The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones PRRI.org Drawing on history, public opinion surveys, and personal experience, Robert P. Jones delivers a provocative examination of the unholy relationship between American Christianity and white supremacy, and issues an urgent call for white Christians to reckon with this legacy for the sake of themselves and the nation. As the nation grapples with demographic changes and the legacy of racism in America, Christianity’s role as a cornerstone of white supremacy has been largely overlooked. But white Christians—from evangelicals in the South to mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast—have not just been complacent or complicit; rather, as the dominant cultural power, they have constructed and sustained a project of protecting white supremacy and opposing black equality that has framed the entire American story. With his family’s 1815 Bible in one hand and contemporary public opinion surveys by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in the other, Robert P. Jones delivers a groundbreaking analysis of the repressed history of the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and white supremacy. White Too Long demonstrates how deeply racist attitudes have become embedded in the DNA of white Christian identity over time and calls for an honest reckoning with a complicated, painful, and even shameful past. Jones challenges white Christians to acknowledge that public apologies are not enough—accepting responsibility for the past requires work toward repair in the present. White Too Long is not an appeal to altruism. Drawing on lessons gleaned from case studies of communities beginning to face these challenges, Jones argues that contemporary white Christians must confront these unsettling truths because this is the only way to salvage the integrity of their faith and their own identities. More broadly, it is no exaggeration to say that not just the future of white Christianity but the outcome of the American experiment is at stake. Robert P. Jones is the CEO and Founder of PRRI and a leading scholar and commentator on religion, culture, and politics. He is the author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” and “The End of White Christian America,” which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Jones writes regularly on politics, culture, and religion for The Atlantic online, NBC Think, and other outlets. He is frequently featured in major national media, such as CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. Jones serves on the national program committee for the American Academy of Religion and is a past member of the editorial boards for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Politics and Religion, a journal of the American Political Science Association. He holds a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University, an M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a B.S. in computing science and mathematics from Mississippi College. Jones was selected by Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion as Distinguished Alumnus of the Year in 2013, and by Mississippi College’s Mathematics Department as Alumnus of the Year in 2016.

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et cetera, et cetera, and all that good stuff. So check that out. Today, we have a most excellent guest, as always. What guest isn't excellent? We have all the best guests. He has written the book, White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. His name is Robert P. Jones. He is the CEO and founder of PRRI and a leading scholar and commentator on religion, culture, and politics. He's the author of the book we just mentioned and The End of White Christian America. Jones writes a column for the Atlantic

online on politics and culture and is frequently featured in major national media such as MSNBC, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. You may have heard of some of these entities. Joan serves on the National Program Committee for the American Academy of Religion and is a past member of the editorial boards for the Journal of American Academy of Religion and Politics. Welcome to the show. How are you doing today, Robert? Hey, Chris. I'm glad to be here.

I'm glad to have you on because we've been having this discussion for quite some time kind of around Black Lives Matter. That seems to be the topic that rules. We've been talking about racism, and a lot of white people have been going, okay, well, how do we contribute to this? And we've kind of turned a page recently. But you've written an interesting book, White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. And you've been talking about these sort of issues for a

while. Give us some plugs so people can look you up on the interwebs. Yeah, well, the book has just been out for two weeks. So it's pretty much hot off the press. And, you know, it's a book that very much came out of my own kind of thinking and wrestling with issues coming out of the Black Lives Matter movement. I mean, I started working on the book in earnest, really after the Charlottesville events with white supremacists, you know, demonstrating in Charlottesville. We just recently had the three year anniversary, youyear anniversary of that event just last week. So it really came out of my own wrestling. I am a religion scholar and social scientist in my day job.

So kind of taking those hats and trying to look at the history and put that in conversation with both current public opinion data and as someone who grew up in the South as a white evangelical Christian, trying to put it in conversation with my own family's history as well. This is what I found interesting when I did research on you, as we always do for our guests, and I watch a lot of your videos. I mean, you're someone like, normally someone would look at a perception of the, this book title and go, Oh, this guy probably isn't, you know, into religion and maybe he's an atheist throwing some rocks. But, uh, you're definitely, you're definitely talking about the issues and, and it sounds like you're going through a lot of the things we're all going through, like what's, you know, how do

we contribute to this? So was it the, was that, that really drove you to write the book, that moment where we saw those, those people in Charleston where, you know, they were marching and everything? Well, I think like many of us, you know, it had been building. I mean, we had, you know, before that we had, you know, a whole, the whole first round of Black Lives Matter, you know, that where we had Freddie Gray, we had Michael Brown, you know, and then we had this, you know, awful shooting with Dylann Roof in Charleston, with the murder of nine African

