Source of book: I own this
“Whiteness, I have learned, is a religion. It is fueled by its power to give those who believe it a sense of worth. And for anyone who needs it, it is a faith that must be sustained in spite of the evidence.” ~ Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Reconstructing the Gospel is a book written for a specific audience: white Evangelicals.
It is really only going to be helpful for those who have an open mind, which is very, very few of them. Mostly the ones who are deconstructing in some way, or who are uncomfortable with the substitution of the Orange Messiah for Jesus Christ by the vast majority of their fellow churchgoers.
For them - for me a few years back had I read this then - it can be helpful. For most white Evangelicals, still desperately clinging to whiteness as their religion, it will be infuriating. For people of color, it will be seriously old news.
For me, I came to the same conclusions over a period of time from roughly 2015 to 2018, watching the Trump Era unfold, and the people I learned my values and morals from systematically abandon them in favor of white supremacist ideology.
So, while the book itself didn’t really introduce me to anything I wasn’t already thinking, it did explain things in a cogent, less wordy way than I tend to myself.
The realization that what passes for Christianity among most white people here in the United States isn’t Christ-following but a worship of whiteness was a devastating unveiling. It was traumatic to hear my own father (who used to teach me that embracing refugees and immigrants was a core Christian and American value) rattle on about how we needed to do something about the “Hispanic problem” and call for the exclusion of all refugees. It was devastating to see that there was zero pushback from my former pastor when church leaders reposted stuff from open neo-Nazis like Milo Yianopoulous and Steve King. It was horrifying to hear an extended family member assert that people who thought they were born in the United States but might have had a faked birth certificate (from a home birth) should be summarily sent back to their “home countries” that they had never known.
But these were just the things that pushed me over the edge. As I started to actually look into things like the history of the Religious Right and the straight line from the modern Patriarchy movement (and cult leader Bill Gothard) straight back to the Klan and the Christian Identity movement, it became clear that much - indeed most - of the cultural “morality” that poisons the water within white churches had absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Christ, and everything to do with an idolatry of whiteness and white privilege.
Wilson-Hartgrove is an interesting person. He grew up Southern Baptist in North Carolina, and initially intended to work in politics. A brief stint interning for the late white supremacist congressman Strom Thurmond opened his eyes to the way that the American Right Wing sells a fear of people of color in order to win votes. Wilson-Hartgrove couldn’t square that with the teachings of Christ, and found himself on a journey away from the blindness of white theology and toward an understanding of the truth about Christ and his teachings.
The book is fairly short, and makes its points simply and briefly. I am putting it on the list of books I will recommend to genuine Evangelical seekers looking to understand why our politics are the way they are.
This means, unfortunately, that, as much as the hopeful side of me has considered sending it to my parents, I know that their minds are closed. They are, at this point, rendered impregnable by their decades of hardening their hearts against people different from them. To the point that they cut first my wife, then me, and finally my kids out of their lives rather than tolerate any pushback against their bigoted beliefs. When they would rather lose family than reconsider ideology, there is nothing further I can do.
The problem is this: when you believe that the most evil things you do are not evil, but the highest good, blessed by God, and necessary for the preservation of the faith, you cannot see the truth without losing your entire identity. When your identity is tied up in cultural middle-class whiteness and privilege masquerading as “godliness,” where do you go from there? When reality challenges this self-image, faith steps in, as Wilson-Hartgrove notes.
It bears repeating that the Ku Klux Klan believed it was not merely a Christian organization, but that it was the true defense of the faith, the faithful remnant warding off an invasion by evil (in the form of black people and Jews.) The Moral Majority believed that preserving segregation was a “gospel” issue, necessary for the survival of the true faith.
And, as the author recounts, the white men who burned down the Colfax Courthouse in 1873, incinerating dozens of African Americans who were insisting on retaining their right to vote, they literally left their Easter dinners to do the work of the Lord. At least, that’s what they firmly and unshakably believed.
When this becomes not merely defensible but indeed “necessary” as an exercise of Christian virtue, something has gone catastrophically wrong with “Christianity.” It has become Ku Klux Klanity instead. A worship of whiteness.
I wish I could quote all of the introduction by the Reverend William Barber II. He is a personal friend of the author, as well as one of the men that helped open his eyes to what a true Church can and must look like. He has, of course, been demonized by the American Right, and particularly by white Evangelicals. But his actual life better represents Christ-following than any white preacher I have ever heard.
