Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Humanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Humanism. Show all posts

Sunday, July 18, 2021

Forums for Diversity - The Challenge for Birding Societies Everywhere

June 3, 2021
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Corina Newsome is a Black ornithologist, as rare as some of the birds she studies.

When she joined Georgia Audubon last year, the group’s executive director called her hiring a first step to “begin working to break down barriers” so that people from all communities can fully enjoy birding and the outdoors.

But overcoming those barriers will be daunting. As with the wider field of conservation, racism and colonialism are in ornithology’s DNA, indelibly linked to its origin story. The challenge of how to move forward is roiling White ornithologists as they debate whether to change as many as 150 eponyms, names of birds that honor people with connections to slavery and supremacy.

The Bachman’s sparrow, Wallace’s fruit dove and other winged creatures bear the names of men who fought for the Southern cause, stole skulls from Indian graves for pseudoscientific studies that were later debunked, and bought and sold Black people. Some of these men stoked violence and participated in it without consequence.

Even John James Audubon’s name is fraught in a nation embroiled in a racial reckoning. Long the most recognized figure in North American birding for his detailed drawings of the continent’s species, he was also an enslaver who mocked abolitionists working to free Black people. Some of his behavior is so shameful that the 116-year-old National Audubon Society — the country’s premier bird conservation group, with 500 local chapters — hasn’t ruled out changing its name. An oriole, warbler and shearwater all share it.

“I am deeply troubled by the racist actions of John James Audubon and recognize how painful that legacy is for Black, Indigenous and people of color who are part of our staff, volunteers, donors and members,” interim chief executive Elizabeth Gray said in a statement in May. “Although we have begun to address this part of our history, we have a lot more to unpack.”

For Newsome, community engagement manager for Georgia Audubon, the pain is real. When she first wore her organization’s work shirt, “I felt like I was wearing the name of an oppressor,” she said, “the name of someone who enslaved my ancestors.”

She and other ornithologists of color deal with added layers of discomfort while doing research. Alex Troutman, a Black graduate student at Georgia Southern University, says he goes out of his way to smile and wave at every White passerby when he’s in a marsh or field “to appear as least threatening as possible” and ease suspicions that he shouldn’t be there.

Corina Newsome, an ornithologist and community engagement manager for Georgia Audubon, is pushing to make her profession more diverse and inclusive. (Nydia Blas for The Washington Post)
Corina Newsome, an ornithologist and community engagement manager for Georgia Audubon, is pushing to make her profession more diverse and inclusive. (Nydia Blas for The Washington Post)
Ornithologist Olivia Wang, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, says her field’s troubling, racist past must be addressed. (Michelle Mishina for The Washington Post)
Ornithologist Olivia Wang, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, says her field’s troubling, racist past must be addressed. (Michelle Mishina for The Washington Post)

Offensive eponyms compound that sense of not belonging. Despite professional and amateur birding groups’ declared commitment to diversity, only two names have been discarded.

The Townsend’s warbler and the Townsend’s solitaire still invoke John Kirk Townsend, whose journals detail his exploits in traditional Native Americans burial grounds in the West. Townsend, a Philadelphia-born ornithologist in the early 1800s, dug up and collected skulls for studies that sought to prove the inferiority of Indigenous people.

The Wallace’s owlet and five other birds honor Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist, explorer and anthropologist credited, along with Charles Darwin, for conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection. Wallace’s writings frequently used the n-word, including in reference to the “little brown hairy baby” he boasted about caring for after fatally shooting her mother during an 1855 trip to the Malay Archipelago. Some historians believe they were orangutans.

Three birds, including the crimson Jameson’s firefinch, are named after another British naturalist involved in a heinous act committed against a young girl he purchased as “a joke” in 1888 during an expedition in Africa. James Sligo Jameson wrote in his journal that the girl was then given to a group of natives described to him as cannibals. He drew sketches of the child being stabbed and dismembered.

“Conservation has been driven by white patriarchy,” said J. Drew Lanham, a Black ornithologist and professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, “this whole idea of calling something a wilderness after you move people off it or exterminate them and that you get to take ownership.”

Lanham views the issues as part of a much larger historic pattern, one connected to the White enslavers who renamed Africans kidnapped from that continent’s West Coast. “They renamed an entire people” — cancel culture on a global scale, he noted.

In Honolulu, ornithologist Olivia Wang is equally harsh. She regards the honorifics that birds carry with disdain.

