Worship of “white Jesus” helps explain why American boys and men are simultaneously struggling and dangerous, author and pastor Angela Denker stressed during a Baptist Women in Ministry luncheon.
The June 26 event in St. Louis was held during the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly.
Denker, a minister ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is the author of the 2019 bestseller Red-State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Trump, and Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood, released this spring.
Angela Denker
In her previous book, Denker explored how Christian nationalism became “a really powerful force in the first (Trump) administration,” she said. That force introduced “weaponization of patriotism, weaponization of a good-faith patterning of the American military and weaponization of what it means to be a proud American — and conflating that with what it means to be a Christian.”
Consequently, “that message has been tweaked even stronger to focus specifically on an idea of masculinity and manhood that’s emphasized in who Jesus is and who God is,” she added. “And that idea is focused on violence. It’s focused on anger and hatred.
“For boys and for young men growing up in this environment, … the only safe emotion you could express is anger,” Denker explained. “So, if you’re sad, if you’re grieving, if you’re feeling left out, if you’re feeling betrayed, you can be angry. But that’s the only feeling you can express.”
Acceptance of anger as males’ only legitimate emotion results in internal and external damage, she said. “You can see the outcomes of this internally in struggles for boys and men, and also externally in the violence and anger and hatred they perpetrate.”
The danger of that anger multiplies “when it’s coupled with extreme power,” she noted. “And when you add in the injection of the power of the Tech Bros’ algorithms to perpetrate these messages over the internet, what you end up with is a really powerful message that doesn’t leave much space for who Jesus actually is.”
An alternate narrative
To counter that anger-fueled narrative, Denker offered an “alternative narrative around masculinity grounded in Jesus — not the caricature of military, muscular Jesus or white Jesus, but who Jesus actually is.”
She cited the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John, which recounts the story of Jesus’ grief alongside his close friends Mary and Martha at the death of their brother, Lazarus.
“Here’s where we see another alternative narrative around who men are called to be and who boys are invited to be in modeling themselves after Jesus,” she said. “Notice the way this public display of grief, this admitting of weakness and sadness, brings them together. …
“Jesus’ expression of tears is a true example of empathetic friendship. He’s sad at the death of his friend (and) he showed his vulnerability and weakness. This open display of emotion from Jesus is a very nontraditional example of masculinity.”
Next, Jesus performs “what was to date his greatest miracle,” she noted. “He raises Lazarus from the dead. And so, his strength — the strength in him from the Holy Spirit — comes out of a display of public weakness.”
After publication of Red State Jesus, people who knew she was working on another book often asked Denker, “Are you going to talk about white Jesus?” she reported.
“White Jesus is the god of Christian nationalism.”
“What I came to realize is that this term — this idea of white Jesus — had come to represent the very antithesis of the Jesus of the Bible,” she said. “White Jesus pursues power and wealth and strength at all costs. White Jesus doesn’t care about the fallout or what it does to other people who get in the way. White Jesus is the god of Christian nationalism.”
Temptation
White Jesus capitulates to the temptations Satan offered Jesus in the wilderness — gluttony, power, wealth and control, she said.
And following white Jesus is a temptation for all kinds of Christians, not just Christian nationalists, she acknowledged: “It does represent a really powerful cultural phenomenon. I, too, grew up with white Jesus. I grew up with a blond Scandinavian Jesus. So, it’s been something that has shaped many of our lives.”
Denker called for humility when blaming other Christians for worshiping a white Jesus. She pointed to Jesus’ teaching to “take the log out of your own eye before removing the speck from someone else’s.”
Specifically, she felt compelled to research the 2015 massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. Dylan Roof, a member of Denker’s own denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, murdered nine Mother Emanuel Church members during a prayer meeting.
“I wanted to guard against this tendency I see over and over again in white Christian spaces,” she said. “It’s this tendency to want to immediately distance ourselves from that which we would consider foreign or problematic.