American worshipers at, you know, an African American church. So I think it was, you know, it's really the kind of culmination of those things. But I think it really did, I think, in 2017, with the Charlottesville thing, I mean, that was, I think, what finally spurred me to say, all right, you know, I really do need to take some time and really dig into this history, and again, as also as I was looking at current public opinion data and seeing, in particular, kind of relative to the book, whenever we would ask questions around structural racism, white Christians would have a very difficult time even admitting that they were a reality. And so it was that, you know, kind of wrapped up with the history and

things just right out of the headlines that made me think, this is worth digging into and trying to sort out what's really going on there. So can you give us an overview of the scope of the book, kind of the body of what maybe it's about, kind of a heads-up view? Yeah, you know, so the first thing I should say is the book is personal. It's the first personal book I've written. I mean, usually I just kind of keep my social scientist hat on and write with a lot of, you know, percent signs. This has got more quotation marks than percent signs in this book. You know, it begins, the first sentence of the book has the word I in it, the last sentence of

the book has the word us in it. So in some ways, I'm writing as a white Christian, really trying to wrestle with these issues and with my own family and my own kind of denomination and upbringing's history. But I then try to marry it up with a lot of history to kind of understand how we got to where we are. And then finally, to the point of the subtitle, The Legacy of White Supremacy, I spent some time right in the middle of the book showing how this is very much still with us today, particularly in white Christian churches and among white Christian subgroups. This inability really to see structural racism is something that is so strong and so consistent over kind of current public opinion survey after survey that you can really see how

this history still plays out and is still very much with us today. This is interesting off the Amazon page. With his family's 1815 Bible on one hand and contemporary public opinion surveys by the Public Religion Research Institute in the other, you deliver groundbreaking analysis of the repressed history of the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and white supremacy. That's, I will say, you know, I try to not pull any punches in the book and try to tell it as straight as I can. I mean, I think that's sort of a part of the book. I know you've had some other guests on and talked about James Baldwin. And I read a lot of Baldwin for this book. In fact, the title of the book comes from James Baldwin, The White Too Long there. And, you know, I'll kind of read you real quickly, just so you can get a sense of it. The epigraph, you know, of the book comes from a piece that he wrote in the New York Times, just a few months after the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. So he had been fairly, like King, I think, fairly hopeful that whites and particularly white Christians would stand up during the civil rights movement, and then quickly became very disillusioned, even after the deaths of Martin Luther King and Bobby

Kennedy, that there wasn't this big uprising. So he wrote this in those months where he was feeling, I think, fairly pessimistic. But I thought it was really worth it. And again, it serves as the epigraph of the book, and it's where I take the title. But these are James Baldwin's words, February 1969. I will flatly say that the bulk of this country's white population impresses me and has so impressed me for a very long time as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long. And he goes on to talk about how this kind of being wedded to this idea of whiteness has really obstructed whites, and particularly white Christians, where it's kind of been built into our religion, really obstructed our moral vision and made, you know, the other image, I think, that has stayed with me is from Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail. And if you know that piece of writing, you know, he's not really excoriating the fringe groups that are, you know, lynching

people and burning crosses in people's lawns. I mean, he really is criticizing the kind of more respectable mainstream white Christians that are just sitting on the sidelines. And he has this and burning crosses in people's lawns. I mean, he really is criticizing the kind of more respectable, mainstream white Christians that are just sitting on the sidelines. And he has this great line in there where he says, he's kind of in dismay, like Baldwin, kind of in dismay. Like, where are all these white Christians? Why aren't they showing up? And he says, who are these white Christians sitting comfortably

behind their anesthetizing stained glass windows? And I think that that is the function, really, that in many ways white Christian theology and churches have played on issues of racial justice. Rather than enlivening our moral sensibilities, they have really lulled our consciences to sleep. Yeah, it's been an interesting journey for me. I grew up in what I term as a religious cult, the Mormon church. And right away I knew that something was up and something was wrong with that whole setup. I think from your background, you're probably familiar with it a little bit.

There are good people in the church. But so I become an atheist and so i don't have a lot of study beyond my teenage years of religion i've tried to stay away from much of it and what was interesting to me was uh i've always uh followed morning joe msnbc in isaadi on eddie glott jr on with his book on balwin and i looked at it and I was like, who's this guy? This seems kind of interesting. I spent most of my life running my businesses rather than dealing with politics. Now I deal with more politics. And then I got to know James Baldwin through his work,

and it just opened my eyes to so much stuff. And one of the things was, I think it was Eddie God Jr. or Nicholas Piccolo. He said, we talked about where religion manifests destiny. We've had the author of the City on the Hill book who talks about how Puritan religion took the City on the Hill phrase and turned it into this marching order. And so I learned so much from this experience. And I remember Googling because we talked about how there was a separation of white and black churches or black people couldn't go to white churches. They had to do their own church. And I think you talked about one of the interviews about how the Baptist conventions and stuff

broke apart. So there was a black and white version or north and south, I think. And it was extraordinary to me. And I Googled it. And the first thing I came up was white churches and there's KKK people sitting in the pews and I'm like within full robes. And I'm like, whoa. And so it just blew my mind to just kind of be on this pattern of learning of stuff

as to how this, how kind of ingrained this is. Yeah, it's very, very deep and it goes all the way back to the country's founding. I think that's the challenge. And even for someone like me who spent most of my life studying religion, I mean, I was astonished at how much of this was new to me, you know, even as a religion scholar. I mean, this history has really just been repressed and suppressed, you know, really both. And so there's one example, I mean, there were, again, I'm kind of following my own family's journey in many ways in the book, as well as kind of larger historical trends. And so both of my parents

are from Macon, Georgia. And my family goes back on both sides of the family, like six generations in Macon. And the church that was the kind of parent church, so the church that my parents grew up in, was founded in 1825. It's First Baptist Church of Macon, Georgia. And at the time it was founded, you know, it was fairly common. And this was not that unusual across, you know, the country in the late 1700s, early 1800s, is that white slave owners would bring enslaved people to church with them, right? And the whites would sit up front, African Americans would sit in the back, or in specially constructed slave galleries, or, you know, up in the balcony. And you can still see this in the architecture of many old historic churches today. And we literally built white supremacy into the architecture of the churches there.

