Whiter than snow, Yes, whiter than snow, Now wash me, and I shall be Whiter than snow. - hymn by James L. Nicholson, 1872
I’ve written throughout this book about the intense focus placed by white evangelicals on sexual purity. But the “purity” they seek isn’t limited to the sexual kind. Purity, by definition, is similarity. Homogeneity. And the concept of racial purity has always been integral to evangelical goals. The roots of racism in the white evangelical church are deep. So deep, in fact, that my last sentence had to specify white evangelicals. There remains a large amount of de facto racial segregation in churches today, and while they may espouse the same core beliefs, predominantly white and predominantly Black churches tend to differ substantially with regard to theology, political views, and worship styles.
This split goes back centuries to when enslaved Africans that were brought to what is now the United States were exposed to Christianity. This exposure took a variety of forms. Some brought their own form of Christianity with them, as the religion had spread into many parts of the African continent by the 17th century. Some Baptist and Methodist ministers would actively evangelize to enslaved people, preaching that all Christians were equal in the sight of God and offering some tiny glimmer of equality with their slaveholders, if only spiritually. Some slaveholders would take the people they enslaved to church with them, where they would sit in the back of the church or in the balcony and listen to white clergy members preach from passages like Ephesians 6:5-7, admonishing them to be obedient to their slaveholders.
Seeing in Christianity a theme of liberation, many of the enslaved people came to identify with the Israelites, who had been enslaved in Egypt until Moses led them to freedom. Very few could read, so the religion was perpetuated orally through the use of story and song. Some enslaved people eventually took on the role of unsanctioned pastors among their own people. This unique form of Christianity blended with the traditions and dances that they or their ancestors had brought from Africa, combining elements of each. Because they were forbidden to meet in large groups, enslaved people would meet secretly in “hush arbors” without the knowledge of their slaveholders.
They used the same book, or—as very few could read—stories they’d heard from it, as the white people that enslaved them, but they took from it a theme of liberation. They developed songs that combined their version of Christianity with melodies and rhythms similar to those from West Africa. Away from the supervision of the slaveholders, they comforted each other with the hope of freedom. And after emancipation, the newly-freed Black people would start their own churches and denominations, often with financial assistance from Christians in the North.
White people in the American South read the Bible very differently, finding instead in its pages justifications for slavery. This nation was founded on the blood and sweat of enslaved people. White people (mostly Christians) from Europe sailed to North America and displaced, enslaved, or killed the Indigenous people that had lived here for thousands of years. Between 1619 and 1808, tens of millions of Africans were enslaved and forcibly marched to a port. They were chained and loaded onto ships in unspeakable conditions, sold, separated from their families, raped, beaten, starved, and killed. Largely by white Christian men. Sometimes by famous Christian revivalists like Jonathan Edwards, who used the receipt from his 1731 purchase of “a Negro girl named Venus aged fourteen years or thereabout,” to scribble down some sermon notes.1
The justification for holding slaves came, in large part, from the story of the curse of Ham that closely followed the global flood in Genesis 6-8. Several months after the beginning of the flood, the waters receded and Noah planted a vineyard, presumably in the still-soggy earth. This newly-planted vineyard was shockingly fruitful, providing enough grapes for him to make wine (another surprisingly quick turnaround). He got drunk and fell asleep in his tent, and his son Ham walked in on him and saw him naked. When Noah sobered up and learned what had happened, he cursed Ham’s son, Canaan to be “the lowest of slaves” to his brothers, although Canaan wasn’t involved at all, and it seems like the whole event was primarily Noah’s fault. Because Ham’s name in Hebrew had been misinterpreted to mean “dark,” this curse was widely used by white Christians to justify the enslavement of millions of Africans and Indigenous North Americans. Even as recently as 2010, John MacArthur wrote that the descendants of “Ham became a servile people and may have moved south and wound up in Africa.”2
Slaveholders were not uniformly Christian, and the racism that persists in the United States today isn’t unique to white evangelicals. But the two are inextricably intertwined. Christian denominations—and the nation as a whole—would fracture over opinions about the institution of slavery. In her book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, Dr. Anthea Butler writes, “The Methodist Episcopal Church split in 1844 because one of its bishops, J.O. Andrew, acquired slaves through marriage. When Andrew was asked to step down from his post, southern delegates drafted a separation,” forming the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. What is now known as the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the US, was formed in 1845 when they split with the American Baptists over a disagreement about whether slaveholders should be allowed to serve as missionaries. The Presbyterians would soon follow suit. In Dr. Butler’s words, “Churches remained true to the social structures of the regions they lived in, and their leaders found scriptures to buttress those social structures.”3
I remember my Christian school education about slavery going something like: “Slavery was bad, and some Christians owned slaves. But they were good to them for the most part, and at least they got to learn about Jesus.” Not much has changed. A 2015 edition of the “Heritage Studies” curriculum that was used in my Christian school teaches fourth graders that, “sadly, Christians disagreed about slavery. Some Christians said slavery must be right. They said the Bible permitted slavery. They said the Bible simply required that masters treat their slaves well,” implying that this was actually the case. Framing slavery as a regrettable mistake, the textbook does admit that “they were wrong to buy kidnapped people. They were wrong to make people and their children slaves forever. They were wrong to mistreat people because of their skin color.”4 But it wasn’t all bad, they continue, because “the slaves shared their cultures and ideas with each other. They also learned from the American way of life. The slaves developed their own rich culture from these different sources. Most significantly, many accepted Christianity.”5
One might think that the atrocities of chattel slavery are minimized simply because the intended audience consists of 9-year-olds. But by 6, I had heard enough graphic descriptions of the torment experienced by those who were burning in hell for eternity to decide to become a Christian. I had seen routine depictions (sometimes live reenactments) of a beaten and bloodied Jesus, nailed to a cross by his hands and feet, wearing a crown of thorns. And my 5th grade class watched Flame in the Wind, a 1971 film produced by BJU’s Unusual Films, “set in the splendor and terror of the Spanish Inquisition.” The film depicts graphic scenes of people being burned at the stake for their faith or being hung by their arms and stretched until their limbs are pulled from their sockets. Evangelicals will lose their shit over boobs, but they don’t have a problem exposing kids to torture porn.
I was told that slaveholders—the Christian ones, at least—were generally good to the people they enslaved. But the scars on their backs and the women that bore the children of those that enslaved them would tell a different story. As Frederick Douglass wrote, “For all the slaveholders I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them to be the meanest, and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.”6
After the Civil War, white southerners rewrote history with the development of the Lost Cause theory, the idea that the war had not been about slavery, but was rather a “War of Northern Aggression,” fought to defend the morally superior southern way of life. It was during this period of Reconstruction that many statues and monuments were erected honoring Confederate generals, and that Confederate Memorial Day was established on the birthday of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
The Ku Klux Klan formed immediately after the Civil War in an effort to maintain white superiority and overthrow the Republican Party, which was the party that had favored emancipation. Burning crosses and Black churches across the South, they terrorized emancipated Black people and their allies until they were shut down in 1871. Dr. Kelly Baker, who studies religion and the KKK, wrote that in its second iteration, which would be formed in 1915 by Methodist minister William J. Simmons and sixteen other men, the Klan sought to create “a homogeneous, Protestant white America, free from the corrupting influences of diversity, whether political, religious, or social.”7
White women during this period were idealized by white men as paragons of virtue and purity. They symbolized the culture of the South, and protecting their respectability was paramount. Black men were painted as presenting a threat to white women, as if they were constantly looking for an opportunity to rape or otherwise defile them. It was this framing that served as the justification for lynching thousands of Black men, often based on false allegations of raping, assaulting, or simply disrespecting white women. As Dr. Butler writes, “Lynching became the ultimate murderous tool used to support white supremacy. Evangelical Christians and churches engaged in lynchings, attending and cheering brutal spectacles of murder enacted upon Black bodies,” sometimes saving body parts of the lynching victims as souvenirs.8
It was this same fear of Black men’s bodies that was responsible for concerns about miscegenation, or mixing of the races. And just as slaveholders found justification in the Bible for slavery, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have used the Bible to sanctify their desire to maintain white racial purity.
