“White Evangelical Racism tells a concise history of the evangelical movement and–here is the hard part–the racist and racial elements that imbue its beliefs, practices, and social and practical activism.”
I first learned of this book and its author from watching the Jerry Falwell Jr documentary on Hulu. Butler is one of the featured commentators, and in the early parts of this book, she spends some time framing her relationship to the material which comes in part from her professional and educational expertise, but also from her own connections to evangelical church when she was younger. I grew up in Roanoke, which has plenty of evangelical churches, but is proximal to Liberty University and by way of some highways, Regent University, the college founded by Pat Robertson. Those are not the only bastions of evangelical churches, but they are big parts of them. One of the most important features of this book is the reminder (and history) of resistance to integration in the South. In places like Virgina, where “massive resistance” to Brown v Board of Education resulted in huge school systems shutting down and money being diverted to private schools to ensure white education, this history is tied in directly with power. In many cases, schools exist entirely as a consequence of being formed in order to receive that money. Even thought the rhetoric around evangelicalism has moved toward abortion, the origins of it have never actually gone anywhere. That racism is foundational to the church, quite literally.
This book is small, about 100 pages, but that offers more of a tighter focus on this question on its own, rather than a full rendering of the history American evangelicals. This focus is both intentional and important.