And if you think about that seriously as the kind of seedbed of early Christianity in America, and you ask the question, so what kind of sermons could get preached in an environment like that, right? And what passages from the Bible could get read? What hymns could get sung, right? And how would you do things like communion? You know, all of that stuff is deeply structured, you know, by this really, you know, this expression of white supremacy in the churches. And so, you know, for example, like the book of Exodus, you know, and you mentioned white and black Baptists, for example, I mean, what you see is this very different outgrowth that in that setting, in that setting where you had enslaved people, you know, and kind of drug the church with their

enslavers, you know, the white minister was not going to preach about the slaves going free in Egypt from the book of Exodus, right? That's not a sermon you're going to hear a lot of from a white preacher with a group of enslaved people in the church. But what happens when African-Americans get their independence in their own churches? You hear a lot of that, right? Liberation, slaves going free, you know, the last being made first and the first being made last, those kinds of themes come forward in a way that they don't really in white

Christianity. So part of the challenge here is to really take that history seriously and ask, you know, honestly, how much of that has been reformed? How much of that has been excised? And how much of that is still, you know, very much with us today. Yeah, it's quite extraordinary. Did they allow the black people to take communion in the sacrament? I know some churches that was, I know in the Mormon church at one time, they were not allowed to, I think. Yeah, you know, there's a whole history here of, I mean, there were various practices, but all of them communicated a clear hierarchy, right, with whites at the top and blacks below whites, no matter how it was. So sometimes they would set up a separate communion so that whites would take it first, and then African Americans could take it second. And for example, the Catholic Church,

the white Catholic Church was doing this well into the middle of the 20th century. I mean, even in the 1940s, it was not uncommon, even where congregations had a mixed congregation, that whites would go up to receive the Eucharist first, and only after all the white members of the congregation had gone were African Americans allowed to come forward. And that was in the 20th century. I mean, so that's not really that long ago. So, I mean, these practices have been handed down, and they've been modified a bit, but this assumption of kind of a racial hierarchy built in to Christianity, and again, you know, I think the evangelical church or maybe the Mormon church, you know, gets, I think, is the most

notable, I think, for these things. But one of the remarkable things about the book is that I found in doing the book was that these patterns are very much there, even in the white Catholic Church and even in the white mainline Protestant Church, which is perceived to be and historically has been the more progressive end or the more liberal end of the white Protestant world. But these practices permeated really all of white Christianity. Growing up Mormon, early on, on a business meeting, I met with Dr. Reverend Franz Davis, who'd walk with Martin Luther King under the bridge, and I had a really great conversation with him.

And he gave me a tour of his church, and I was like, you guys have drums, and you guys sing? And I'm like, you guys are fun, man. You guys have a fun church over here um but yeah a mormonism the same way was was raised with a ton of racist stuff i mean brigham young said so many ugly things they can't even release his journal um they won't release his journal um and uh the lds presence over the years said so many racial things and in in their in their tome or whatever book you want to call it or fiction um is is uh because you know Joseph Smith I mean come on uh

I think anyway I'll go on about um if they're in the book uh they they say that they say that black people are part of the Lamanites and so they were cursed with blackness because they were they say all sorts of horrible things about them being subhuman. Let's put it that way. And that narrative goes through the Mormon church up until the 70s when they're suddenly opening, trying to open missions in countries like South America and Africa. And it's a little hard to sell that sort of business if you've got stuff written down talking about how horrible they are. And so, you know, they have epiphany revelation and went, oh, you know, we're cool with everybody now. Yeah. Well, I spent some time on the theology here too, because it is remarkable, again, how recently and these sorts of doctrines, and it's not just the,

you know, the LDS church, I mean,, among Southern Baptists, which is the denomination which I grew up, and it grew to be the largest Protestant denomination in the country by the middle of the 20th century. There were 16 million Southern Baptists by the middle of the 20th century. And so it was no fringe group, but among its early teachings were a very similar teaching that kind of re-read back into the story of Cain and Abel in the Old Testament. And for those who don't know it, it's basically an early fratricide story, right? That Cain murders his brother Abel out of jealousy and then lies about it. And through a kind of interesting turn of events, the scripture says that, like, that God marked him with a physical mark. But it doesn't necessarily say it's racial. It doesn't say it's skin. It just says he marked him in some way.

And what happened was in white Christian theology, they took that and ran with it and made that to be about the origin story of black people, um, in, in the world. Right. And so you've got then, uh, the origin story of, of white people is, you know, through Adam and Eve and, um, and, and through the righteous brother. And you've got the story of African-Americans literally through a criminal is the birth of African-Americans into the world was through a criminal act. Um, and that's, that was, you know, and that so it was not only dark skin, but the original ancestor of African Americans and this theology was a criminal. Right.

