White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Real Family Values

Here’s what Robert Jones has to say: Christianity in America has been and remains the single most important source of racial prejudice and active bias against the black population of the country. His sub-points, supported by enormous amounts of data, studies, and reports, are roughly as follows:

1. Historically the Christian churches of America have consistently used religious doctrine to justify both slavery and white supremacy.
2. These same churches have institutionalised racism within their own organisations by segregating congregations, educational facilities, and church leadership.
3. More recently, the political campaign for ‘Christian family values,’ which unites Catholic and Protestant sects is a thinly veiled attempt to promote continuing white cultural dominance.

This is undoubtedly news for some. But not for those who remember the Christian complicity with Nazism and the Holocaust. Or for those who are sufficiently educated to know that the French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese churches were the front-line forces for the subjugation and elimination of the native populations of North and South America as well as large parts of Africa and Asia. And not for the single mothers of Ireland, or the Conversos of Spain and Portugal, or the pedophile-victims in Mexico, or the gay folk of Poland, or the atheists of any town in Red State America.

The facts of Christian-inspired racial injustice assembled by Jones are important, however, not because they are news but because they compel an important conclusion that few Christians want to recognise: the crimes of Christianity are the rule not the exception. Christianity promotes a doctrine of love; it lives a consistent policy of hatefulness. That this has been so even in its most primitive stages of development is clear in its own scriptures and history. And to the degree that any culture has been influenced by Christian thought, hatefulness and oppression has increased proportionally.

This persistent inhumanness of Christianity is not a function of any particular doctrine but of what it means to be a Christian. Whatever sect or congregation, a Christian is identified by the idea of belief. It is faith, ostensibly faith in a formula of words, which makes a Christian. The specific creeds may vary, but having one is what all forms of Christianity uniquely have in common.

Creeds are the focal points for Christian communities. Being formulated in words, creeds demand continuous interpretation - from language to language, culture to culture and situation to situation. From this comes the need for organisation - a process, structure of authority and method of enforcement for ‘correct’ interpretation.

And religious organisation is unavoidably political, not just internally regarding the interpretations to be accepted by believers, but also externally in the religious organisations relations with the rest of society. The greater the role played by a religious organisation in society, the greater this function of external politics becomes.

But here is where things get particularly sticky in two distinct ways. The first rule of all organisational leadership is to maintain the power of leadership. Religious leaders typically claim the source of their organisational power in God. Hence the degeneration of large religious organisation into impenetrable bureaucracies, and smaller ones into cultic strangeness.

But it a different problem which Christianity has historically failed to cope with. The politics of faith has always been a prime target of secular politicians. And as a matter of historical record, Christian institutions have been consistently co-opted by secular politics. From Constantine to Donald Trump, there is no period of institutional Christianity that has been immune from enlistment into secular interests.

Of course the Christians involved in such outflanking by their secular counterparts don’t even suspect their situation. In fact they consider themselves to be influencing social and cultural policy. Theirs is a willing, often passionate, naïveté which allows them to think they maintain control over the interpretations their creeds and the social matrix in which these creeds are explicated.

So it is hardly surprising that Christianity is the primary social vector for American racism. America is an inherently racist place. Its religious institutions are unlikely to be otherwise. Christianity is easy for evil to infiltrate, and very difficult to spot much less eradicate once embedded. Ah, the delights of faith. As every secular politician knows, anyone who believes in the Virgin Birth will believe in birtherism or any other racial slur with only the slightest provocation.

This is the point that I don’t think Jones gets. ‘True’ Christianity is not something other than what is practised in America. Christianity by its very constitution of faith is always this way. That the very different American constitution was formulated by atheists and deists ended up in such a Christian mess is one of the more interesting ironies of the country.

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