TOKENS PODCAST: S4E16
In this episode, Robert P. Jones discusses some of the most distressing realities we have yet to encounter on our show: namely, the racist attitudes and obscene violence – and the simultaneous willful ignorance – perpetuated by white American Christians of all denominations. His study of history, paired with modern socio-scientific research, offers a shocking conclusion that many will find themselves reluctant to accept: “If you take your average white American, and you add Christian identity, they move up the racism index, not down.” But such a confession, he says, is a necessary starting point before there can be any reconciliation.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Robert P. Jones is the CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. Jones writes regularly on politics, culture, and religion for The Atlantic online, NBC Think, and other outlets. He is frequently featured in major national media, such as CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. He holds a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University and a M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of The End of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Jones writes weekly at https://robertpjones.substack.com, a newsletter for those dedicated to the work of truth-telling, repair, and healing from the legacy of white supremacy in American Christianity.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
The content in this particular episode is distressing to me. Our guest points to some conclusions about white Christianity in America that I wish were not true. His claims, and the historical incidents he discusses, are so troubling, in fact, that I found myself in a space of wanting to wish them away. But that serves no good; and to yield to such a temptation would only further perpetuate the failings, the cover-up, the blind spots and ignorance, that contributed to such failings, and to such violence.
No change ever seems possible without acknowledgment of the realities in which we find ourselves.
Robby: It really wasn't until I was 20 and in seminary that I finally had a professor really gave me the story of our own denomination's history and that is that the 1845 Southern Baptist were formed. And they were formed explicitly to justify enslaving other people and to proclaim that that was perfectly compatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Lee: That's Robert P. Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, in Washington DC. Robert is the author of the book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, in which he works through the various historical and socio-scientific studies which led him to this troubling conclusion:
Robby: Take your average white American, and you add Christian identity, they move up the racism index, not down.
Lee: Today, a difficult conversation that requires the sort of self-examination that can, one hopes, shake us from the throes of self-delusion.
Robby: It's now an unavoidable, moral choice, for us. It's in front of us in a way that I think at this point it becomes willful denial. The time of innocent denial, it really has long since passed, but I think today, you have to work at it, not to see it. And that means culpability.
Lee: All this, coming right up.
INTERVIEW
Lee: Robert P. Jones is a CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute and the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity and The End of White Christian America. He's a columnist for The Atlantic writing regularly on politics, culture, and religion, and has been frequently featured in the likes of CNN, NPR, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Also has a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University and an M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a B.S. in Computing Science and Mathematics from Mississippi College. Welcome Robbie.
Robby: Thanks. Glad to be here.
Lee: Yes, glad to have you. I think that you may be the only person I've ever talked to who, like me, did an undergraduate in computer science and then went on to do an M.Div. and a Ph.D. in religion or theology. So, yeah.
Robby: Yeah, I'm not a club of one. That's good.
Lee: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I think another sort of similarity that we share is that, both of our stories didn't began to think a whole lot, certainly at least not theologically about the issues of race until we went to seminary.
Robby: Yeah, you know, I think that's right. Race was fairly invisible to me growing up. It's not something I spent a lot of time thinking about. It's certainly not anything that my church ever talked about growing up.
And I should say I was, I was that kid who was at church like five days a week. I mean, I was there all the time, you know? And if there was a sermon, if there was a Sunday school lesson, if there had been a Bible study about it, I would remember it, and, you know, it was literally silent on the issues of race, racism, white supremacy, et cetera.
And it really wasn't until, you know, I was 20 and in seminary that I finally had a professor, really gave me the story of our own denomination's history. And that is that in 1845 the Southern Baptists were formed. And they were formed explicitly to justify enslaving other people and, to proclaim that that was perfectly compatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
So that's the origin story of Southern Baptist, of my denomination. It's not one that I knew about at all. You know, until, like I said, I had one Baptist history, professor, Leon Macbeth, uh, at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that, I remember him saying, he said, you know, I'm going to give it to you straight. It was about slavery and that's a cold historical fact.
I had never heard that history, despite the fact that it's all right there. And you know, even so I'm 53. Um, and I was in elementary school in the 1970s. And, I remember the first African-American kids showing up to our public school.
And that's kind of remarkable 20 years after Brown v. Board of Education. Right? Is when the Jackson public school system finally got around to integrating my elementary school on the kind of working class side of, Jackson, Mississippi, and our church had absolutely nothing to say about that.
Right? So here we are where kids were seeing this great social transformation in our everyday lives and our churches gave us absolutely no, markers or bearings or any way of understanding what was going on or the role that our churches has had played in segregation in the city.
Lee: Yeah. I mean, that's certainly reflects, I think in many parallels in my own experience in that, I recollect, no, I was similar, um, in sort of church attendance and participation in church life. But I remember next to none, explicit conversations about racial justice in our church. And I remember one of the things that was really remarkable to me, when I first started being introduced to even the history of the Civil Rights Movement was one of our seminary professors.
At the time I was in Abilene, Texas at Abilene Christian, and one of our professors showed us some video clips from the Eyes on the Prize series, which is a sort of marvelous, historical depiction of Civil Rights Movement. But he, showed us a clip about one of the bombings of the buses on the freedom rides.
