R&P: My sense is that, throughout the book, you restate the caveat that not all evangelicals are racists while observing that most evangelicals are conservative, and one of the things that conservatism seeks to conserve is racial hierarchy. Is that accurate?
AB: Yes, I think so. A lot of readers will find this troubling because they would prefer not to think about it. But if you look at evangelicalism as a political movement, in addition to a religious group, you have to grapple with the various ways that whiteness can be reinscribed. It’s not just that the movement is led by a bunch of white guys. It’s that there is a cultural whiteness at the heart of evangelicalism that anyone who enters the community has to receive. I try to show, from Billy Graham onward, how this inherent whiteness works, often by way of color blindness. Officially, evangelicalism claims to be committed to a series of beliefs and values that are higher than and so uninvested in questions of race, and yet their political conservatism really seems to limit their tolerance for non-white input, even from peers and leaders who share their belief system.
Let’s think about Raphael Warnock, for example. He’s the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, has a Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary—the same school where Reinhold Niebuhr taught—and yet white conservatives have been very disdainful of his Christianity. They’ve repeatedly picked apart his statements and questioned his faith. Now I ask you—what does this mean? To me, it’s an example of how the goalposts always get moved for Black evangelicals in a way that never applies to white evangelicals.
R&P: Let’s consider some cases. If we go back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would we have found strong evangelical support for slavery and Jim Crow?
AB: Evangelicals who have written their history have asserted that, yes, we were abolitionists, we opposed Jim Crow, we were for temperance, and we worked hard to push reform on all these social issues—and much of that is true. But what I wanted to do was to show the various ways in which they also accepted the social and structural racism embedded into society. Denominational splits happened because of slavery. In the Reconstruction period, the “Religion of the Lost Cause” lamented the end of slavery and asserted that Black people were inferior. The missionary movement asserted that foreigners were “heathen” in need of civilization, which was invariably couched in white expressions of Christianity.
These are important issues, and they explain why I started the narrative in the nineteenth century. I wanted people to see the historical arc of how racism inflected almost every point of evangelicalism along the way. If I started in the twentieth century, people may simply say, “Oh, that’s modern-day racism.” But we need to see the underpinnings of what happened in the movement to understand the very clear throughline of racism connecting the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
R&P: In the 1940s and 50s, evangelicals were consolidated in and around the National Association of Evangelicals, Billy Graham, and a patriotic “Americanism.” What did these have to do with race?
AB: They had a lot to do with race! Patriotism, first of all, was codified through whiteness. The National Association of Evangelicals was comprised entirely of white denominations. Based on theology, a lot of Black denominations would have fit with the NAE, but they were not invited. Billy Graham was talking about communism as an existential threat to America, at a time when the charge of communism was easily tainted with a racial brush, so that anyone who was Black, and working on integration issues or civil rights—including Martin Luther King, for example—was easily branded as a communist. And there’s much more. Essentially, I’m trying to show that modern American evangelicalism has been constructed on racial ideas and assumptions, even though these may not always be explicitly stated.
R&P: In the 1970s and 80s, the Christian Right became a political force by advocating “moral issues” and “family values.” As you note, the movement was also reliant on racism. Tell us more about that.
AB: There’s a prevalent belief around evangelicalism that the movement was formed in the 70s in response to Roe v. Wade. In actuality, though, it had a lot more to do with taxation, and specifically with the federal government’s decision to strip segregation academies—and significantly, Bob Jones University—of their tax exemptions. This prompted huge letter-writing campaigns, and mobilized evangelical activists led by Paul Weyrich, among others. It wasn’t abortion that fired them up—it was integration, taxation, busing, and similar issues. You have to understand that, while Brown v. Board happened in 1954, integration didn’t happen immediately. In many parts of the country—including the town that I grew up in—integration didn’t happen until the middle of the 1970s. And in those places, racism was not a problem for evangelicals so much as a rallying cry that they could organize around.
Shortly before Ronald Reagan told evangelicals that he “endorsed” them, he launched his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, not far from the place where Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were murdered. Why do it there? Because it communicates, to anyone who is paying attention, that Ronald Reagan is for “state’s rights.” He’s not going to interfere in southern states, and his government is not going to interfere. His candidacy was a direct rejection of 1960s governmental action on civil rights, and it played directly into evangelical disdain for such governmental action. If integration was going to happen, evangelicals wanted it to happen on their terms, and not the way the government wanted to do it.
R&P: Early in the twenty-first century, evangelicals positioned themselves behind George W. Bush, against Barack Obama, and emphatically in support of Donald Trump. It seems impossible to separate race and politics and religion from that support.
AB: In 2000, one of the tactics used by the Bush campaign against John McCain was to spread the rumor that he had fathered a Black child, when really it was his adopted daughter from Bangladesh. In South Carolina, where the primary was being held, this deep-sixed McCain’s campaign. And where did the smear originate? With a professor from Bob Jones University. We don’t even have time to cover all things they did to Barack Obama. There was the deployment of race in the claim that he was born in Kenya; that he was a secret Muslim. The sound of his name made him a target for the same sort of Islamophobia that evangelicals embraced after 9/11. Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, was immediately on board with Trump’s birtherism, demanding that America’s first Black president produce his birth certificate to prove that he’s a real American.
It is naïve to think that these things are not racialized. Because if you think that, then you are complicit in this larger evangelical project, which is to make us believe that they are this benevolent and patriotic group working for America’s flourishing, when in fact they are interested only in their own.
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