So-called white evangelicals, who say so much about what God says so little - and so little about what God says so much - have dominated public discourse about religion in America for my entire adult life. They have insisted that faith is not political, except when it comes to prayer in school, abortion, homosexuality, and property rights. They have overlooked the more than 2,500 verses in Scripture that have to do with love, justice, and care for the poor, and they have tried to make Jesus an honorary member of the NRA.
Preach it!
What these so-called evangelicals have done is nothing short of theological malpractice. With pornographic sums of money from corporate backers, they have hijacked the gospel and used it to justify what the Bible calls sin.
Yes, it is obscene the way they have twisted the “gospel” to favor wealth, power, privilege, and brutality.
I’m not surprised when I meet people who tell me they’re agnostic. When I was a guest on the talk show of one of America’s most famous atheists. I told Bill Maher that if you’re talking about a god who hates the poor, immigrants, and homosexuals, I’m an atheist too. I don’t know that god, and I definitely don’t believe in him.
I totally agree. I honestly cannot defend what passes for “christianity” in this country - and in my extended family - as being worth believing in. Not one bit. I don’t know that god, and I do not believe he exists outside of the imagination of hateful bigots.
Reverend Barber quotes Christ’s first sermon, a sermon which will dominate this book. It’s short, simple, and an utter contradiction to the politics of white Evangelicalism.
The spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor. (Luke 4:18)
This is it. If what you preach is not good news for the poor, it isn’t fucking good news. It’s heresy.
The word translated “poor” means those destitute, those reduced by injustice to begging, those without power to better themselves. One could think of our current homeless, of course, but also more broadly those who are on the margins of the systems of power.
I also love the Reverend Barber’s diagnosis of America’s original sin - our founding myth, our deepest depravity, the thing that haunts every challenge we face.
The original sin of racism in America began with a deeply flawed and demonic notion that shaped this nation’s development. Bad science claimed that black bodies were biologically deficient, then extrapolated a sick sociology that assumed that people of color had to be placed in subordinate positions. Evil economics perpetrated the lie that money and profit are the chief ends of human existence, and these ends justified almost any means. Slaveholder religion blessed all of this with a heretical ontology, asserting that God ordained racism, slavery, and systems of subjugation. The cumulative effect of this lie threatens not only the witness of Christianity in the world but also our existence as creatures on God’s good earth.
He further explains how this has prevented us from taking the necessary - and obvious - steps toward a better world.
The main obstacle to beloved community continues to be the fear that people in power have used for generations to divide and conquer God’s children who are, whatever our differences, all in the same boat.
We fear rather than love, we grasp for resources and privilege we see as finite rather than share with others. We allow our unspoken faith in whiteness to blind us to the truth God would have us see. That is what this book is about.
The first few chapters of the book are damn depressing. Wilson-Hartgrove talks about his discoveries about his local history. Which included a lot of white people who were, as he calls it, “torn in two.” They were caught between the systems of whiteness - slavery, Jim Crow - and their own consciences. Indeed, he argues that all of us white folk are in that position, and I agree. We are in ways we cannot entirely escape, complicit in the systems of injustice, and when we choose to fight against them, we lose things dear to us. (I lost my parents, for example, and I am not the only person in this book who experienced that - see below.)
Like a young woman on a tour of a church along with the author, I find myself “desperate for a word of assurance - for some sign that the gospel has power, not simply to remind us of what should be but to change who we are.”
Like that young woman, I have been bitterly disappointed. For whatever reasons, what passes for “gospel” here seems incapable of changing people for the better - only for the worse.
I have been writing periodically on why I find “evangelism” to mostly be appalling and horrible, but I think Wilson-Hartgrove may have said it best.
The gospel that was twisted to accommodate America’s original sin must also be reconstructed if we are to experience the healing that Jesus wants to bring. Otherwise, evangelism is violence and those of us who spend our time in church meetings are perpetuating a death-dealing culture without even realizing it.
The most inspiring parts of this book are about Wilson-Hartgrove’s experiences working in a historically black church, with teenagers of all races eager to embrace a true gospel, one that, well, let him tell it:
How, I asked myself, had I missed it? In all of my genuine concern for these kids who I’ve known and cared about since they were born, how had I failed to see that the healing and hope Jesus most wants to give them can’t be separated from a prophetic truth telling that confronts the systemic injustices they feel weighing on their bodies? What kept me from seeing this gospel?
