I suppose this might be considered “history lite” but toward the end Butler makes a definite point and gets quite heavy-handed about it – imo. While totally ignoring 1 factor in the issue but …
White Evangelical Racism:
The Politics of Morality in America
by Anthea Butler
2021 – 168 pages
Reader: Allyson Johnson – 3h 44m
Rating: 8 / politics and religion (and too short)
In this book Anthea Butler is pretty much calling all evangelicals racist who are led by power-hungry white men. I can’t totally disagree with that as a broad-brush generalization, but Lutherans call themselves evangelical while they tend to be liberal – not as much as Quakers or Unitarians but maybe a wee bit more than Roman Catholics.
Personally, I’m not an evangelical in any way, but I know many people who are. My mom was one but her definition was that evangelicals are missionary types – spreading the “Good News” of the Gospels. My mom didn’t have a racist bone in her body and got very hurt when she overheard her friends at church (Lutheran) the only reason to be against Obama was that you were racist. She wasn’t against Obama for any reason other than his being too close to socialism than any other Democrat tended to be. She was very much like Jimmy Carter, the only Democrat she ever voted for. (“Because he was so Christian.)
Another time she was very hurt that a woman next to her was saying something about gays should never be allowed to marry or serve any position in the church – sorry but my mom’s son is gay and she’s not willing to send him to damnation (or to therapy like his parents tried). My mom was horrified by Trump’s “wall” although she voted for him. She could spot racism better than I could. She believed “he was sent by God.” One time when she was 95 or so, she asked herself if she would evangelize to a new neighbor who was Muslim. It was hypothetical and she never came to a conclusion that I know of – she was horribly torn.
So what is it the book says? Basically that the racism we see in Evangelical US churches today has been around for a long, long time. NOT all Evangelicals are racists (racism, even historical racism, disgusted my very Evangelical Lutheran mother.)
Anyway, the book was on sale and, conflating it with The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta, I got it. I have yet to get it – lol. So when I started this one it wasn’t as good as I’d expected and I put it down for awhile. Then, when I picked it back up, I felt like I was in a different section – not a different book really – but different in that it was suddenly much more appealing.
During that time I’d looked into the author’s background and that may have piqued my curiosity ??? I found that today Butler is a Catholic by choice, but she was evangelical for awhile including the time she was in training at an Evangelical Pentecostal college.
From the book: “The Church of God in Christ (COGIC), an African American Pentecostal denomination founded in 1896, has become the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States today. Although an international and multi-ethnic religious organization, it has a predominantly African American membership based within the United States.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthea_Butler
What is an evangelical? (I got curious.) https://hwpi.harvard.edu/files/pluralism/files/fundamentalism_evangelicalism_and_pentecostalism.pdf
In contemporary America, evangelical generally means happy and spreading the “good news,” but it’s also come to mean a kind of fundamentalist approach to Christianity. It’s not in any rules book but if you look around. Evangelical Christians are white-skinned with European ancestry.
White Evangelical Racism: covers the period from Reconstruction to George Floyd and a bit beyond (published 2021). George Bush (a truly evangelical president) and Donald Trump. “King Cyrus.” were supposedly evangelicals.
After 9/11 many Evangelicals in the US targeted anyone who looked Muslim and it didn’t matter if they were Sikhs or Pakistani or anyone else wearing a turban.
Barrack Hussein Obama, although assumed to be Muslim (leading to the “birther conspiracy”), went to church to hear Rev Jeremiah Wright, a Black minister from the African Methodist Church, and his very harsh sermons often concerning the US and race. And then came Sarah Palin with the kind of anti-Islam/Muslim harangue the Evangelicals embraced. She was followed by the Tea Party with its ongoing rants about economic and social issues.These T-vangelicals were concerned with various “entitlements” including health care coverage, schools, and more.
Right now Trump, at the tail end of 2024, is on top of the polls again even after all his nonsense. But Evangelicals will make excuses and try to believe in him and conspiracy theories until hell freezes over, or the Big Money dries up. but the federal lawsuits might have an effect.
Sarah Palin’s anti-Muslim rant added to her brand of pro-Life in action, Conservative Pentecostalism, To the Evangelicals, Sarah was the very best pick McCain could have made. The enemy was the Obama campaign and Fox News helped out by carrying Palen’s stump speeches. The fear-mongering got bad. And the book gets hard to listen to, heavy-handed toward the end and then just over-the-top in the Conclusion. I kind of wish I’d gotten the Kindle copy for the Notes, but I can guess.
Fwiw, the author, Anthea Deidre Butler (born 1960). is an African-American professor of religion and chair of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies, where she is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought.
Becky's Books - 
Like most things, I guess this is a very complex issue. These days there are people who say that if you are white you are by definition you are racist, and if you think you’re not you should ‘educate yourself.’ So I’m not surprised that there would be a book that claims that all evangelicals are racist too.
I don’t think it’s helpful to label people on the basis of their skin colour or their religious or political beliefs. (They would say, of course, that I would say that because of my ‘white privilege’). But I think that if the modern world is anything to go by, we need to bring people together, and I don’t think that labelling, blaming and imposing guilt will ever achieve that goal. Making people feel bad doesn’t make them behave better.
At the interpersonal level it means learning about, respecting and having contact with people who are different to us, and at the political level it means being careful about what institutions you belong to that claim to speak for you, and being judicious with your vote for politicians who will act in your name. That’s not as easy as it sounds, because all politics involves compromise. But the more we learn about people who are different to us, the better, I think…
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Exactly, Lisa. I don’t care much for the charges of “systemic racism” and “white privilege” because, imo, that too often covers up the worst of it by using the broadest brush possible even for the most offensive acts. Of course these things exist on a broad level but to call a hate crime “systemic racism” is only going about an inch deep. We might be better served focusing on the ugliness of the individual acts of racism than on the whole system even if at other times it is indeed systemic and comes from the top. – i.e. private Christian schools to avoid integration, white male boards of directors in the churches, etc.
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I hadn’t realised that private Christian schools were part of the problem for that reason, which shows, I’m sure, that each country has its own particular issues.
FWIW I think the biggest problem that’s universal is economic inequality, which has become worse since Reagan and Thatcher and globalisation, and it involves systemic racism in the sense that around the globe people of colour tend to be more poorly educated, and to be among the working poor if they have jobs at all, and for them, poverty is often inter-generational. And people get judged for that, for being poor as well as for race-related reasons.
We do know how to fix poverty. In the postwar era, in the much-derided welfare state in places like the UK and Australia, rich people paid enough taxes to even things out… to fund good schools and health care for everybody, and wages were enough for a working person to have a reasonable standard of living. If we had a global movement to eradicate poverty, things would improve for millions of people, who would mostly be people of colour.
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I think historically immigrants have come to the US to make money. There are some who came for religious freedom, but that was down the list. Poverty may be eradicated but I think the last place might be the US. They vote no to taxes – always thinking they might be rich one day. Most people feel like they’re getting a bum deal economically. You want freedom or equality? – that’s become the choice. Trump isn’t the problem – it’s the people who identify with his feeling of being picked on. It’s very close to 50/50 here (in my state it’s more like 70/30 for Trump and it does not make one bit of difference what he’s done. Trump said it, I believe it, and that settles it. (I guess it looks like it might make a difference if he gets convicted and sentenced – but he’s looking to win and pardon himself. – Nikki Haley could be a challenge but politically she’s pretty close to what he says he is (but isn’t). The Christian right isn’t so much behind her.
This is a long story that started with Reagan.
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Bec, you must come and live in Australia if Trump gets elected!
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