“I see it happen so often in conversations around racism, … this tendency to look at something we would consider to be really bad and say: ‘Well, this is how I’m not like that. This is how that has nothing to do with me. You know, I’m not racist. …
“So, it’s like, let’s find the craziest church we can and say, ‘This is what Christian nationalism looks like.’ And it makes it really easy for other Americans to go: ‘Well, that’s not us. We’re not doing that. So, therefore, we can’t be culpable in the violence or the hatred that comes out of it.’”
But Christians need to think about “really confronting the ways in which racism is baked into our churches — in ways that don’t necessarily have to do as much with the individual sin as they have to do with structural sin.”
Denker acknowledged an inability to grapple with that uncomfortable reality.
“There is no magical safe space where this stuff does not exist.”
“I hear this from people my age, when we’re talking about boys and young men … we’re going to raise them up with messages that girls can do whatever boys can do, and boys can be kind and gentle,” she said. “But the messages about masculinity are in all our households. There is no magical safe space where this stuff does not exist.”
Solutions
Looking to solutions, Denker lauded the work of men who challenge the erroneous notion of white Jesus and called on others to join the endeavor.
“One of the most powerful antidotes to everything we’re talking about today is men being engaged in the work,” she said, recognizing the challenge of holding men and boys to account for dangerous masculinity while feeling compassion for the danger it represents to them.
“The statistics I kept holding on to were that white men are more likely than any other demographic group in the U.S. to be a mass shooter and also white men are more likely than any other demographic group to die by suicide,” she said. “This is a really tragic story. Nobody wins. …
“And even for those folks who love Donald Trump or love Elon Musk, I don’t think a lot of moms are looking at their boys and saying, ‘Well, I want my son to be the kind of dad that Donald Trump or Elon Musk is.”
For families, the notion that all women should quit their jobs and remain home “is a disaster for both women and men,” she said. “The way the American economy is structured, it is very, very difficult to have a one-earner household.”
“The big engine that is propelling it is the prosperity gospel.”
“So, you have men who are feeling like failures because they’ve been told the only way they can prove their worth as a man is through financial success. And the big engine that is propelling it is the prosperity gospel that’s being preached in so many churches across this country,” she said. “And you end up with women feeling like: ‘Well, I was promised this? And this guy can’t do it.’ You’re seeing a lot of trauma in heterosexual marriages.
“And for children growing up in those households, you’re also seeing a lot of brokenness, a lot of shame. And it all comes out in violence — violence against themselves and violence against others.”
Gender equality
BWIM Executive Director Meredith Stone pointed to global opposition to women’s equality and urged Fellowship Baptists not to grow complacent, even though people and churches in their movement affirm the full equality of women in church and society.
“Across the world, gender equality is not getting better. It’s getting worse,” Stone said. “And it’s not just in other countries. If you read any analysis provided by groups studying and advocating for gender equality in the United States, they will tell you in the last five months, efforts toward equality for women here in our country have indeed been moving backward instead of forward.”
Access to health care, workplace protections and voting rights are eroding, even as “that backward movement has been promoted as … ‘protection’ for women,” she reported. “Naming efforts to undermine women’s equality as protection instead of oppression reminds me of something I heard a Baptist say a couple of weeks ago, and I’ll quote him directly. He said ‘the aim of complementarianism is not to limit what women can do in the church, but actually to free them to minister in an appropriate role alongside men.’”
Noting “that doesn’t sound like freedom,” Stone warned, “You can’t think this has nothing to do with us when our congregants don’t understand what is happening across the world.”
She described how a man in a CBF church asked her, “Isn’t this (gender equality) already decided?”
“My answer was a simple and firm, ‘No,’” she reported. “Society as a whole will not inevitably move toward equality. There is no inevitability. Any progress that has been made and achieved is because people have worked tirelessly to get there.
“It takes far less effort to revert back to 2,000 years in patriarchal norms than it does to keep us at this level of progress. So, we have to keep going. We have to keep inviting people to join us in this work if we are ever going to see the fulfillment of the gospel’s freedom for women.”
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