A lot of evangelicals bemoan the catastrophic flight of the younger generations from religion, never pausing to consider whether the problem is that the religion is shit. (And it really, truly is.) I find that so many people - myself, my kids, most of us who have left religion - are actually hungry - famished - for this kind of a religion. One that confronts injustice rather than preserves it, one that envisions a true community of mutual aid, rather than brutal late-stage kleptocapitalism and theocratic brutality.
Why are millennials choosing to part ways with the faith of their parents? No doubt their reasons are many and complex. But one clear factor in the decline of white Christianity is a prevailing sense that Christians are more likely to be racist, homophobic, self-righteous, and blindly patriotic. Not just in the past. And not just in the South. This is the lived experience of twenty-first-century Americans. Theirs is not an angry rebellion against conservative values. It simply seems to them that the Christianity of this land makes people worse.
He’s nicer than I would have been. There is in fact solid, peer reviewed, repeatable research that proves that in fact Evangelicals are far less moral and ethical than other groups (with white Catholics close behind.) The counterfeit “Christianity” of this land does in fact make people worse. Much, much worse.
It is no mystery why people like me left organized religion. Our consciences mandated that we not sell our souls and become evil and hateful.
Wilson-Hartgrove came from a tradition pretty similar to my own, so it is occasionally startling to hear him reiterate something from my memories that I hadn’t thought about for a while. Like this one:
Sin is a complicated thing for religious people, even if we have a hard time admitting it to ourselves. We tell our children that the allure of illicit sex or drugs may be enticing but it’s really only the devil trying to trick them. All those smiling faces on the cover of People magazine - well, deep down they’re miserable. Just look at them without all their makeup, there on the tabloid covers in the checkout line. Behind their masks, they’re hurting.
Hey, any other ex-evangelical remember that? “Everyone outside our narrow tribe is secretly miserable!” Which isn’t true, exactly - miserable people are everywhere, as are happy people. And it wasn’t just “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” - it was stuff like…being a normal person, not someone obsessed with a particular set of religious beliefs.
This serves as an introduction to another of the author’s epiphanies: so much of what we consider “Christian virtue” is really just white middle-class privilege. He tells of talking to a group of mostly black teens about sex. (Hey, if you were a white evangelical teen, you know the sermon. You could likely quote it. Right?)
It fell flat.
I told them they didn’t have to agree. I’d love to hear their honest feedback.
Silence.
Finally, a young man spoke up. “Yo, that all sounds good, but I just gotta be real with you. We don’t know anybody like that.”
“Like what?” I asked him.
“Like…who got it all together to get married, buy a house, hold down a job, and raise some kids? I mean, you’re right. It would be nice. But we don’t really see it happening.”
In the best way I knew how, I’d told those kids the biblical truth. But I knew in that moment that I was missing something. I not only assumed that the good life I imagined as a white man in America was what God wants for everyone, but I also naively suggested that these young people had the freedom to choose biblical faithfulness in all the same ways I did.
This too was something that I gradually realized over the past few decades. The “American Dream” - accessible only to white people in the 1950s, and increasingly unavailable to anyone these days - was by design a white thing. And we have baptized this privilege and called it “godliness.” So we can look down on the poor and particularly on minorities.
I recently wrote about this in the context of the Cult of the Stay-at-Home Mom, which is one of the whitest things ever. It is also a significant reason that I am estranged from my parents. My wife has continued to work even after our kids were born, something my mother never forgave her for. While she didn’t say it outright, it practice it is very much “middle class white women don’t work.” I also recommend The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Koontz, which looks at the history. Women who didn’t work for money are a historical and geographical aberration - and strongly associated with white supremacist beliefs.
For Wilson-Hartgrove, even though he softens things here a bit to avoid losing a conservative evangelical audience, he realized that his version of “godliness” when it comes to sex was so inseparable from that white middle-class lifestyle as to be useless outside of that context. And he is right. (W.E.B. Du Boise also talked about how poverty and racist systems make families fragile.)
I am not the first to notice that white Evangelicals use sexual puritanism to justify their economic brutality and selfishness. Morgan Guyton, for example, notes that sexual puritanism has always been used as proof of the inferiority of black people. Sex is a convenient “sin” to focus on, because the consequences are mostly borne by the vulnerable - the poor, minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. This allows us white guys to ignore the far more serious moral issues.
