White Too Long - Sermon for Week ending August 8, 2020

Reading: 

Our reading is by Frederick Douglass, describing his experience of American Christianity, from Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. 

"I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies that everywhere surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members.  The man who wields the blood-clotting cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. He who sells my sister stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babies sold to purchase bibles for the ‘poor heathen,’ all for the ‘glory of God and the good of souls."

Sermon: 

We are starting a new sermon series this week, using this book,  White Too Long:  The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, by Robert Jones. And we are considering reading it for our New Vision book study. Thank you Debbie for recommending it. Robert Jones is the founder and CEO of Public Religion Research. He also has a Masters of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Seminary and a PhD in religion from Emory University. He defines white supremacy as “the continued prevalence that white people are superior to black and other non-white people, and that white people’s superior nature entitles them to hold positions of power over black and other non-white people.” Jones grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, and it wasn’t until he was in seminary that he learned about its white supremacist roots. And it wasn’t until he was working on his PhD that he felt he could speak honestly about it, which I understand, as it is also my former denomination. Jones begins his discussion about white supremacy and the Southern Baptists, which is just one section of the book, at the dawn of the Civil War, with Reverend Basil Manly, who was one of the top religious leaders who supported slavery, believing that it was part of the ‘divinely ordained order of Christian society.’ It was under Manley’s leadership that Baptists churches in the South withdrew from their Cooperative Fellowship with the North and established the Southern Baptist Convention. In his sermons and his writings, Manly claimed that slave owners, as the superior human species, were protecting black people by enslaving them in a benevolent environment. And the Southern American culture was the ideal setting for both slaves and slave owners. We heard differently in the reading by Frederick Douglass. After the Confederacy was defeated, in order to maintain their belief that they were favored by God, they developed the religion of the lost cause, which you have probably heard of, comparing their military defeat with the crucifixion of Jesus, and saying that just as Christ rose from the grave, the noble Confederacy, which was God’s ideal for human society, would one day rise again. Over a century later, during the struggle for civil rights

for black Americans, white Southern Baptists were still staunch supporters of white supremacy. I know because I was there.  Jones uses as an example the First Baptist Church in his hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, who in 1962 claimed 3 of the most influential segregationists in the whole South, including Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, who in his campaign, claimed that God was the original segregationist, and that God made black people different in order to punish them.

30 years after that, in 1995, The Southern Baptist Convention publicly apologized for its long legacy of racism, which Jones says was a good first step. But it was followed by what he calls, the ‘White Christian Shuffle,’ which emphasizes lament and expects absolution, but says nothing about justice or repair or even change going forward. An example of this one step forward, two steps back shuffle was  in 2012, when the director of the Convention’s ethics commission and one of those who wrote the 1995 apology, said on his radio show, commenting about the murder of Travon Martin, that President Obama had poured gasoline on the fires and that Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were ‘race hustlers who were using the case to try to drum up the black vote for an African American president who is in deep, deep, deep trouble for re-election.’ Jones says that Al Mohler, the current president of Southern Baptist Seminary is also caught up in the White Christian shuffle. In 2015, after white supremacist Dylan roof murdered 9 black people at Emmanuel AME church in Charleston, Mohler posted on the schools’ website that racial superiority was Christian heresy, and he commissioned a report that admitted that the founders of the seminary were deeply involved in slavery and in defending it, and that their successors believed in the inferiority of African Americans. But, in another article during that same year, he wrote that he gladly stands with the seminary’s and the convention’s founders and their affirmation of Baptist orthodoxy, calling them, ‘titans of the faith’ and ‘consummate Christian gentlemen.’ And, as of this writing, he has refused to even consider renaming the campus buildings that were named for them.

The Southern Baptist Church is evolving, slowly, but it is still overwhelmingly white and conservative. As I said, we talked about evolving in our New Vision zoom book group this week, And Jennet said and we all agreed that in order for any real change to happen we have to admit that things need to change. It is not enough to just confess and apologize for the historical roots of racism in the church. We have to recognize our role in allowing racist systems to continue. And then we have to do the hard work of making change happen.