Quotes from Robert P. Jones

It is true that old-school Lost Cause theology is rarely aired in mainstream white churches today. But its direct descendant, the individualist theology that insists that Christianity has little to say about social injustice — created to shield white consciences from the evils and continued legacy of slavery and segregation — lives on, not just in white evangelical churches but also increasingly in white mainline and white Catholic churches as well.

blunt conclusion was that "Christianity has an image problem" among American youth.48 Similarly,

The racial perception gap highlights one of the most powerful—but also least discussed—divisions between Americans on the topic of race: the rift between the descendants of White Christian America and the rest of the country.

These stark divides prompt a simple but fundamental question: why can't White Christian America understand how African Americans feel about the black men who have died at the hands of white police officers? To

For 2015, the Equality Index found that blacks had on average only 56 percent of the economic well-being and 61 percent of social justice benefits that whites enjoy.

Defining a mono-racial church as one that has more than 80 percent of its membership consisting of a single racial group, nearly nine in ten (86 percent) congregations, which account for 80 percent of churchgoers, remain essentially mono-racial.46

1845, when the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society declared that any slave owner would be disqualified from consideration for missionary service, Baptist churches in the South seceded and formed the Southern Baptist Convention so that members would not have to choose between their slaves and their calling to be missionaries.

it's no longer possible to believe that White Christian America sets the tone for the country's culture as a whole.

I think the fact that white churches produced such a strong sense of safety and security for those of us who were inside the institution Is why it is so hard for white Christians to see the harm it did to those who were outside it, particularly African Americans, and the other kinds of damage it did to us, numbing our own moral sensibilities and limiting our religious development.

While white Christianity was protecting the interests and consciences of those under its canopy, white Christians were also staunchly defending the purity and innocence of the religion itself. They accomplished this principally by projecting an idealized form of white Christianity as somehow independent of the failings of actual white Christians or institutions.

Through the twin pathways of white racial identity and the increasing relevance of Republican partisanship in each of these groups, the freewill individualism of white evangelicals has been diffused throughout white American Christianity

When white supremacy was still safely ensconced in the wider culture, white evangelicals argued that the Bible mandated a privatized religion. This was a powerful way of delegitimizing the work of black ministers working for black equality. But as these forces gained power, white evangelicals discovered a biblical mandate for political organizing and resistance.

It is also perhaps the biggest challenge for us white Christians, who have been conditioned to move through our lives preoccupied with personal sin but unburdened by social injustice.

it is white Americans who have murdered our black and brown brothers and sisters. After the genocide and forced removal of Native Americans, the enslavement of millions of Africans, and the lynching of more than 4,400 of their surviving descendants, it is white Americans who have used our faith as a shield to justify our actions, deny our responsibility, and insist on our innocence. We, white Christian Americans, are Cain.

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. Robert Baker, a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary through the first half of the twentieth century, acknowledged that "the involvement of the South in the 'peculiar institution

Christians began to slip in the late 1990s, expanding the tent to include white Catholics helped perpetuate the illusion that White Christian America was still the country's dominant religious culture. But

Even as Jim Crow laws have been struck from the books in the political realm, most white Christian churches have reformed very little of their nineteenth-century theology and practice, which was designed, by necessity, to coexist comfortably with slavery and segregation. As a result, most white Christian churches continue to serve, consciously or not, as the mechanisms for transmitting and reinforcing white supremacist attitudes among new generations.

Like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, resurrection by human power rather than divine spirit always produces a monstrosity. If

Not only in the South but nationwide, higher levels of racism are associated with higher probabilities of identifying as a white Christian; and, Conversely, adding Christianity to the average white person's identity moves him or her toward more, not less, affinity for white supremacy. White supremacy lives on today not just in explicitly and consciously held attitudes among white Christians; It has become deeply integrated into the DNA of white Christianity itself.

Two thousand eight was the last year on record in which Protestants as a whole—not just white Protestants—represented a majority of the country.10

Today, former Catholics—most of them white and relatively young—make up 15 percent of the total adult population.45

He concluded that while the Constitution protected freedom of religious belief, the same privilege did not necessarily extend to freedom of religious action.

The historical witness is clear: as confederate symbols migrated from cemeteries and veterans' parades, they became less about honoring the past and more about upholding white supremacy in the present. In fact, the relationship is inversely proportional. The further the distance from the cemetery and the past, the more nakedly obvious their role in asserting white supremacy becomes.

If you were recruiting for a white supremacist cause on a Sunday morning, you'd likely have more success hanging out in the parking lot have an average white Christian Church —evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, or Catholic —than approaching whites sitting out services at the local coffee shop.