Even when we mess up, we like to think we knew what we were doing. But the Christian men who burned down the Colfax Courthouse on Easter Sunday back in 1873 and summarily executed forty of their brothers in Christ didn’t think they were giving in to temptation. If anything, they fought the temptation to sit out the moral struggle of their day. Their religion didn’t temper their violence. It added fuel to the flames.
The religious authorities who arrested Jesus, testified against him, and called for his crucifixion weren’t succumbing to the flesh. They were standing up for righteousness. They were doing their religious duty, which is why sin is so complicated for religious people. Because even as we feel guilty about doing the things we know we ought not do and strive to do more of the good we want to do, our very worst sins are almost always things we know to be our Christian duty.
Yes. Exactly. When we get all self-righteous and decide to go judging and controlling others, we abandon Christ-following, and follow after the doctrine of demons.
Oh, and he gets specific too.
Distance lets us imagine that we would never have prayed for Hitler’s success or killed our Rwandan neighbors with machetes, all while feeling righteous as we work to rid the world of evil. But nothing calls us into account like sitting face-to-face with our contradictions…And white evangelicals can’t ignore black and brown sisters and brothers in American who ask why 81 percent of us voted in 2016 for a man who was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. At least, we can’t ignore them if we see them.
This was ultimately the issue that led to my leaving organized religion altogether. While we were forced out of our long-time church for refusing to observe the unspoken rules against criticizing Republicans and those who vote for them, it was the fact that the support for the KKK candidate was near universal. In the church, and also in my extended family.
At some point, this isn’t so much a blind spot as willful blindness, truculent bigotry.
If we are honest to God and ourselves, we have not wanted to see. Far too often, we have chosen blindness, even refusing the hands of friends who reached out and tried to lead us to the one who could restore our sight. Our racial blindness is generational and multilayered, folded in among all that is true and good about our faith. There is no easy way to be freed from it.
This speaks to me. For far too long, I too was willfully blind. Hell, I had my Rush Limbaugh period. (Embarrassing.) But eventually, I could no longer reconcile racism with Christ. Or Social Darwinism with Christ. Or misogyny with Christ. I decided that, no matter where that journey led, I was going with Christ.
Unfortunately, that quote above also resonates for the way my parents chose to discard me rather than reconsider their worship of whiteness.
Another passage that I found fascinating was the one about hip hop music. Wilson-Hartgrove eventually asks the kids to show him the good stuff.
I didn’t tell Mario that, where I grew up, people who were saved didn’t listen to rap music. I’d been saved since before I knew how to turn a radio dial. Not listening to 102 JAMZ wasn’t something anyone ever explained to me. It was a given - like locking our doors when we drove through East Winston or scoffing at anything that smacked of big government. Our silent boycott of a whole genre of music couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that rap was “black music.” We weren’t like that.
And he is right about this. Although, to be fair, for those of us who got into Gothard’s cult, the racism was fucking explicit. Jazz, Rock, and Rap were ALL evil and demonic, because they came from people from Africa, where they worshiped demons. The BEST music was from Europe, particularly that healthy military marching music from the Colonial era. Yeah. It was that explicit.
This was a senseless battle I had with my mom, which only ended when I just decided to make the music I made and lie about it, rather than try to explain how the beats that were supposedly “evil” were everywhere in Western music – including marches. But, willful and stubborn blindness.
Wilson-Hartgrave spends time on slavery, which is the key to understanding America’s past and present. And, uncomfortably, on the way that “christianity” has come down on the wrong side of justice seemingly every time.
As formerly enslaved people, such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, shared publicly about their experience of life in bondage, white Christians began to feel in public life the gut-wrenching moral contradiction they had only considered in private. Ministers like Rev. Stringfellow took it on themselves to ease the conscience of white congregants by helping them feel good about themselves. He concluded his defense of slavery by asserting that not only was it defensible but it was a great good for Christianity.
And why? Well, because those godless savages learned about Jesus. This is at the core of why I dislike “evangelism.” Slaveholder religion has severed body and soul, justifying brutality toward bodies by claiming to save souls. The two are inseparable and always have been, but the need to justify the brutality led to this severance.
For any Bible-believing American who is heartbroken by racial strife and offended by the crude bigotry of the alt-right, this is a serious reality to grapple with…But the gospel of white evangelicals hasn’t interrupted our racial habits; it has reinforced them. To be white and Christian in America is to be, on average, more segregated than your unchurched neighbors, whatever the color of their skin. How could this be? The heresy of America’s segregated church is rooted in the racial habits of the heart that grew out of the nineteenth century’s struggle with America’s original sin.
