Anthea Butler’s -White Evangelical Racism — A Review

Anthea Butler paints a compelling picture of our current toxicity- through: White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. Examples of her words may be helpful.

In the summer of 2019 in Mississippi, a couple was turned down when trying to rent Boone’s Camp Event Hall for their wedding reception. Why? The couple, a Black man and white woman, was told by the event hall owner, “First of all, we don’t do gay weddings or mixed race… because of our Christian race, I mean our Christian belief.” The hall owner’s slip of the tongue was telling in its equation of Christianity with whiteness. (p.8–9)

Evangelical preoccupation with race. communism, and Catholicism would only ramp up in the 1960’s. (p.52)

Understand that for those of us in the Black community, it was not the evangelical who came and taught us our worth and dignity as Black men. It was not the Bible-believing fundamentalist who stood up and told us that Black was beautiful. It was not the evangelical who preached to us that we should stand on our own two feet and be men, be proud that Black was beautiful, and that Good could work his life out through our redeemed Blackness. Rather, it took Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, and the Brothers to declare to us our dignity.

(quoting Tom Skinner, p.61–62)

The hot-button issue of interracial relationships would prove to be an important facdtor in how evangelicals would eventually eventually come together… (p.63)