White Evangelical Racism
The Politics of Morality in America
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Descripción editorial
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.
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In this vigorous volume, Butler (The Rise of the New Religious Right) forcefully argues that racism is "a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism." She traces how white evangelicalism has responded to and been influenced by eras of slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights era, and in the rise of the "Moral Majority" and makes a persuasive case that evangelicalism is a "nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others." Butler's narrative revisits famous figures such as Frederick Douglass (whose autobiography "provided fuel for the abolitionist movement" and caused rifts in communities of white evangelicals), Franklin Graham (whose overt Islamophobia demonstrated how "racism became an undeniable aspect of American evangelicals and their public persona"), and Sarah Palin (who "tugged at the heartstrings of older white evangelicals who did not want to see a Black man in the White House") to show how evangelicals' contemporary embrace of right-wing politics is rooted in its centuries-long problem with race. This scathing takedown of evangelicalism's "racism problem" will challenge evangelicals to confront and reject racism within church communities.