Another historical event that Wilson-Hartgrove examines is a certain book and movie. Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr. was the Billy Graham of his day. And he was also the author of a novel, The Clansman, which was turned into a movie. You might have heard of it. The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 silent film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan and portrayed African Americans (white actors in blackface, btw) as subhuman animals and monsters. President Woodrow Wilson - himself a vicious white supremacist, hosted a screening of the film at the White House. Wilson became the most effective recruiting tool the KKK had ever had.
As terrifying as this history may be to twenty-first-century Christians looking back, we cannot ignore the fact that it is our history. Dixon’s propaganda cannot be dismissed as lies from the secular media or corrupt politicians. The Birth of a Nation is Christian propaganda, written and popularized by a Baptist preacher who went on to start one of New York City’s first non-denominational churches.
Wilson-Hartgrove goes on to note that the preachers who baptized his grandparents were part of that glorification of the Klan.
I will also note that the author is too nice here. Most white evangelicals are NOT in fact horrified by the Klan. There is literally no meaningful difference between Trump’s policies and rhetoric and that of the modern Klan, which is why the Klan endorsed him as “the best possible scenario for our policy goals.” White Evangelicalism IS the propaganda wing of the Klan these days, which is why I will go nowhere near it.
Try to talk to a white person about racial politics and the go-to response is some version of “that’s not what my black friends say.” And it’s true - because racial politics has never been about hating the people you know. Racial politics is about dividing us from people we don’t know through fear, then offering a savior to make us feel secure.
And righteous. In America, racial politics has always been “Christian” - has always cloaked itself in the language of redemption and morality.
Yep. Always the “some of my best friends are black” while voting to end Medicaid and rattling on about “welfare queens.” And yes, from the very beginning, racial politics in the US has been cloaked in the language of religion. It continues to be. And one more thing: isn’t it interesting how quickly white evangelicals lined up to worship a new orange savior?
I loved the stories about Grandma Ann, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement who continues to work for social change.
Grandma Ann organized for systemic change because Jesus called her to love her neighbor as herself. But she knew well that neither black nor white churches in her lifetime had universally embraced a prophetic challenge of the world that white supremacy built. Stokely Carmichal coined the term “institutional racism” in his 1967 book Black Power, summing up what Grandma Ann’s generation had learned from experience: people have to change the unjust systems that people built. But forty years later, the basic notion that economic and political systems function to exclude people of color from access to power was still offensive to many Christians. Indeed, faith seemed to create an internal resistance to systemic change.
Amen. We built the systems. We will have to dismantle them to make a better world. And for reasons I still cannot fathom, the faith that claims the name of Christ works to preserve, rather than challenge, the systems of injustice. Indeed, the polar opposite of everything Christ taught and stood for. Grandma Ann was one of the biggest influences on the author, and I love how he sums up the truth of what he learned from her.
She also insisted that I know King Jesus - the Lord for whom friendship is always political because we live in a world where friends get hurt by injustice. To be a disciple of Jesus and a son of Ann Atwater, she told me, is to be in a quarrel with the world. Yes, our greatest weapon is love. But when we love in public, it looks like a disruption.
The first part of the book is devoted to a diagnosis of the disease. The second offers an alternative to Slaveholder Religion - the Christianity of Christ. Which is the polar opposite of the Republicanity and Ku Klux Klanity that dominates our religious spaces in this country.
It may seem obvious to many of us now, but the enslaved saw themselves in Scripture - specifically as the enslaved Israelites that God delivered from bondage. This somehow shocked the believers in Slaveholder Religion, because after starting off trying to “civilize” the enslaved by teaching them to read - and read the Bible - they switched to forbidding the teaching of reading to the enslaved, limiting them to sermons on “slaves obey your masters.” But African Americans better understood the meaning of the Gospel than their enslavers did.
If the gospel was good news, then it meant freedom from bondage.
For the author, he experienced a period of disorientation after he started to see the light. This so much resonates for me.
After my stint in Strom Thurmond’s office, I came back to North Carolina confused. I no longer believed in the fear-based politics that drove the religious right, but I didn’t know what an alternative looked like. My Jesus was too white, but I didn’t know where to go to learn to read the Bible differently. I had a hunch that all was not right with the world I inherited, but I was ignorant of the other half of history. I wasn’t even a pilgrim, really - just a young man without a country.