Bob Jones Sr., the founder of Bob Jones University, was of the view that miscegenation was a sin against God, who intended for the races to remain separate. This was a common view among leaders of Christian educational institutions, many of which had been founded expressly to exclude Black students after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. When Bob Jones College was founded in 1926, the keynote speaker was Bibb Graves, the governor of Alabama who had recently been elected with the support of the KKK, of which he was a prominent member.9 There was a men’s dormitory on the campus of Bob Jones University named after Graves, who served on the university’s Executive Committee until his death in 1942, and a plaque on the building proclaimed him “honorable.” The dormitory was eventually renamed due to Graves’s association with the KKK, but not until 2011.10
Daniel L. Turner, the author of a history of the university called Standing Without Apology, writes that Jones Jr. believed that no one “should be discriminated against in this country under the law because of his creed, or his color, or anything else,” although he “saw forced integration as a method of unifying the world for the Antichrist.” Jones Sr. had considered opening a parallel institution for Black students, but he was staunchly opposed to integration due to fears that it “would lead to marriages that were against the principles of Scripture and contrary to the rules of the school.”11
Although Jones Jr. had emphasized that “you have to do what the law makes you do,” when urging those in the Civil Rights movement to act lawfully, he refused to sign documents from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1965 certifying the university’s intent to comply with the Civil Rights Act. His reasoning was that doing so would allow the federal government to have control “over God’s institution. We are not going to do that," he stated. "We are going to do what God tells us to do.” This issue was, for him, a religious conviction “against interracial marriage and not an issue of race.”12
Those who have not existed inside evangelical or fundamentalist Christian circles may have difficulty grasping how opposition to interracial marriage could be viewed as anything but an issue of race. But logical consistency is not a requirement when fundamentalists are seeking to justify their beliefs.
Opposition to integration was not limited to the fundamentalists; it was shared widely within white evangelicalism. W. A. Criswell, the pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas, of which Billy Graham was a member, said in a 1956 address to the South Carolina Baptist Evangelism conference that “true Ministers must passionately resist government mandated desegregation because it is a denial of ALL we believe in.”13
BJU’s prohibition against interracial dating was still in effect when I was in high school, and it was justified by citing the first few words of 2 Corinthians 6:14 out of context, “Be ye not unequally yoked.” They conveniently omitted the next two words, “…with unbelievers,” as well as the even less subtly racist ending (when read in this context, at least): “What fellowship can light have with darkness?” I never understood why they would care, or why God would care, about students of different races dating. We were all created in God’s image, I had been told. And while my Southern Baptist youth group consisted exclusively of white kids, I had never heard anyone forbid interracial dating before.
It is crucial to note that BJU’s ban on interracial dating began in the 1950s without any scriptural support at all. As Turner writes, “A white male student was seriously dating an Oriental girl against the parents’ wishes, and the young man’s parents threatened to sue the school for allowing social contacts between the couple…The wisdom of a dating policy seemed strong as a way to head off any potential difficulties.” Thus, this prohibition began not as a religious conviction, but because of societal views that were widely held at the time.14
Over the years, however, they developed a framework of scriptural support on which to hang their cultural beliefs. The story of the Tower of Babel, recorded in Genesis 11, tells of an attempt to build “a city, with a tower that reaches the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.” But just as in the Garden of Eden, the existing power structure was threatened, and “The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking one language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’” And then God, perhaps with the assistance of whomever he was speaking to, scattered the people “all over the earth” and “confused the language of the whole world.”
