White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

By Anthea Butler

The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power.

Butler reveals how evangelical racism, propelled by the benefits of whiteness, has since the nation's founding played a provocative role in severely fracturing the electorate. During the buildup to the Civil War, white evangelicals used scripture to defend slavery and nurture the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, they used it to deny the vote to newly emancipated blacks. In the twentieth century, they sided with segregationists in avidly opposing movements for racial equality and civil rights. Most recently, evangelicals supported the Tea Party, a Muslim ban, and border policies allowing family separation. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism's racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469661186

Anthea Butler

Anthea Butler is professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World. A leading historian and public commentator on religion and politics, Butler has appeared on networks including CNN, BBC, and MSNBC and has published opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other media outlets.

Book preview

WHITE EVANGELICAL RACISM

WHITE EVANGELICAL RACISM

The Politics of Morality in America

ANTHEA BUTLER

A Ferris and Ferris Book

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

This book was published under the Marcie Cohen Ferris and William R. Ferris Imprint of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed and set in Miller and DIN types by Kim Bryant

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: background © iStock.com/kyoshino; flag © iStock.com/GoodLifeStudio

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Butler, Anthea D., 1960– author.

Title: White evangelical racism : the politics of morality in America / Anthea Butler.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2021] | A Ferris and Ferris book. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020047941 | ISBN 9781469661179 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469661186 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Evangelicalism—United States—History. | Racism—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Christians, White—United States—History. | Religion and politics—United States—History. | Racism—United States—History. | United States—Church history. | United States—Race relations.

Classification: LCC BR563.W45 B88 2021 | DDC 305.6/80408900973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047941

For Bill Pannell & Walter Hollenweger

Thank you for lighting the antiracism path

CONTENTS

Introduction

Evangelical Racism: A Feature, Not a Bug

1 The Racist Foundations of Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth Century

2 Saving the Nation

Fervor, Fear, and Challenges to Jim Crow

3 Whitewashing Racism and the Rise of the Religious Right

4 How Firm a Foundation

A Twenty-First-Century Precipice Appears

Conclusion

Whom Will You Serve?

Acknowledgments

Selected Reading

Index

WHITE EVANGELICAL RACISM

INTRODUCTION

Evangelical Racism: A Feature, Not a Bug

White Evangelical Racism tells a concise history of the evangelical movement and—here is the hard part—the racist and racial elements that imbue its beliefs, practices, and social and political activism. It is racism that binds and blinds many white American evangelicals to the vilification of Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans. It is racism that impels many evangelicals to oppose immigration and turn a blind eye to children in cages at the border. It is racism that fuels evangelical Islamophobia. It was evangelical acceptance of biblically sanctioned racism that motivated believers to separate and sell families during slavery and to march with the Klan. Racist evangelicals shielded cross burners, protected church burners, and participated in lynchings. Racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism.

I will take you onto the third rail of American religious history, focusing on the key issues evangelicals have succeeded in shaping—especially those that have influenced our current politics. Starting with the slaveholding Christianity of Frederick Douglass’s era, this history bridges, as did Douglass’s life, slavery and emancipation. It churns through the eras of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and relentless violence. It leans deeply into the rise of Billy Graham and the civil rights era, arriving at birtherism and the rise of the man some evangelicals refer to as King Cyrus, Donald Trump. It looks from there into the future. It looks directly at the choice white evangelicals must make if they can justly perceive the history of racism embedded in their tradition: Will they allow racism to continue to taint their faith, or will they reject it?

I can invert the story, too: this book is a short primer on the history of racism as directly implicated in conveying the vast majority of white evangelicals to their unabashed embrace of contemporary right-wing politics. To be clear, not all white evangelicals embrace the kind of conservative politics that build on the foundation of racism. Today, a small but growing number of white evangelicals belong to churches and movements that robustly reject racism and right-wing politics. Despite this, it is well documented that white evangelicals in this country vote in overwhelming numbers for right-wing candidates, causes, and legislation.

