A heart-felt cry from a sociologist of religion

When I last discussed a book about U.S. white Christianity by Robert P. Jones, CEO of the survey research outfit Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), I was frustrated. His deep collection of data about belief and behavior somehow didn't point to entirely sustainable conclusions.

Now I think I know why that 2016 Jones book evoked those feelings. In 2020, he's written the book which explains what he really thinks: White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. This one is sociological research -- yes -- but also a cri du coeur, a heart-felt protest, against the white evangelical Protestantism he was raised in.

The book's first sentence:

The Christian denomination in which I grew up was founded on the proposition that chattel slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ. It's founders believed this arrangement was not just possible, but also divinely mandated. ...

And he wants it understood that although his own tradition is Southern/Confederate, white supremacy also shaped northern Christianity. None of our white forbears are off the hook in Jones' telling:

... to the dismay of African American abolitionist leaders like Frederick Douglass ... white Christian convictions about the evils of slavery more often than not failed to translate into strong commitments to black equality. 

... White Christian churches have not just been complacent; they have not just been complicit; rather, as the dominant cultural power in America, they have been responsible for constructing and sustaining a project to protect white supremacy and resist black equality. ...

First we -- white Christians -- must learn to see the truth of own racist history. He remembers his own personal story of growing up in Southern Baptist churches in Texas and Mississippi.

... I never once wrestled seriously with our denomination's troubled racist past. ... The most powerful thing about my childhood experience in church was its ability to generate a palpable feeling of living under a protective sacred and social canopy. ... Our church succeeded in generating a culture of protection for most of us in our white, working class corner of southwest Jackson [Miss.]  

... Because of the existing conditions of inequality, late twentieth century white Christian theology didn't necessarily need to actively work against African American civil rights (although it did this too.) Rather, its most powerful tool was its ability to constrict radically the scope of whites' moral vision. ...

Not surprisingly, Jones is highly critical of the theological framework generated within this clubby white religiosity. He particularly indicts white Christianity's location of sin and salvation in the context of a "personal relationship with Jesus." I admit I've never quite resonated with this approach to knowing a good God. But Jones considers what I find baffling as downright pernicious. He insists this peculiar habit of mind underlies white supremacist belief:

... anti-structuralism denotes the deep suspicion with which white evangelicals view institutional explanations for social problems, principally because they believe invoking social structures shifts the blame from where it belongs: with sinful individuals.  

... In the personal Jesus paradigm, Jesus did not die for a cause or for humankind writ large but for each individual person. Responding positively to [Jesus], entering into this relationship, is an intimate decision that must be made freely by each person as an accountable act of will. ... There's nothing in this conceptual model to provide a toehold for thinking about the way institutions or culture shape, promote, or limit human decisions or well-being.

Though he's hardest on his own white evangelical Protestants, Jones doesn't let white mainline Protestantism or white American Catholicism off this hook either, pointing to a growing prominence within these faith traditions of salvation hopes rooted in personal relationship frameworks.

From there, he documents how Christian churches have sacralized and marked the South's Lost Cause in all those Robert E. Lee monuments. In this regard, my Episcopal branch of the faith comes off pretty badly, as "the church of the Confederate elite." And he delves into white Christian participation in lynchings and torture.

Jones concludes with some stories of particular Black and white congregations which have struggled to overcome our ugly history. He's not hopeless about white American Christianity reckoning with its white supremacist culture , but he warns:

Whites, and especially white Christians, have seen this project as an altruistic one rather than a desperate life-and-death struggle for their own future.

This time around, in this book, Jones has put both his life history and his data to challenging, informative use.