Instead of Hillbilly Elegy ... Part II

Here's a bit of the book I wrote post-2016 Trump election

Hi Readers,

I mentioned in my Fourth of July post that I’d be sharing excerpts from my book Red State Christians, on the final three Tuesdays of July: starting last week on July 16. Here’s that post if you want to start there:

Here’s part II. I’ll send part III next week, on July 30.

Thanks for reading,

Angela

Here’s the second excerpt, from the first part of the Conclusion to the 2022 edition. Stay tuned for the ending, coming next Tuesday. Purchase your copy of the book here, via ebook, paperback or hardcover (2019 edition only).

I originally ended Red State Christians with a plea that readers—and American Christians—might be open to further conversation. I had genuinely hoped that dialogue, coupled with mutual understanding and knowledge of one another, could lead to greater compassion in American Christianity and American politics.

In the past four years since I wrote Red State Christians, I have sat through innumerable conversations. In some of them, I have been a bystander or observer. I’ve watched some on TV, some on social media, and some in person or via Zoom. Sometimes I have engaged in these conversations and have been assured that there has been mutual growth. In conversation, I have been humbled and sometimes chagrined by my inability to take my own advice: to see peoples’ humanity before qualifying their assumed demographics.

What I’ve sadly learned is that conversation will not save us. There are those who enter into conversation as they’d enter a boxing ring, armed with jabs and shots and dodges, wearing head guards to block out any sounds from their supposed opponent. I’ve sadly found that most who enter into conversation this way consider themselves conservative Christians. They envision themselves as boxed into a corner, crouched in a defensive stance. From this position, there is little opportunity for mutual understanding and growth.

Again and again, I have found myself returning to Jesus’s words in Matthew 10:

As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for laborers deserve their food. Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town (Matthew 10:7–14).

As I have fielded phone calls and emails from devastated fellow ministers and even from family members distraught by angry conversations with loved ones, I have found myself counseling people again and again: “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.”

But as any parent of young children knows, shaking off the dust from your feet (or the playground sand from your shoes) is a messy undertaking. You are always finding dust and sand everywhere you look. It is easier said than done. The dust clings to you. There is always some residue left behind. It is difficult to let go of relationships, hope, and the alluring dream of Christian unity.

White Christian unity has often been prioritized by white American Christians at the expense of justice for Christians of color. The soul-searching after 2016 that sought to “understand” the white, often rural Christians who voted for Trump too often overemphasized economic anxieties and cultural differences and tiptoed around obvious racism.

Red State Christians sometimes walked this line, and it is my biggest regret as I read back over the book four years later. Throughout the book it was important for me to prioritize listening to non-white Christian voices from a variety of perspectives, and I believe Red State Christians did this well, including elevating voices who are too often ignored in American politics. However, in too many cases, I soft-pedaled or used academic language to cover clear instances of racism in the people and topics I covered in this book, as well as in myself. For this, I offer my confession and my lament.

Regrettably, the cost of my own failure to clearly indict the white in white Christian nationalism only really became clear to me after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man from Minneapolis, by white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, just six miles from my house. It took the courage of a seventeen-year-old Black teenager, Darnella Frazier, to capture Floyd’s brutal murder on video for me and for many white Christians like me to admit that much of what we were talking about politically and culturally in American Christianity really did boil down to race.

For those of us living in supposedly liberal Northern environs, we hadn’t wanted to admit this. We’d wanted to believe that we were past all that, or somehow above it; that racism existed someplace else, rather than taking its deepest roots in the white churches worship- ping white Jesus where we’d all grown up singing about Jesus loving “all the little children of the world.”

The summer of 2020 was a bleak time but, finally, it was time for truth telling. It was too late for me to change the hardcover edition of my book, but it was not too late for me to change the way I would speak, preach, and write in the future. The new subtitle of this edition of Red State Christians comes out of this time of prayer, listening, and discernment. I had seen the book’s original purpose as one of storytelling and uncovering identity that had previously been ignored or covered up. Now, I wanted the book’s subtitle to reflect my own evolution and my own mission to speak the truth more clearly than I had in the past, particularly when it came to the role of race in Christian nationalism.

Prior to George Floyd’s murder, I had repeatedly told crowds at churches and universities and on Zoom that “Jesus is not American.” I’d watched as their faces sort of uncomfortably half-smiled, and then their eyebrows went up as some of them realized how much they’d taken for granted that, of course, our Savior was “one of us,” and had come especially for “our great country,” despite the fact that America is not in the Bible and the only Promised Land is located in the Middle East.

But there was a deeper truth that perhaps I’d been too afraid to say in front of my mostly white and conservative Christian audiences:

“Jesus is not white.”

This truth is even more important. For white American Christians, it forces us to acknowledge that so much of what we’ve unconsciously and subconsciously assumed is somehow better, paints over our racist assumptions with vanilla language of “good schools, good neighborhoods, low crime,” etc. This is actually alien to the person of Jesus Christ himself. This truth forces us to admit that the center of Christianity is nowhere near us. We are the wild olive tree Paul speaks about in Romans 11, grafted into the chosen people, and all our supposed privilege and wealth and power is not earned or God- ordained at all but instead ill-gotten and stolen. Behind our glim- mering homes and growing 401Ks are stories of Native suffering and Black enslavement and lynching.

This truth also forces us to acknowledge that the American church has lost its way. That the media narrative about religion in this country is promoting a false truth and a false god. Too often, the media repeat and swallow an unexamined belief that the real Christianity in this country is white, rural, and conservative—honed on God and guns. This is the fault of sensationalist stories done by journalists who have no training or background in religion, theology, or rural life, as much as it is the fault of a mostly white media that tends to tell stories of religion centered on white, affluent elites like themselves. These trends are of course not all-encompassing, and there is hope that they are starting to change as newsrooms work hard on real diversity. But the narrative of Christian = white + Republican will be a tough one to overcome, and ultimately that narrative does more damage to the gospel than it does to America.

While it may seem like a political misnomer, assuming that Christianity is inextricably linked to Republican politics in America dilutes the very gospel message of Jesus. Making this assumption takes a religion centered on the story of a brown Middle Eastern Jew killed by capital punishment and remakes it into a religion constructed to defend the white, male status quo of America. Where Jesus was a threat to the religious and governmental hierarchy of his day, due to his advocacy for the poor and for people on the margins, today’s Republicanized American Christianity instead ties itself to wealth and political power. It makes all sorts of concessions about doctrine or belief to maintain that wealth and political power, claiming its right to do so because of hot-button social issues like abortion, guns, and immigration—issues that threaten the very marginalized people who were at the center of Jesus’s ministry.

The convictions I held when I wrote Red State Christians are the same ones I hold today, but today, I know that those convictions must be stated plainly, as Jesus instructs in John 16, not long before he faces capital punishment on the cross: “I have said these things to you in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures, but will tell you plainly of the Father” (John 16:25–26).

Read the rest of the Conclusion next Tuesday right here on Substack.

P.S. …

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