Episode 304: White American Evangelicalism + Racism = BFF

Transcript!

PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.

Shownotes
(because citations are political)

Today’s episode is the first of a pair centered on white American Evangelicalism and racism, because in our next episode, Dr. Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism (2021) is coming to school us. This one sets up all the issues: we point to the places we’ve already talked about race and religion in the US, Christian imperialism, and more, but we focus on the uniquely pernicious relationship between white Christianity (and white Evangelicalism) and racism here. Next time, Dr. Butler will do it with a whole new book’s worth of receipts.

The thesis of this episode? To define some terms and give you the horrifying straight dope on white evangelicalism, racism, and how they are BFFAEAEAE. 

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

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(E304) White American Evangelicalism + Racism = BFF
24 February 202

1

In which we (mostly Megan) quickly survey the long and sordid history of white supremacy, American politics, and evangelicalism in what’s now the US.




(E305) White Evangelicalism Racism with Dr. Anthea Butler
10 March 2021

Guest lecture chat with Prof. Anthea Butler, possibly the public face of why you need to care about religion in the US? Most recently the author of White Evangelical Racism (UNC 2021).

The 101:

(where we did the professor-work)

If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you know we’ve covered the relationship between race, religion, and politics a whole lot—both in the context of what’s now the United States (Megan) and well beyond (Ilyse). But: 

  1. Turns out we’re never done talking about religion and white supremacy, because that shit is TENACIOUS and PERNICIOUS

  2. There are a lot of angles to come at this issue, because that shit is tenacious and pernicious.

As a review/set of resources; or, where have we heard this before?

  • E103 & 104 - we talk about “world/major/minor” religions as categories that work alongside European Christian imperialism and white supremacy to authorize material and intellectual colonialism (Ilyse’s thing about the white euro christian dudes with pens being just as dangerous as the dudes with guns)

  • E106 - folks who are religio-racialized, like our fictional friend Ahmed Ahmed, do not get to opt out of that state-sponsored white Christian violence, no matter how much of an atheist he is

  • Smart Girl Summer:

    • Cults episode talked about how US white supremacy consistently categorizes and polices religio-racial innovation as “cults” (Moorish Science Temple, NOI, Father Divine’s Peace Mission)

    • Religion and Pop Culture episode: we talked about how Not Without My Daughter constructs Muslim men as a racial and religious threat both to white American women (presumed Christian) and to the American body politic

  • All of season 2 talks about race and white supremacy, even the episodes that are nominally about gender

    • E203’s historical shock and awe on race and religion in what’s now the US also provides helpful historical context for today’s conversation

    • And, finally, our conversation with Dr. Judith Weisenfeld, whose ground-breaking and frankly scintillating work on religio-racial formations continues to rock our world

Key Terms

  • Racism: Race is a social construct: we made it up. Race is also a system of social organization, hierarchy, and violence, built to justify and maintain members of one racial category above all others. Racism is the ideology that values this system.

  • White supremacy: Yes, this includes the Proud Boys and the Klan but if we only understand white supremacy in terms of swastikas and burning crosses, we’re frankly not understanding white supremacy. American racism privileges white people and qualities associated with whiteness over all other races and expressions of race. Like other forms of oppression, privileging whiteness doesn’t have to be deliberate, intentional, or even conscious. White supremacy is the particular confines of the system of American racism which values whiteness above all else, even if/when other forms of racisms exist.

  • evangelical: Megan claimed that technically all Christians are evangelical, because Christianity is rooted in imperialism and asked you not to @ her. Evangelicalism, at its root, is the directive to go forth and make everybody Christian. But, broadly, there isn’t just one type of evangelical. Evangelicals include people of all races, from all over the world, all along the political spectrum. We associate whiteness with Evangelicalism because—you guessed it!—of white supremacy.

Two important things to know, we claimed, before Dr. Butler comes to Keeping It 101:

Thing #1: white supremacy is mainstream Christianity. And this is a place to remember again that white supremacy isn’t just about burning flags and pointy white hoods. In fact—following Kelly J. Baker—we have pretty compelling evidence that while very few Americans were members of the second Klan, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-semitic, and anti-Black violence of the Klan had extremely widespread approval among so-called “normal” Americans and Christians. Anti-Blackness is everywhere in mainstream Christianity, regardless of whether individual Christians think they are themselves racist.