They combined this story with Paul’s sermon on Mars Hill in Acts 17, in which he says, “From one man [God] made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.” Extrapolating geographical boundaries to races, Jones Jr. reasoned that God must have intended for people of different races to remain separated. Slavery, for this reason, “was of satanic origin and was an attempt to break down the boundaries that God designed.” They viewed forced integration as “a method of unifying the world for the Antichrist,” proclaiming the horrors of a world in which people from all nations lived and worked in peace and unity.15
The university filed a lawsuit in 1971 in an attempt to prevent the IRS from revoking its tax-exempt status, arguing that doing so would violate the school’s right to free exercise of religion under the First Amendment. The U.S. District Court of South Carolina ruled in favor of the University, allowing them to exclude Black students while retaining their tax-exempt status. The day after this ruling, like a petulant toddler that had refused to put on a jacket only because they had been told to do so, Jones Jr. announced a change to the university’s admissions policies. BJU would now admit married Black students, who they felt posed minimal threat to white racial purity, and in fact they had already identified their first “fine young married black.”16
After a series of appeals, this case, Bob Jones University v. Simon was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974, which ruled that the IRS would be acting within its authority by revoking BJU’s tax-exempt status, and the IRS notified the university that it intended to do so. Dr. Bob Jones III, now the president of the university, responded with a letter stating that BJU’s admissions policies were being revised again “to admit students of any race to all rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the University" and that "the University does not discriminate on the basis of race” in any way. He then went on to note the school’s firm and continued stance against interracial dating and marriage.17
Unsatisfied with this response, the IRS revoked BJU’s tax-exempt status in January 1976, retroactive to 1970. In the view of BJU, “the battle lines were drawn over the rights of a private, religious institution to have its own standards, beliefs, and policies.” Another lengthy legal battle, Bob Jones University v. United States of America, ensued, and was eventually scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in January 1982. However, on the day before the hearing, Ronald Reagan’s Treasury and Justice departments intervened. Reagan had won the 1980 presidential election with the support of the “Moral Majority.” This was an organization that had been formed to preserve the tax-exempt status of Christian educational institutions with racially discriminatory policies, as discussed in the previous chapter. Reagan’s administration approached the Supreme Court and “asked that the Bob Jones case be declared moot, that it be dropped, and that all previous court decisions against the school be vacated. They also announced that the IRS would revoke its antidiscrimination policy,” stating that the IRS had exceeded its authority. The IRS was ordered to reinstate the tax-exempt status not only of Bob Jones University, but also of hundreds of other educational institutions whose exemptions had been revoked for similar reasons.18
This decision made headlines for the next few weeks, as major media outlets exploded with outrage at what they correctly identified as government subsidized racism. Dr. Jones III wrote editorials for several major newspapers and appeared on television and radio shows, arguing again that for BJU, the “issue is religion, not race.” The Supreme Court decided to hear the case in spite of the Reagan administration’s decision not to continue as the prosecution, appointing attorney William T. Coleman, a Black civil rights activist, to take over as the prosecutor.19
Bob Jones University v. United States of America was finally heard by the Supreme Court on October 12, 1982. The court ruled against BJU, that “the Government's fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on petitioners' exercise of their religious beliefs.” The IRS’s decision to revoke Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status was upheld, and the university was on the hook for “nearly $490,000 plus interest and penalties for unemployment taxes for the years 1971-1975.”20
Roy Barton, BJU’s Director of Financial Affairs, waited for the tax bill from the IRS. When it never arrived, he called the IRS to inquire about the bill. The IRS agent replied, “Your bill? You are going to change your policy, aren’t you?” Barton responded, “Sir, from 1971, we told you that this was a matter of conviction. It is still a matter of conviction…We are not going to change our policy.” The IRS, which had fully expected BJU to modify their racist policy rather than pay the taxes, was unable to determine exactly how much the university owed, and the university was forced to calculate its financials from the past 13 years and file tax returns as a for-profit corporation. The final amount owed was nearly $1 million.21
