White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea Butler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Colour-Blind Gospel

Racism is the American Evangelical equivalent of pedophilia in the Catholic Church, only worse because so much more pervasive. Like the scandal of pedophilia, racism has always been a part of institutional Evangelicalism, embedded in their tendentious readings of the Bible and their historical practices. And like pedophilia, racism is considered as an individual sin rather than a systemic evil. And so, like pedophilia, racism can be forgiven rather than corrected. As Anthea Butler says, “Racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism.”

Evangelicals want to make race invisible, both existentially and politically. ‘All Lives Matter’ is the code phrase which summarises the strategy of erasure of race as an issue. The strategy allows evangelicals to ignore their own institutional legacy of racism, the continuing large-scale segregation of their own congregations, and the hurt, violence, and even deaths of people of colour. These are civil matters which are not related to the saving of souls. < blockquote>“[S]in for evangelicals is always personal, not corporate, and God is always available to forgive deserving individuals, especially, it seems, if the sinner is a white man. The sin of racism, too, can be swept away with an event or a confession. Rarely do evangelicals admit to a need for restitution.”

Evangelicalism practices its racism genteelly. In line with the Republican ‘Southern Strategy’, the racial epithets of the past have been replaced by euphemisms. Racial activists are communists, revolutionaries, promoters of civil disorder, un-American, and those who don’t share our Christian values. James Baldwin had it exactly right, white Americans fear their own spiritual impurity and project that fear on to black people as those who embody their own chaotic guilt. They huddle together for comfort under the guise of being an oppressed minority:

“The ubiquitous support demonstrated by white evangelicals for the Republican Party made them not just religiously or culturally white: it made them politically white conservatives in America concerned with keeping the status quo of patriarchy, cultural hegemony, and nationalism.”

The real religious personality behind the cloak of evangelical confidence, respectability, and morality has been self-outed in their support of quite horrible political figures and causes. Their fantasy of Trump as a modern King Cyrus freeing the new Hebrews is only one example. And their persistent resistance to gay and women’s rights, voting rights legislation, voter enrolment programmes, and anti-gerrymandering controls are manifestations of their real objective - not personal sanctity but political power. The evangelical coalition with fundamentalists, among white Protestant sects, and Catholics, show clearly that their dogmatic differences have conveniently evaporated. They are a racially-motivated political not a religious force, the Republican Party at prayer. Paul Weyrich, a Catholic evangelical, laid out the programme as early as 1980:

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Racism is not an incidental component of evangelicalism, it is the central plank from which all their other policies emanate. According to Butler “Slavery is the foundation of racism and power in American evangelicalism.” It still retains the attitudes of the “Religion of the Lost Cause” that mythical tale of Confederate civilisation in which black people knew their place. Blackness is so obviously inferior it is no longer necessary to debate the point. It is black girls who seek abortions; it is young black males who are the primary danger to law and order; it is black men who suffer from a lack of spiritual manliness; and it is black women who don’t know how to maintain the integrity of family life. Besides, black people in general have an agenda which is politically divisive. Meanwhile, evangelicals claim ‘colour-blindness’:

“[C]olor-blind gospel is how evangelicals used biblical scripture to affirm that everyone, no matter what race, is equal and that race does not matter [just as they had previously used it to justify racial segregation]. The reality of the term ‘color- blind,’ however, was more about making Black and other ethnic evangelicals conform to whiteness and accept white leadership as the norm both religiously and socially. It is the equivalent of today’s oft-quoted phrase ‘I don’t see color.’ Saying that means white is the default color.”

Evangelicals complain of ‘cancel culture’ when it comes to the positive contributions of white folk who, from Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump, and from George Whitfield to Billy Graham, have tried to minimise the monstrosity of the racism which has lived in the heart of America. That they won’t acknowledge the historical and continuing existence of that monstrosity is the greatest act of such cancellation possible. To use the gospel to promote such an erasure of suffering and injustice is just an additional obscenity added to their large collection.

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