And I realized that one of the buses that was firebombed, that that happened about 12 miles, literally from my house. And I had never heard that story. You know, we certainly never talked as, as I recollect, at least we never talked about it in church and I don't recollect, hearing, heard stories about it in my schooling experience.
Yet again, it just kind of points to the fact that, the sort of ignorance and I, I want to come back later and talk a little bit about culpability and ignorance, but, uh, I don't want to go there quite yet.
Robby: Yeah.
I mean, when you mentioned 12 miles, I mean, the other thing that I realized as an adult, and it really not until I was like doing the research for this book over the last few years, did I realize, that Medgar Evers, right? Who was assassinated in 1963. That his driveway was 12 miles from my driveway in Jackson, Mississippi.
And if you had asked me who Medgar Evers was in high school, I would have had no idea. Right. This was not a story that got told, in our circles and to put a finer point on it. What very few people, I think even when I sort of learned the story of makeovers, what very few people know, and it again, only dawned on me as I was kind of putting the research together for White Too Long, is that the last act that he did in Jackson, Mississippi was he was organizing a campaign to de-segregate Baptist and Methodist churches in Jackson, that's what he was doing. And the two churches that they had targeted were Galloway Memorial Methodist, which was the home church of the mayor, the segregationist mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, and First Baptist Church.
It was just kind of the tallest steeple in the state and the home of the governor, Ross Barnett, also a strongly segregationist governor. And that's what he was doing. Uh, this is the last campaign he was working on before he was gunned down in his driveway in front of his family. And that the person who gunned him down was a member in good standing at an Episcopalian church in Greenwood, Mississippi, Byron De La Beckwith, upstanding, you know, in his community, thought of as a kind of upstanding Christian man.
But who had also been writing op-eds in the “Delta” newspapers ahead of this saying that if any, black person tried to attend his church, he'd be standing on the steps with a pistol. Um, and so the way in which this is intertwined with Christianity is so deep and right there, and yet this utter silence and kind of cover up, that we never talked about.
Lee: So let's shift a little bit to, you have one chapter in which you talk about what you believe are some of the theological categories that help undergird white supremacy in American white churches. The first one being the sort of explicit defenses of slavery, going back to a Basil Manley, one of the figures in your own tradition, but talk to us a little bit about how you get these explicit theological defenses of slavery and white supremacy.
Robby: Yeah. Well, that's what mainly Senior, again, another figure that should have been very prominent in my Baptist education growing up, but no one I had ever heard of, I mean, he essentially was, the chaplain of the Confederacy. He was a prominent Baptist preacher in the South.
A very gifted order and known for making the theological case that enslaving other people and Christianity were perfectly compatible, uh, with one another. He, most strikingly, was the guy who held the Bible during the swearing in of Jefferson Davis as the president of the, the Confederacy, he gave the inaugural prayer as first president of the Confederacy was being installed into office. And in that prayer he called God's blessings down upon the Confederacy and talked about it as really the Confederacy, and enslaving other people as God's ideal plan for human society. I mean, it was so overt, right?
It was not just sort of an optional way of, of being in the world, and being Christian, but it was like the ideal way that God wanted to see human society set up.
Lee: Hmm. You draw the contrast between the way somebody like Manly and others would have this sort of Southern trope of the loving master and, uh, the grateful slave, and then juxtapose that against Frederick Douglass's description.
Robby: Yeah, I mean, this was always the defense, or a part of the defense, aside from the most explicit defense was that God had actually created white people of European descent all other people and a kind of hierarchy, with white people intended to be over and above others.
Uh, but kind of buttressing this whole argument was slavery as a kind of benign institution. In fact, the argument goes, that not only was slavery benign, but it was beneficial to African-Americans because it brought them into quote unquote, civilization and Christianity, right? This was the idea to kind of raise them up to European levels, the way the argument went.
But it is striking when you compare that, to the testimony of Frederick Douglas, who of course was himself enslaved. In his first autobiography, he has an entire appendix dedicated to his experience with Christianity. And he has this just damning statement where he says, it was kind of the common wisdom among himself and a common experience among himself and other enslaved people that one of the worst things that he said of himself, I knew that one of the worst things that could befall meother than being a slave in itself was being enslaved to a Christian master. And the reason that he said that is that he said that, there was this kind of paradoxical way in which the blessings of Christianity on the institution of slavery actually gave permission for greater cruelty.
Christian slave masters to slaves, and he said, this was kind of common knowledge that, bad enough to be enslaved.
But if you knew you were being sold or found yourself enslaved in a Christian household, you knew your fate was going to be worse.
Lee: As I recollect he even tells this story of one particular slave master who had not been a Christian, had been cruel enough. And then after his conversion, that cruelty got all the more multiplied.
Robby: That's right. And this is his own experience. Yeah, got more cruel and would cite Bible verses, you know, about sparing the lash and, you know, the other thing. So again, the kind of justification, what Christianity essentially provided was, a justification for, and even an amplification of the cruelty, you know. He would be whipping people and shouting Bible verses, which he wasn't doing before.
