Quotes from Robert P. Jones

It's nothing short of astonishing that a religious tradition with this relentless emphasis on salvation and one so hyperattuned to personal sin can simultaneously maintain such blindness to social sins swirling about it, such as slavery and race-based segregation and bigotry.

But if we white Christians are going to get any critical leverage on our past, and the distortions this past has brought into our present, we have to let go of both the quest for self-protection—that is to say, the advantages we hoard at unjust costs to others—and the insistence on our racial and religious innocence.

The historical record of lived Christianity in America reveals that Christian theology and institutions have been the central cultural tent pole holding up the very idea of white supremacy. And the genetic imprint of this legacy remains present and measurable in contemporary white Christianity, not only among evangelicals in the South but also among mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast.

In other words, the Confederate monument phenomenon was no innocent movement to memorialize the dead; it was primarily a twentieth-century declaration of Lost Cause values designed to vindicate white supremacy and bolster white power against black claims to equality and justice. These Confederate monuments, strategically placed in public spaces, are deposits left by the high tide of white supremacy.

To be sure, this theological worldview has done great damage to those living outside the white Christian canopy. But what has been overlooked by most white Christian leaders is the damage this legacy has done to white Christians themselves. To put it succinctly, it has often put white Christians in the curious position of arguing that their religion and their God require them to aim lower than the highest human values of love, justice, equality, and compassion.

For more than two decades, as the temperature climbed in Mississippi race relations, Reverend Hudgins built brick by brick a theological bulwark of personal and individual salvation, designed to protect white Christian power and white Christian consciences from black demands for justice.

white Christian convictions about the evils of slavery more often than not failed to translate into strong commitments to black equality.

White Christianity has been many things for America. But whatever else it has been -- and the country is indebted to it for a good many things--it has also been the primary institution legitimizing and propagating white power and dominance.

The Christian denomination in which I grew up was founded on the proposition that slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ. Its founders believed that this arrangement was not just possible, but divinely mandated.

No segment of White Christian America has been more complicit in the nation's fraught racial history than white evangelical Protestants.

As prominent Baptist historian Walter "Buddy" Shurden has pointed out, it wasn't until the last two decades of the twentieth century that white Baptist historians directly faced up to the proslavery, white supremacist origins of their denomination.

As the Democratic Party came to be identified as the party of civil rights, white Christians increasingly moved to the Republican Party—a migration that political scientists have dubbed "the great white switch.

The unsettling truth is that, for nearly all of American history, the Jesus conjured by most white congregations was not merely indifferent to the status quo of racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordained order of things.

during the national anthem to protest the killing of African Americans by police; and has consistently avoided unequivocal condemnations of violence perpetrated by white nationalists.

While many have scratched their heads wondering how white Christians could support a candidate who has made white supremacy a foundation of his campaign and presidency, knowing how deeply racist attitudes persist among white Christians today makes this unorthodox political marriage less mysterious. Trump's own racism allowed him to do what other candidates couldn't: solidify the support of a majority of white Christians, not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy.

Trump's powerful appeal to white evangelicals was not that he spoke to the culture wars around abortion or same-sex marriage, or his populist appeals to economic anxieties, but rather that he evoked powerful fears about the loss of white Christian dominance amid a rapidly changing environment.

On a broader level, white supremacy involves the way a society organizes itself, and what and whom it chooses to value.… And that's white supremacy without all the bluster: a set of practices informed by the fundamental belief that white people are valued more than others.

The stances of white churches on the issue of integration were seen by civil rights activists and segregationists alike as the keystone holding the entire Jim Crow edifice together.

To many well-meaning white Christians today—evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, and Catholic—Christianity and a cultural norm of white supremacy now often feel indistinguishable, with an attack on the latter triggering a full defense of the former.

However, the pro–civil rights orientation of white mainline Protestant and white Catholic leaders is not an accurate barometer of the influence of white supremacy among white Christians sitting in the pews. Declarations on racial justice by national institutions and hierarchies were more often than not ignored or actively flouted by local clergy and their congregations.

If white supremacy was an unquestionable cultural assumption in America, what does it mean that Christian doctrines by necessity had to develop in ways that were compatible with that worldview? What if, for example, Christian conceptions of marriage and family, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, or even the concept of having a personal relationship with Jesus developed as they did because they were useful tools for reinforcing white dominance?

At a pragmatic level, white churches served as connective tissue that brought together leaders from other social realms to coordinate a campaign of massive resistance to black equality. But at a deeper level, white churches were the institutions of ultimate legitimization, where white supremacy was divinely justified via a carefully cultivated Christian theology. White Christian churches composed the cultural score that made white supremacy sing.

There are five southern states that continue to include Confederate symbols in their flags. Notably, four of the five (Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Georgia) are also among the top ten states containing the highest percentage of white evangelical Protestants in the country.

Although it received little press and was rarely incorporated into explanations of his motivations, Dylann Roof's identity as a white Christian was central to his worldview.