White Evangelical Racism
I’m very grateful Chapter 16 gave me the opportunity to review Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. Please read the review and consider attending Parnassus Books’ featuring Professor Butler Thursday evening (3/25/21).
I don’t think I’m quite done hoping the word "evangelical" might be wrestled back from the white supremacist marketing scheme that currently holds it captive, but centering my own obsessions did not fit the assignment (or the word count) of this review. The patterns Butler chronicles and the insights she offers need to be widely shared and discussed. It's all kind of devastating but “racial reconciliation,” she’s helped me to see, has functioned as a long, cruel con for most of my life. Reconciliation without reckoning is just more marketing. She has the receipts.
I give a lot of thought to the Prayer Trade *looks outside the window at Nashville* and what I refer to as the Faith Cartel *looks at our state legislature* as cultures we have to scrutinize and critique, especially within the mixed bag of love and sadness and longed-for righteousness that is Nashville, lest they do further psychic and literal damage to our fellow human beings. I often think that if we could get everyone who's in (or has passed through) Nashville under this very broad umbrella (the Prayer Trade) to follow up with everyone else who has and get really honest over what we've all abided along the way and don't want to abide for one second longer...all manner of restorative justice would come crashing down like rain. Perhaps it begins with people who know people sharing and reading and discussing this review. We live in hope.
A quick word on Billy Graham’s appearance in the book and the piece: I think it’s important to keep myths in motion. I have no doubt Reverend Graham came to regret his decision to flex when asked to comment on Dr. King’s speech. To love a Billy Graham is to love a process. And I think we owe it to Graham, the human being, to note the missteps, especially when we see them repeated for instance, in the decisions of so many famous white people in America who’ve been successfully marketed as Christians. We don’t have to defer to a myth. We don’t have to keep repeating those moves. We have to stop, repent, and enter into the space of moral adulthood Professor Butler invites us to see together. Reckoning, after all, is gospel. May we receive the gift of discernment she’s placed in front of us.