American Christianity Must Reckon With Legacy Of White Supremacy, Author Says
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Robert P. Jones is the founder and CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts research on issues at the intersection of religion, culture and politics.
Simon & Schuster
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Simon & Schuster
America Reckons With Racial Injustice
White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots In U.S. Christianity
As the U.S. begins to grapple more seriously with issues of racism and white supremacy, Jones says the time has come for churches to be more in vocal about social justice.
«There’s so much work still to be done,» he says. «White Christians have been largely silent … and have hardly begun these conversations.»
Interview highlights
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White Too Long, by Robert P. Jones
Simon & Schuster
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Simon & Schuster
Religion
Southern Baptist Seminary Confronts History Of Slaveholding And ‘Deep Racism’
On how some Northern churches imposed segregation even after the Civil War
the Catholic Church had long had a practice of African Americans sitting in the back. [They] couldn’t come and take part of the Eucharist until all the white members had done so.
It wasn’t just in Southern evangelical churches or Baptist churches. … Even when [the Methodists] admitted African American churches into the larger Methodist denomination, they segregated them into one jurisdiction. It was essentially a version of religious gerrymandering so that they would get one bishop instead of possibly competing for power in other jurisdictions; they were all locked into one jurisdiction, so their voice inside the denomination will be smaller.
And even among white Catholics, the Catholic Church had long had a practice of African Americans sitting in the back. [They] couldn’t come and take part of the Eucharist until all the white members had done so. New York, for example, did the same thing, and actually segregated the African American Catholics into a single parish and also made only one Catholic school available to African Americans and made it a segregated school. And these practices continued in the middle of the 20th century, even even among Catholics in the North.
On the contradictions within white churches that supported the civil rights movement
Code Switch
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The United Methodist building here in Washington, D.C., was the staging ground and playing a lot of supporting roles for the March on Washington in 1963. The Christian Century, the kind of flagship magazine of the mainline Protestant world, was the place where Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail was originally published. He was on the editorial board of essentially this white mainline Protestant magazine. So there’s certainly very prominent figures, places that showed up and helped in organizing, but [also] this huge gap between the official statements, leaders who showed up in those things, and the vast majority of folks on the ground.
At the same time The Christian Century is publishing A letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King and his wife apply for their son, Martin Luther King III, to attend a private Episcopalian school in Atlanta. And he’s turned down on the basis of race. At the same time there’s a very mainline denomination helping support the march on Washington … another wing is denying his [son’s] admission to a school on the basis of race. It’s a very mixed bag. … The symbolic things that were done and even courageous leaders that were out in the front of the civil rights movement never quite fully brought the great bulk of people in the pews with them.
Sam Briger and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.
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