Less than a year after the March on Washington, my family moved from Illinois to the South, land of funny accents, “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am,” grits, cornbread and persistent segregation. (As a child, I was only vaguely aware of it in my hometown.)
There was some culture shock. Baptists seemed to run everything. There were Blue Laws. Shops and banks closed on Wednesday afternoons. The high school pep band’s fight song was “Dixie.” People called us Yankees.
Robert P. Jones, founder and CEO of PRRI, is the author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.” Raised in a working-class neighborhood of Jackson, Miss., Jones was nurtured in the world I found strange. His community bequeathed him the view that dominated local, White culture. He writes in Time:
I internalized a cycle of sin, confession and repentance as a daily part of my life. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, this was a double inheritance. Beneath this seemingly icy surface of guilt and culpability flowed a deeper current of innocence and entitlement. Individually, I was a sinner, but collectively, I was part of a special tribe. Whatever our humble social stations might be, we white Christians were God’s chosen instruments of spreading salvation and civilization to the world.
As the Old South faded and the New South rose, textiles died as a major factor in the economy. “Yankees” and foreign companies moving in for cheap, non-union labor brought new sensibilities. You could buy cheese that wasn’t cheddar or Swiss, and beer not advertised during football games.
What also happened was the iron grip of evangelical Christianity on the culture and politics began to slip. The sense of entitlement evangelicals had that they ran the show, as God intended, slipped too. They did not much like it.
In the fullness of time, the erosion of the world view they held unleashed “a volatile cocktail of fealty to Donald Trump, wild-eyed rants about vaccines, faith in QAnon conspiracies and hysteria over critical race theory,” Jones writes.
Recent surveys by PRRI, an organization I lead, reveal disturbing realities among white evangelical Protestants today: 61% believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. And the idea of patriotism has taken a troubling turn: 68% believe Trump is a “true patriot,” and one in three believe that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” More than seven in ten deny that the history of slavery and discrimination in the U.S. has any bearing on economic inequalities between white and Black Americans today. White evangelicals are the religious group most likely to refuse COVID-19 vaccines and object to mask mandates. One in four are QAnon conspiracy believers.
Evangelicals’ intense focus on personal redemption left them with a sense that nothing “outside our intimate lives, not even (or particularly) major racial upheavals in our community, were perceptible objects of Christian concern.”
By the 1970s, integration delayed became integration realized. The religious right abandoned the Democratic Party that enabled it and hitched its wagon to Ronald Reagan’s as a way to bolster its slipping cultural dominance. This, even as Southerners welcomed the economic development and in-migration eroding it.
But now the bulwark of white Christian America is crumbling. We are no longer, demographically speaking, a white Christian nation. White evangelical Protestants—the once self-proclaimed “moral majority”—have fallen from nearly a quarter of Americans just over a decade ago to 14.5% of the public today. And Southern Baptists, who grew to be the largest Protestant denomination of all by the mid-20th century, have lost more than 2 million members across the same period.
As the shadow cast by white Christian churches and institutions is shortening, we’re witnessing in real time the anomie this contraction is producing among many of its adherents. Many are responding by abandoning the ranks. The increasingly desperate remainder are screaming defiantly from the ramparts, determined, to the last man, to defend the breached walls.
The evangelical movement is, Jones explains, “trapped in a kind of self-induced psychosis, stemming from the strain of sustaining a conception of themselves as repentant sinners while living lives of indifference and violence toward their fellow Black and brown citizens.”
In these twilight years of white Christian America, for those still within the veil, the strain of holding these contradictions can lead to a dissociative state, where self-reflection becomes treasonous and self-delusion a necessity. The fruits of this spirit are abundant. Empathy signals weakness, and disdain strength. Prophets are shunned, and authoritarians embraced. Truth is exchanged for a lie.
And the Lie was made flesh and dwelt among us … as an autocrat wannabe in the White House.
What to do now? Jones offers advise conservative Christians are unlikely to heed:
The first step toward recovery is to separate being white from being Christian. Practically, we must reject what have, for too long, been three articles of our faith: that the Bible is a blueprint for a white Christian America; that Jesus, the son of God, is a white savior; and that the church is a sanctuary of white innocence. Most fundamentally, we must confess that whatever the personal sins of white people, in the past and present, they pale in comparison to the systemic ways we have built and blessed a society that reflects a conviction that, to us and to God, our lives matter more.
That is, more than non-White Christian citizens, as behaviors on display during the pandemic illustrate in body count. They will not, as Jones advocates, surrender their conviction that they are God’s chosen people living in a God-ordained, White Christian homeland. That, says Jones, “is not an eternal truth grounded in the Bible but rather a self-serving lie rooted in white supremacy.”
And rooted in the peculiarities of American-style conservative Protestantism, itself a recent, homespun invention. With any luck, the rest of us and the United States will outlast it.