Before diving in, I want to be clear about what my working definition of evangelical is in this book. The word white in the title White Evangelical Racism is about the construction of evangelicalism, from the theological to the political. If one takes the purest definition of evangelical, that is, spreading the gospel, then there are many Christians who believe that they should spread the message of Jesus Christ to the world. That includes believers of all races. In the American context, evangelical means different things in different centuries. In the nineteenth century, the term evangelical was about missionary work, spreading the gospel to the heathen (read: ethnic groups other than white), and was embraced by people who were both for and against slavery. In the twentieth century, evangelicalism became a term that was used internally as a boundary-making enterprise, to wall off evangelicals who embraced an identity different from fundamentalists, who believed that the Bible was both inerrant and infallible. By the 1950s and the entrance of evangelist Billy Graham, evangelicalism had mainstreamed itself, and in the words of George Marsden, an evangelical is anyone who likes Billy Graham.

That simple definition changed in the 1970s as evangelical allegiances aligned with political activity, namely that of the Republican Party. While it is true that one could look at Black evangelicals like Tom Skinner and others, their political leanings did not align with those of the majority of white evangelicals, who embraced the Republican Party starting in the 1970s. 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.

White evangelicals’ stark identification with the Republican Party also became a handy catchall for pollsters eager to measure evangelicals’ impact politically. Many historians of evangelicalism, such as Mark Noll, Thomas Kidd, David Bebbington, and George Marsden, have been concerned for much of their academic careers with defining evangelicalism via theology and history. Their projects are not expressly concerned with racial, nationalistic, and political concerns of conservative white Americans. Evangelicals are, however, concerned with their political alliance with the Republican Party and with maintaining the cultural and racial whiteness that they have transmitted to the public. This is the working definition of American evangelicalism. American print and television media have embraced and promoted this definition, and the American public has accepted it. So for the purposes of this book, the word evangelical, unless otherwise noted, should be read as WHITE evangelical.

To a great extent, the evangelical church in America supported the status quo. It supported slavery; it supported segregation; it preached against any attempt of the black man to stand on his own two feet. These words, uttered in 1970 by Tom Skinner—the son of a Black preacher and a former gang member turned evangelist—still ring true today. In an impassioned speech titled Racism and World Evangelicalism, given at the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s Urbana conference, Skinner challenged the large crowd of young white Christians to look more closely at the history of evangelical complicity in racism in America. For the very small number of Black evangelicals who were present, it was a promising moment in which Skinner affirmed their experiences with racism in the evangelical movement.

Skinner’s claim that evangelicalism supported the status quo, slavery, and segregation is not hyperbole. It speaks to a history that is obscured by some historians of evangelicalism who cannot or will not deal with the racism at the core of evangelical beliefs, practices, and political allegiances—with good reason. Evangelicals today are not only a religious group but also a powerful voting bloc of Republicans and a strong lobby on Capitol Hill. They have their own colleges, universities, and secondary education facilities. They are embedded in local and state governments all over the United States. They have been loyal Republican voters since the late 1970s. In the 2016 election, 81 percent of evangelical voters supported Donald Trump, and this support continues to hold firm now. Yet many political commentators seem stymied by evangelicals’ love for Trumpism. There are many reasons for this love, but one reason is most important: racism. Evangelicals’ support for current-day policies that seem draconian and unchristian is linked inescapably to a foundational history that we will uncover in this book. American history chronicles evangelical support for and participation in racist structures in America. Skinner got it right.

We will look at how nineteenth-century Bible reading helped pave the path that took us to 2016 and into the present. Hundreds of articles and a fair number of books have been written in attempts to understand evangelicals’ rock-solid support for Trumpism. John Fea came up with a name for the large number of evangelicals who surround Trump: court evangelicals. These are the evangelicals who obtained virtually unrestricted access to Trump’s White House, where they prayed for him regularly and advised him triumphantly on matters large and small.

It was the lament of some evangelicals, however, that gave me pause. One important lament was expressed in Michael Gerson’s poignant article The Last Temptation, published in the Atlantic in April 2018. In this overview of evangelical political and public involvement from the Civil War to the present, Gerson lauded the highlights of evangelical history and bemoaned evangelical support for Trump. Speaking of Trump’s racism, Gerson remarked, Every strong Trump supporter has decided that racism is not a moral disqualification in the president of the United States.

