Criswell, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Focus on the Family, the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, Bob Jones University, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jack Hayford, George W. She unflinchingly confronts evangelicals’ complicity in America’s lynchings (over 4,000, according to NAACP records), their support for Lost Cause ideology, their history of opposition to interracial marriage, and their contemporary insistence on a colorblind approach to race.īutler’s analysis of the 20th century is impressively thorough as it draws in a wealth of prominent evangelical leaders, organizations, and initiatives: Billy Graham, the National Association of Evangelicals, W. (About half of the book covers national politics in the post-1970s era.) She offers a refreshing corrective to common popular misconceptions about 19th-century evangelicals and race, such as the notion that evangelical theology “required” believers to be abolitionists and that only Southern evangelicals were racists. “Racism,” she declares, in one of her pithiest formulations, “is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism.”īutler is at her best when exposing and seamlessly weaving together the long arc of racist evangelical practices from the days of slavery to our own generation. Butler argues emphatically and unapologetically that racism thoroughly infects all of evangelicalism. All this makes for painful reading, especially for those unfamiliar with the history. To this end, she deliberately focuses on the “trajectory of evangelical history that supported slavery, the Lost Cause, Jim Crow, and lynching” because it is key to understanding how and why evangelicals “continue to use scripture, morality, and political power” today in support of racist and conservative policies and politicians. She wants to use history to jump-start some serious evangelical soul-searching. In fact, her project is designed to do the exact opposite. While evangelicals often like to emphasize the proudest moral and racial moments of their past, Butler cares nothing about boosting their collective self-esteem. While prominent scholars of evangelicalism such as Mark Noll, George Marsden, David Bebbington, and Thomas Kidd define the movement theologically and historically, Butler argues that it is “not a simply religious group at all” but rather a “nationalistic political movement.” Evangelicals, she writes, have defined themselves by their “ubiquitous” support for the Republican Party and its conservative quest to retain America’s “status quo of patriarchy, cultural hegemony, and nationalism”-and this has made evangelicals, for all intents and purposes, culturally and politically “white.” She argues that racism and a quest for political power have defined evangelicalism for approximately the last 50 years. Baker, Darren Dochuk, and Randall Balmer, among others, Butler challenges evangelicals to reject their racism and lust for political power and to work cooperatively with their fellow Americans to build a better society. Citing such important scholars as Daniel K. A strong work of synthesis designed for a popular audience, White Evangelical Racism deftly weaves together cutting-edge scholarship on evangelicalism from the last 20 years. Butler argues that the persistence of racism among evangelicals (not fear, as Fea argues) explains their support for Donald Trump and conservative politics since the 1970s.īutler, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, provides a strong historical overview of the depth and breadth of racism in American evangelical culture since the early 19th century. In some ways it is a cross between the spirit of The Color of Compromise and the style of Believe Me. Into this rich body of work steps Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, an analysis of American evangelicalism’s last 50 years that also includes a larger backstory. This is evident in books like Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, John Fea’s Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, and Thomas Kidd’s Who is an Evangelical?: The History of a Movement in Crisis. Some of the most striking works have explored the political and racial history of the movement. The last several years have witnessed no small uptick in accessible academic books about evangelicals.
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