the whole Nazism, Hitler rhetorical move, which you say, you know, it’s too easy. And also sometimes it’s the only appropriate comparison. Could you talk with us a little bit about how this concept of future regret moves you, inspires you and inspired the book?
RPJ: This book is more philosophical and theological than most of the books I’ve written. I’m wrestling with concepts like future regret or what does it really mean to tell the truth. I dedicate the book to my kids here. The dedication is for my children and to those born after. And “to those born after” is a Bertolt Brecht reference to a poem he wrote about thinking about the times in which he lived in the 1930s and fleeing Germany himself and thinking about future generations.
You and I are both friends with Jemar Tisby. He’s often said we all like to think if we transport ourselves back to the Civil Rights era, we’d be standing in between King and Heschel and they’d have our arms. The clear testimony of history is the opposite. It’s almost none of us.
If you’re white, I mean, pick your tragedy, the lynchings in the 1920s, the destruction of Reconstruction after the Civil War, the Civil War itself, a century of segregation, the violence over tearing down segregation, all those moments — white Christians in particular had the moral and social capital to have stopped any of that in its tracks. And we’ve never seen fit to do it. Do we really want that to be the story again about where we were and who we were in this moment?
“Do we really want that to be the story again about where we were and who we were in this moment?”
This idea of future regret is projecting yourself forward in the future and imaginatively, using a moral imagination to look back on your present self and say, “What would I want the story to be about what I do and what I don’t do today?” And then letting that be the guide for how we engage the present.
I’m hoping we would all regret saying that in this moment we were the bystanders, right? Even if we know we’re not the sympathizers, the real risk to most people who are going to read this book is that they’ll be the bystanders. That’s always where justice fails, when the bystanders don’t stand up.
GG: What hope, if any, do you have at this moment?
RPJ: I’m going to give two conflicting answers to this question. I think about James Baldwin and being a witness and, you know, you could look, Greg, to the two of us. Through the grace of God and interventions of teachers and people who loved us and people who cared enough to tell us the truth. You know, we’ve been able to go on a journey to find something different from this destructive form of Christianity that was shot through with white supremacy and was all about hierarchy and dominion to finding something better.
I had a Confederate flag on the front of my pickup truck in high school. I went to a high school that was the Forest Hill Rebels, like in Jackson, Miss. Our mascot was a Confederate colonel. We flew the Confederate flag at football games, and the band played “Dixie” on the rare occasion our terrible football team scored a touchdown. I was deeply, deeply steeped in this neo-Confederate world. I mean, I grew up in it. It was part of the church. It was part of the world I grew up in.
And, you know, again, through a lot of people I have made my way to a different place. And so I have some faith that I know you, I know a bunch of people, actually. I know it’s possible and I know it’s liberating when it happens because we’re being freed from, as your book title aptly says, a bunch of white lies, right? There’s freedom and liberation in that.
At the same time, what the data unfortunately shows is that there is a significant bloc of white Christians who have now fully given themselves over to this MAGA movement, have fully embraced it, and are fully compromised.
“They were no longer able to tell the truth, even if they wanted to.”
Hannah Arendt in a different time, a different place, interviewed Germans in Berlin in 1950 after the war and she came to this chilling conclusion. This is where a lot of the white Christian church is: People had started compromise after compromise after compromise, and they were the bystanders who knew what was going on, at least at some level, and just kept their heads down, tried to kind of stay out of the way, didn’t stand up. What she has to say about them is that she discovered that they had so compromised their moral and spiritual faculties, and — this is the way she put it — they were no longer able to tell the truth, even if they wanted to.
When you’ve got a group of white evangelicals, for example, who have voted more than 80% for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and 2024, who even when there are things like the example I give in the book — you would think that a bright line for Christians might be concentration camps, for example. But we’ve had to ask it. And when we do, lo and behold, you get a majority of white evangelicals saying, “Yeah, I’m fine with that. I’m fine with rounding up people into concentration camps, undocumented immigrants, and sending them to concentration camps.”
So it’s sort of a both/and. I have a hope that — and I write about this at the very beginning of the book — I’m not saying the vast majority of white Christians who have pledged themselves to the MAGA movement are going to turn away. But I think what’s important is that there’s enough of a remnant, I think particularly among white Christians. There’s no guarantee of winning, but there’s enough that will preserve something of integrity, that there might be something recognizably Christian left at the end of all of this.
Greg Garrett
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.