Episode 305: White Evangelical Racism with Dr. Anthea Butler

Transcript!

PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.

Shownotes
(because citations are political)

Today’s episode is the second of a pair centered on white Evangelicalism and racism, because today we get to welcome Dr. Anthea Butler to the pod. Dr. Butler is, among many other things, the author of White Evangelical Racism (2021), a book just out (March 2021) and one which you must purchase.

As a reminder, this mini-arc looks like this:

Dr. Anthea Butler is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a prolific public scholar (to put it mildly) who writes and appears regularly in places like BBC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, the Washington Post, and more. She is the President-elect of the American Society of Church History, a recent winner of a LUCE grant for the Crossroads Project, along with Drs. Judith Weisenfeld and Lerone Martin, which is the creation of a digital platform and scholarly hub for the study of Black religious histories and cultures, and the author of too many articles to name.

As we’ve said, her newest book is coming out just as this episode drops, titled White Evangelical Racism with UNC Press, and it is a must-read.

The 101:

(where we did the professor-work)

In this episode, we talked about whiteness, Americanness, Evangelicalism and more. Dr. Butler is a master course in history, race, religion, and politics.

Her 101—the most basic take away—was to name and own the whiteness and the racisms of Evangelicalism. These are historically rooted, perpetuated by media, and made evident in political movements the world over, but with an especial flavor of the US, enslavement, and anti-Blackness.

Frankly, there’s too much to summarize here. So we’re jumping straight to references and homework:

• Andrew Whitehead and his book, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (OUP: 2020).

• Kristen Kobes Du Mez and her book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020).

• Robert Jones and his book, White Too Long: the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (2020)

• Katharine Gerbner and her book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (2019)

• Jemar Tisby and his book The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (2019)

Primary Sources!

(the segment where we talk about how the episode’s themes affect us, as humans, because the “I” matters)

Dr. Butler told us that she’s part of the story because she was always been curious about how folks rebel, resist, are “hardcore against the culture.”

Homework!

(that’s right, nerds, there’s always more to learn)

Reread Dr. Anthea Butler’s work—there are tons more journal articles, chapters, op-eds, talks, and speeches—but this is a start for you nerds:

• White Evangelical Racism (2021)

  • Here’s a short video interview (with captions) via Act.TV

  • And here’s an interview with the Exvangelical podcast

• Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (2007)

• “Why White Evangelicals Support Trump,” Conversation

• “White evangelicals, don’t just condemn Christian nationalism. Own it.” Religion News Service (12/2020)

• “The Fire This Time”

• Her whole collection at Religion Dispatches (truly there’s so much here!)

Check out her new grant-funded Crossroads project with Luce, here.

Need more? Here’s what we recommend:

• Khyati Joshi, White Christian Privilege (2020)

• Todne Thomas, Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality (2021) and her article “White Evangelical Support of Trump Makes Perfect Sense When You Examine the History of the Christian Right” for Faithfully Magazine (2019)

• Monique Moultrie, Passionate and Pious: Religious Media and Black Women’s Sexuality (2017) and her article “Putting a Ring on It: Black Women, Black Churches and Coerced Monogamy” in the Black Theology (2018) journal

• Kelly J. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan but also an op-ed about white Christian supremacy that isn’t the Klan: “Nice Decent Folks” 

• Samuel Perry, “Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell Sr. have long talked of conspiracies against God’s chosen – those ideas are finding resonance today” The Conversation (10/12/20)  

• Gillian Frank, “The Deep Ties Between the Catholic Anti-Abortion Movement and Racial Segregation,” Jezebel (1/22/19)

• PRI “The World” series on diversity of global evangelicalism(s), Part I and Part II

• Baldwin, “On Being White and Other Lies”

• Randall Balmer’s Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, 25th Anniversary edition (2014)

• Simran Jeet Singh, “Evangelism and Religious Supremacy”

• an Edward Said lecture because Orientalism is tied up with Christianity, too.

wowzers—what a doozy of an episode!