Lee: Another significant theological piece you add, it’s this so-called religion of a Lost Cause. And again, this one, I think this was another thing that I was completely ignorant of until I, one of my seminary professors had us start reading some on the so-called religion of the Lost Cause. But for those who may be unfamiliar with that, describe that and describe how that theological lens plays out.
Robby: Yeah, me as well. I mean, it's not something I grew up thinking about, even though I was living among it, right? This kind of religion of the Lost Cause, it didn't have a name, it had a reality for me, but it didn't really have a name. But, you know, reading historians, Charles Reagan Wilson and others, you know, what really developed after the defeat of the civil war, Mark A. Noll has been great about identifying, you know, the Civil War as a theological crisis.
It was a crisis of worldview, a crisis of theology, because again, the white Christian world and the Confederacy saw this as a moment of establishing, you know, God's ideal on earth. And so when it all came crashing down, uh, it pretty much blew up those claims and that worldview.
And so one of the things that developed out of that was, uh, what got dubbed, the Lost Cause theology. And that is that okay, even if we have political defeat in the civil war. And, you’ve heard these slogans, the South will rise again. We will be vindicated. And in fact, you can see this on major Confederate monuments.
This motto, God will vindicate, it's often in Latin. And so for example, on one of the largest Confederate monuments that got installed in the early 1900’s in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, to Jefferson Davis, includes a five story column with a gold statue of a woman, with her finger pointing toward the heavens, right? Kind of pointing toward God and right under her in Latin, it says, God will vindicate. Right? This was put up in like 1904. Not, not during the civil war, but afterward as, people were still laying claim to this idea of a kind of Confederate like society was yet going to rise from the ashes. And it was all wrapped up in a really white supremacist Christian worldview.
Lee: So not to belabor the point here, but just to make something a little more obvious here. So, are you suggesting that there is an explicit awareness or overlay of the gospel narrative of crucifixion and resurrection being overlaid upon defeat of the Confederacy and the South will rise again?
Robby: Yeah, there's a direct overlay there. I mean, it's, again, it's so overt in history and yet it has been so hidden, I think for me. So what do we have after the Civil War? We had reconstruction, right? Which was the federal government, kind of taking over many governments in the South, ensuring that African-Americans could vote.
It results in the election of many, uh, first African-American officials in the South. Uh, but what very, very quickly happened is, there was not enough federal enforcement and it fell apart. And when whites in the South wrestled control back of those governments, often through violent coups, such as in Wilmington, South Carolina, and Colfax, Louisiana and in other places. What did they call it?
They called it redemption, right? Um, kind of borrowing from their Christian… So it really did have a Christian narrative to it, that there was this idea of redemption. And Lost Cause was not pessimistic actually, but hopeful, right? That at some near time in the future, I mean, it had it, an eschatology, to it, right?
And in many ways it, you know, again, these kind of tropes of the second coming of Christ, there was going to be this resurrection of this world that had crumbled after the Civil War.
Lee: Another significant theological piece you point to is a sort of shift in eschatology.
Robby: Yeah, again, it's related to this idea that there was this very hopeful. Um, I mean, when you read the prayers and sermons of Confederate supporting Christians in the South, there is so much optimism and enthusiasm. I mean it often refers to God's kingdom here on earth, right out of the Lord's prayer.
That's what they saw the Confederacy as being. So their hopes were up in the stratosphere. And then when defeat came, it really did present this great crisis. And so one of the things that happens is theologically people started wrestling with, what does all this mean for us?
And one of the real key worldview shifts is that, prior to the civil war you know, if you thought about eschatology, most Christians did have this idea that the job of Christians was to help bring God's kingdom to earth, right? To kind of make society better and better. Uh, and that the second coming of Christ was going to come when there had been this kind of upward trend, in human society, that human society was an upward trajectory. And what happens right after the Civil War is that that eschatology radically shifts. And instead of this idea that we're building, uh, God's kingdom here on earth, and things are getting better and better, there was a radical shift to this idea, that no, actually things are getting worse and worse. And it's not until they kind of hit the pit, right? It was only Jesus coming again that’s going to set these things right. And so what it means is that, that idea really does undercut any concerns about things like Civil Rights or social justice, and in the modern context, climate change, ‘cause those are seen to be things that, you know, the world is supposed to be getting worse and worse in this worldview, right. And it's only Christ coming at the end, that's gonna set it up.
And so, that was a direct shift to the collapse of this Confederate Lost Cause mindset after the Civil War. And we're still, with us today. The Scofield Reference Bible, which any of us who have traveled in Baptist and other conservative white circles, published again, kind of turn of the century, uh, but was the thing that really cemented this view of eschatology, right?
That things were going to get worse and worse. And only at the end is Jesus going to come back. But it was directly related to this crisis after the Civil War.
Lee: Another a related piece that seems to play a significant role in all of this is a sort of view of salvation as individualistic. That the locus of salvation is individualized as opposed to socials. So how does that play out?
Robby: This is, really, uh, maybe the, one of the strongest ways that I think white Christian theology has harbored white supremacy, just to say it bluntly. And this idea of a personal Jesus, right, that comes into your heart. Like that's the language. If there was any language I heard over and over, it was let Jesus come into your heart. Right?
