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I'm really glad to see conversations about race, Christianity, and white supremacy in the mainstream media. But! 1/ https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/883115867/white-supremacist-ideas-have-historical-roots-in-u-s-christianity?utm_term=nprnews&utm_campaign=npr&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com
These ideas were fully developed in the nineteenth century, but they didn't just spring into existence. There's a much earlier, and very sordid history here. 2/
For the Anglophone Americas, the process of associating Christianity with whiteness and irredeemable heathenism with Blackness begins in the late sixteenth century. 3/
This racialization of Christianity gets fully developed in North America and the Caribbean across the long seventeenth century. The stuff these nineteenth-century ministers are saying in this article? 4/
It would have been familiar and comprehensible in the seventeenth century. 5/
Black people and Native people also used Christianity as a tool to resist white supremacist ideas rooted in Christianity, so of course racist ideas were never a monolith, nor did they go unquestioned. 6/
I just think it's important that we [meaning historians, who are always happy to say, but everything was happening earlier than you thought!] remind folks that these ideas have a long, troubling history. 7/
Oh yeah, and I wrote a book about this for @JHUPress !! /fin https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/baptism-early-virginia