Although the Moral Majority had been formed to support causes like that of BJU, the university never joined forces with them. Dr. Jones Jr. stated that the reason for this was that the Moral Majority’s primary goal was “to join together Catholics, Jews, Protestants of every stripe, Mormons, etc., in a common religious cause.” Tellingly excluding everyone but fundamentalists from the category “Christians,” he stated that “Christians can fight on a battlefield beside these people, can vote with them for a common candidate, but they cannot be unequally yoked with them in a religious army or organization.”22 Within the university there was room for disagreement about doctrinal issues, some of which are significant. About these topics, Dr. Jones Jr. said that “good men disagree” and that the university would not tolerate controversy “about things that are not clear in God’s word.” “In matters of interpretation where good men differ,” he noted, “you had better not be too dogmatic about your interpretation.”23
Maintaining white racial purity, then, was not judged to be a matter about which “good men” could disagree. The university’s ban on interracial dating and marriage remained in place until 2000. During the GOP primaries for the 2000 presidential race, George W. Bush made a campaign stop at BJU where he gave a stump speech to a crowd of 6,000 people. The media that covered the campaign event reported on BJU’s prohibition against interracial dating and marriage, as well as its anti-Catholic stance. Bush’s primary contender, John McCain, took advantage of the political opportunity afforded by Bush’s association with BJU, and had those running his phone banks inform potential voters of BJU’s anti-Catholic views. The “news” of BJU’s historic racial bigotry and anti-Catholic sentiment made headlines in every major newspaper, and news commentators around the country “pompously joined in the castigation of BJU, its students, and its faculty,” as noted by a BJU-sanctioned historian.24
The university attempted to downplay the anti-Catholic stance; after all, Catholicism was precisely the thing Protestants protested. But they found it difficult to minimize when they regularly preached that Catholics were not true Christians and were going to hell, and had historically referred to the pope as the Antichrist. Dr. Jones III went on a damage control campaign, taking out full-page ads in national newspapers and stressing that “BJU was neither bigoted nor hateful of Catholics.” And then one night, during an interview on Larry King Live, he announced that the school’s prohibition against interracial dating and marriage, for which it had fought so hard at such great cost as “a matter of conviction” had been rescinded: “Our concern for the cause of Christ, our concern for our graduates, our concern for our testimony, our concern for the school’s broader usefulness is greater to us than a rule that we never talk about and is meaningless to us.”25
In White Evangelical Racism, Dr. Butler records how the Bush campaign attacked McCain through a Bob Jones University professor, Richard Hand, “who sent out an unsolicited email that supposedly summarized McCain’s life story, accusing him of partying, drinking, womanizing, and siring a child out of wedlock.” Rumors began to spread about McCain’s illegitimate Black child who “was neither illegitimate nor Black,” but rather a daughter that he and his wife had adopted from Bangladesh.26
This wasn’t the last time that race-based attacks from evangelicals would play a part in a presidential campaign for John McCain, but the next time they were on his side. While he wasn’t the candidate most evangelicals preferred in the 2008 GOP primary, McCain won the party’s nomination. And for the first time in our nation’s history, the Democratic Party had a Black candidate. Rumors began to spread that Barack Obama was a Muslim, or that he was not an American citizen because his father was from Kenya. McCain’s campaign released a television ad called “The One,” not-so-subtly implying that Obama was the Antichrist. But in the end, it wasn’t McCain but his running mate, Sarah Palin, that finally gained evangelical support.27
The governor of Alaska at the time, Palin was “pretty, charismatic, and a gun-toting Christian” who had a story of having been advised to abort her fifth pregnancy when she learned that the child would have Down syndrome. As the campaign progressed, Palin’s campaign events became more openly racist and violent as she repeated the line that “Obama’s pallin’ around with terrorists.” Tellingly conflating race and religion, one of her supporters expressed fear that “if he wins, the Blacks will take over. He’s not a Christian! This is a Christian nation!” Other supporters expressed race-based opposition to Obama as well: “Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they might be anti-white. That he might try to hide that.” And, “When you got a Negro running for president, you need a first-stringer. He’s definitely a second-stringer.”28
In the end, Obama won the election, and it was, as Dr. Butler writes, “a sign of the apocalypse for evangelicals. Because of the marriage of evangelical morality to the Republican Party—all in the service of maintaining white conservative male leadership—the election signaled the failure of the evangelical political machine,” setting the stage for the radicalization that would result in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who didn’t make America more racist, but simply allowed the racism that has been there all along to proclaim itself.29