All of that is a very personalized individualized way of thinking about salvation. And I think what it ends up doing is it makes the entire end of being Christian all about a kind of interior state, you know, and so you obsess over maybe individual sin. Like, you know, in sort of the Baptist circles I grew up in, it was often around sex or drinking or, you know, those kinds of things. Uh, but it's all about kind of your individual vices really. But it's not about what we're doing in the world and how we're treating our fellow citizens in the world, that becomes very truncated. So it's almost like near-sighted glasses that you put on, right.
That you could only see just a few feet out, and it limits your ability to see anything further than that. And, you know, there's, no one who captured that better, I think, than Martin Luther king Jr. in his letter from Birmingham jail.
And I'd read that, you know, back in graduate school, but it really came back and I don't think I really realized the perceptiveness, the theological perceptiveness of this one line in there, where he's kind of, you know, he's looking around the churches in Birmingham who are sitting on the sidelines or worse, in the way and telling him to wait, not to push, right, for civil rights. And he's mystified. He, because he can't figure out how Christians can be ambivalent or complacent about equality and social justice. And he has this line where he, again, he's kind of in dismay. And he says, who are these white Christians sitting safely behind they're anesthetizing stained glass windows.
Lee: Hmm.
Robby: I used a metaphor of vision or short-sightedness, but I think that's another way of thinking about it, that, one of the things this personal Jesus and this kind of very limited way of thinking about salvation, it actually does have the consequence of anesthetizing our moral sensibilities to things around us, to things outside those stained glass windows, because all of our focus is just on ourselves. So it's a very narcissistic really way of thinking about salvation. But again, it's such a powerful trope, that I think most white Christians haven't given it much thought about how it does kind of dull our moral conscience when it has to do with our fellow human beings.
Lee: You alluded to this, but perhaps a helpful. For somebody who's listening, who might think, well, what's the alternative to that kind of vision of salvation? You point rightfully so, I think to. That often that’s what you have for example, in black churches is readings of salvation that takes seriously, for example, the Exodus narrative, which is taking seriously, the salvific work of God in the world as a historical, social, reality that changes and challenges, structures of power that be and so forth. Or as I often tell my students, you know, that one of the ways you can translate Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is to say, seek first the kingdom of God and its justice. We prefer the translation righteousness, because it seems to have a much more kind of individualized, pietistic sort of sound, I think, but when we rightfully translate it seek first the kingdom of God and it's justice, that opens us up to other possibilities than this sort of narrow individualized vision.
Robby: Right. And again, it's, everywhere, right? I mean, both the Old Testament and the New Testament. You know, we have put into the mouth of God. God's saying like, look, don't come and worship me at the altar if something's wrong between you and your brother and sister, go and get that right first. Right?
And that's the only way you can come and genuinely worship. We, I think most white Christians have not taken that quite seriously. That is really has been, well, as long as we're in my heart, I'm okay. But I don't really have to interrogate my external relationships, particularly to people who don't look like me.
Lee: Yeah. Also in your book you do a lot of history with us. But let me kind of maybe weave into some of the history by asking you to tell the story that I think you set up early in the book as a very distressing, I would say, even horrific, illustration of the ways in which cultural historical occurrences illustrate this problematic link between American white churches and white supremacy.
With the story of the lynching of Samuel Thomas Wilkes.
Robby: Um, yeah. it's such a painful story. I mean, you know, I've, studied it a lot. I wrote about it. I end up talking about it a lot and my heart just sinks every time it comes back up again, when I hear his name. Uh, so he was a man, accused of killing his white employer and raping his wife, which is a common trope, in the South, the accusations of rape.
He was hunted down by a posse. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was publishing these kind of salacious stories and calling on him to be lynched, actually in the, in the newspaper. Uh, so he was finally caught, taken by a mob from the jail on a Sunday, um, in Newnan Georgia.
And it's just horrific. They pulled him from the jail, parading him around town and it was about the time that church was coming out. And so they passed by Central Baptist Church, number of other churches on the town square. And there was literally a parade of people holding him aloft.
They would hoist him aloft for everyone to see and cheer, but there were people streaming out of churches and joining this parade, like coming from worship services. And if that weren't enough, word got out to Atlanta, which is in those days a little bit further away. And word got out and the same thing happened in Atlanta.
There were hundreds and hundreds of people, who when church let out, they went straight from church to the train station, to catch a train to Newnan, explicitly to join the lynching so much so that there were so many of them, they had to a special trains to accommodate everyone.
And conductors were yelling, you know, on the platform “this way to the burning.” Even at the event, there’s records of people, reporters who were there recorded people saying things that you would hear at a revival. Like, there was an older man, so one reporter reported as the fire was being set, uh, who was shouting “glory, glory be to God.”
And it just had this kind of carnival last revivalist kind of feel, to this horrific event and, you know, this was one of, you know, 4,400 documented lynching’s in the country. Many of whom I, I told a few other stories. Um, there is one in Springfield, Missouri, where I also used to live. That one happened on Easter Sunday.
And they actually not only printed postcards of the charred bodies strung up, uh, in the town square. Uh, but there were even coins that were minted, like commemorative coins of the thing that were stamped Easter offering. It's just horrific.