And so that was a way of kind of, again, re-inscribing this not only kind of, you know, racial hierarchy, but as you said, like a moral hierarchy, right? That white people were literally better, created better than black people that justified all kinds of logic about then manifest destiny. We've already mentioned, but about whites being on this God ordained mission to civilize, you know, the rest of the world because they were up here at the top of the moral, you know, like by,

by God's design at the top of the moral pyramid and had this kind of, you know, patriarchal duty to really subjugate and quote unquote civilize, you know, other people. And that runs really deep, again, all the way into the 20th century. You can hear this being preached, you know, and this interpretation, you know, right out of the Bible among Southern Baptists. And so is that the core where it really comes from, or is it just the hate in people's hearts or racism that we've, you know, inherited from so many years ago that, you know, that's just the excuse they're looking for? Yeah, you know, it's always interesting, like, when you, I mean, I read this mostly

through a sociological lens, you know, so when you see, like, when you, I mean, I read this mostly through a sociological lens. Yeah, so when you see it, I mean, one of the questions I always ask is that when you see a dominant theological frame emerge, it's always worth asking what's going on in the world while that frame is emerging, right? And so you get these interpretations, you get them in the Catholic Church, you get them in the Protestant churches. And it's really, you know, goes back to kind of a European colonial mindset, right? And so when you have this sense of Western European powers, really sitting at building empires and colonizing the world, you know, you need a worldview that justifies that. And one of the more powerful ways of legitimizing a worldview

is through religion, right? And the dominant religion in Western Europe is Christianity. So that gets built in, I think, through economic interest, through political interest. And then you get this theology that fits, you know, not surprisingly, hand in glove with these economic and political interests. And religions used to basically be governments. I mean, the Catholic church, I mean, you know, they're, they're, they're basically a government and so, you know, do what they want. And like you say, pushing. So it sounds like maybe it more comes down to power and the retainment of power and the control of power.

Maybe. I mean, it's certainly been that way. And this is a good segue to just talk about whiteness for a minute, you know, that, and how whiteness gets melded onto Christianity in the American context. And again, I think Baldwin has really been helpful for me on this front. I mean, he, he, he would often kind of flip the script, you know, in the sixties there were, I don't know,

white author after white author writing about the quote unquote Negro problem and Baldwin would say, well, let's talk about the white problem, you know, kind of flipped it around. And, and. And one of the things you realize, I think, historically, is this category of whiteness is not a stable one, right? It's a very malleable category. And in fact, you know, Baldwin was like very, I think, shrewd to point out that, look, before people came to the America, people who came from France saw themselves as French. They didn't think of themselves as white. Germans, you know, they were German. They were French. They were British. They were Irish.

You know, it's only when they get to America, really, and this kind of mixture where the concept of whiteness really takes off as an umbrella term to really signal admission to this class that's in power, right, and where certain rights are preserved. And so if you even you think about, you know, the Constitution and early voting rights, I mean, who could vote? I mean, you had to be white, you had to be male, and you had to own land, right? That's who could vote in early, you know, constitutional, in the early constitutional setting. So, you know, it's been very clear if you just kind of have, you know, if you pause long enough to look at our history, it really has been kind of protecting this kind of category of power and privilege that's around whiteness. And Christianity has been really wrapped up in that as the kind of prime central legitimizer of that and putting

this kind of stamp of divine authenticity on top of this. One thing I really loved about James Baldwin is he really speaks to white people. And he's like, you mentioned, he's talking to us going, look, and I think he said this in, I am not your Negro, his dissertation of that. It was look, white people, this is your problem. Not our problem. This is your problem. You've got to deal with this. You've got to fix yourselves.

And he did it in a very nice, empathetic, emotional, intellectual way. I just love the delivery of James Baldwin, of his ideas. But he was right. He's like, look, you guys are the racists. You guys are the ones having problems over here. We're just trying to get along. But, and he gives a good pathway and a good workout to, you know, what we should probably be arc of, of, of James Baldwin's writings, but also the arc of history and how, you know, we, we kind of had those great times during Johnson. Uh, and then we kind of fell apart with Nixon, uh, and Nixon, you know, really went after

everybody, um, Jewish people, uh, you know, people of color. Um, and then, so then, you know, kind of pull back and then you go to Carter for a while and things seem a little bit, might seem a little better, better, even though we're in a session, which affects usually minorities more. And then we went into Reaganism, which was very anti-black, you know, and just given his, his sort of rhetoric that he used to put out in, in to become governor and becoming governor. In fact there was a lot of article uh stuff in that and gene guerrero's book recently hate monger that we reviewed um and you go through this arc and and he basically laid out uh eddie did is this arc of how we keep going through these racist sort

of presidents and now we've like really hit the mother load with uh with uh mr trump and steven miller and it's interesting to me as to how much white uh white christian churches support these guys as we've gone through these curves ronald reagan you know they were big for him trump they were big from him and what's even extraordinary is as an atheist as someone who grew up in religion you know i've read the bible and and and i and so i i still to this day go, I don't think Jesus would do that. I'm pretty sure I read the Bible. Seemed like a nice guy. I don't think he did that.

