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A key finding of Robert P. Jones's research in both his End of White Christian America and his new White Too Long is that a majority of US white Christians hanker for an idyllic time in the past (which never really existed in the way they imagine it) when All Was Right. /1
White people were on top, and Black people in their places. Women stayed home happily cooking for their men, whose job it was to bring home the bacon. Men were men and women were women and there was no confusion of the two. LGBTQ folks? Did not exist. /2
The 2016 election revealed to us that a majority of white Christians will do just about ANYTHING to try to retrieve that imaginary lost world β and will not stop short of electing an immoral, racist, authoritarian strongman to try to reach that goal. /3
This white Christian subset of America, which is aging and dwindling, likes to talk about "religious freedom" as some kind of special weapon given uniquely into their hands to wield β against others. /4
Here's a snapshot of what the religious freedom rhetoric really means to a lot of US white Christians: a few years ago, I went with my husband to a community in Iowa where some of his roots lie, a community that has long been heavily Catholic. /5
We met a cousin of his and some of her friends and had lunch. Talk turned to the school system in their town. They were very unhappy that the public school in their community can do whatever it wants, as they see it. They remembered a time when their parish priest could /6
instruct the public school system regarding what teachers might say in the classroom. They wanted to go back there.
They had no concept at all, it seemed, of how the "there" to which they wanted to go back was also a white supremacist paradise. /7
They had no concept at all, it seemed, of how the "there" to which they wanted to go back was also a white supremacist paradise. /7
It didn't seem to occur to them that public schools serve a wide variety of students from various racial backgrounds, and attacking and undermining public schools β trying to place them under the control of particular religious groups β has a racial subtext. /8
Because their heavily Catholic community in Iowa has almost no people of color living in it, and they don't have to think about what any of this means, do not have to confront the reality of otherness β are not taught to do so in their churches. /9
Multiply this little town by hundreds and place it all over the US, and you see why our problems as a nation seem so intractable right now β with white Christians front and center in producing and compounding those problems. /10
