As someone who barely survived Evangelicism with my faith intact, I can say that white Evangelicals & Black Evangelicals who are manipulated into/ are willingly complicit in protecting them will never come to a reckoning because it requires forfeiting belief in moral superiority.

…And it requires the inevitable realization that they are not “last days” martyrs, but are in fact as invested in empire as Rome ever was.

When the whole foundation of your faith practice is rooted in respectability and apologitics and winning—be it arguments or souls—it’s impossible to relinquish that belief without realizing that the way you’ve been taught to practice your faith has failed you.

Modern Evangelicism in particular is invested in being “correct” and has largely no tolerance for gray. If you have doubts you’re a backslider, if you question you’re “divisive,” if you’re crude you’re “rebellious.”

The vulgar work of confronting antiblackness isn’t actually conducive to respectability, which is white Evangelicism’s first idol. Example: How can a white Evangelical truly hear the sentiment under “fuck the police,” for instance, when they can’t even get past the words.

They’ll be quick to quote Eph 4:29 but won’t actually pause to seriously consider that perhaps their schema for “unwholesome talk” is narrow. That perhaps they’d be better served by turning to the KJV again, which says “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth.”

But modern white Evangelicism is corrupt, and does corrupt the spirit. It is as inextricable from whiteness in any other secular context because it is fashioned by whiteness, which knows no god other than itself.

As long as you have the lexicon of Christianese you can bend your interpretation of the the Word of God in whatever way suits your convictions.

There is no room to say, publicly or privately, “Maybe I’m wrong; maybe my idea of God has been wrong” because the consequences feel dire. Worship of one’s idea of God must give way to the vast expansiveness of a God who can’t be fully known on earth but dares us, begs us to try.

Until white Evangelicism and white Christianity recognizes itself as an idol erected in place of the God it claims to serve, it will continue as it has and both its constituents and all affected by them will suffer.

And until Black Christians understand & accept that we cannot be “unified” with what has been designed to kill us without it killing us, we will continue to be used as instruments of our own destruction, worshipping a blonde, blue-eyed god who has the ethics of a slave master.

If you’re a Black Christian like me, this all requires a willingness to be ostracized, misunderstood both incidentally and willfully, and will require a flint-like commitment to only desiring acceptance from God, because you will be unlikely to get it anywhere else at first.

Black Christians—adjacent, reluctant, faithful—we will *always* be seen as Black before we’re anything else, and any white Christian who denies this is lying. Until their approval means nothing to you, you will never be free. But I promise you it’s possible to get to that place.