But what about racism being a moral disqualification in evangelicalism?

Gerson’s point is typical of the struggle evangelicals of conscience are experiencing with their faith tradition. Gerson looks to the nineteenth century, focusing mostly on northern evangelicalism, to make the claim that evangelicals in fact sought to establish a more moral nation through the temperance, abolitionist, and missionary movements. Ignoring the South, slavery, and the church splits, Gerson narrates a story focused on evangelicalism’s declension from the seemingly blameless moral heights of the nineteenth century to the despairing depths of the present. Like most white evangelicals, Gerson offers no criticism of the nationalism embraced by figures like Billy Graham, or of the racism of the baldly named White Citizens’ Councils that fought against integration, or even of the pat racial reconciliation moments evangelicals staged in the late 1990s. In this story, the racism of evangelicals appeared only when they embraced President Donald Trump.

Gerson’s misty-eyed longing for a virtuous evangelical heyday conveniently leaves too many events out of the historical narrative. For instance, let us

Reviews for White Evangelical Racism

[Melvin Hamalambo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am not an American but a non-religious admirer of your country. This book opened my eyes understanding the history of evangelicalism and how the evangelicals have resisted changes in the American political and social landscape. For the evangelicals the Trump presidency was the embodiment of the resistance to black and minority political and social advancement. After reading the book one understands clearly the genesis of the insurrection on 6 January. This is a great book for religious and non-religious people to understand why and the origins of the polarisation of the American body politic. The enemies of America have taken advantage by infiltration of the religious right espousing racism. Putin in Moscow and the Ayatollah in Tehran and the Chinese Communists in Beijing must be smiling watching evangelical useful idiots willing to destroy the American dream.

[Allie Tichenor · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In White Evangelical Racism, historian and former evangelical Anthea Butler shows how racist ideology and practices are embedded in evangelicalism in the United States. This deep-rooted racism, she contends, explains why white evangelicals overwhelmingly supported the 2016 presidential bid of Donald Trump despite all his moral failings. In taking aim at the structural racism that underpins US evangelicalism, Butler also offers a sharp critique of historians who have underplayed or ignored the “racism at the core of evangelical beliefs, practices and political allegiances” and thus have been at a loss to explain why so-called committed white Christians would support a candidate promoting decidedly un-Christian beliefs. Yet, for Butler, evangelical embrace of Trump, is unsurprising given evangelicalism’s long history of defending first slavery and later Jim Crow laws, homophobia, and Islamophobia—all in the name of defending traditional family values and Christian civilization.

Although Butler acknowledges in the Introduction that a growing number of young contemporary evangelicals today are rejecting racist religious and political beliefs and that even in the nineteenth century some evangelicals were also abolitionist and progressive reformers, neither of these groups represents the dominant trend within evangelicalism. Instead, the defense of slavery and white racial superiority divided churches and became an internal boundary through which evangelical defined themselves. In 1844, the Methodist Episcopal Church split over slavery, followed by the Baptist Church in 1845, and in 1861, slavery played a major role in the third split within Presbyterianism. Congregations and their pastors, especially in the South, relied heavily on two biblical verses to justify slavery: Genesis 9: 18–27 in which Noah’s son Ham was cursed for upon his father’s drunkenness and banished to Canaan (Theologians argued that Canaan was a reference to Africa, and thus Africans were cursed) and Ephesians 6: 5–7 which calls on servants to obey their masters. More moderate pastors acknowledged that in principle slavery was wrong, but since God had not prohibited the Israelites from possessing slaves, it was an acceptable, if not moral, practice.

After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the Southern evangelical emphasis on white supremacist patriarchy did not disappear; instead, ministers in the South argued that their former way and their former society was the key to Christian Civilization. In short, they supported the ideology of the noble Lost Cause, that downplayed the brutality of slavery and emphasized the chivalry of white slave-holding families. According to this ideology, the Confederacy was not about defending slavery, but rather about of Southern traditions which were described as morally superior to Northern ones. That said, this romanticized narrative of the South maintained the idea of white racial superiority by contrasting white women’s alleged sexual purity with black women’s sexual promiscuity and by defining black men as dangerous brutes, intent on raping white women. This racist ideology was used not only to support white superiority but also to justify a campaign of violence against African Americans—a campaign that sadly was supported by many white evangelical churches.