I was living in Charleston, SC in 2015 when a 21-year-old white supremacist entered the historic Emmanuel AME Church during a Bible study and shot and killed nine Black people including the head pastor. The community rallied around Mother Emmanuel, but while the shooter’s manifesto made it very clear that white supremacy was the reason for this act of racial terrorism, white evangelicals minimized this and reframed it as an assault on Christianity, with Franklin Graham stating that “there are people out there looking for Christians to kill.” It was only after this brutal mass shooting by a radicalized man that had embraced the Confederate flag as a symbol of white supremacy that the Confederate flag was permanently removed from the South Carolina state capitol, where it had flown for 77 years.30
White evangelical racism has been the cause for countless other instances of racial violence as well, and it isn’t limited to Black victims. In 2021, a 21-year-old Christian man shot and killed eight people, eleven of whom were Asian women, at spas or massage parlors in Atlanta. The shooter, who was active in his Southern Baptist church, had spent time in an evangelical treatment center for his “sex addiction.” The shooting came amid a wave of anti-Asian violence that began with the COVID-19 pandemic, which Donald Trump and his allies had blamed on China. But the shooter cited “sex addiction” as his motive, and it is dangerous not to listen to him. Purity culture’s objectification of women, combined with sexual repression and the intense focus on avoiding lustful thoughts that I wrote about earlier in the book, frequently results in severe guilt over sexual desires. While there was certainly an element of race involved, I would argue that the problem wasn’t the the shooter hated Asian women, but that he objectified and fetishized them, then struggled with intense guilt for having done so, which eventually prompted him to go to extreme measures to “eliminate the temptation” for himself and others.31
In 2018, a 46-year-old man attacked Jewish people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing eleven people and wounding six more. One of his social media accounts proclaimed Jews to be “the children of Satan,” citing John 8:44.32 At the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, white supremacists, many of whom are Christians, carried tiki torches and chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”33 And as I was writing this chapter, in May 2022, an 18-year-old white man killed ten people and wounded three more at a grocery store in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo. This hate crime was committed because the shooter had espoused replacement theory, the idea that the United States is a nation of white Christians that are being replaced by Jews, people of color, and non-Christians. While this shooter’s manifesto stated that he wouldn’t call himself a Christian, the reminder of it was textbook white Christian nationalism, a toxic soup that is the product of Christianity simmering with centuries of white supremacy.34
Dr. Sam Perry, a sociologist of religion, said in an article for Baptist News after the Buffalo shooting that the “holy trinity” for white Christian nationalists is “freedom, order, and violence." "The people in power—white Christian men, primarily," he explains, "get the freedom. It is their country to do with as they will. They have a calling from God, and this country rightfully belongs to them. Everybody else gets the order, and that is non-whites, non-Christians, immigrants and often women. Included in that are sexual minorities, as well. And when they violate the order, they get violence and white Christian men are justified in perpetrating that violence.”35
One of the major problems that I see underlying our inability to address issues like racism or gun violence is the fundamental disagreement about whether problems should be addressed individually or structurally. The social philosophy of conservatism tends to view society through an individual lens, holding each individual responsible for their own actions and seeking individual solutions to problems. Progressives tend to look through a structural lens, seeking to identify systemic root causes for problems and address those.
After a mass shooting, progressives push for legislation to address systemic issues like the widespread availability of assault rifles, or loopholes that allow the purchase of firearms without background checks. Conservatives, many of them white evangelicals, tend to resist these systemic changes, placing the blame on the shooter as an individual and prioritizing the rights of individuals to own whatever firearms they want. We need to arm the teachers, they say, or improve mental health, or give kids bullet-proof backpacks. The same pattern holds true for other issues as well.
Because I grew up as a conservative evangelical, I learned to see the world through this individualistic lens. If people were poor, it was because they should work harder. If they were dependent on substances, it was a personal moral failing. If they were in prison, well, they shouldn’t have committed the crime.
Through that lens, I was unable to see the systemic problems that result in people being impoverished, or dependent on substances, or incarcerated by the masses. And I was unable to see the need for systemic reforms. I did have internalized racist biases, like thinking that Black people were more violent or more likely to commit other crimes—after all, a greater percentage of them were in prison. It wasn’t until I learned to view the world through the progressive lens that I was able to see the problems inherent with policing, mass incarceration, the racial wealth gap, and other systemic problems that are vital to addressing racism. I didn’t have any conscious racist thoughts, but the way that I saw the world, and the way that I unknowingly participated in perpetuating a system of white supremacy was racist.
