The Death of the American White Evangelical
How Bad Theology Produced Bad Politics and Killed a Movement
In the early morning hours of October 18, 2015, black musician Corey Jones was driving home after performing drums with his band. A car malfunction forced him to pull over on I-95 in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and as he attended to the vehicle, a plainclothes police officer, Nouman Raja, approached Coreyafter arriving to the scene in an unmarked van. Frightened by Raja and not recognizing him as law enforcement, Corey exposed a registered gun but did not fire. Raja then drew his weapon and unloaded multiple shots that fatally wounded Corey. Just a few hours later, Corey was scheduled to play drums for Sunday morning services at his church.
Once again, it seemed the police state had murdered a person of color. The killing enraged the local black community, who quickly organized a rally to demand justice. I attended the rally to show support, and as a white man who was raised in the evangelical tradition, what I witnessed simply floored me. Local leaders took the stage and guided the community in prayer, pleading with God for a justice grounded in the Christian scriptures. Worship leaders directed the community in singingChristian hymns and praise songs, such as "How Great is Our God," and the chorus of voices rivaled any cathedral choir. Pastors opened their bibles and preached sermons, one even preaching racial equality from the Letter to the Romans, a book that I as an evangelical had grown accustomed to as the "how to get out of hell" handbook. For this black community in Palm Beach Gardens, faith meant not only personal, private contact with God, but it also meant public and political justice. In their God's name, they would not let this injustice stand.
Just over one year later, eighty-one percent of American white evangelicals, in their God's name, elected a known racist, sexist, ableist, adulterer and lover of money to the presidency. On November 8, 2016, the white evangelical died, pulling the plug on the precarious life support system that hardly could sustain them. The white evangelical support of Donald Trump exposed the movement's true colors, one that many of us already knew, and the white narrative that had dominated American Christianity came crumbling down like the walls of Jericho. While political and social commentators rushed to explain the white evangelical vote, the results of that November night did not surprise me. America had this coming, and the white evangelical, as one who had succumbed to the peer pressure of the Republican party, toed the party line. Politically speaking, one could trace this step most recently back to the 1980s, when Jerry Falwell Sr.'s Moral Majority movement led the white evangelical to the Republicans. But theologically speaking something was happening too: the white evangelical practiced a theology that almost exclusively focused on individual salvation and morality, in contrast to the practice of early Christianity, and this individualistic focus practically ignored the larger social justice issues in America. Thus, the white evangelical could vote for Donald Trump, because, one, he was a Republican, and two, the social injustices that Trump perpetuated simply did not matter. The death of the white evangelical, as a result, potentially signaled a new era of American Christianity. The demise paved the way for a fresh discourse that elevates the voice of the marginalized while it seeks justice, as Corey's community exemplified, thus re-connecting American Christianity with its first century roots.
Social justice held much greater importance with the early Christian church than it does with the white evangelical. The New Testament writers and their communities understood that a gulf existed between God and humanity due to sin entering the world in the Garden of Eden. Sin was a power that caused all the world's ills, ranging from individual immoral behavior to the structural oppressive systems of nations. The ancient Christians continued the Jewish belief that God had appointed the nation ofIsrael to be a "light" to humanity, and through both individual and corporate just behavior, Israel would lead humanity back to God, and so reversing the curse of sin. By the time of Jesus, Israel had suffered an exile and was now a subject of Roman rule, and it appeared that the role of Israel as the world's pathway to God had gone defunct. As one who understood himself as a divinely appointed figure in Israel's history, in fact a climatic figure, Jesus believed God had not forsaken the promises that God made to Israel and humanity. Like the Hebrew prophets of old, Jesus believed God would one dayrestore Israel and humanity to God, "righting the world's wrongs," as New Testament scholar Tom Wright phrases it. But Jesus also believed that this restorative process had begun in his own day. When Jesus began his public ministry, he attended synagogue services in Nazareth, his hometown. He read from the book of Isaiah, a Hebrew prophet, where Isaiah envisions a future when the economically distressed receive good news, criminal prisoners receive their liberty, the blind receive their sight, and God sets free those who are oppressed. After he completed his reading, Jesus announced that God was fulfilling these promises that very day. For Jesus, the restoration of human lives that sin had diminished was beginning in his own presence. It was not only an individual restoration with God, but also the dismantling of systems that subjugated God's creatures.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus preached and performed acts of justice as a manifestation of God's kingdom, and by the kingdom of God he meant God's presence on earth, a presence that eliminated sin. Jesus healed diseases, criticized the accumulation of wealth and economic disparity, taught peaceful reconciliation between humans, and associated with the socialpariahs, among many other acts and words of social justice. For Jesus, these deeds and expressions were not random acts of kindness, but rather a turning a point in history, that moment when God removed sin that separated humanity from God and each other. However, Jesus' words and deeds had an edge to them; they were a counter-cultural critique. As a Jew living under the oppressive Roman hand in Palestine, Jesus was quite aware of the imperial values of Rome. Whereas Rome worshiped emperors, money, power and violence, and so marginalizing those who they ruled, the kingdom that Jesus preached promoted economic and racial equality, peace, and the elevation of the marginalized. The edgy counter-cultural message of Jesus ultimately led to his torture and crucifixion, and according to Christian belief, God raised Jesus from the dead three days later as a sign of vindication.