Yeah, me too. And while I believe that I have found better ways of reading the Bible and following the teachings of Christ, I have yet to find a spiritual home. Wilson-Hartgrove managed to land in a rare situation, and I am happy for him. But he also understands and discusses the problem. There is no “pure” form of Christianity to be found here. Black churches too have largely embraced Slaveholder Religion, in the form of the Prosperity Gospel. (And also in Patriarchy and anti-LGBTQ hate, unfortunately.) Particularly here in the city I live in. The very few LGBTQ-affirming churches are also incredibly white. I don’t mean to cast shade on the lovely people I know who have found a home in progressive churches, but they just don’t have what I am looking for.
It was also refreshing to hear someone else say the truth about salvation:
[W]hite men can’t be saved until we face the fact that we do not know what we are doing. So Jesus tells Nicodemus, “You must be born again.”
The author’s interpretation of the Nicodemus story is wonderful. Nicodemus is the establishment, the group in power, the one with the blind spots. The poor are given the good news, not an admonition to be “born again.” And the meaning of that phrase is really better translated “re-sired from above.” We must be renewed in our perspective - to see ourselves not as superior but as those most blinded by our privilege. And I think for white people in 21st Century America, we are like the rich that Christ talked about. It is easier for a camel (more accurately translated, a hawser) to go through the eye of a needle than it is for us to be saved.
The author also takes an honest look at the “Moral Majority” and what it actually meant. It was, of course, as is well documented, a pro-segregation movement, a reaction to the Civil Rights Act. The Religious Right opted for a highly successful political ploy to get religious people to abandon Christ-following and instead embrace white supremacy. And boy did it work.
Meanwhile, political operatives focused the incredible power of faith to motivate people for action on a very narrow set of moral issues, which could be manipulated to rally us at election time. Nothing worked better than abortion. The “Christian” vote wasn’t about which candidate, regardless of party, offered policy proposals that moved us imperfectly toward the deepest values of Scripture. That would be too complicated. Instead, the “Christian” vote was framed as candidates who opposed abortion, claiming to be pro-life even as their policies were often detrimental to the lives of poor and black people in America. I, along with millions of other white Christians in America, was sold the stale bread of racism in this sweet and simple packaging of the Moral Majority.
Oh, and there is so much more. The author describes the Moral Monday protests against harmful policies that he and his church participated in. He then explains what the real meaning of “take up your cross” is in its original and modern contexts. Hint: it isn’t feeling uncomfortable when someone calls you out on being a bigot.
White Christians who have felt guilty about their “cross,” agonized over whether they were doing enough, and practically worshiped the image of heroes who bear a cross they could never imagine. But for all the attention we’ve given this central teaching of Jesus, racial blindness has kept us from seeing what everyone in the first century knew as a fact of life: the cross is a consequence of confronting political power.
Wilson-Hartgrove goes on to explain the real meaning of “Church” - ekklesia - those called out.
To be called out of the patterns and practices of this world’s sinful and broken systems into the economy of God’s grace is to become church. To participate in an institution called church that nevertheless reinforces this world’s broken systems is something far more cynical. I’m tempted to call it a country club for the middle class, but the country club is less tortured. Its members do not have to grapple weekly with a text and a tradition that have the power to liberate us from our self-imposed slavery, if only we would believe.
Honestly, that is the biggest reason I haven’t returned to organized religion in nearly seven years. There is something cynical and yes, evil, about calling one’s organization a church while working to reinforce the systems of injustice which are harming others. I can’t do it anymore. There is nothing I can do to change the system from within, so I refuse to lend my talents and credibility to an evil system.
The author turns to a vision for what the church should be doing, one that I not only agree with, but would be eager to join.
No one could deny that Jesus calls us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and visit the imprisoned. But those works of mercy had been imagined as auxiliary ministries, dependent on the central mission of building up a spiritual institution.
And even these “auxiliary ministries” end up on the chopping block all too fast. Our former church had a food pantry for years - one of the good things it did - but when they built a shiny new building, that was axed. Likewise, there was a huge disagreement about whether we should feed the homeless, or demand change and an altar call before we did so. The priorities were not on doing the work of Christ, but on building the institution and preserving the toxic theological superstructure. The Slaveholder Religion.
I believe that the market for Slaveholder Religion is shrinking rapidly, as the decline of religious affiliation, particularly among the young, gives ample evidence. Much ink has been spilled about this, with all kinds of “solutions” proposed. I commented on this in the wake of Trump’s election, believing that Evangelicalism had chosen suicide.