“They are a reminder that this field that I work in was primarily developed and shaped by people not like me, who probably would have viewed me as lesser,” said Wang, an Asian American graduate student at the University of Hawaii. “They are also a reminder of how Western ornithology, and natural exploration in general, was often tied to a colonialist mind-set of conquering and exploiting and claiming ownership of things rather than learning from the humans who were already part of the ecosystem and had been living alongside these birds for lifetimes.”

Indeed, White explorers, conservationists and scientists who crossed the world conveniently ignored the fact that birds had been discovered, named and observed by native people for centuries before their arrival.

To the Cherokee, eagles are the awâ'hili and crows are kâgû. The English common name for the chickadee is a butchered translation of the Cherokee name, tsïkïlïlï. Similar-sounding names for other birds that English speakers renamed or mispronounced are scattered throughout East Coast tribes.

Europeans named birds as though they were human possessions, but American Indians regard them differently. The red-tail hawk in some languages is uwes’ la’ oski, a word that translates to “lovesick,” because one of its calls sounded like a person who lost a partner.

“A whole lot of Native people, in thinking about birds, don’t open a book of science. Their book of science is in the knowledge possessed by people in generations before them, the elders,” said Shepard Krech III, a professor emeritus at Brown University and author of “Spirits of the Air.”

Bird lovers have agitated to change eponyms linked to racists for several years but have encountered resistance.

It would cause confusion in the profession and among casual birders, opponents said. Books and ledgers would have to be revised, and people would have to learn new names. Only twice have such objections been overcome and the American Ornithological Society approved a switch. The first was for the oldsquaw, a species of waterfowl now known as the long-tailed duck. And last summer, the McCown’s longspur became the thick-billed longspur — the first time a name with a Confederate past was dropped.

By then, a confrontation in New York City had linked race and birding in an ugly way. In May 2020, Christian Cooper, a Black birder in Central Park, was falsely accused of threatening behavior by a White woman who called police on him after he asked her to leash her dog.

An expedition to Africa in the late 1880s, during which a young girl was cruelly killed, forever stained naturalist James Sligo Jameson's reputation.
An expedition to Africa in the late 1880s, during which a young girl was cruelly killed, forever stained naturalist James Sligo Jameson's reputation. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
John James Audubon, long the most recognized figure in American birding, is now being reconsidered for his abhorrent views and actions against Black people during the early 1800s. (Bettmann Archive)
John James Audubon, long the most recognized figure in American birding, is now being reconsidered for his abhorrent views and actions against Black people during the early 1800s. (Bettmann Archive)

For the leaders of Audubon, the American Ornithological Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, among other groups, systemic racism had hit home.

At the same time, activists in the ranks were growing more aggressive in opposing the eponyms. One of the loudest voices was that of Jordan Rutter, a White co-founder of Bird Names for Birds. She wanted to upend the society committee that names a species and reconsiders historic names.

“White people are credited for discovering [the birds]. White people were the ones to name the birds after other White people. And White people are still the folks that are perpetuating these names,” Rutter said in a recent interview.

A decade ago, that same committee unanimously refused to rename the Maui parrotbill, criticizing the proposed kiwikiu as “contrived,” ridiculous and hard to pronounce. As part of last year’s awakening, activists sought an actual transcript of the debate but were denied. “I called out the AOS and NACC for censoring some racist and offensive comments the [committee] made when discussing the … proposal,” Wang said, referring to the American Ornithological Society and its North American Classification Committee.

The society has since publicly apologized for those and other insensitive comments.

It is clear that leaders in the profession are listening more closely to the protests — and preparing to act. Audubon and the American Bird Conservancy, where Rutter works, have looked inward at their near-total lack of diversity and vowed to change. The American Ornithological Society pledged to “redoubl[e] our efforts toward making ornithology, birding, and access to the natural world equitable and inclusive.”

This spring, society president Mike Webster announced that the internal group responsible for bird names will now be guided by an advisory committee composed of people of different backgrounds — although 13 of the 17 advisers are White and the ethnicities of the four others have not been identified.

The new panel is “not just because we want to feel good about ourselves,” said Webster, who is White. “We see it [as] critically important to understanding and conserving birds. It’s critically important that we have a diversity of people out there doing it.”

A virtual panel discussion took place in April. Every major birding organization was represented, and 535 people joined from around the country as a majority of the panelists — nearly all of them White — agreed that it was time to move beyond racist eponyms.