In the wake of World War II and the growing civil rights movement, blatant racism largely disappeared within the evangelical community, as a growing number of ministers began pushing a “color-blind” gospel. This “color-blind” gospel allowed for the integration of black congregants into white churches, so long as they accepted the dominance of “white” culture. The mission of the Christian Churches, evangelical ministers now proclaimed, was to win souls for Christ, not to get involved in politics. This attitude and the problematic nature of this approach is best summed up by Billy Graham’s response to Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream Speech”: “Only when Christ comes again will little white children in Alabama hold hands with little Black children.” Put simply, African Americans and other persecuted groups should not protest social injustice; rather they should wait patiently and docilely for their turn to have the same freedoms as their white neighbors. Other evangelical ministers took a much harder line against the civil rights movement, associating it with a Godless communism against which God-fearing white Christians must unite. If they did not, the American way of life would collapse. This formulation clearly equated “whiteness” with Christianity and with nationalism. By the late 1960s, the issue of race, particularly mixed-race marriage and school busing, had some evangelical ministers rethinking their earlier admonition against political involvement. The decision to enter the political arena in the 1970s, Althea Butler argues, was not prompted by the abortion issue and Roe v. Wade. It was the result of a new Internal Revenue Service policy in 1971 that denied tax exempt status to private schools and charitable organizations that had racially discriminatory policies. The Bob Jones University refused to admit African Americans because according to officials “unmarried black men” inevitably would violate the university’s policy against interracial dating. When the IRS rescinded the university’s tax-exempt status, evangelicals were outraged and began organizing politically.

By the early 1980s, religious political organizations, such as the Moral Majority, had become a force with which politicians seeking election had to reckon. However, in the 1980s, it was still considered ill-advised for politicians campaigning at the national level to support racist ideas openly. Thus, candidates, such as Ronald Reagan, used coded language to court the white evangelical vote. Reagan, for example, in a speech noted that evangelical churches could not endorse him, but he endorsed them. Moreover, he professed his support for “state’s rights.” By the late 1980s, this prohibition against political candidates openly endorsing racist ideas was beginning to erode, as evidence by the race-baiting Willie Horton ad campaign used in 1988 against Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the structural racism of evangelicalism was clearly visible for all to see. Like his father before him, George W. Bush used a racist ad campaign in South Carolina to discredit his opponent; this time, it was a Republican—John McCain—who was outperforming him in the primaries. The Bush campaign distributed flyers suggested that McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh was a black child that McCain had fathered out of wedlock. Such racist smear tactics by the Republican Party and their white evangelical supporters became the norm following the nomination and election of the first African American president, Barack Obama. In looking at the 2008 presidential campaign, Butler pays particular attention to the race-baiting antics of Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin—a strategy that Donald Trump would use 8 years later to win the presidency.

Butler’s indictment of white evangelicalism is convincing and deserving of a widespread readership. However, the shortness of the book (only 149 pages) means that as many questions go unanswered as answered; it also means that much nuance is lost which sadly may result in many being unconvinced by her argument. For example, in focusing exclusively on the racist lineage of evangelicalism, rather than situating it in dialogue with those who rejected slavery and supported abolition, the author misses an opportunity to explain why the former gained prominence over the latter nationwide (not just in the South) despite the South’s defeat. Similarly, the author briefly touches on the alliance that formed between evangelical protestants and conservative Catholics in the 1980s, but never explains how protestants overcame their previous hostility towards Catholicism, which in the 1950s and early 1960s was only second to Communism as the enemy of Christian civilization in the eyes of white Evangelicals. More problematic is the author’s oversimplification of contributing factors to election losses and victories in the service of her larger argument about systemic racism in evangelicalism. For example, she seemingly attributes Michael Dukakis’s 1988 election loss solely to the race-baiting Willie Horton ad campaign. The ad campaign undoubtedly played on white racist fears, but as political scientist John Sides notes the ad was only on TV for a short time in a limited market. Moreover, at the time that the ad was aired (October 1988), Dukakis was already far behind in the polls. Butler only briefly touches upon how issues of class and gender (long-simmering economic resentments and misogyny) played into Trump’s electoral success and how the evangelicalism’s initial lower status vis-à-vis the rich steepled churches may have contributed to its adherents’ vulnerability to racist arguments.

