White Too Long 2 - Sermon for Week ending August 15, 2020

Our reading for this week is from White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, by Robert Jones.

Underneath the glossy histories that white Christian churches have written about themselves, is a thinly-veiled, deeply troubling reality. White Christian churches have not just been complacent; they have not only 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. The historical record of Christianity in America reveals that Christian theology and institutions have been the central cultural tent pole holding up white supremacy. And this legacy remains present and measurable in contemporary white Christianity, not only among Evangelicals in the South, but also among mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast.

Sermon:  

We return this week to the book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which challenges us to take an honest look, without becoming defensive, at the Christian Church’s past complicity in white supremacy and racism, to see the ways that it continues in the present, and then to get to work making real changes, so that we can leave something better to future generations. Last week, we talked about the Southern Baptists, the author, Robert Jones’ former denomination, and mine. But as he points out, white supremacy has existed and still exists in all branches of Christian religion. For example, the Southern Methodists, like the Southern Baptists, split with the Northern Methodists because they disagreed about slavery. But both Southern and Northern white Methodists agreed that black people should hold a subservient place in society and in the Church. The roots of the Catholic Church are in colonization. Many prominent slave holders were Catholic, and in 1940’s Harlem, black Catholics were segregated into one parish, regardless of where they lived, and the color line was enforced by priests wielding bullwhips. In the 1940s and 50s, white Presbyterians and Episcopalians used their church- sponsored neighborhood councils to keep black people from moving into white areas.And in 1963, The Lovett School in Atlanta, GA, affiliated with the Episcopal  Church, notified Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that his six-year-old son was being denied admission because of his race. During the Civil rights era, there were leaders of mainline Catholic and Protestant denominations that spoke out against racism, but local congregations carried on as usual. And as the Democratic party became the party of civil rights, white Christians moved to the republican party.

 

What about now? So many people say, ‘The past is past. We weren’t involved in that.’

But have white Christian attitudes changed that much? According to Jones, they haven’t. They just aren’t as blatant as they once were. As I said last week, Jones is the founder and CEO of the Public Religious Research Institute. In chapter 5, entitled Mapping, he puts his research skills to use to try to answer, with data, the question, “How prevalent are racist and white supremacist attitudes among white Christians today?” The biggest hurdle with public opinion surveys, Jones said, is that you can’t get accurate results from asking respondents outright if they are white supremacists or racists. So they first asked white Christians how warmly they felt toward African-Americans on a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 is cold and 100 the warmest. Mainline Protestants and Catholics averaged 67 In warm feelings toward African-Americans.

And white evangelicals were even warmer, 71 out of a 100. But then, the survey asked more specific questions, about symbols of white supremacy, economic and social inequality between white and black people, and the criminal justice system.

And those answers didn’t coincide with the first ones. For example, 75 percent of white Christians said that the Confederate Flag is more a symbol of southern pride than of racism. 83 percent said the Confederate monuments were more a symbol of southern pride than of racism. When asked about the killing of black men by police, 64 percent of white Christians believe that the killings are isolated incidents rather than a broader pattern. When asked how they felt about the  protests of police killings by NFL players taking a knee, 72 percent believe that professional athletes should be required to stand during the National Anthem. 76 percent of white Christians believe that racial minorities use racism as an excuse for economic inequalities more than they should. And 62 percent disagree with this statement: `Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.’ The conclusion, Jones says, is that while white Christian profess to have warm attitudes toward African Americans, ‘they embrace racist and racially resentful attitudes that are inconsistent with that assertion.’ No wonder there is so little justice for African Americans in America. Too many people, too many Christians, don’t want it. They prefer a society where they can maintain their white privilege and supremacy. And this, I am pretty sure, would make the Jesus we see in the gospels weep. And wonder how those who claim to be his followers are thinking and doing the opposite of what he taught.

And perhaps turn over a few tables and declare that this has gone on long enough.

It is time to change. I think that is our charge, and the charge of every white Christian today, to wrestle with and conquer whatever demons of racism handed down to us by our family, our culture, and our church that we still hold on to, and then to go about dismantling this legacy of white supremacy, and helping to create the kind of world that Jesus wanted for us, a world of justice and equality and love for all people.