The first century followers of Jesus wrestled with the significance of Jesus' ministry, death, and resurrection. The most prolific writer of the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, particularly tackled these questions. For Paul, yes, a major component of God's restoration project was removing the sin that separated an individual from God. But Paul also understood that something bigger, even cosmic was at play, and this was the result of Jesus' death and resurrection. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul states that the entire creation has been groaning as it lives under sin, but God is in the process of liberating the entire creation. The cross that had killed Jesus was also a tool to restore everything to God, according to Paul, because it removed the sin that had separated all of God's creation from God. Elsewhere Paul, or at least someone writing in Paul's name, explains that Jesus' death on the cross "disarmed the powers and authorities" and had made a spectacle of them by "triumphing over them by the cross" (Colossians 2:25). In other words, the systemic powers of the state and society, which typically oppress, had lost their stranglehold over humanity due to Jesus' death on the cross. Because the cross dealt with sin, oppressive powers that were the result of sin could no longer oppress God's children.
Like Jesus, the early church faced a tension between living under Roman rule and living out God's alternative kingdom. The early church did not endorse a dominion theology, or a theology that sought a total Christian takeover of government and culture. Rather, the early church understood that they were to live counter-culturally; they were to provide an alternative way of being. This included not only living individual, moral lives, but it also included prioritizing public justice, exactly as Jesus had done. The result was that the church faced persecution at various times in its formative history, including imprisonment and death, which continued at certain points fornearly three centuries under emperors such as Nero, Domitian, Diocletian and Decian. The book of Revelation, in fact, was likely written by a late first century persecuted Christian community who employed metaphorical language to critique Roman oppression.
When analyzing the theology of the modern white evangelical, a theology that enabled the election of Donald Trump, even a casual observer of Christian history can notice a significant disparity between the theology of ancient Christianity and white evangelical doctrine. While it is true that every faith system changes over time, adapting to the circumstances, the white evangelical has taken the faith in a direction that I believe the founders of the faith could not fathom. The white evangelical church has focused almost exclusively on individual salvation, or escaping hell to reach heaven, and concomitant with it, an emphasis on individual piety and well-being. Yes, the early church cared greatly about individual salvation as well as the moral behavior of the individual. But unlike the white evangelical, they understood salvation holistically, which had implications for justice at every level of society.
A series of complex reasons throughout history can probably explain the gap between early Christianity and the white evangelical, such as Martin Luther's focus on individual salvation as a hallmark of the Protestant Reformation (he really did not have a choice at the time); the rise of dispensational theology in the 19th century, which envisioned social justice as a future, not present reality; the evangelical reaction to critical biblical scholarship; the evangelical overcompensation the "social gospel's" near exclusive emphasis on social justice, and so on. But whatever the reasons for the white evangelical's narrow theological focus, the result is that they have become their biggest fear: irrelevant. Where was the white evangelical when half of the nation was earning less than $30,000 a year, exhausted from working multiple jobs for low wages, barely able to afford rent and healthcare? Where was the white evangelical when the war on drugs targeted people of color and created a system of mass incarceration, decimating communities of color and formulating a "New Jim Crow" as law professor Michelle Alexander describes it? Where was the white evangelical when the United States invaded Iraq, an invasion based on fabricated intelligence, killing 500,000 Iraqis in the process? Where was the white evangelical when the majority ofscientists warned us of catastrophic climate change? They were busy, instead, building mega-churches, focusing on "church growth," and preaching sermons on how to connect with God individually. The white evangelical blunted early Christianity's counter-cultural edge, and they succumbed to the white bourgeois culture that defined America's elites. Rather than "speaking truth to power" to Caesar, the white evangelical looked like Caesar himself.
The irrelevance of the white evangelical is obvious, as Generation X has left the movement, and the Millennial Generation refuses to identify with it. As America lowers the coffin of the white evangelical into the ground, perhaps now in its place can arise the voice of the marginalized. It is the marginalized – people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and the poor – who can truly grasp the counter-cultural edge of Christianity, for they are the ones who suffer at the hands of systemic powers and can better appreciate the holistic nature of salvation. This does not mean there is not a place for white people in the future of American Christianity. In fact, we are witnessing positive movements of white Christians emerging in the United States, such as the Red Letter Christians, who are attempting to re-join orthodox theology with social justice. But perhaps the role of white American Christians should now be one as an ally rather than a leader. We had our time, and we blew it.
The black community that mourned Corey Jones' death did notlet the killing ruin them, but instead through the foundation of their Christian faith, they fought for not just justice, but justice in the name of Jesus. Because of the community's efforts, the state is charging Officer Raja with manslaughter and attempted murder, which could set a national precedent in racial police brutality cases if he receives a conviction. That right there is first century, counter-cultural Christianity before our eyes; it is a type of Christianity that the white evangelical refused to embrace. The contrast between the two communities, one that seeks justice, and one that perpetuates injustice, proves that the death of the white evangelical is real and necessary. Jesus said that in the kingdom of God "the first will be last, and the last will be first." Instead of denying the white evangelical's death, it is time for those who of us who are first to surrender to those whom we have made last.
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Elyssa Durant, Ed.M.
Nashville, Tennessee
"You may not care how much I know, but you don't know how much I care."
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