He would approve of that. And so what's extraordinary is you see these horrors that the Trump administration and Stephen Miller have been doing to people, and you're just like, what's the breaking point for white religious people to go, okay, you know, we've had enough, you know? It's been extraordinary to watch. Yeah. Well, we haven't seen it yet, the breaking point, you know,

and just a kind of reminder in 2016, you know, white evangelicals got like all the press, you know, because they voted like 81% for Donald Trump. And that was actually a little bit higher than they even voted for George W. Bush. But, you know, the other thing to remember is the other white Christian subgroups also voted for Trump. So white Catholics, nearly two-thirds of them voted for Trump. And white mainline Protestants, again, this is the National Council of Churches crowd, the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, they voted 57% for Donald Trump, right? So you've got all the white Christian groups on that side.

It's worth saying, so, you know, PRI is a nonpartisan, you know, organization, and I'm going to be kind of careful to say that, but the pattern here is so clear that, for example, today, if you look at the two political parties and their makeup in terms of race and religion, the Republican Party today is about 70% white and Christian, right? It's this very homogeneous party. The Democratic Party today is only about a third white and Christian, and this gap has been getting bigger over time. So what's behind that trajectory, really, if you trace this back as you did, the real genesis of the composition of our current, of our two political parties, is in the Civil Rights Acts in the mid-1960s. And once we get the Democratic Party being associated as the party of all rights, there is literally a white

Christian flight from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, right? You see this movement, and it takes a little while, takes about 15 years, and it really settles with Reagan. Reagan is the one who really finally pulled everyone in. And, you know, again, I mean, this kind of opening event of Reagan's presidential, you know, campaign, not to mention some of the events you could cite from his governorship. But it's worth noting that, you know, I think it was the earliest public event on his calendar was to go to Neshoba County, Mississippi, and speak at the Neshoba County Fair. That's just a few miles away from the county seat where the civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi. So he shows up there

and he makes a speech where he emphasizes states' rights, you know, in a speech there, with none other, by the way, than Paul Manafort as the person who was organizing his early strategy there, right, who shows back up as Trump's campaign manager decades later. But I think this sense and this deployment of what came to be called the Southern strategy by the Republican Party exploited white Christians' belief and racial animosity to create, really, the current two-party divide that we have, that is heavily divided around issues of racial justice, you know, as much as they are anything else. Yeah.

And in order for him to become governor, when he was running, he was bashing Mexicans. You know, California was largely, I guess, Republican back before he became governor. And, you know, there was a lot of people coming from Mexico. And so he demonized those people in order to win office. And then, of course, I guess he learned, hey, this works great, just like Trump did. Yeah, it's really interesting to me. So let me ask you this. You know, I settled in when I first saw the voting numbers because, you know, the morning after 2016, I woke up with a hangover and went, oh, my God, what just happened?

Especially when we handed him the house and the Senate too. Um, and so I struggled to, you know, look through all this voting data and try and figure out what, what the hell happened. And, uh, you know, Utah, uh, it was kind of funny. Everyone was saying in Utah, we won't vote for him. He's awful. And we kind of had like some presidential guy here. I forget his name, that was going to split the ticket or whatever. Oh, Edmund McMullin. Yeah, McMullin. Great guy.

And they just went all in for Trump when the numbers came in. And so at first I kind of looked at it and I went, okay, they really want that Supreme Court stuff. They really want, you know, a turnover Roe v. Wade. Okay, I get what they want. But now, you know, more and more like reading these books and City on a Hill and Manifest Destiny and, you know, all this sort of stuff. I'm starting to wonder if it really isn't all about that. If it really is about power, control, and a bit of racism through it all. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, that's honestly my take too. And so I've been, you know, doing kind of public opinion work, you know, for more than a decade now. I've never seen a survey where evangelicals listed abortion or judges as their top voting priority. Really? Okay. I thought, see, I thought it was. No. Usually we ask, if you ask it in a battery of a whole bunch of other things, abortion, same-sex marriage,

these things that were supposedly the tip of the spear of the culture wars, they show up in the bottom third of actual priorities. If you ask people about vote or what's most important to people in the country. Now, evangelicals will rate it higher than other groups, but still, it's not terrorism, the economy, jobs. These other things are much higher than those things. So I think that's never really been driving it. We did some analysis after 2016 because I think the big question was,

was it economic anxiety coming out of the recession or was it kind of cultural anxiety? And in our analysis that we did with The Atlantic magazine, we kind of tested these two narratives. And, you know, what the numbers told us from 2016 was that it was about two to one cultural anxiety instead of economic anxiety. In other words, people were more concerned or more driven to their vote choice by their attitudes on immigration, racial issues. And it really is about American identity. And maybe one question that kind of goes to the heart of it is we asked a question in 2016, turned out to be highly predictive of the vote. And the question went like this.

It said, do you think the American culture and way of life has changed for the better or changed for the worse since the 1950s. And it turns out the country was evenly split on that question. And the two political parties look like mirror images of each other. Two-thirds of Democrats say things have changed for the better. Two-thirds of Republicans say things have changed for the worse. And all the white Christian groups are over there aligned with the Republicans saying things have changed for the worse.

Whites who aren't Christian aligned over here saying things have changed for the better. And so I think it's a little clue for us that, you know, these divisions really are about, like, identity, right? And who is America? Who are we as a country? And I think this sense of white Protestants, especially like white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, WASPy, we have that little acronym even, being used to the idea that they are America, right? And that suddenly the country is actually changing around them. And that's no longer true. So like my last book, The End of White Christian America, I just documented this basic demographic shift that in the last 10 years, we've gone from being a country that was demographically speaking, majority white and Christian.

So in 2008, the country, when Barack Obama was first ranked for president, the country was 54% white and Christian. Today, that number is 44%. So we've lost, we kind of crossed the threshold. We lost about 10 percentage points in terms of the general population of being white and Christian. So, you know, we are at a really different place where white Christians can no longer even claim to be numerically, you know, the majority in the country, much less calling the shots at the level of culture and politics. That's really interesting, man. You're

blowing my mind. Identity. You know, you're right's that's really the clarification of the manifest destiny the city on the hill this is our country you know we i think we talked with nicholas piccolo about just all the horrific things we did to the indians uh they did to black people you know even then when you kind of look at the the way the arc of of history uh between policy where we've zoned out or redlined certain neighborhoods, you know, even Trump's talking about that now, where he's trying to dial back the red, I guess the red lining or, or the things, um, Eddie Law Jr. even mentioned in my interview, he's like,

they build freeway systems to, to keep certain people away from people and, and build slums. I mean, it's, it's, it's this, it's, it's interesting. Just the fabric of it is so thick and waving slums. I mean, it's, it's, it's this, it's, it's interesting. Just the fabric of it is so thick and, and waving so heavily. And you're just like, how do we dig out of this? You know, I asked City Glide Jr. I'm like, are we going to be here, you know, 60 years from now talking about Baldwin and how he still didn't learn from his lessons. And I noticed on the cover of your book there, it's a,

it's a diamond or it's a, it the pyramid uh if so and am i wrong but it reminds me of a hood am i well you know it's it's interestingly ambiguous i have to have to say that was not the the original design um it's actually a church steeple um was the design right with the cross on the top of the steeple, but it's interesting. I've heard from various people, it's a cross with a white shadow. It's a steeple with a cross on it, or in fact, it looks a bit like it could possibly

be a KKK hood, right? With the cross on the top. I actually don't mind the ambiguity, but it wasn't intentional. I looked at it, and I'm like, well, there is a cross, and yeah yeah the implication of a steeple but then i was like that kind of looks kind of hoody so anyway um but uh no you you this this is some interesting stuff how how well has the book been received i saw you talking

i think at a baptist conference uh or a or a pack agency or some sort of a group of people and i i was really heartened that everyone seemed really receptive and everyone talked about how, you know, we need to do some internal conversations with ourselves. Well, you know, I do think there's an opening. And I have to say, I think there's more opening now in the wake of, you know, the death of George Floyd and all of the protests about, you know, police violence against African Americans that I would have anticipated, right? So, you know, books take a while to kind of work their way through the press. And so I turned in the final

manuscript last fall when none of this was really going on. So I think I did worry like, will there even be an opening, right, to have this conversation? And, you know, and there's much more of an opening now. And so, you know, even the two weeks the book's been out, I've spoken at two churches and a synagogue already in the last couple of weeks. And I think that's where the real work gets done. It's on the ground in local communities. And, you know, those two churches in Macon that I highlight in the book, I do that because I think that's really where the work will happen and where the changes will happen.

And, you know, and the other thing I'll say is just one kind of glimmer of hope here, too, is that, so again, I grew up in Mississippi. You know, Mississippi was the last state to have the Confederate battle flag still incorporated into its state flag. And I would not have anticipated when I turned the book in just, you know, last fall, that by the time the book was out, that Mississippi legislature would have voted to take that Confederate battle flag out, that the governor would have signed it. And I think more importantly than that, before all that happened, none other than the Mississippi Baptist Convention held a press conference and called on the legislature and the governor to do it before they did it.

And actually a former colleague, a friend of mine, actually, who's the president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention was the one standing there, you know, calling on the governor and the legislature to, you know, finally step up and do the right thing. But, you know, but I think that's, you know, that's, that means a different kind of conversation is happening. Because I mean, that's the state arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Again, the domination that was literally created to defend slavery in 1845. Wow, that's just crazy, man. The, you know. I think someone said on my podcast, they said, basically, I supported Black Lives Matter in 2014. A lot of white people didn't get behind it. But George Floyd, we watched basically a modern lynching on TV. We all had to watch it. We all had to see it. We all had to empathize with it if we had a soul. And I think that's what really changed it for white people and flip the switch. And then,

you know, we started to see how integrated systematic racism is into our society, into police departments and what was going on. And it kind of was a straw that broke the back too. But I think watching that sort of horrific lynching on television was the thing that flipped the switch. You know, you mentioned in the book, if you want to retell the story, I think it's great, about the two churches who had separated from black and white. I don't know if you want to share that with us. Sure, yeah, yeah. You know, I think that's right. I also think, again, I do think that you're right that the early sort of 2014, 2015 era of Black Lives Matter when it first broke through, I think you're right,

did not really get on the radar of white people as well as much. And I even know like, you know, churches that tried to put a Black Lives Matter sign, it got vandalized, it got burned, it got, you know, in 2015. And I think this summer that hasn't happened. I've seen a lot more of them and I haven't heard any from any of my pastor friends have had any trouble that they did in 2015 when they first took a stand. So something different's happening. But yeah, the two churches in Macon. So again, one of them was the progenitor of my

parents, you know, the parent church of my parents' church in Macon, the predominantly white one. But what's interesting about them is that they have shared this history. And again, they used to be the same church back before the Civil War. It was white slave owners taking their enslaved people with them to church. And then they split actually before the war. And one of the reasons why they split is because as tensions were heating up around abolitionist movement in the late 1840s, the enslaved people actually outnumbered the slave owners in the church. And there was, I think, actually some kind of worries about safety.

And so they actually purchased land and a building for the African American church. Of course, they put a white pastor in charge of it. Oh, seriously? Right. Yeah. So it was still very much directly under the quote unquote supervision of the white church. But after the Civil War, they got their own independence. But what, you know, they, like many churches who share this kind of history, they just kind of sat there not too far from each other in this, you know,

modest sized town of Macon around the corner from each other and just ignoring each other's existence for 150 years. And then finally got, you know, had two pastors, James Gouldsby from First Baptist New Street and Scott Dickinson from First Baptist Church of Christ. And they finally just, you know, met and just said like, what are we doing? Like, you know, we share this history and we have no connection with one another. And they, and they literally just sat down and said, we don't really know how we're going to do this, but let's, let's agree together that we're going to start building some community between our two congregations. And, you know, they're not really up to re-merge the church or anything like that, but they are about trying to build some connections with each other in ways, I think, in particular that have shifted the vision of the white church

in particular, I think, because the white church has had to face this very challenging and difficult history, including, for example, like, you know, as they started to dig into it, they've encountered things like, you know, some lean times for the church. And what the accounting ledgers look, it seemed to indicate is that when they were having trouble paying the bills, that one of the ways they covered the bills, they actually sold some of the enslaved members of the church to pay the bills of the church to pay the pastor's salary, and to pay off the building. And having to face that, you know, kind of history, that's part of the history of who they are, and in relation to this other church. But over like a period of five years, they built enough trust that, for example, last year, they went together to Montgomery to visit

the Memorial for Peace and Healing, which is the museum kind of memorializing the lynching victims in the country. So they took this one bus, took people there from both churches, and came back and had a joint worship service and conversation about that experience. Now, that's something that's not easy to do, right, and takes some time and some trust. But I think by kind of allowing this kind of honest conversation to take place over a period of years where they're actually getting to know each other, again, I think this kind of movement, you're totally right. It's daunting when you think about how deep this stuff is. But I think that kind of really organic connection is the way to undo it going forward. And that's awesome. I was going to ask you, do you think it has to start with the preachers that are out there on Sunday morning,

what they're talking about, what they're discussing? They have to start leading their followers to, hey, let's all try and figure out how to get along, or let's reconcile this stuff? You know, I certainly think it helps because one of the challenges really is that, you know, the country is so socially segregated, right, by race. We did just a survey a few years back, and we asked people to tell us about their friendship networks, like in how diverse they were. And it turns out that, you know, the astonishing

number that we came back with, and this is a nationally representative survey, is that the average white person's friendship network is 93% white. And fully 75% of whites reported that they had absolutely no one, no person of color of any kind in their social networks. So, you know, but the problem is that that's the result of our history. But the problem is that we just don't have that many public spaces that help people communicate across those lines, right? There, you know, public schools were some places where that kind of mixing was supposed to occur, but we have lost much of the gains that we made from Brown v. Board of Education that actually did succeed in integrating schools up through the 80s, and we've lost a lot

of that ground since the 1980s. But if you think about it, there's just not that many institutions, and so churches could be one of those places. And I think people, it's helpful for people if they have a structure where they have permission to enter into these kinds of difficult conversations. That's much easier than, you know, trying to find the random, you know, if you live in a mostly white neighborhood, trying to find, you know, the random African-American person on the street and say, hey, can I talk to you about, you know, these difficult issues? I mean, that's hard to do. But if we have these kind of structures, and I think churches can be these places, but it's going to take some kind of courageous pastoral leadership, I think, to get us there.

See, I grew up in California, and I had friends with everybody. My parents would take us to the different delis, all the different restaurants and boroughs that are in California, we can go get authentic, real food. And so to me, I didn't really, I didn't really, you know, deal with racism. And then when I moved to, uh, Utah, I, for the first six months, I didn't see anybody with white people. And it was really weird to me. Like I really stuck out to me. It's one of the, it's one of the first things that I went, what the hell, where, where the hell are we? Um, I remember the first time I saw Hispanic gentlemen and I and I was like, oh, my gosh, cool, other people are here. And it was like, wow. And even now, Utah is, I think, 93% white, but we're supporting Black Lives Matter, so that's good. But I think they're still going to vote for Trump.

