Tuesday, October 13, 2020

History: Free of Charge (Copied from a Facebook Post)

Last night an evangelical Christian friend whose spirit for loving people I adore vented about her inability to understand the complicity of the white evangelical American church with the open support of white supremacy in their support of Trump. 

I found her statement most interesting because white supremacy is the historical catalyst for the formation of nonsectarian evangelicalism in the United States. One needs to know and understand history to know and understand the present. So I present to you the shortest history possible of nonsectarian evangelicalism in the United States and its complicity with white supremacy.
---
In the years leading up to the civil war many of the country's denominations split between Northern and Southern councils over the issue of slavery. Most importantly noted is the Southern Baptist, which today is the largest segment of nonsectarian evangelicalism in the United States. The largest portion of this movement had the protection of the institution of human slavery as its conception point.
After the war however one needs to look at the man most associated with the Evangelical origins today, DL Moody. DL Moody's complicity with white supremacy in order to unify Christians under a single banner of revivalism is well documented. Racial Segregation for the sake of interdenominational unity is the womb for the movements gestation.
While studying the history one needs to look up names like Jerry Falwell Sr, Francis Schafer, and Bob Jones and the role White Supremacy plays in the formation in the late 1970s of the Religious Right. The catalyst for this final unification of nonsectarian evangelicalism in the United States is to protect the ability of Christian colleges to keep their tax-exempt status while still upholding their teaching on segregation and Miscegenation.
Religious freedom as defined by evangelicalism in the United States has been about the freedom to uphold white supremacy since its official birth in the late 1970s.
From conception, through gestation, and into its modern birthing Evangelicalism has always been intertwined with this "first sin" of American nationalism which is white supremacy. The racism changes its face, but never its history and intent.
---
That history is lesson is provided free of charge and effort, but if you are willing to put in the academic work of understanding the larger movement of all these pieces there are many wonderful scholarly works I would commend to you.

Lastly to my beloved friends and family who remain a part of that movement, and yet understand that the love of God and white supremacy can not coexist, I want to say, the future is yet to be written.