Thing #2: the mid-20th century matters, a lot, here. The kind of white Evangelical racism Dr. Butler talks about in her book (and on the news like once a week now), obviously has long, deep roots in American history. And we’ve already been over the fact that religion IS politics, and that goes triple for Christianity in what’s now the US. BUT ALSO: to really get how white Evangelical racism is operating NOW, you have to know a bit about the politics of the 1960s through the 1980s. The short of this is: after Roe v. Wade, after the Civil Rights successes, after immigration laws changed, we see an unprecedented coalition of different kinds of Protestants, some Catholics, the odd Jew into a powerful, cohesive political machine that became the Moral Majority and New Christian Right. And a white racist evangelical preacher, Jerry Falwell, was at the head of that movement. The flavor of white supremacy in the US became expressly Evangelical, even if its participants were not exclusively Evangelicals; we see this nearly everywhere, from the 1/6 Capitol insurrection to political campaigns to slogans like “American family values.”

In short, the things we said you needed to know were:

  • Racism and white supremacy aren’t about your feelings

  • Christianity is inherently imperialist

  • White supremacy IS mainstream Christianity

  • White Evangelical racism is and has been a driving political force in what’s now the US since the 1970s

Story Time!

(the segment where we cite major works, scholars, & ideas in the study of religion)

In this episode’s story time, Megan shared an excerpt from James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” first published in the New Yorker in 1962 and later included in his short essay collection, The Fire Next Time.

Baldwin was a gay Black man who grew up in early 20th century Harlem who wrote in unflinching, eviscerating ways about anti-Black racism in what’s now the United States. He is, without exaggeration, one of the greatest and most important American writers of all time.

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In this piece, he writes:

““White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks (intrinsically, that is: God decreed it so), and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared…

I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is — a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one, who was once defined by the American Constitution as ‘three-fifths’ of a man, and who, according to the Dred Scott decision, had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. And today, a hundred years after his technical emancipation, he remains — with the possible exception of the American Indian — the most despised creature in his country.”

Megan and Ilyse unpacked this, talking about radical love, being churched and un-churched, and the inherent violence of Christian imperialism that Baldwin so masterfully reckons with, and with which we, too, much reckon. We also told you to shut off our podcast to go read him. Did you listen?

Primary Sources!

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

Ilyse was not feeling primary sources this week. As a Jewish lady who experiences more than her fair share of Christian imperialist nonsense—and white supremacist and Nazi stuff (though, for the record, never as much as her Muslim, Black, brown, and otherwise racialized colleagues experience)—Ilyse felt like having to recite that laundry list to our listeners to “make real” the experience of living in white Christian supremacist spaces was too much. But, trust her: sometimes it is too much, and this is as a woman well-protected by whiteness.

Megan talked about all the liberal Christians who wanted to disavow Christians who love white supremacy, who loved 45, who stormed the Capitol, who do violence. This impulse—”this isn’t us! this isn’t real Christianity!”—neither solves the problem nor confronts the terrible ways in which, actually, it is us and it is one way of doing Christianity. We talked, too, about other kinds of Christianities in the US! But Megan’s primary source was, basically, to own your vast and complicated traditions so that we can do less harm—and if you’re not going to do that, at least stop yelling at her about it.

What does all this have to do with Prof. Butler’s work and her appearance on the next episode?

Prof. Anthea Butler has literally written the book on white Evangelical racism. She has also been a clear, consistent voice calling for Christians in what’s now the US to take responsibility and atone for white Christian supremacy. She was the instigator of and a primary organizer for the #ScholarStrike this fall, which encouraged those of us in higher ed to use our training to strike back against institutionalized racism in the academy. She served as a consultant to the PBS series God in America and  the American Experience on Aimee Semple McPherson. She was the very first guest on Simran Jeet Singh’s “Becoming Less Racist” series for Religion News Service. She’s also who MSNBC, NPR, NBC, the Guardian, and basically any news outlet with half a brain cell calls whenever some horrible religio-racist bullshit happens, and we thank her for her service.

Homework!

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

Obviously, dig into 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:

Megan tried to keep it together and assign just enough.

Ilyse suggested:

With BFFs like these, who needs enemies?