Jeff Gordon, president of the American Birding Association, stressed that North America lost 3 billion birds over the past 50 years and that saving what’s left will need people of every ethnicity and background to be involved. “The biggest threat birds face … [is] being ignored to death,” he said. “Not enough people know and not enough people care.”

There is no timeline for decisions about the worst eponyms, but the discussion seems unlikely to wane, given participants such as Rutter and Newsome. Within days of the incident in Central Park last year, Newsome helped organize a very public declaration dubbed Black Birders Week — an event that quickly became a viral movement. By happenstance, it took place amid nationwide demonstrations and calls for racial justice following George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

The 28-year-old again took part in this year’s Black Birders Week, which began last weekend. She is encouraged by ornithology’s increasing focus on diversity and racism. She hopes it will soon extend to what the National Audubon Society and its chapters call themselves. “I believe they should both absolutely change the name. It feels wrong to enter African American communities … celebrating [Audubon’s] name,” she said. “It’s a reality I am wrestling with constantly.”

Yet far more progress is needed. Heads still turn when Newsome is in the field, observing birds. “I’m always questioned, in a seemingly friendly way, ‘Oh, what are you doing out here?’ ”

On urban and rural trails, she quickly lifts her binoculars when she sees White people do a double-take. In a scorching Georgia marsh where she slogs through muck to study a seaside sparrow, she shifts heavy equipment to the side of her body that faces the roadway so suspicious White motorists “won’t think I’m doing something illegal and make trouble for me.”

Across the muddy water is the Brunswick neighborhood where Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger, was chased down and fatally shot in February 2020. Three White men have been indicted in the case. Newsome remembers driving past the neighborhood after the killing as she again headed toward the marsh.

“I felt like my soul couldn’t take being there anymore,” she said. “Like a Black person can’t even be what they’re called to be without encountering such violence.”

CORRECTION

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the location of an 1855 expedition by Alfred Russel Wallace as Africa; it was the Malay Archipelago. In addition, some historians believe that the mother and baby Wallace wrote about in demeaning human terms during his trip were orangutans. The story has been corrected.

About this story

Story editing by Susan Levine. Photo editing by Olivier Laurent. Copy editing by Carrie Camillo. Design and development by Leo Dominguez.

Bird photos by iStockphoto/Getty Images.

Darryl Fears is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on the national staff who covers environmental justice. Over more than two decades at the Post, he has covered the Interior Department, the Chesapeake Bay, urban affairs and race & demographics. In that role, he helped conceptualize a multiple award-winning project, "Being A Black Man."



Sunday, August 2, 2020

Christian Humanism - Christianity's Intersections with White Supremacy & Racism


Beecher family - Wikipedia
Beecher Family of Boston

   Beecher-Stowe Family | Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at ...
Haarriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe
   UncleTomsCabinCover.jpg

Feast of Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry Ward ...
Lyman Beecher Family Tree





The Good and the Bad of White Christianity

R.E. Slater
 August 2, 2020

My roots go back to the Beechers of Boston, all preachers and social activists. This would also include Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Beechers were all abolitionists, suffragists, early advocates for removing children from dangerous manufacturing labor environments, for safer work places, and reduced labor hours for the common laborer with better pay. They bought slaves at Sunday Church auction services and immediately released them to freedom (cf, the Story of Pinky). Generally the Beechers were a hard preaching family for God, Gospel,  Country, Social Activism, and Christian Humanism, now more commonly known as Social Justice.


Legacy of Beecher Family of Boston References








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Samuel Slater | Biography & Facts | Britannica
Samuel Slater, Founder of the American Textile
Industry, Pawtucket, Rhode Island

THOUGHTS ON…SLATER THE TRAITOR. A while ago we took a trip to ...


But if I go back far enough to my first American ancestor, Samuel Slater, I will find not only the Father of the American textile industry, or the Father of the American Sunday School system, but the implementer of child labor which sadly included the mutilation of their little hands by textile machinery. Of families working long hours while being preached to on Sundays of the sanctity of Puritan religious laws and dictims which encouraged hard work as unto God. And very possibly a great ignorance to the pollution of land and water in the manufacture of clothing for America. Though Samuel Slater clothed America he also acted in accordance with his Christian faith and religious upbringing.