I also didn’t realize the level of atrocities that had been committed by white people in the past. Slavery had been minimized, as had the genocide of Indigenous Americans—a topic that I will return to in a later chapter. I had never heard of Japanese internment. I didn’t know about housing discrimination, or voter suppression, or wealth inequality, or racial disparities in health care. I wasn’t aware of the harm done to Black families and individuals by the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and other policies of the president who received support from the “Moral Majority.” I didn’t realize that Black men were far more likely to be confronted or killed by police. Once I was able to see these things, I wanted to change them. But to be able to see the world through that lens, for me at least, meant leaving evangelicalism.
While progressive Christians take from the Bible a message that promotes systemic social change, evangelicals are more likely to read the Bible with a conservative lens, focusing on individual accountability, as well as on the idea that one needs to pay for their sins. Both messages are there, and as we saw with slavery and fears of race-mixing, one will get out of the Bible whatever they need to support their views.
In 2008, Stephen Jones, the fourth president of Bob Jones University, issued a public apology for the institution’s racist history. Jones admits that “for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by [the segregationist ethos of American culture] than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures,” and apologizes for the university’s historical failure to follow Jesus’s commandment to love others as themselves. Demonstrating that one can find support for opposite sides of an issue within the pages of scripture, he cites Colossians 3:11, and says that “for those made new in Christ, all sinful social, cultural and racial barriers are erased.”36
The SBC, too, has acknowledged and apologized for its racist past. At the 1995 Southern Baptist Convention, the messengers passed a lengthy resolution “unwaveringly denounc[ing] racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin.” They apologized for the historical roles that the SBC and its members have played in perpetuating racism, from their involvement in slavery to their failure to support the Civil Rights movement. Now able to find scriptural support for the exact opposite position from the one they have historically weaponized the Bible to defend, they affirm the biblical “teaching that every human life is sacred, and is of equal and immeasurable worth, made in Gods image [sic], regardless of race or ethnicity (Genesis 1:27), and that, with respect to salvation through Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for (we) are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).”37 They would later elect Fred Luter Jr., the SBC’s first Black president, in 2012, and Rolland Slade, the first Black chairman of the Executive Committee in 2020. Black pastor Willie McLaurin took over as interim president and CEO of the SBC’s Executive Committee in 2022.
On the surface, that looks like progress. But race was a major topic of discussion at the 2021 Convention, as Black pastors (which lead approximately 8% of SBC churches) and their allies found themselves at odds with the more conservative wing over Critical Race Theory (CRT). Long before the GOP made CRT its boogeyman du jour, the SBC had convinced itself that CRT was to be the downfall of the church, and while most of them don’t know what it is, they had already been fighting against it for two years. CRT is a scholarly and legal conceptual framework. It rejects race as a biological entity and is a tool to examine how racialized minorities are affected by structural aspects of society. Essentially, it is a way to look at race through a progressive lens in order to identify systemic problems and solutions. And that seems to be something that white evangelicals don’t want to do.
The racist roots of the United States and white American evangelicalism run deep, and are impossible to address without systemic changes. Enslaved people found a message of liberation in the same book their oppressors used to justify enslaving them. The Bible has been used to argue both that the races should remain separate, and that all Christians are one in Christ. And if evangelicals wanted to find a gospel of social reform, they certainly could. I guess we’ll know them by their fruits.
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Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021. pp. 22-23
Heritage Studies 4, Third Edition. Greenville, SC, BJU Press, 2015. pp. 20-21
Heritage Studies 4, Third Edition. Greenville, SC, BJU Press, 2015. p. 314
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021. pp. 21-22
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021. pp. 26-27
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021. pp. 29-30
Wright, Melton. Fortress of Faith: The Story of Bob Jones University. Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1960. p. 51
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. pp. 223-225
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. pp. 223-230
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021. p. 49
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. p. 225
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. pp. 225-226
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. p. 227
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. p. 228
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. pp. 227-230
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. pp. 227-230
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. pp. 231-235
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. pp. 235-236
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. pp. 245-247
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. pp. 240-241
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. pp. 247-250
Turner, Daniel L. Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75th Anniversary Edition. Greenville, Bob Jones University Press, 2001. pp. 247-250
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021. pp. 102-103
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021. pp. 108-118
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021. pp. 108-118
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021. pp. 120-121
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021. pp. 134-135