When Donald Trump was elected president a second time, something in me broke and has stayed broken. I now realize what broke was the version of white liberal Christian optimism I had unconsciously imbibed from my teachers and milieu.
It’s gone. It will not be recovered.
And I now realize that’s a good thing. Because it is better to live in reality than in fantasy.
David Gushee
So let’s start at the very beginning. It is, after all, a very good place to start.
Where we came from
White liberal Christian optimism, as a U.S. worldview formation, was the happy confidence that the United States, although flawed in its origins, was in the process of being reformed, even redeemed.
Honestly recognizing the flaws in U.S. origins, such as Native American genocide and chattel slavery, made one a white liberal.
That’s because white conservatives, as we have been amply reminded recently, are not willing to acknowledge the flaws in U.S. origins. Indeed, they actively suppress their recognition and certainly their repair.
What made one a white liberal in the U.S. setting was indeed to recognize that the U.S. was damaged by its original sins, certainly, but also believing the U.S. was making considerable progress toward recognition and repair. White liberals believed the U.S. was redeemable and in the process of redemption.
“The drama of the Civil Rights Movement was the fundamental narrative that shaped the white liberal imagination.”
The drama of the Civil Rights Movement was the fundamental narrative that shaped the white liberal imagination. Martin Luther King Jr. was the central hero. The fact that he was a Baptist preacher with a Ph.D. in theology from white liberal Boston University made him even more appealing to a certain species of white liberal Christian preacher/academic. The fact that he made both constitutional and biblical appeals for a redeemed America was icing on the cake. Americans believed in the Constitution and most believed in the Bible, after all. All we had to do was, at last, as King said at the March on Washington, “rise up and live out the true meaning of our creed.”
The Civil Rights Movement, usually dated as beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, certainly exposed the seamy underbelly of white (Christian) racism. But the story of the Civil Rights Movement was ultimately taught as a series of hard-won victories over that more noxious strand of American life.
After all, there was Lyndon Johnson, from Texas, signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which committed the federal government to full civil and voting rights for Black people and other nonwhite Americans.
On Jan. 20, 2009, Barack Obama is sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts as the 44th president of the United Statesas on the West Front of the Capitol as his wife Michelle, holding the Lincoln bible, looks on in Washington, DC. (Photo by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images)
Inspired by the glory days
Some of us came of age in the generation in which teachers who had marched for civil rights told us about the glory days, celebrated the legislative victories, and called us to imitate their example, knowing the federal government was now on our side. They reminded us that King said, “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We could see that arc, like a rainbow in the sky, and we could feel it when we saw so many visible signs of progress in what used to be called “race relations.”
Some of us were predisposed to a Christian theology that also was confident God is active in history, fighting alongside human beings for justice, peace and reconciliation. For those of us who had embraced a this-worldly kingdom of God theology, in the lineage of the Social Gospel movement, we could easily count Civil Rights victories and signs of racial desegregation and growing multiracial human community as evidence of God’s kingdom breaking into our scarred history.
“When Barack Obama was elected president twice, by comfortable margins, how could we not see further confirmation of our worldview?”
And then, when Barack Obama was elected president twice, by comfortable margins, how could we not see further confirmation of our worldview?
I was in Denver in 2008, applauding and listening raptly as Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president. And I joined millions as, with tears in my eyes, I watched Barack and Michelle in Chicago on election night celebrating his election as president.
Obama represented a kind of culmination of white liberal Christian optimism, a confirmation of a deeply held and deeply needed narrative of American renewal and God’s merciful action in history.
US President Barack Obama and Republican President-elect Donald Trump shake hands during a transition planning meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on November 10, 2016 ,in Washington, DC. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
White backlash
But there were other voices, even back then, rarely white, who voiced other sentiments. There were wiser Black and brown and indigenous theologians and social observers who were worried. They were worried about Obama failing as president — indeed, being intentionally made to fail by determined opponents partly motivated by racism. They were worried about harm coming to him or his family. Based on a sadder-but-wiser reading of U.S. history, and maybe God’s action in history, they feared what they knew was coming — the inevitable white backlash.
Because U.S. history is not a linear narrative of redemption, never has been. These wizened observers knew, as I now know and always should have known, that our history and culture have white racism baked in. Think of a big 250th birthday cake in a few weeks; picture it, if you will. The poison is in the cake. It always has been in the cake.
“Our history and culture have white racism baked in.”
Every gain in the battle against our baked-in racism evokes a ferocious backlash. The greater the gain, the stronger the backlash.
After the Civil Rights victories came King getting gunned down in Memphis. After Obama getting elected came the Tea Party. After two Obama elections came two terms for Donald Trump. After Colin Powell becoming America’s leading military man came Pete Hegseth firing and blocking Black officers from advancement. After Obama and Biden’s multiracial appointments came Trump’s almost entirely white appointments. After Obama’s invocation of the legacy of King came Trump’s trampling of the same.
Suddenly, King’s more pessimistic speeches make more sense than “I Have a Dream.” Malcolm X looks more relevant. As does James Baldwin, not to mention James Cone.
Suddenly our immanentist kingdom theology looks hopelessly naïve, and the Cross as Lynching Tree looks much more apropos. Suddenly the arc of the universe bends backward, into white backlash and backward-looking dreams of Making America Great Again.
I was reading the memoirs of the great French pacifist pastor André Trocmé, who along with his wife, family and community rescued several thousand Jews during World War II. He describes being in a prison camp in France, facing deportation and death. He notes with surprise the deeply eschatological expectation of some of his Communist fellow prisoners, who found hope in a detailed vision of the coming Communist Revolution after fascism crashed and burned. They had all their scenarios of the eschaton all worked out.
Trocmé says he had no such hope. What he did have, still, in a Nazi prison camp, was a commitment to following Jesus as faithfully as he could, even to death.
“White liberal Christian optimism was infected by the privilege of being white in a society where white supremacism is baked in.”
White liberal Christian optimism was infected by the privilege of being white in a society where white supremacism is baked in.
It had the illusions fostered by a liberal reading of U.S. history which overestimated progress and underestimated toxicity and backlash.
It had the vulnerability of a kingdom theology that turned out to be a theology of glory, when what was needed was a theology (and ethic) of the Cross.
None of these are particularly weaknesses, say, of the historic Black theological, political and moral traditions, to whose wellsprings many of us now find ourselves drawn as to streams of living water.
Finding new hope
One final thought. When I discovered the folly of white liberal Christian optimism, I felt disempowered. I felt like resigning from life, from history, from social ethics. My toolbox felt like it was empty. Because if the arc of the universe is not in fact bending toward justice, and there is nothing I can seemingly do about it, why not quit?
But that is exactly where the deepest wisdom of the Black and brown and indigenous and feminist and many other dissident theological-ethical traditions begin. These traditions know that you act for justice, you act in faithfulness, you act for mercy, you act for a better world, country and church, even when you have no reason to expect you will win. Even if the most likely outcome is defeat, jail, exile or a cross.
So farewell, white liberal Christian optimism. Your day is past. Good riddance.
David P. Gushee serves as Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, chair in Christian social ethics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and senior research fellow at International Baptist Theological Study Centre. He is past president of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Christian Ethics. He also is author of 30 books, including Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust; Kingdom Ethics; Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies; Changing Our Mind; and The Moral Teachings of Jesus.