These photos ended child labor in the US
by Lewis Hines


Lewis Hines - Vox Series on Child Labor in the US

Library of Congress - National Child Labor Committee Collection



Samuel Slater References















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From both illustrations of my family tree I find the good and the bad to Christian endeavor though I look at both instances as important contributing legacies to the early and middling histories of an evolving America. A country filled with both good and bad Christian people each looking for leadership and direction in the life of America's democratic union.

Today, in the pandemic year 2020, we find ourselves in a similar story of America as it looks to embrace the difference of others into its sadder legacies of not embracing the Native American or enslaved populations of America. A horrid practice begun by its mother country England having brought the practice of slavery to the Colonies beginning with Virginia's early cotton crops made necessary for clothing. And its tobacco crops made necessary for the human predilection for habit based social behaviors.

Over the past twenty years the opening of the 21st Century has been a volley across America's bows by popular forces struggling with one another. The struggle of class and racial neglect, resistance, and political warfare for societal, economic, educational, and legal equality and opportunity. The majority white population of America has scattered across various lines of embrace or rejection. The minority populations are as divided as well, wishing all the privileges of American citizenship but concerned whether opening America's democratic union too wide might allow too many into America's privileged status.

Part of the American Church's struggle has been its intersection between Jesus' Deeds with Jesus' Words. Some churches like to walk the talk while other churches like to talk the walk. To each is the difficulty of doing both together at the same time. Social Justice ministries differ widely from theological dogmatic ministries. And when one side disparages the other side - either for its lack of community ministries or for its lack of paying attention to whatever "religious truths" happen to be vogue in that decade - both seem to speak past each other.

White supremacy and racism has exasperated these nominal Christian positions forcing the church to take cultural sides which most favor its character. Unfortunately, Christian doctrines denying the social gospel while elevating Empire ethics and morality as substitute for Jesus' deeds is the worst choice of all. It oppresses, harms, and divides societies of difference rather than strengthening them. It excludes, and seeks to exclude completely by nestling up to power, wealth, and politic preferencing. Whereas Jesus had harsh words for ungodly rulers and governances He reserved His wrath especially for the religious who had become tone-deaf to the harm they were doing to God's kingdom on earth.

And so, let us turn our attention today to White Christian America and what we might do within our faiths to be more sensitive to white nationalism and racism, more helpful in undoing the shackling bounds we have placed our brothers and sisters of another color or religion in, and in creating a greater freedom and liberty that is equitable and fair to all across our borderlands. To see America's pluralism and pursuit of justice as a just cause, a merciful duty, requiring Christian ethics to go beyond the borderlands of its creeds and beliefs into the hinterlands of the world that America may truly become "A Beacon on the Hill of Democracy."

Peace, my friends.

R.E. Slater
August 2, 2020

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Select Quote from White Too Long author
Robert P. Jones

"In my day job as CEO of PRRI, we’re repeatedly confronted with public opinion data that suggests white Christians really have a blind spot in seeing racial injustice and particularly structural racism. So it was a combination of really reckoning with my own family’s history, together with seeing patterns in the data that just made it so clear that this is not a story of some distant past, but this is very much still in the DNA of white Christianity today.
"They tell themselves that their version of Christianity is God’s means of bringing salvation to the lost world. That they are the embodiment of everything that is good about America, that they are pillars of the community. But that story doesn’t stand up to very much scrutiny.
"Along with the good that white Christian churches have done — building hospitals, orphanages and other civic institutions — they have also pronounced the blessings of God on slavery. They were the main legitimizers of a massive resistance to civil rights and have very consistently been on the wrong side of those issues. You can certainly point to the abolitionist movement and say, yes, that has Christian roots. But the bigger picture is that there were many, many more white Christians resisting desegregation than were on the abolitionists’ side of things."


Amazon Link
The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.
In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), anti-racist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.



