I watched Obama clinch the presidency from a bar in Munich which stayed open all night for the occasion. From thousands of miles away, my fellow Democrats Abroad and I, along with a smattering of Germans and other foreign nationals, cheered the returns, drank and danced until Obama finally took to the stage in Grant Park to announce his victory. We’d done it, we’d elected not just a great candidate, but the first African American to our country’s highest office. I fell into bed around 6am, elated.
It feels like a lifetime has passed since politics felt that hopeful. Donald Trump made reversing the bulk of Obama Administration policies the cornerstone of his platform. Ta-Nehisi Coates argues convincingly that Trump was the first [explicitly] white president—that is, the first president elected in a bid to restore white supremacy. Which leads me to wonder, was racism a deciding factor in Evangelical support of Donald Trump?
As our country begins to grapple with its history, it’s worth looking at Christianity’s role in creating America’s racial hierarchy and ask ourselves some hard questions. How did a religion ostensibly based on love become a tool of oppression? And how do we even begin to repair the many harms of racism?
There’s no way I could give satisfactory answers to all that in a single blog post, but I can give an overview and point the curious reader towards the scholars who can offer deeper insights.
While Jesus was a rebel from a scrappy religious and ethnic minority, Christianity has, since the conversion of Emperor Constantine, been a religion of empire. Empire, power, and control were at the root of the crusades as well as imperialism in the new world. Missionaries spread out from Europe attempting to convert and “civilize” what they viewed as inferior cultures.
While slavery was widespread in the ancient world, Western Europe and America crafted, in the Atlantic slave trade, an institution terrifying in its efficiency and brutality. And the church was there to help justify it, first as a means of “civilizing” non-Christian Africans, and then, once many African Americans embraced Christianity, by extrapolating some dumb story about Noah’s sons into “the curse of Ham” as justification for chattel slavery. (If you need a good example of the Biblical gymnastics Christians have used to justify their greed and hatred, check out the 2012 film Lincoln.)
But Christian white supremacy didn’t die with slavery. In her book, White Evangelical Racism, Dr. Anthea Butler provides a necessary corrective to the whitewashing of American Christianity. Again and again, American churches have chosen to side with white supremacy, whether it’s dominations splitting over the issue of slavery (Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians), churches and clergy that supported the KKK, lynching, Jim Crow, and The Lost Cause narrative, or Billy Graham opposing Martin Luther King’s work. Butler argues that Evangelical support of Trump shouldn’t come as a shock precisely because of the church’s devotion to maintaining white supremacy.
To be sure, there have also been Christians pursuing abolition as long as there have been Christians touting slavery. And after the Second Great Awakening in the mid-19th century, postmillennialism (the belief that Jesus would only return after 1,000 years of peace) led to many Christians becoming involved in social reforms promoting education, literacy, and charity. But then the premillennialists came and fucked everything up. This belief, still prominent among many Evangelicals, is that Jesus will only come back once things are at their absolute worst, so we should look forward to war in Israel and Climate Change displacing billions of people. These are the Christians who’ve been setting our national political agenda.
Reading White Evangelical Racism in the same month as Jesus and John Wayne and John Fea’s Believe Me, a picture of the religious right begins to come together: a white male patriarchy which has been frightened by rapidly changing social mores. They have a death grip on the levers of power, afraid, perhaps that the people they’ve long oppressed will want revenge and not equality.
But Jesus didn’t come as ruling king. Instead he washed feet, he fed people, he talked to children. He didn’t lead an empire; he was killed by one. You can’t worship both Jesus and the pursuit of power; one will always claim your loyalty over the other. If the Evangelical church is going to survive the next hundred years, it would do well to step back from politics and engage in a season of reflection and repentance.
Do you think racism played in the election of Trump and other far-right politicians, or is that argument overly simplistic? Do you have any favorite resources to share on racism in Christianity? Feel free to share your recs in the comments.
Bonus Materials:
Throughline podcast on The Evangelical Vote
This bonkers Hulu documentary on Jerry Falwell Jr’s pool boy scandal features Dr. Butler as a talking head!
Premillennialism is accelerationist nihilism wearing a crucifix.
There is no doubt that racism played a big role in the election of Trump. However, I am not sure if promoting racism was the main motivation for evangelicals to vote for him. There are certainly plenty of racists among evangelicals. But you find them more often in certain regions where there has been a history of racism, e.g., the South. In other parts of the US, evangelical views on race are likely to be much more diverse. For example, the West coast has large numbers of evangelicals of Asian (Chinese, Korean, etc.) heritage. They, like their white counterparts, probably voted for Trump but not for the purpose of maintaining white supremacy. I think it is mainly for reasons that you pointed out in your previous posts: the lust for power (Christian nationalism) and the maintenance of patriarchy.