Religion, Populism, and Modernity

From the start, the whiteness of White Christian nationalism was opposed to blackness as well as to redness and to color more generally. Until well into the 19th century, many American Whites believed that their Black slaves had no souls to save. To be Black was to be irredeemable. The reverse was also true. To be unredeemed was to be “Black.” Until well into the 20th century, the Irish and Italian Catholics and Central and East European Jews who immigrated to America were regarded not only as religious others but also—and therefore—as racial others. Italians, Irish, and Jews were widely understood as not quite White. Their whitening was only gradual. The whitening of Mexican-Americans, meanwhile, was halting at best, that of Asian-Americans more halting still.

The racial segregation of American churches is well-known—and enduring. But the effects of whiteness on evangelical Christianity were theological as well as sociological. Consider Biblical literalism. Its origins are usually traced to the American reception of German “historical-criticism” during the late 19th-century and the eruption of the “fundamentalist/modernist” controversy during the early 20th century. But as the religious historian Mark Noll has persuasively shown, Biblical literalism initially emerged a half century earlier – as a means of defending slavery. Whereas abolitionists appealed to the “spirit” of the Bible, pro-slavery theologians fastened onto the “letter”—onto specific passages that mentioned slavery in an approving fashion. Many conservative Protestants were already inclined to Biblical literalism long before the Social Gospel and the Scopes Trials turned them against political and theological liberalism.

Or consider the evangelical reading of Christian ethics in terms of “personal accountability” rather than “social justice.” As the political scientist Michael Lienesch and other scholars have shown, it was propagated by Gilded Age business elites as a means of opposing the Social Gospel and providing theological cover for laissez-faire economics. And as the American historian Kevin Kruse and others have shown, it was repropagated by Cold War business elites for similar purposes. Conservative Christians were taught that their faith was about saving individual souls not pursuing the common good. But the ethics of personal accountability had as much to do with race as with economics. As sociologists Christian Smith and Michael Emerson have demonstrated, personal accountability talk has also become a means of stripping inequality of its social context—a means, that is, of blaming the poor, and especially poor Blacks, for their own poverty, for a lack of wealth that is demonstrably better understood in structural and historical terms.

Finally, consider evangelical theologians newfound love for the subtleties of the Holy Trinity. For decades, evangelical preachers have urged their followers to establish a “personal relationship with Jesus.” So “Christ-centered” was their theology that God the Father sometimes seemed to fade into the background. As for the Holy Spirit, that was for the “Holy Rollers” of a Pentecostal persuasion. No more. As “radical Islam” has replaced “Godless communism” as the religio-racial other for religious conservatives, evangelical theologians have rediscovered the Triune God. For trinitarian doctrine makes it possible to draw a sharp line between Christianity and Islam, which insists on the one-ness of God. It allows evangelical theologians to argue that Christian and Muslims do not worship the same God. That this dividing line also runs between Christianity and Judaism, or that the doctrine of the Trinity has no “Biblical basis” whatsoever (i.e., is not explicitly mentioned in the scripture), is evidently of no account. The theology must be bent to fit the politics. The racial tail is wagging the theological dog, and not for the first time in the history of evangelicalism.