Lee: we just come off of the September 11 20th anniversary remembrances. And I was struck again, by the ways in which the public conversation about 9/11 so often says that September 11 was the largest terrorist attack on American soil. And yet for a number of years, people active in racial justice have been saying, no, actually 4,400 people lynched in the country is the largest act of racial terror or terrorism generally that has ever occurred on American soil.
And it seems like even that's another kind of instance in which we have this sort of persistent and widespread naiveté, ignorance, willful ignorance about our history. But any commentary on that, or thoughts on that?
Robby: Yeah, right. Well, you know, this year we also had, the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. And I think again we haven't told the truth really about the white Christian churches and their involvement. In that massacre, and I did some digging, for example, like virtually every white minister…
So this happened on a Tuesday and Wednesday, estimates were about 300 people, killed hundreds of others.
300 African-American killed, over a period of two days by just roaming bands of their white neighbors, over a day and a half, period. And the entire section of African American town burned down. And so this happens Tuesday, Wednesday. So the following Sunday, some of the sermons are still available, what got preached from white pulpits. And from one of the biggest pulpits in town from Boston Avenue Methodist, um, the Church is still there. The Bishop from Dallas actually came up to give them the sermon, right, to kind of make sure he put his appropriate authoritative stamp, on the response. And he very quickly blamed it on the African-American community, justified the white response you know, and then basically said, you know, if whites bear any responsibility, we have been too lenient with our Negro workers.
Like that was the logic and it allowed vice to spread. And this is how it overflowed. And it said nothing about the white violence. There was a sideways, uh, remark, justifying the clan, uh, even in the sermon. So, and then explicitly says, even in the wake of that kind of violence in the sermon says, you know, this one thing we should be clear.
Social and political equality between white and black people in Tulsa is something that's not good for the white man or the black man. You know, so that's the service that gets delivered, from the church, and, and for most other, white churches in Tulsa.
I, I should say that, a hundred years later that church actually had a hundred days of lament, this year, for its role in that, and I think that's quite significant. And those kinds of things are happening today. I think it's important, but this history is so deep and so awful that it's almost hard to believe.
I think that's part of it. It's almost hard to take in that it was this prevalent, this common, and this violent.
Lee: So, let me dig in just a touch more to some of the history there then. You do a very helpful, and for me was, unexpected. As I reflected upon it I thought, yeah, I see that now, but I don't know that I had quite thought about it in the way you put it, where you talked about the ways in which after the Civil War, there's a sort of rather quick reconciliation between North and South in that you had people who formerly, those who were in favor of slavery and those who were opposed to slavery, but that they kind of reconcile around white supremacy. And that we should keep a distinction between support or not of slavery and white supremacy. That those are two different issues.
Robby: Yeah, no, I'm with you. This distinction, was not one that I had before I started digging in and doing this research for the book. And if something's all over Frederick Douglas’s work, I mean, he was probably one of the most angry and dismayed people, because what he found is that his, what he thought were his comrades, in the abolitionists movement.
He thought, not surprisingly that they'd be for black equality. Uh, but it turned out that many of them were just against the institution of slavery, but had no intentions of being, you know, behind any reordering of society to provide real equal rights. Um, and so yeah, the, kind of opposition to slavery, the abolitionists movement was not necessarily in, in, and in most cases, it seems not connect it to any idea of equality between the races.
It was simply about the evil of that institution. And Douglas was dismayed at how quickly those, the whites mended the fences North and South precisely in that way. One kind of graphic example to put it in Christian context is Charles Finney, who was known to be, he's a New York Presbyterian abolitionist preacher, really outspoken on the issue of slavery. And he had a young protégé that was going to set up, uh, interracial worship service. And Finney wrote back to him and said oh no, no, no, no. You err in supposing that the principles of abolition and amalgamation are the same, and just said, there's no way we're doing that right.
Yes, we're against slavery, but we're not for social equality. And I think we're still wrestling with that, you know, so even as little things would come down. Like, people will say, well, okay, I'm not for segregated schools, right? But this underlying sense. Uh, and it really, when I've used the word white supremacy, I should just say a quick word about that.
You know, I really am thinking not just about these acts of violence, but about a more fundamental idea that I think has been with us and still is with us today. And that is just to kind of underlying belief that white lives are more valuable than others, right? And that they should be protected.
They should be given the best schools, the best jobs, the best opportunities, at the expense of other people. And I, there's no way you can read our history without seeing.
Wow. That's the way that the laws have been set up. So even though many people would not like to say that out loud, you know, supporting separate schools, restricting jobs, redlining it. There's not a city in the country, right, that you can't look at and see the result of redlining.
That is, the government realtors, all collaborating and colluding to protect whites only neighborhoods from encroachment by anyone who wasn't white. And churches, by the way, we're often anchor partners in those neighborhood covenants, you know, both when it was legal and even after it was not legal, but there could be private agreements.
Churches were often kind of the anchor institutions where those neighborhood associations met and were party to those agreements themselves.
Lee: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
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This is our interview with Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute in Washington DC, and the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.
Part two in just a moment.
HALFWAY POINT
Lee: Welcome back to Tokens and our interview with Robert P. Jones.
