1,069 words
Anthea Butler
White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021
White Evangelical Racism by Athena Butler is a book where the author is correct, but only partially so.
Butler was an Evangelical Protestant and worked/volunteered at a mega-church in Southern California. During a “community healing” event after the 1992 Rodney King Riots, Butler was offended that the mother of the senior pastor didn’t recognize her when she was intermixed with a group of sub-Saharans from a black church. I think this response to such a misunderstanding is very petty, but who am I to judge such an affront to Blackness.
This sort of book will be lapped up by smug liberals that think they can think, but it is not a serious work of theological scholarship. Butler argues that Evangelical Protestantism was always for slavery, segregation, etc. even while she describes how religious denominations split over the slavery issue in the 1850s. Some of the denominations — such as the Presbyterians — have since reunited. The Baptists remain separate. (One can read Southern Presbyterian literature here.)
Butler likewise fails to recognize the considerable splits within mid-twentieth century Evangelical Protestantism. She lumps in Ministers Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis with Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale. These ministers had some of the same goals during the Cold War, might have been in the same room at some point, and might not have voted for JFK in the 1960 election (which was their right), but they had very different methods and end-goals.
As a side note, in the late 1990s, Billy Graham held a revival where I was living. The religiously inclined women at my workplace, both sub-Saharan and white, were excited for this event and both attended with their respective churches.
This misreading of data on Butler’s part comes out in other ways. She describes Evangelical Protestant attempts at racial healing as proof of her thesis. For example, in the 1990s, the anti-abortion activist Ralph Reed called abortion “black genocide,” and the focus of the 1996 Promise Keeper’s series of revivals was racial reconciliation. This is a somewhat strange way to go about proving one’s point that all Evangelicals are racists. If so, wouldn’t they be for “black genocide?”
Ultimately, Evangelical Protestants are damned to be racists no matter what they do or fail to do.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Here’s the Thing here.
The Issues of the Religious Right are a Proxy War
I believe that the Religious Right that took off as a political movement in the late 1970s was a legitimate white reaction to the “civil rights” disaster of the mid-1960s. Butler mentions, and I agree totally, that Evangelical Protestant political activism really started with the Green v. Kennedy (1970) case that challenged the tax-exempt status of private, religious, and segregated schools. Issues regarding abortion were a way to rally Evangelicals to focus on judicial appointments to avoid another disruptive Warren Court “Black Monday” type of situation.
Unfortunately, the Religious Right’s activism was a proxy fight for this struggle. To use a military metaphor, Evangelical Protestants defended a terrain feature — tax exemption for segregated schools — that they felt was important. Evangelical Protestants recognized that they wanted to keep their children safe from young, sub-Saharan wildlings while providing them a solid education. They chose to not take direct offensive action against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which remains a major problem.
Racism is a Rational Response to Negro Pathology
“Racism” is actually a neologism. Marxists made up the term out of whole cloth sometime in the 1930s to impeach civically virtuous white Americans. By the sola scriptura lights of Evangelical Protestantism, “racism” isn’t a sin. It isn’t anything at all.
Indeed, I’ll argue here that Evangelical Protestants, and indeed every implicitly white institution, should drop the pretense and flat-out embrace “racism.” Whites will be called “racists” no matter what they do or fail to do.
“Racism” is a rational response to the considerable pathologies of sub-Saharans, which include criminality, sympathy for criminals, lower average IQ, and the fact that sub-Saharans are a danger to themselves and others.
The way to fight one religion is with another. Evangelical Protestantism is an effective counter to the religion of Negro Worship. An example of Negro Worship can be found in the Anglican Christ Church in Zanzibar. The temple is filled with graven images of sub-Saharans and the graven image altar is where the whipping post supposedly was. Also, Zanzibar was the scene of a horrific massacre of Arabs by sub-Saharans in 1964.
Anthea Butler is also every bit as “racist” in her critique of Evangelical Protestants when she uses terms like “whiteness.” Such terms are, in fact, a dehumanizing call for violence — such as that in Zanzibar. Indeed, Butler only switched religions. She went from Evangelical Protestantism to Negro Worship.
Proxy Wars to Direct Wars?
All unstable political arrangements last around four score and seven years. As this article goes to print, Brown v. Board (1954) is 67 years in the past and the 1964 Civil Rights Act is a mere decade younger. When proxy wars regarding the instability cease to be fought, the real war eventually comes about. Although the evidence in this book is contradictory, the book does strip away the proxy war aspects of Evangelical Protestantism’s social activism and argues for a direct conflict.
It’s a bit like moving the Cold War’s conflict from Vietnam to one of Soviet bombers attacking the cities of the east coast with hydrogen bombs.
Ultimately, the real conflict might be irrepressible. The entire society of the United States bends backward to accommodate the sub-Saharan population, despite that population being expensive, burdensome, and unproductive. Indeed, the Democratic Party seems to only exist to placate the needs of sub-Saharans. But there are too many frauds, too many problems, and too many expenses to keep this situation going indefinitely. Regardless, we all might come to regret the end of the ongoing racial proxy war.
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12 comments
There is nothing anti-Biblical about segregation and it was a mistake for Churches to cave on this issue. National, or ethnic Churches, like the Orthodox, can been a haven, and suburban Catholic and Protestant Churches remain overwhelmingly White, but until, and unless, Churches stay substantially segregated, we risk even more people falling into secularism and its degeneracy and negro worship.
