Wednesday, November 29, 2017

"White Voters Backed a Candidate Who Assured Them That They Will Never Have to Share This Country with People of Color as Equals": White Jesus, White Bible, White U.S. Christians & Trump Presidency



A week ago (plus a day), I shared with you an excerpt from Adam Serwer's outstanding recent essay in The Atlatic entitled "The Nationalist's Delusion." At his Slacktivist site, Fred Clark has been commenting on and sharing pieces from Serwer's essay. Here's a valuable passage from Fred's commentary today:

"A majority of white voters backed a candidate who assured them that they will never have to share this country with people of color as equals," and nothing about white Christianity as currently practiced in America makes white Christians any less susceptible to this explicitly racist con job than any other set of white citizens. 
If anything, white Christianity — particularly white evangelicalism — only seems to make white voters more resentful, more stupidly gullible, more eager to punch down, more enthusiastic about accepting Trump’s vision of a world in which our neighbors are our enemies. 
When I speak of "American white Christianity," I’m not listing demographic attributes, but theological qualities. I do not mean adherents of Christianity who also happen to be American and white. I mean practitioners of a religion characterized by whiteness and American-ness. It is a white theology based on the white Jesus reflected back from a white Bible. There is nothing in such a faith to make any of its adherents less susceptible to the "haze of delusion, denial, pride, and cruelty" Serwer describes as white nationalism.


The graphic: the cover of a publication called Treasure Chest 2,9 (1946), publisher by George A. Pflaum of Dayton, Ohio. Clara Elsene Peck uploaded this item to Wikimedia Commons from the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives of The Catholic University of America. It's in the public domain. Treasure Chest was a comic book series distributed to Catholic children in parochial schools from 1946 to 1972.

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