I didn't catch this until I was reading the acknowledgements at the very end of your book. But you allude to the fact that your wife does academic work herself in a performance art area. And that gave me language to think about your storytelling around Confederate monuments. And that is that a lot of the defense of Confederate monuments has always couched in terms of respect of history. But I think one of the things that you're helping us see there is that the erection of the monument was much more an act, not of observing careful history, but was an act of performance art that was trying to communicate something about domination.
But describe that to us and talk to us a little bit more about the history so that people, if people are unfamiliar with the timeline and how this unfolded, they might be able to begin to see that.
Robby: Yeah. Well, thank you for that. Yeah. As someone who grew up in the South, where there's, every other corner there's a Confederate marker of some kind up, I mean, these things were all around me growing up and were so Prominent. Again, kind of like a fish in water. I didn't give them much thought and because I'm white, I didn't give them much thought.
You know, but the eye-opener for me is exactly what you said. It is the timeline, right? That really helps you see what's going on. It should give kind of a hat tip here to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who's done the real tracking of the initial tracking of this. There's also a new organization called the Monument Lab, that actually has a report coming out in just a couple of weeks, where they kind of have been mapping America's history with monuments to kind of give you the contextual understanding. But when you map them, and I include a graph of this in the book, over time, like if you just take the frequency of monuments that go up in a given year or given decade, what you'll see is that the bulk of them were not built in and around the Civil War, even immediately following the Civil War. The bulk of them start getting built in the 20th century actually. And there's a big spike in the 1920s. And so the other thing that happens in the teens and twenties, is that there's also spike of lynching’s in the country, right?
So these things go hand in hand. And there's also an avalanche. This is when the Jim Crow laws really take off and get set up of re-segregating the country. Again, after the Civil War, after reconstruction, it's whites resting control back of the apparatus. So all the restrictions on voting, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, all that kind of stuff to keep African-Americans from voting, and terror and intimidation, by the second rising of the Klan.
And these monuments go up, right? So you've got terrorism, laws, and these public markers. Right? So if you didn't get the message from the terrorism and you didn't get the message from the laws, when you walk down the public square and you see on the courthouse grounds, like these big monuments to the Confederacy.
It really is, I called the chapter marking is the name I gave the chapter, because like a dog or an animal, you know, peeing on the corner bush to kind of mark its territory. I mean, this is really what this was. It was sending an unequivocal message, both to the African-Americans and other non-white people in the community that they were second class citizens.
Uh, and it could expect a kind of second class justice from those courts if that monument is sitting right there on the courthouse steps. And it was a message. This was very clear from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which was responsible for putting up the vast majority of these. It’s basically a Christian women's movement, responsible for putting these up.
And it was a message to the next generation of white children. It was about instilling a sense of white supremacy into the next generation of white kids. And so when you see it in that regard, it's clearly, yeah, it's not really about history. It really is about power, and a declaration of literally white power in the face of the struggle for civil rights.
Lee: Alongside your theological categories that we've discussed and alongside the history, uh, both histories of America. You do a lot fascinating autobiographical storytelling as well, but you also have this very significant social science research piece, which fits with your day job, I suppose, with the PRRI. But this correlation between white Christianity and racism. And let me quote you here, you say at one point, quote, most white Christian churches continue to serve consciously or not, as the mechanisms for transmitting and reinforcing white supremacist attitudes among new generations, end quote. Which, I think that's probably, in my mind, that's one of the most provocative slash indicting statements in the book.
But tell us how you see it that way, how so?
Robby: Yeah. well, you know, the book kind of has three components. One is, as you said, memoir, the other one's history and the other one is social science. And so, you know, I don't come to that statement lightly. I do think you could legitimately get to that statement from the history alone, from understanding the way that institutions work and the way that institutions pass things down. I mean, it is the very purpose of institutions, right? That's why we have churches, for example, to pass down our version of Christianity to the next generation. That’s why we have denominations and churches in those denominations.
It is an intergenerational transmission vehicle. I mean, that's really what we built them for. And so apart of that transmission, and the way those things function, it passes down all kinds of things. Some things that we don't want to pass down, even, that is sometimes passed down as part of the tradition.
But, uh, the social science data, I think makes it even more clear. So I not only want to look at the history but look at where American and Christian attitudes were today. So one of the best ways to do that is to use contemporary public opinion data. So that is what I do at my day job at, PRRI. And so I used a, a very large survey that we'd done, in 2018, to take a look at a whole range of attitudes on race, systemic racism, et cetera.
So I asked about Confederate monuments and flags. I asked about the influence of past discrimination on the president, the influence of slavery on the president. Also some more contemporary things about criminal justice, whether African-Americans receive equal. Whether, uh, the shooting of African-Americans by police are isolated incidents, or whether they're part of a pattern how police treat African-Americans.
So a whole range of things.
At the end of the day, I ended up with 15 questions that all correlated quite tightly together. And I put them on a, a composite index and kind of scaled it from zero to 10.
With 10 being holding the most racist attitudes, zero being, holding the least racist attitudes, uh, across all these items.