Far too many conversations about the renewal of the church in America focus on secondary issues of translating the gospel’s message to new generations in a changing culture. I’ve sat with Episcopal bishops and evangelical grandmothers whose theologies (at least in the way we usually frame things) couldn’t be further from each other. But they have this in common in twenty-first-century America: they worry that the church that has been a sanctuary from the storms of life for them will not be there for their grandchildren.
But before any message can be translated, it must be understood. The greatest threat to the gospel in America is not that it will be lost in translation; it’s that it will be confused for the Christianity of the slaveholder. As such, it can either be dismissed as unhelpful baggage or be embraced as a set of beliefs that prop up the world as it is. But either way, it doesn’t offer the gift of church - a people called out of this world’s system into the life that is really life.
And we wonder why young people don’t want this? Why the fucking hell would I want this? Why would white supremacist religion appeal to me? Why would bigotry and selfishness appeal? The issue isn’t the marketing. It is the product.
Wilson-Hartgrove examines another uncomfortable historical fact as well: for white Southern Christians (using that term loosely), for the 25 years after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, said that preserving segregation was the single most important issue to them. I myself realized during the Trump Era that this hasn’t gone away for white Evangelicals. Not at all. This is what “vouchers” are about, and a whole host of other conservative priorities. They are still pissed that their kids have to attend school with “those people.”
There is something else, too, that I have realized, that I appreciate that Wilson-Hartgrove said out loud:
If we recall that no single issue for a quarter century after Brown v. Board was more important to white Southern Christians than segregation, it’s much less confusing why our various denominations have been in turmoil for the past decade over how the church should respond to homosexuality. We are well practiced in self-deception.
Oh hell yes, he went there. And he’s right. Why haven’t we responded to modern knowledge about sexual orientation and gender identity with rationality, with compassion and empathy, with humility? Well, we have already hardened our hearts against racial minorities, so it was so very easy to do the same against sexual minorities.
As the author puts it in multiple places, Slaveholder Religion has replaced our hearts of flesh with a heart of stone. The same disease of the soul drives both racism and anti-LGBTQ bigotry, which is why they correlate so strongly.
Ultimately, the author concludes that two things have to go together. We have to work in community and against evil systems at the same time we work on our individual hearts and minds.
I am a man torn in two. The only gospel that can be good news to me is one that has the power to touch me down on the inside and heal the hidden wound that rends my soul. Reconstructing the gospel can never only be about the individual. This is why so many noble efforts at reconciliation fail. They pretend that broken people with the best of motives can simply opt out of hundreds of years of history through individual choices and relationships. Such relationships are necessarily dishonest, both because they ignore the real material conditions that weigh on people’s lives and because they offer a false sense of relief from white guilt, which keeps people like me from facing the hidden wound of our whiteness.
Whenever we try to start with the personal work of reconstructing the gospel, the individualism of the faith we’ve inherited almost guarantees that we miss the essential context of our personal conversion in community. But if we stop short of the personal work - if we deceive ourselves into thinking that we can reconstruct the gospel without addressing our divided souls, then we carry the germ of white supremacy with us into our most noble efforts to rid the world’s systems of racism.
I mentioned early two things that tie together near the end. One was the idea of carrying one’s cross - bearing the consequences of challenging power. The other is the reality that choosing to challenge white supremacy will cost many of us people dear to us. Wilson-Hartgrove tells the story of an old white man, Bob, who joined the Civil Rights Movement in college, getting arrested and yelled at as a “white n-----r.” Into his old age, he still fights on the side of right. But what did it cost him? And, what did it cost his father, who also “changed sides” by leaving the Klan when Bob was a child?
Bob said his granddaddy and his uncles never spoke to his daddy again after he left the Klan. To hold on to their view of the world and of themselves, they had to disown their flesh and blood. He didn’t comprehend the pain of that rejection until later in life, but Bob said it helped him to understand the white men who nearly beat him to death in Mississippi, as well as the officers who arrested and jailed him dozens of times in the 1960s.
When I finally spoke up privately then publicly about my parents’ racism, they cut me out of their lives. But that followed years of tension, with my dad complaining that “we can’t talk politics anymore” - because “politics” meant airing his bigotries. I left the Klan, in a very real way. Not that my parents would ever admit that. After all, they aren’t racists - just ask them! (The Klan claimed to be not-racist too, of course.) But their politics in the 21st Century were for all meaningful issues, identical to that of the Klan. And indeed, the rhetoric more than once sounded more like the Third Reich than anything else. (Referring to other ethnic groups as a “problem” to be solved is literally the core belief of Nazism.)