[deusvitae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A less than celebratory exploration of white Evangelicalism, primarily covering the past seventy-five years.The author was raised and nurtured in the Evangelical context. Some time is spent arriving at the postwar era, but the focus is on how (white) Evangelicalism stood in terms of race from the postwar era until today. The author brings out all the skeletons from the closet: Graham's waffling on race and his belief that white and black children would only associate after the return of Jesus; the condemnation of the Civil Rights Movement as godless Communism and a distraction from spiritual witness; the willingness to use those same methods to develop the "Moral Majority," and the development of that organization first on account of the threat of segregation academies losing their tax-exempt status, not abortion; the willingness to look as if they were about to become inclusive, but then the turn toward dressed up racism in white grievance politics and hegemony with Bush II, the reaction to Obama, and reaching its apotheosis with Trump. The judgment is sharp and bracing; if the work were presented as if it were *the* history of Evangelicalism, it would surely be a warped and unbalanced distortion. Yet the author herself, in conclusion, recognizes the good that many Evangelicals have done, and recognizes this is not the only dimension to the story of Evangelicalism in America. Yet it surely represents *a* dimension of what conservative Christendom in America has been and now is. It's the story left untold, that which was passed over in silence, or attempted to be swept under the carpet. But now it's out in full force and sadly proving to be a powerful motivator for affiliation. A very ugly and distressing truth indeed, but a necessary counterweight to the celebratory works of history often made of the Evangelicals and their influence on American politics.**--galley received as part of early review program

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea Butler is a clear and concise history of how contemporary Evangelicalism is not a sudden phenomenon but the result of the racism built into its early strands and maintained as a foundational element throughout.There is a faux educator on Netgalley (unless maybe he works (mis)educating people for Breitbart) who can be counted on to spew nonsense whenever he stumbles across any book that supports anything other than white pseudo-Christian patriarchal society, and this is no exception. He pretends that Butler does not acknowledge that some early Evangelicals did lead the fight against slavery (she does acknowledge it). He cites an economist (though by the wrong first name, William is his middle name and not the one he publishes under) who won a Nobel prize for a theory on slavery, though that is not what Fogel is mentioned for. The book mentioned is questionable at best and, even giving some of it the benefit of the doubt, does not refute Butler's points at all. This bigoted faux-educator hopes that no one has read or is familiar with any previous scholarship or, for that matter, historical events and will not notice the stench coming from his mouth. And, since he is really just preaching to others like himself, they are probably as unfamiliar with the books and events as he is, he is clearly cribbing his racism from someone else, but he still spreads his filth on far too many good books that could help bring people together, except he has a narrow view of who qualifies as people.Okay, I feel better now, cowards like that just irk me. This book disrupts what Evangelicals have been doing for generations not so much by uncovering new information but by bringing all of these things together so we can see the big picture. And the big picture is that racism is at the heart of white Evangelicalism in the United States and has been for many years. Once they finally left any Christianity behind and became a full-fledged cult intent on gaining power, they were no longer able, in a rational person's mind, to hide behind any form of morality.Yes, this book fired me up because it makes very clear, in well argued and supported points, the things many of us have known and/or sensed for some time. Maybe someone who doesn't live in stupidity central (Lynchburg, VA, home of the faux university Liberty run by the cult Falwell) will be able to stand back and have their understanding improved by this book. I see this hatred and inbreeding daily and get fired up. If I have offended anyone, too bad. Considering the people in cages, dead or dying, going hungry and/or homeless because of what these people do, I don't care if I hurt someone's little feelings. I am not worried since you're all cowards anyway.So, highly recommended for those who want to learn. For those who don't, well, you probably wouldn't be able to read it anyway, there are polysyllabic words in the book.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.