And what I found was, that white Christian was on a whole score toward the upper end of that scale. White evangelicals, which is the group I grew up in and more prevalent in the South, scored eight out of 10. That may not be so surprising. That is the area of the Confederacy, down in the Southeast, where these groups are more dominant, but perhaps what was more surprising is that white mainline Protestants or non-evangelical Protestants that are more prevalent in the Northeast and the upper Midwest, also scored seven out of 10. And white Catholics who have their own history of discrimination scored seven out of 10. And because I wanted to see what work Christianity was doing among whites, I also compared this to whites, Americans, who are religiously unaffiliated, not Christian. And the gap there is huge.
They only score four out of 10 on this scale. So essentially what the social science data tells you, is if you take your average white American and you add Christian identity, they move up the racism index, not down.
Lee: It's very, very difficult to, um, to hear that.
I, I'm imagining different possible retorts that folks might raise in response to that. One might be, those aren't real Christians. How do you give an account for that?
Robby: Yeah. You know, I, I thought of this too, and I'm with you. I mean, it, you know, when I first saw the pattern of this data, I checked it like four or five times ‘cause I had a similar reaction. I was like, oh, well, I, that can't possibly be right. But it turns out it is. And I even, so then I did check ‘cause exactly that. People might say well maybe these are just Christians in name only, right? People who just claim the faith, but they don't go to church. They're not connected to Bible study or the exposed to preaching or in community, people that haven't been formed, right, in Christian community. So I actually checked, uh, so we had. The best proxy we had for that was attendance, to look at people who attended more frequently and less frequently to kind of get a proximity to churches, to see what I can see. And overall, it turned out that if I look at white Christians as a whole, that church attendance essentially made no difference, right? Uh, that, the views, the connections between white supremacy or holding racist attitudes and identifying as white and Christian, were just as strong as among those who attended frequently and infrequently.
However, when I dove down and looked just at white evangelical Protestants, I found something even more disturbing. That, the relation church going is significant, but in the opposite direction that you might think. In other words, the strength of the relationship between holding more racist attitudes and identifying as a white evangelical Christian is actually stronger among those who go to church more, right, rather than, than those that go to church less.
That is just quite, yeah, troubling, when you really take that in. And, you know, I think that there is a, a sense, and even in my own self, as I was kind of processing the data, again, it kind questions like, well, how can this possibly be, as someone who grew up inside the church.
But you know, I think the more that I've sat with it, the more, and certainly the more history that I've really taken in and understood. And, and when I've talked to other folks to, that question, how can this be. In light of the history, it kind of transforms into, well, you know, how could this be otherwise, given the history?
Lee: So I'm no, I'm no statistician. But I know that there's a difference between correlation and causation, right?
So are you, are you making a claim about correlation or causation?
Robby: Yeah. It's somewhere in between. It's stronger than correlation. But the lines go both directions, right? So causation also applies from one thing to another. It's kind of hard to entangle the causality, but, I did go beyond correlation. So one of the things you can do in statistics is you could test to see whether there's an independent relationship between one variable and another, right?
Cause it could also be, oh, well, I see this correlation between white Christian identity and holding racial attitudes, but maybe that's really about political. It's about politics, right? It's about being Republican or Democrat or it's urban versus rural arts about education. It's about college educated versus not, those kinds of things.
So what I basically did to kind of kick that tire was put all these things into a statistical model where I can isolate all of those other factors and hold them steady. And then see if I hold all that stuff steady, is there still this independent connection, uh, between, holding more racist attitudes, and identifying as white and Christian? And I actually thought that a lot of the effect might disappear, uh, when I control for political party, for example, or education.
And it turns out it doesn't, it's actually quite robust, even when you control for all of those things. The predicted probability of being white and Christian, as you go up the, if you move like all the way from zero to 10 on the, on the racism index, for example, It goes up 20 points. Even holding all that stuff constant.
It is an independent, predictive, you know, variable here. If you boil it all down? What it really does mean is that, Christianity is doing a significant part of the work, in this relationship.
Lee: I was also fascinated to say that there, if I understood one of the studies or charts that you had there, that there seems to be a stronger predictive index with regard to the Northeast versus other regions of the United States. Did I read that correctly?
Robby: Yeah, it's interesting when you control for region and you kind of go down into the regional levels, and this is something also interesting is that actually operational cause one of the other things that could be that it's so strong in the South, that if you're just looking at national data and the South just swamps everything.
And it looks like it's happening everywhere, but it's really in the South. So I also dove down and did independent regional analysis to kind of protect against that worry that the Southern data was swamping everything else. Turns out it's not. And that the way I kind of write about this in lay terms, after crunching the data, is that what we see in current public opinion attitudes is it's almost as if there was a kind of cartel agreement among white Christian groups that just divided up the country. And white evangelicals said we'll take care of the South, kind of upholding this connection between, uh, holding, racist attitudes and connecting it to Christianity. We'll handle that in the South. You Catholics handle that in the Northeast, especially in the urban centers. And you white mainline Protestants can handle it particularly in the upper Midwest, where there's a bunch of Lutherans and the like in the upper Midwest. And that's what the data really looks like.
So is not just a Southern thing. And in fact that some of them you're right in the Northeast, you can actually see slightly stronger connections when you isolate it. Just in the Northeast.