It was a mistake, but a mistake driven by the internal universalist logic of the Christian faith. If everyone can be saved, then everyone as worth equal to everyone else. You cannot tell Negros ‘No, you are not equal’ when Jesus has already declared them equal. I don’t think Christianity can ever get itself out of the ‘equality’ business as long as there is no hierarchy to control interpretation of the texts.
I think the error is yours, not Christianity’s. Yes, it is also my understanding of Christianity that the brotherhood of Christ is spiritual, based on the primacy of moral character rather than secondary characteristics like skin color. But the assumption of racial equality of salvific potential (ie, the potential to be saved in Christ) does not logically lead to any conclusions about racial equality in material matters. Jesus did not say that any people was equivalent to, or interchangeable with, any other. Nor did He ever charge one people with the obligation of enhancing the undeserved self-esteem of another.
Prowhites simply must eschew the white nationalist tendency to view Christ and Christian moral theology through the filter of degenerate liberalism (if the North American New Right has a single purpose, it is uncovering the deep sources of corruption at the root of liberalism). There is something unchristian about robbing a Negro (not because the Negro is special, but because robbery is wrong). There is nothing wrong with disassociating from him. Nonwhites have no more right of access to white societies than whites have to access nonwhite homes. My home is mine, not yours (and yours is yours, not mine). Likewise, while white home-lands may not be private (individual) property per se, neither are they “global commons” (like Antarctica, the Pacific Ocean, or the moon), either. They are the collective property of their peoples, public as to those peoples themselves, but private as to aliens. And that collective, national property is intergenerational, too. It is held in trust for future generations. It is not property than any single generation may ruin or irrevocably transform at a whim.
DNA is a prime mover, not a secondary characteristic.
Not from a Christian moral perspective. Moral character determines one’s status in Christian spiritual hierarchy (which is what I was plainly referring to).
An excellent, succinct review of what appears to be an intellectually deficient publication. I once heard someone say that bookstores were one of the last indicators that Americans were still thinking, meaning freely trading in ideas and differing opinions. I have been to my local Barnes & Noble lately and let me tell you, if a visit to B&N, and a look at the contents of its shelves, is an indicator of anything, it’s that thinking is the last thing that the vast majority of Americans are doing these days: worship of blacks and the LGBTQXYZ+ non-binary (whatever they call their movement at the moment) agenda are, among other things, America’s official religion. Enough is enough. It’s time to build a political and metapolitical movement that will directly challenge the Left and not back down. If it’s successful enough, the National Justice Party (NJP) would be worth lending one’s support to.
Excellent essay.
Christianity was the ringworm of Western Culture. The West was born with it in its guts. Christianity poisoned the West from within.
But can a West without Christianity be imagined? Expunging Christianity from the West is as un-doable as a brain transplant for a person. I now see no path to a Western Recovery other than violent collapse followed by a New West rebuilt from ashes. A project of centuries.
The author is prescient: “there are too many frauds, too many problems, and too many expenses to keep this situation going indefinitely”. Indeed, and the sooner the Left itself collapses the current System the better. Social structures can be rebuilt, but the genetic and demographic damage being done to Western people is unrecoverable and increases every day that the System remains standing.
There’s a theory that a major social revolution occurs every three generations (c. 75 years). Thus, American Revolution to Civil War to New Deal to Trump and the events of 2020.
There may be a parallel series of revolutions on the American racial front: Manifest Destiny and commencement of the Winning of the West (1815+), to White People’s Revolution (1880s), to Civil Rights movement (1950s-60s). Which means that some time around the year 2030 things could really break loose.
The events of the Civil Rights Revolution do have strong elements of religious war: the worship of ostensibly messianic figures (MLK, jr., Nelson Mandela, George Floyd); the public acts of faith (“taking a knee”); the hunts for the heretics (“anti-racism”); the non-stop rioting, pillaging and iconoclasm; the crusades into foreign lands to bring the infidels into line (Regime pushing the BLM narrative worldwide).
Might look to the decades from Jan Zizka and the Hussite Wars running up to Martin Luther posting his 95 Theses at Wittenberg in 1517. Compare those decades with the various campaigns which opposed the Civil Rights movement, openly or explicitly (Critical Resistance, White Nationalism 1.0, housewife protests against forced busing, White evangelicalism (per the book reviewed), the Alt Right, today’s National-Populism). The issue then becomes, how can the Dissident Right in the decade of the 2020s prepare for its own “Wittenberg?”
“It is earlier than you think.” –attributed to Ayn Rand
A Diet of Worms
Indeed.
Look at the era running up to that Diet of 1521: the Hussite and Taborite Wars, the impact of the printing press, the emergence of new thinkers like Machiavelli. And consider how in 2021 the Regime treats the Dissident Right as a heresy against the prevailing egalitarian ideologies: the censorship, the iconoclasm, the expulsion from the polite cocktail parties, the big hammer brought down on events like Charlottesville and the Scanza Forum. Yet at that Diet where he confronted the lords of the late-Medieval era, Martin Luther stood and won, and thus rose the modern world.
A mission for the Dissident Right today is the ongoing metapolitical struggle, to establish the intellectual foundations for the day when a great spokesmen can confront the Regime on its own grounds – and win.
(Incidentally, this is not meant to take sides in the Protestant versus Catholic debate of centuries past. There are many lessons to be learned from both sides. The Jesuits have a thing or two to say about the efficacy of political soldiers. Let’s see those lessons learned!)
Christian beliefs are used as the escape hatch/ cop out for the denial of race realism. I often debate a certain someone on this topic, and every time he or she gets cornered, which is often “God” is the deus ex machina that swoops in
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