White Evangelical Racism by Anthea Butler

The polarization we are experiencing in government has stymied progress. All of these things have occurred because evangelicals, through religious lobbying and interference, supported the political structures that curtailed, limited, or struck down truly important issues. You helped make this carnage we now experience. The president you followed slavishly declared “American carnage” in his inaugural speech. Disdain for science has left America behind during a pandemic, while the rest of the world moves forward. Calls for law and order mean more Black and Brown bodies dead at the hands of the police. More people go hungry today than ever before. While you are clinging to God and guns, mothers are clinging to pictures of children who have been shot dead in classrooms, in streets, in malls, in cars.

The bile and hatred of some of the leaders you emulate make it impossible for people to believe whatever witness you have left. The candidates you back want to take us back to a mythical time-apparently the 1950s-that honestly did not exist. “If you are an evangelical reading this book, then I would ask you to look around and see what your witness has wrought.

White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America More than that, their embrace tore the covers off the anti-Black racism that had existed since the nineteenth century.” Evangelicals’ embrace of an unrepentant racist solidified the place of racism in the history of American evangelicalism. Their embrace of this thrice-married casino-owning reality TV star would both give them new recognition in the Republican Party and destroy the image of morality and uprightness they had so carefully cultivated. Donald Trump, who won the Republican primary against sixteen opponents and won the presidency in 2016, would become both the savior and the nadir of the evangelical movement in America. This willful blindness would open the door for a man who would be revered by them despite all of his moral failings. They looked to religiosity in symbolism to deflect scrutiny of their own shortcomings and historical failures with regard to the racism in their churches.

“Even the massacre of nine Black Christians following a Bible study class was not enough to make American evangelicals face the fact that racism remained a major problem within their ranks.

White Evangelical Racism by Anthea Butler