Lee: I found myself numerous times in reading your book grappling with the notion of the culpability of our ignorance or how we think about blame and ignorance or moral guilt and ignorance. And so, for example on page 118, you say quote, in retrospect, the most remarkable thing about my growing up in the deep South, is how massive contradictions somehow evaded seriously moral or religious interrogation. And there, you're speaking about kind of the prevalence of not only Confederate monuments, but the reality of white supremacy all around you juxtaposed against practices of Christianity. And that there's not an obvious sense in your experience, there's not this sort of cry of wait a second. There's tension here, right? And then you say, quote, this juxtaposition produced virtually no cognitive dissonance. And then you conclude that section by saying it is a testimony to their power that as late as the 1980s, these symbols could escape Christian or moral interrogation.
So I wonder sometimes. The fact that there is this lack of moral interrogation about these apparent contradictions, I think, allows maybe white Christians to say, well, I'm not racist. And I'm not a part of the problem because we don't have these interrogations of what it seems to be such apparent tensions or contradictions. And so my question or my sense of being ill at ease about this is not sufficiently coalesced here, but I don't know any response or what would you make of what I just said there?
Robby: Yeah. I mean, I guess the first thing I would say is that as I've become more aware, is that it's required quite an enormous amount of energy to keep these contradictions from coming to the surface. So It's required, you know, like we were talking before, an entire theology, right, that is essentially designed to put moral blinders on white Christians to keep these things from being visible. And so I think a lot of, I mean, like King, I, I think King's letter from Birmingham jail is exactly him wrestling with this problem. And we already talked about that, but I think it is him going, how do white Christians not see this, right?
I mean, he really is wrestling with this problem, in complete dismay. And I think it is a testimony to its power, um, that it has been able to hold such blatant contradictions from enslaving other people based on the color of their skin to mass incarceration, to kind of mocking the black lives matter movement.
All of this stuff is erecting, these, these huge monuments the Confederacy. All of this I think is part of bigger worldview. So I, you know, I guess you're right. And there's a way in which people are so caught up in it, it's hard to see, but I think one of the things about our current moment, particularly over the last year, I mean, we have seen an explosion of the black lives matter movement over the last year that was not just national, you know, with, protests in cities, all across the country, but international. We saw cricket teams, uh, in India, talking about black lives matter, right? Um, and, and major league baseball, had it on the mound, right.
Uh, so the idea, I think it's increasing unlikely defense to say I can no longer see it. I no longer thought about it. Nobody's brought it up. I think the last thing I write in the book is that, it's now an unavoidable moral choice for us it's in front of us, in a way that I think at this point it becomes willful denial.
The time of innocent dial, it really has long since passed, but I think today, you have to work at it, not to see it, right? That means culpability.
Lee: Yeah. And you've got this great quote from Edmund Burke there. An event has happened upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to remain silent, which is a quite on point there, I think. You suggest that perhaps white Christians especially should be careful about, or kind of give up the language of reconciliation and instead, perhaps start employing the language of racial justice and repair, and then you kind of give us some examples of that.
So could you kind of, as we kind of get close to closing out here, point us towards some of the things that you think are happening that are tending in helpful directions.
Robby: Yeah. I should give a shout out to Jennifer Harvey here, whose work has been really helpful. She basically observed, uh, and did her first book Dear White Christians, was looking at churches wrestling with this. And what she found there was exactly this, that the model that most white Christians most naturally were attracted to was a model of reconciliation. Now it's understandable, right? Um, that we want things to be well between us and our fellow citizens of color. But there's a way in which it is self-serving I think if you're white and that's why I've kind of pushed back a little bit.
And what I've argued is that, you know, really, what that often lets white Christian skip is confession and repentance, uh, and the work of justice, right? We can just skip all of that messy stuff and go straight to the good stuff of reconciliation, where we all feel good about ourselves. But I think the only real way to get to reconciliation, and this is really, you know, the biblical model. This is not me sort of speaking up here, but you know, again, if you know, you've done something, if something's wrong between you and your brother and sister, you first go and get that right.
And I think for white Christians, that means that we got to learn to tell a truer story about ourselves, about our country, and about our churches. And if we can learn to do that, that puts us in place of confession. Uh, and then the next step is to repair the damage. Right? If we, confess that we've harmed other people, then we've got to think seriously about, how do we begin to repair that damage?
And I think that's really the work for white Christians, that they kind of focus on truth-telling confession, and really repentance and repair. If we do enough of that work, our fellow Christians of color are going to tell us when we're reconciled, right? So I think we don't have to aim at reconciliation directly.
And in fact, I think white Christians are in trouble if they do aim it at it directly. They really should aim at truth-telling and repair, confession and repentance. And that those actually are building the road to reconciliation. And again, our fellow citizens of color they'll tell us when we've gotten there.
Lee: We've been talking to Robert P. Jones, CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute. And most recently the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. Thank you so much, Robby, for your time and for your good work for us.
Robby: No. Thanks. Enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for having me.
Lee: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
For more on this history of Christianity as it relates to racism, check out our episodes with Randall Balmer, Kristin Du Mez, and Willie James Jennings. Or check out our very first episode, Season one, episode one, with journalist Jerry Mitchell, whose investigative work contributed to convictions in 24 cold murder cases from the Civil Rights era, including the assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi.
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