It wasn’t always that way, which is why it was so devastating to me. I have noted elsewhere that I was raised with anti-racist values. My own journey over the last couple of decades is nothing more or less than a continuation of the direction I was sent in as a child.
But something happened to my parents. And indeed to millions of other white Americans of their age, who once were different.
The obvious things apply, of course: the rise of the Religious Right, the gradual transition of the GOP from the party of Lincoln to Nixon’s Southern Strategy, to Reagan’s dog whistles, to the open Fascism of Trump. The core loyalty apparently wasn’t to Christ, but to a particular party. And there is Fox News and Right Wing Talk Radio. I also think that a bad experience after the LA riots broke something good in my dad.
Whatever the cause, the rupture with my parents was very much at its core about my leaving the Klan - leaving the political commitments they now embraced. That this was also connected to their increasing identity as patriarchists and anti-LGBTQ bigots is unsurprising, because all three are inseparably intertwined.
I think Bob’s conclusion, expanded on by Wilson-Hartgrove, is spot on:
Eventually, Bob came to the conclusion that, as a group, white people suffer from a malady that he calls the “shriveled heart syndrome.” It is rooted in the experience of white people enslaving black people. “Slavery is an act of war,” Bob said. “You can’t maintain it without violence.” If black people were to be kept in slavery, they had to become an enemy. That meant cutting off any empathy that arose from witnessing the suffering of a fellow human being.
That is the core of the problem. White Christians have hardened their hearts over generations, being carefully trained in the art of maintaining a pathological lack of empathy toward people who are deemed “less than.” This started with enslaved black people, but the circle of anti-empathy was easily expanded to immigrants, refugees, poor people, and LGBTQ people. Indeed, once you start excluding other humans, it is increasingly difficult to draw the line anywhere - and vicious selfishness and alienation is the result. My extended family is proof of that.
Part of my own journey has been realizing that this hardness of heart was passed down as a generational inheritance. Coming face to face with it, and working to think differently has been a challenge - an ongoing one.
The election of Trump was in so many ways a watershed moment for me. One of the actions that the author recommends as a way to take a risk for justice is to “Tell your friends why you can no longer vote with the good white Christians for every Republican candidate on the ticket.” I did this, starting with this post, and it has cost me a number of friends - and yes, eventually my parents.
The book ends with an open letter from the author to two people dear to him: his adopted African American son JaiMichael, and his Trump-voting grandfather (who isn’t named.) There are two lines from this amazing and heartfelt letter that stood out to me. The first is the one about whiteness being a religion - which I quoted at the top of the post. I believe this to true. My parents’ religion, at least post-Bill Gothard, has been whiteness. The attraction of the cult was the rows of overwhelmingly white, middle-class children in navy slacks and white dress shirts. Every subsequent issue we have had - their denial of a choice in higher education, the pointless feud with my wife over career and clothing and childrearing, their embrace of white supremacist politics, their rejection of my LGBTQ kids - it’s all about that worship of whiteness. Until they repent of this, there is no way forward to repair the relationship.
The other is this:
Most of the social sins that have been committed in our tortured history have been perpetrated by Christians. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) we say, and it is true. But we practice self-deception if we do not acknowledge that the worst of these sins were done in the name of God. From Easter Sunday at the Colfax Courthouse to our family’s Easter dinner, we are a people divided by faith.
And this is where we are. Divided by faith. My faith has taken me in one direction, while the faith of so many I once loved has taken them in an opposite direction. The sins done in the name of God continue to cause endless destruction in individual relationships, and in our social fabric. The worship of whiteness - Slaveholder Religion - has been the primary source of evil and harm in America during my lifetime, and in the centuries before. It’s time to reconstruct the gospel, as Christ did when he opposed the systems of power and money and oppression and preached the good news to the poor. It’s time for us to follow.
I wish I could give this book to so many people, but I know that their hearts and minds are closed. Their identity is too closely wrapped up in whiteness. At this point, I can merely pray and hope for a miracle, knowing that if loss of a relationship with me matters far less than preserving their toxic beliefs, I will almost certainly be disappointed. But for those who are open to change, to realizing their blindness, and to charting a better course, this book has so much good in it.
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