5 Quotes by Robert P. Jones

White Christian America had its golden age in the 1950s, after the hardships and victories of World War Ii and before the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. June Cleaver was its mother, Andy Griffith was its sheriff, Norman Rockwell was its artist. and Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale were its ministers.

the U.S. Census Bureau has not asked about religious affiliation since 1946

It’s nothing short of astonishing that a religious tradition with this relentless emphasis on salvation and one so hyperattuned to personal sin can simultaneously maintain such blindness to social sins swirling about it, such as slavery and race-based segregation and bigotry.

But if we white Christians are going to get any critical leverage on our past, and the distortions this past has brought into our present, we have to let go of both the quest for self-protection – that is to say, the advantages we hoard at unjust costs to others – and the insistence on our racial and religious innocence.

The historical record of lived Christianity in America reveals that Christian theology and institutions have been the central cultural tent pole holding up the very idea of white supremacy. And the genetic imprint of this legacy remains present and measurable in contemporary white Christianity, not only among evangelicals in the South but also among mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast.