It started out as a joke ... Part II
The dystopian world created by white Christian boys in church, an excerpt from DWJ
Hi Readers,
As promised, over the next two Tuesdays in July, I’m sharing with you an excerpt from Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood. This is Part II.
If you missed Part I, you can read it here.
I first heard this story from the Midwestern pastor who told it to me the summer before I started researching and writing Disciples. In fact, it was this story, and the conversation we shared, that helped to convince me of the importance of writing this very book.
It’s a painful and powerful story, one that’s hard to read. But it’s also one that in its telling, I believe, can help us write a new and kinder future for white, Christian boys and men - and importantly, for us all.
Here’s Part II of the excerpt, with the rest to follow next week:
“We did this exercise,” the pastor said. “I asked them: ‘If you were God, what would you include that God didn’t? What kind of world would you create?’”
The pastor walked over to a group of girls discussing the question. They brought up ideas like breathing underwater. A world without diseases.
The pastor walked across the room to the boys’ table. They were snickering, blushing. “What if we had invisibility so we could look in the girls’ locker room?”
The pastor attempted to move the conversation along, to open the Bibles and get to the “real” lesson. But the boys were getting into it now. They started talking about North Korea and the dictatorship there and its ruler, Kim Jong-Un, who had recently succeeded his father.
One of the boys just said it: “If I was God, there would be no Koreans.”
Another one nodded accordingly: “No Russians, obviously, either.”
“Definitely not any Mexicans. No Hispanics.”
The mood in the room shifted. It got personal. Their desire to eliminate North Koreans and Russians was abstract and political, but their reasoning for eliminating Mexicans or Hispanics came from much closer to home—simply because of a few kids at school they didn’t get along with.
“No African Americans either,” someone said.
There was internal debate.
“No, no, no,” another boy said. “Take that back. [The African Americans] can be the ones who clean and cook the food.”
The boys—all of them white—continued planning their white utopia, assuming that White Jesus would agree.
“I just let them keep going,” the pastor said, looking stricken. “I was internally just like: ‘Holy shit.’”
At some point the group had also banned all Jewish people, though the pastor was doubtful any of them had ever met a Jewish person. There were no synagogues or Jewish temples for at least sixty miles.
Eventually, they got to the coda of their new creation: the shining White City on a Hill.
“Women can be there, but they all have to be naked!”
They sat there grinning, proud. They’d made a plan. Now, the pastor would tell them to open their Bibles and class would go on, right?
The pastor stopped them.
“I was just really animated, really over-the-top,” the pastor recalled. “WHOA! You guys! Holy cow!” the pastor started out, the boys looking at the pastor expectantly. “Do you know what, you guys? I totally know this. What you’ve created. It sounds so stellar to me. So similar. You have actually described the requirements of a super elite exclusive club of people.”
They just looked at the pastor, some of the boys starting to furrow their brows. Maybe the pastor was mad they’d also banned a fellow high school student, a frequent church volunteer and attendee who was known for speaking his mind. He had to go, too.
The pastor looked back at them, caught in a moment of heartbreak almost hinging into despair. What happened to all the lessons on God’s love, God’s acceptance? What of the Jesus who came to save the world? Hadn’t they heard a single one of the countless sermons the pastor had preached?
One of the boys cleared his throat.
“Are we like the KKK or something?”
Stay tuned and subscribe to get next week’s conclusion of this story in your inbox.
P.S. …
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