Amazon Link
Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, spells out the profound political and cultural consequences of a new reality—that America is no longer a majority white Christian nation. “Quite possibly the most illuminating text for this election year” (The New York Times Book Review).
For most of our nation’s history, White Christian America (WCA) set the tone for our national policy and shaped American ideals. But especially since the 1990s, WCA has steadily lost influence, following declines within both its mainline and evangelical branches. Today, America is no longer demographically or culturally a majority white, Christian nation.
Drawing on more than four decades of polling data, The End of White Christian America explains and analyzes the waning vitality of WCA. Robert P. Jones argues that the visceral nature of today’s most heated issues—the vociferous arguments around same-sex marriage and religious and sexual liberty, the rise of the Tea Party following the election of our first black president, and stark disagreements between black and white Americans over the fairness of the criminal justice system—can only be understood against the backdrop of white Christians’ anxieties as America’s racial and religious topography shifts around them.
Beyond 2016, the descendants of WCA will lack the political power they once had to set the terms of the nation’s debate over values and morals and to determine election outcomes. Looking ahead, Jones forecasts the ways that they might adjust to find their place in the new America—and the consequences for us all if they don’t. “Jones’s analysis is an insightful combination of history, sociology, religious studies, and political science….This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers across the political spectrum” (Library Journal).



Amazon Link
Drawing on history, public opinion surveys, and personal experience, Robert P. Jones delivers a provocative examination of the unholy relationship between American Christianity and white supremacy, and issues an urgent call for white Christians to reckon with this legacy for the sake of themselves and the nation.
As the nation grapples with demographic changes and the legacy of racism in America, Christianity’s role as a cornerstone of white supremacy has been largely overlooked. But white Christians—from evangelicals in the South to mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast—have not just been complacent or complicit; rather, as the dominant cultural power, they have constructed and sustained a project of protecting white supremacy and opposing black equality that has framed the entire American story.
With his family’s 1815 Bible in one hand and contemporary public opinion surveys by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in the other, Robert P. Jones delivers a groundbreaking analysis of the repressed history of the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and white supremacy. White Too Long demonstrates how deeply racist attitudes have become embedded in the DNA of white Christian identity over time and calls for an honest reckoning with a complicated, painful, and even shameful past. Jones challenges white Christians to acknowledge that public apologies are not enough—accepting responsibility for the past requires work toward repair in the present.
White Too Long is not an appeal to altruism. Drawing on lessons gleaned from case studies of communities beginning to face these challenges, Jones argues that contemporary white Christians must confront these unsettling truths because this is the only way to salvage the integrity of their faith and their own identities. More broadly, it is no exaggeration to say that not just the future of white Christianity but the outcome of the American experiment is at stake.


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POLITICS

White Supremacy Shaped American Christianity, Researcher Says

07/26/2020 12:00 pm

Racist theology is deeply embedded in the DNA of white Christian churches, influencing even their theology on salvation, PRRI founder Robert Jones argues in a new book.

Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, comes from a line of white American Christians that stretches back before the Revolutionary War. His ancestors weren’t large plantation owners or Confederate generals, or ― as far as he knows ― active members of the Ku Klux Klan. For much of his life, Jones believed the “unremarkable” nature of his family’s background meant that white supremacy wasn’t a part of their history.

But he’s recently started to tell a different kind of story ― one that acknowledges that white privilege shaped his family’s sojourn on American soil.

His ancestors were wealthy enough to own slaves, Jones said. The family settled in Georgia on land the government seized from indigenous Creek and Cherokee people. They became Southern Baptists, part of a denomination founded in 1845 on the belief that it was perfectly moral for Christians to be slave owners.

Decades later, after Jones’s great-grandfather was killed in a clay mining accident, co-workers allegedly killed an innocent Black worker in retaliation. Jones still remembers how satisfied his great-uncle appeared while retelling that story, as if this arbitrary and unjustified act of racial violence helped balance the scales after a white man’s death.

It wouldn’t be hard for many white Christians to find examples of white supremacy’s claims on their own family’s trees, Jones said. But white Christians’ image of themselves and their religion has been warped by what Jones calls “white-supremacy-induced amnesia.”

Jones wrestles with that amnesia in his new book, “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.” He argues that white Christians ― from evangelicals in the South to mainline Protestants in the Midwest to Catholics in the Northeast ― weren’t just complacent onlookers while political leaders debated what to do about slavery, segregation and discrimination. White supremacist theology played a key role in shaping the American church from the very beginning, influencing not just the way denominations formed but also white Christians’ theology about salvation itself.

HuffPost spoke with Jones about his book earlier in July. Just as his own family history would be incomplete without acknowledging the influences of white supremacy, Jones said it’s impossible to talk about American Christianity without recognizing that racism helped shape the church.

Robert Jones is the CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit
organization that conducts research on religion, culture and politics | Courtesy of PRRI


How did your own eyes open to the ways that white Christianity and white supremacy are entangled?

