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The Conversation
White Evangelical Racism Has Always Been a Political Power Grab
Anthea Butler explains how racism has been essential to growing the power of white evangelical Christians
Evangelicalism is having a moment of reckoning. What once seemed like a conservative, Christian way of life became so baldly entangled with President Donald Trump, and so obviously detached from its espoused morality, that many followers are now leaving their churches. Those still on the inside are trying to see a movement they still love for other reasons, more clearly. And those on the outside are trying to grasp why Christians were willing to excuse Trump’s speech and actions against women and immigrants and his easy embrace of racism.
While evangelicals defended the movement by pointing to those in their history who were abolitionists or by painting portraits of a color-blind spreading of the Gospel, the movement’s broader history and powerful influences are far from innocent.
Anthea Butler’s new book, White Evangelical Racism, shows how racism is original to the fabric of evangelicalism. She draws lines from Biblical references used in defense of slavery, through Reconstruction when Black men were framed as a sexual menace against virtuous white women, and evangelical believers and churches engaged in lynching. Butler demonstrates how political organizing by the Christian Right in the 1970s (prior to Roe v. Wade) was actually first a response to desegregation and the end of interracial marriage bans. That power coalesced and became institutionalized in such a way that evangelicalism was no longer exactly a religious designation but a political one.
As Butler reminds readers of her book, scripture quotes Jesus saying, “By their fruits you shall know them.” But, she continues, “evangelical fruit — the results of evangelicals’ actions in civic life — today is rotten. Racism rotted it.”
Sarah Stankorb: How did evangelicalism become so detached from a morality it always claimed to be a part of? Why are people finally able to see it for what it really is?
Anthea Butler: I think it’s sad it took this long. The media allowed evangelists to narrate their stories. And when the story became too…
