Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 14: White Evangelical Racism and the history of slavery and white supremacy

Sam Seder's Majority Rupport yesterday feetured an interview with Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (2021). The interview starts at aroun 21:00 in this YouTube video, White Evangelical Racism & The Politics of Morality in America w/ Anthea Butler- MR Live - 4/13/2018:



She provides a helpful historical overview of how evangelical Protestant Christians in the US developed religious justifications for slavery.

I found it particularly interesting how she talks about the way conservative Christians today adapt the idea - which they theoretically hold - that racism is un-Christian, with their political opposition to addressing systemic racism and even supporting suppression of black and brown voters. As she explains it, Christian evangelicalism (both the fundamentalist and more moderate versions) emphasize individual salvation and the relation of the individual to God.

In that religious construction, sin is a matter of individual choice and guilt, not a matter of systems or institutions. Structural racism doesn't fit into this framework.

Of course, this is also pretty obviously a convenient way to deny that there can or should be any systemic, political, or institutional solutions to racial discrimination. Yes, cops who murder black men for no good reason are committing a sin in religious terms and making the kind of "bad choices" that conservative Christians so often talk about.

But it's also happening all across the country and has been for a long time. And police departments are institutions, normally public institutions, and there is a national police culture that is more than one way is badly deficient. If the current problem of police murders of African-Americans is going to be solved, it will not only take determined state action, including federal action to make that happen.

We all live in society. And the Christians and conservatives who focus on individual "bad choices" do too. Conservative churches can contribute to ameliorating or even solving social problems. But they have to be recognized as social problems, not just an infinite number of individual choices.

Here's how Butler reacted to the January 6 lynch mob attack on the US Capitol in real time on Twitter:

No comments:

Post a Comment