I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. I was deeply immersed in white Southern Baptist evangelical culture. I was that kid who was always at church, four to five times a week. I have a degree from a Southern Baptist college, and I have a Master of Divinity degree from a Southern Baptist seminary. But it wasn’t until I was in grad school in my 30s that I really began to examine the history of my denomination’s direct ties to slavery.

Along with that, in my day job as CEO of PRRI, we’re repeatedly confronted with public opinion data that suggests white Christians really have a blind spot in seeing racial injustice and particularly structural racism. So it was a combination of really reckoning with my own family’s history, together with seeing patterns in the data that just made it so clear that this is not a story of some distant past, but this is very much still in the DNA of white Christianity today. 

So what is the story that white Christians tell themselves about the church’s relationship to white supremacy? 

They tell themselves that their version of Christianity is God’s means of bringing salvation to the lost world. That they are the embodiment of everything that is good about America, that they are pillars of the community. But that story doesn’t stand up to very much scrutiny.

Along with the good that white Christian churches have done — building hospitals, orphanages and other civic institutions — they have also pronounced the blessings of God on slavery. They were the main legitimizers of a massive resistance to civil rights and have very consistently been on the wrong side of those issues. You can certainly point to the abolitionist movement and say, yes, that has Christian roots. But the bigger picture is that there were many, many more white Christians resisting desegregation than were on the abolitionists’ side of things.

The legacy of this ― the proof in the pudding ― is what public opinion looks like today. White Christians ― evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Catholics ― are 30 percentage points more likely than religiously unaffiliated whites to say the Confederate flag is more a symbol of Southern pride than a symbol of racism. If you ask whether the killings of Black men by police are isolated incidents or part of a pattern, white Christians are twice as likely as religiously unaffiliated whites to say these are isolated instances. They have a very difficult time connecting the dots and seeing the structural justice issues at stake. 

You spend some time in the book explaining that white mainline Protestants and white Catholics were also complicit in white supremacy. Why did you feel that it was important to point that out? 

It’s important not to dismiss this as a question of Southern culture. In the book, I developed a racism index, a broad index of 15 different racial attitude questions. I put those into a statistical model that controlled for things like Southern regionalism, Republican identity, education level, all kinds of things that could be driving these attitudes that have nothing to do with Christian identity. Even when I controlled for all of those things, white Christian identity in itself is directly connected to racist attitudes. 

Some of this data gets dismissed by white Christians who say those numbers are muddied because they include people who just claim to be Christian but never darken the door of a church. But the data refutes that quite soundly. In fact, among white Christians overall, there’s a positive relationship between their religious identity and holding more racist views. Perhaps most disturbing is that among white evangelicals, the relationship between holding racist views and white Christian identity is actually stronger among more frequent church attenders. That ought to be a cause for a deep soul-searching among white Christians overall and among white evangelicals in particular. 

White evangelicals who attend church frequently are more likely than less frequent attenders
to hold racist views, Robert Jones argues in a new book | Middelveld via Getty Images


How do you think racism helped shape white American Christians’ theology about salvation?

I think it’s helpful to go back and imagine what early church history in the U.S. looked like in the colonies. There was this sense that white people were God’s chosen instruments to civilize the U.S. and the world. It would not be unusual for white slave owners to bring enslaved people to church with them on Sunday morning. Whites would sit in the front and enslaved people would sit in the back. That context certainly shapes the way Christian theology and practices form. You’re not going to preach a lot of liberation, freedom and equality from the pulpit. You’re going to preach more about obedience to the master and fulfilling your roles, those kinds of things. I think that fundamentally distorted American white Christianity from the beginning.

One of the ways this happened is that salvation became this very hyper-individualized concept. So it becomes about a person’s individual relationship to God through Jesus, and it’s very much about personal morality and piety. It was this very privatized and cordoned off way of thinking about spirituality and Christianity. This developed by necessity and by design, as a way of thinking about salvation that would be consistent with a world that was already committed to the idea of white supremacy.

I’d like to get your thoughts on how white supremacy influenced how white Christians think about the purpose of government. In my own reporting, I’ve seen white evangelical Christians express the idea that, when it comes to issues such as immigration and policing, it’s the government’s God-given duty to keep the country safe, while it’s individual Christians’ duty to be charitable and care for the poor. Do you think this way of thinking has racist roots? 

