Book Review: White Too Long

NCF Office – April 16, 2024 4 Comments

If you like to read, but your stack of “to read” is about to topple over OR you really can’t get through a book these days, but want to be in the know, then this book review is for you! Carolyn Vance, NCF Librarian, provides us with a detailed review of the book “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” by Robert P. Jones, 2020. This is a great follow up to a recent blog post from Jeff Trask. –Melissa Logsdon, NCF Associate Pastor

The title comes from a James Baldwin quote in which he describes the white population of the United States, “as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long …”

Jeff Trask recommended this book in one of his teachings a year or two ago and mentioned it again in a recent Pastor’s Note.  The author is CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute and has training in both theology and the social sciences.  He is a white southerner who grew up in the Southern Baptist Church. It was not until he was working on his PhD that Jones began to see, acknowledge and wrestle with the horrible violence that white Christians visited upon on African Americans, post-civil war, especially to resist their right to vote and their right to be treated equally as full citizens and human beings.

This book is the result of his journey of understanding which he presents with a remarkably clear-eyed, frank look at the reality of white supremacy being inextricably part of the white Christian faith, such that it was weaponized against the African American population. Brutally.  It is part personal story, part statistical study, part narrative.  He does not try to trace the entire history of white American Christianity but focuses on some key narratives of white supremacy within the White American Christianity.  He focuses particularly on his own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, founded to affirm the rightness and validity of slavery.  He also makes clear in the book that it is all of white American Christianity that is built on white supremacy: Evangelical, mainline Protestant and Catholic. Nor is it limited to one geographic area, such as the south, where slavery reigned.

One of the most eye-opening chapters for me was how white supremacy has infused our theology and our eschatology, what we emphasize and what we don’t.  Obviously the defense of slavery is one theology that existed for a long time, but other theologies also were born out of the white supremacist underpinning.  Though most people today realize that slavery is wrong, in recent years we have seen a disturbing renewed acceptance and tolerance of overt racism both in the U.S. and internationally. Many of us thought that we, as Americans, were better than that.  We are learning otherwise.

Before we get to specific theologies, we need to recognize the “Lost Cause” mythology of the superiority of southern culture and way of life. This mythology enabled the south, which had lost the war and the confederacy, to place their hope in a new day when their defeat would be transformed and their culture would rise again.  Impact: This cultural civil religion was intertwined with the White Christian religion to the point that they were hardly distinguishable from one another in the minds and hearts of their followers.

Here are some of the other theological characteristics of a white Christianity carrying on the white supremacy that had been part of their faith since the beginning of the nation’s history. Some I have seen as problematic, but never thought to connect them to white supremacy.

* Premillennialist theology “End Times”– the present world will only be redeemed by a second coming of Christ who will take believers with him to heaven. This sinful, evil world will decline. The Impact of this theology is that it “undercuts calls to social justice,” to change in the here-and-now and “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Faith is heaven-focused and “soul-saving” in its primary work on this earth.

* Emphasis on personal sin, personal salvation, free will, individual responsibility and a personal relationship with Jesus. All blame is on the individual, not social structures or institutions. Individuals are responsible for their own choices, actions and their own embrace of faith in Jesus. Impact: It blinds the faithful to social, institutional and structural sin.  It restricts moral vision to the personal and interpersonal.

* Biblical understanding – The individualistic world view is read back into their biblical understanding. The Bible was written in the context of communal not individualistic societies. Their focus is on the Gospels and the Pauline writings, that emphasize salvation, rather than on the liberative (Exodus) and prophetic writings of the Old Testament.  Impact: An incomplete Biblical understanding masquerading as a complete Biblical understanding.

Conclusion: Though these are primarily Evangelical theologies, they have seeped into the larger white Christian church.  They protect the status quo. They protect white Christian consciences. They have hurt those outside the white Christian world, but they have also damaged white Christians themselves because their theologies contract their moral vision, causing them to eschew human values that aren’t part of their own narrower understanding of their faith and their God.  White Christian identity is tied to whiteness and white power.  The fear of losing that power can and does lead to some very ugly realities such as racism, xenophobia, two characteristics of white supremacy that can cause loss of life and loss of Jesus’ values.

Jones’ continues his narrative with a chapter on southern monuments to white supremacy and their history and some of the more recent tragedies of ongoing white supremacy.  He follows it with a chapter on statistics from PRRI research which back up his narrative. He also tells some stories of truth telling and relationship building between a white and Black congregation.  He concludes with a call to white Christians to wake up and face the reality of white supremacy distorting their version of Christianity: acknowledge the history, reckon with it, journey through it, interrogate our theology, confess the history, repair the damage, begin the work of healing and recovering from white supremacy. This is our moral choice. –Carolyn Vance, NCF Librarian