Abstract
Robert P. Jones, the CEO of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), is a lifelong Baptist who was reared in Jackson, Mississippi. He attended church five times weekly in a Southern Baptist Church as a youth, received a degree from a Southern Baptist undergraduate school (Mississippi College), a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. from Emory University. His occupation involves research and analysis about the opinions and attitudes people have concerning religion and public issues. That background, plus a succinct statement by James Baldwin in a February 1968 New York Times op ed, led Jones to write his latest book, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.
In this book, Jones draws on PRRI opinion research of the attitudes expressed in 2018 and 2019 by white evangelical Protestants, white mainline Protestants, and white Catholics. He analyzes white Christian responses to public opinion surveys about issues such as the Confederate battle flag, Confederate monuments, systemic racism, and reparations to the descendants of Africans who were enslaved in this society for almost 250 years, suffered a century of legalized segregation and political disenfranchisement, and who continue to suffer harm and injury from police, the courts, employers, and in other ways. And Jones prepares readers for that analysis by reviewing how racism and white supremacy has operated in white evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, and Catholic Christianity across US history. Based on that research and analysis, Jones concludes that long-standing allegiance to white supremacy and racism by white Christians is an existential threat to racial justice in the United States.
White Too Long is a reflective, piercing, and timely book that readers from all walks of life will find accessible. The book is historically unapologetic, socially prophetic, and surprisingly confessional.
Jones does not write only as a historian, theologian, and public opinion research analyst. He writes as a white follower of Jesus who traces his personal and religious ancestry to white Southern Baptists. Jones writes as a white Baptist follower of Jesus pained by the power that white supremacy has on white Christianity. He exposes how the legacy of white supremacy and its power distinguishes how white evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, and Catholics approach racial injustice—no matter where they live and whether they seldom or frequently attend church—from both African American Christians and white persons with no religious affiliation.
Confronted by the impact of the power of white supremacy on white Christianity and the impact of that power on public policies and practices surrounding racial justice, Jones restates the questions God put to Cain after the murder of Abel: “Where is your brother?” “What have you done?” As Jones puts it, white Christian Americans are Cain. In this regard, Jones admits that James Baldwin has influenced his perspective.
It is striking and refreshing to read such an admission from a White Southerner whose moral, religious, and ethical worldview—some might prefer the term “moral and spiritual formation”—was grounded in Southern Baptist life. One does not expect, let alone frequently experience, such candor from white cisgender Christian men. That candor in and of itself makes White Too Long worth reading by people who are affiliated with organized religion (and especially the religion of Jesus) as well as people who are unaffiliated with organized religion. The admission by Jones that his perspective concerning racial injustice and white supremacy has been influenced lately by the writings of James Baldwin—a Black gay man and public theologian who did not attend college or seminary, and whose analysis about racial injustice continues to inspire and challenge—is a hopeful sign of what might be possible for other white Christians (evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics alike).
What remains to be seen, however, is whether White Too Long will be a hopeful sign to religiously unaffiliated white Americans and African American persons (whether religiously affiliated or not). Frederick Douglas, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin openly criticized white Christian allegiance to racism and white supremacy. The voting behavior of white Christians in the 2016 US presidential election and Donald Trump’s reliance on that constituency in his 2020 re-election campaign are not signs of hope to religiously unaffiliated white Americans and African Americans (religiously affiliated or not). In the face of that 2016 history and current events involving unarmed black people who have been injured, killed, and terrorized by police and vigilante conduct, we need signs now, as never before, to help us hope white Christian Americans have not been “married to the lie of white supremacy” so long that they are “beyond any conceivable hope of rehabilitation.”
Perhaps White Too Long will be such a hopeful sign. Readers will decide.