I do think whenever white Christians declare or draw lines between what is biblical and what is political, I would look for white supremacy to be at work. This kind of boundary drawing is a way of delegitimizing certain kinds of claims and privileging other kinds of claims. One of the most prominent recent examples is from the 1960s, when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other African American ministers were using churches as places for civil rights organizing.

Jerry Falwell Sr. came out and said that this was not a legitimate thing for a pastor to be doing, that pastors should only be preaching the gospel from the pulpit, that these kinds of organizing things are political and shouldn’t be the concern of the church. Not too many years later, Falwell suddenly changed his mind. The one thing that really made him change his tune on this was that Bob Jones University, an evangelical university, was threatened with losing its federal funding because it didn’t allow interracial relationships. Evangelicals at the time were making very explicit claims defending the separation of races, and all of a sudden, that was a biblical issue.

What is biblical, what is political, often tends to be driven by self-interest. In the case of white Christian churches, I think it’s always appropriate to ask, “What kind of interest is that? Is it an interest that is privileging the position of white Americans over Americans of color?” And if it is, then it’s a straightforwardly white supremacist interest that’s being reflected in those distinctions.

In his new book, Robert Jones argues that racist attitudes have become embedded in the DNA of white Christian identity over time and calls for an honest reckoning with the past | Courtesy of PRRI


There still seems to be a lot of skepticism and resistance in white Christian spaces to words such as “social justice,” “white privilege” and “systemic racism.” At the same time, over the past few weeks, I’ve seen evangelical news sites emphasizing reconciliation, forgiveness, people coming together. Where do you think that comes from? 

The easiest thing for white Christians to reach for is reconciliation. While I think that’s a laudable goal, if it’s reached for too quickly, I think it’s actually disingenuous. Too often, the formula for white Christians is white apology or lament plus Black forgiveness equals reconciliation. What’s missing in that equation is any conversation about justice and repair. If you’re a white Christian, heading straight for reconciliation is the quickest way to protect the status quo without doing the hard work and without really dealing with the past.

It’s surprising to me in some ways because if there’s anything I heard and that white Christian churches emphasize is this idea of repentance. But repentance, in the biblical sense of the word, is never just about apology. It’s about making things right. I think the real test of authenticity for white Christians who want to lament this past is whether they’re willing to walk through the valley of repair and justice in order to get to that destination of reconciliation or whether they want to skip that part of the journey.

How do you think white Christian churches have responded to George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter protests? Do you think the message is sticking, or are you seeing more evidence of what you call in the book the “white Christian shuffle”?

I called it the white Christian shuffle because there does tend to be this one step forward, two steps back movement. Particularly at moments like this one, where there’s a high social expectation that something will be said, something will be done, the question is whether it’s something authentic or something to just check the box and move on.

In my home state of Mississippi, the legislature finally voted to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state flag. Before that happened, the Mississippi Baptist Convention had a press conference and actually called on the legislature to do that. Now that’s a pretty big deal. But in my view, we can’t pretend we’ll get on the right side of the battles around symbols without dealing with the way white Christians built white supremacy into their theology and for so many years used Christian theology as a way to legitimize the worldview that put those monuments up in the first place. 

What do you think it would it look like if white Christians began reckoning with that theology?

Part of what I hope the book will do is help white Christians tell a truer story about themselves. If it’s an older church, the questions are pretty obvious: “Where were we on the issue of civil rights? Where were we on the integration of our own congregation? Where are we now on the issue of mass incarceration?” Even for newer congregations that are predominantly white, it’s worth interrogating things as simple as, “Are we in an all-white suburb, and if so, why? Has there been a conversation about police killings of African Americans or about Black Lives Matter that isn’t just about the dangers of rioting but actually about the pain that African Americans are feeling at this moment?”

The second step after that reflection is to ask, “How can we be in community with African Americans and other people of color in our communities? How can we be allies on issues of racial justice?” Those conversations themselves will begin to challenge some of the ways in which white Christian theology has blinded white Christians to these issues.

A defensive reaction is a real temptation for white Christians at the moment. One of the biggest moves white Christians could make is to try to find some deep sense of humility and to listen and resist the urge to rebut and defend and to try to take in the witness that our African American brothers and sisters are trying to bring to white Christians. 

This interview was condensed and edited for clarity. 

CORRECTION: Due to transcription errors, this article previously misstated the number of questions on Jones’ racism index, and how much more likely white Christians are to say the Confederate flag is a symbol of Southern pride rather than racism.