But you bring up a good point on how hard it is for us to unravel this. The conversation is really good, but there's a lot we have to unpack. James Baldwin spoke about, and some of his people that came on him sexually in the South when he toured, but basically this shame that white people have inside of the horrors of what we've done and the fact that trying to reconcile or face them isn't fun and isn't isn't cool and it isn't like a good feeling you know you're like okay we we did some bad stuff um but but having to sort through it and cleanse it like we we need to in conversation, like I'm sorry for that, I'm sorry for that, and I'm sorry for that, is an important discussion because until we atone for it,

until we go, okay, we're wrong, we're going to do better, it's just like anything, an apology, you've got to do the thing. But to what you mentioned earlier, I've watched so many people, I used to love watching the interviews after 2016 because they were like why did you vote for trump and you see people that would first be like it's about the jobs and then you either see the misogyny pop out you get them talking along if you start getting the truth out and you either get misogyny or you get racism out and i've seen so many trump voters that will come out or republican voters that will come out and go go well the black people and you people and, you know, other races are breeding so much and they're immigrating this country.

They're going to outnumber us and they're going to pay us back for all the things that we did to them over the last 400 years or 200 years. And I'm like, really, that's your mentality. I mean, it's just extraordinary to look at. But like you mentioned earlier, people have this cultural anxiety or racial anxiety where they're worried that once they become a numbered and of course they've, you know, I know a lot of people that have trouble still with mixed couples from different races. You know, oh, they're, they're, they're, you know, taking away the Puritan, whatever, whatever, all that racist stuff. So it's, it's interesting to to me the outlook that people have. I mean, I think it's by 2050 white people will be outnumbered. So, I mean, you can't stop what's going on. Yeah, they've actually adjusted it down to 2042.

Is it 2042 now? Yeah, I think the original pronouncement was they got all the press was 2050, but as the country has continued to shift, that number's kind of inched its way down. I think it's now around 2042, 2043 today. Yeah. I mean, one of my favorite lines from No Country for Old Men,

you can't stop what's coming. That's vanity. So, I mean, it's going to come here. Might as well reconcile it and stuff. So, what are some other things in the book that we maybe haven't covered? Well, I mean, it's going to come here. Might as well reconcile it and stuff. So what are some other things in the book that we maybe haven't covered? Well, you know, I think just right on line with what you were saying, I think that certainly there are external reasons for white people and white Christians in particular

to really confess, right, to use a theological term, right, to really tell the truth about our history, because it helps us understand how we got to where we are, right? I think that's really important, and to be honest about that, but I think that many whites, and I have to confess that was a bit of this in me as well, have not quite realized what we ourselves have at stake in telling the truth, right? So it's not just that we should repair some of the damage that we have done out here, we should make things right with our African American brothers and sisters. That is all certainly true. Very, very important. But if you think about the integrity, I'm talking to white

Christians, for example, you know, if you think about what are we I'm talking to white Christians, for example, you know, if you think about what are we passing on to our kids, right? And you ask that question. Surely, we want to pass down a faith that's free of racism, that's free of white supremacy. And if we realize how deeply that got ingrained into the faith we received, that means that our generation, right, is the one that's got to do the work, that's got to do the work to really fix it so that we're not handing down those same damaging and really disfigured version of Christianity that has come to us in many ways. We've got an opportunity. Our eyes are open. There's a real window here, I think, to respond and to really

do the hard work. And we have something at stake in that. It's not just that, you know, we're doing on behalf of some other group that we've wronged, but like we have our own self-interest, you know, in really kind of trying to recover the integrity of a faith that's been deeply, deeply disfigured by white supremacy. And I love what you said. The interesting thing about it that seems to be a theme through all of it is the theme of scarcity. And of course you need to straw men and you need to go, they're taking your stuff over there.

And there can't be this unifying vision of a rising tide lifts all boats. To me, that's what it is. Hey, you guys are crying out. I mean, we can see on TV and through news reports of police killings, we need to change what's going on, and there needs to be policy change and change in everyone's attitudes. And together we lift everyone up. This thing of division that Trump does and other people that have used it for power going back, you know,

hundreds of thousands of years to getting government powers by going, the immigrants are your problem. You know, even I think Jesus and Jesus' parents were persecuted, weren't they? And that's why they had to go to a different place to have him or something like that. Yeah. But so, you know, there's always been this thing going on, and it's time to just stop where we stop going, you know. I mean, some of the greatest people that we've had contribute to this society have been Americans. I mean, Steve or immigrants, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, the CEO of Google right now, grew up living on a dirt hut in India. There's so many people that contribute.

In fact, in the recent book we're reading from Gene Perillo, Hatemonger, $68 billion are contributed to the American economy as a net plus through immigrants. And so, yeah, we need to start having this thing and maybe realize it's about power and then the identity of America really isn't the identity of white America. And, you know, we came here and, you know, settled the people that were heathens or, you know, they weren't like us, basically, uh, the people that were heathens or, you know, they were, they weren't like us basically as the real problem. Um, and, uh, and instead of, instead of, uh, of appreciating their cultural differences and racial differences, we, we, you know, we turn them into, into, um, just ugly racism, uh, persecution. So, um, hopefully that's the journey we can all go on. I think more people need to have it.

You know, let me ask you this. Some people have said to me that are religious, as they've said, you know, Chris, a certain generation that grew up in the 50s has got to kind of pass away. They're just so ingrained with it from the 50s. And do uh does that do you think we do you think we're still gonna be quoting baldwin and talking about how no one listened to baldwin 50 years from now you know i i hope not but but i do think these windows um show up and and then you know they won't be open forever right so i do think this current moment we're at that's one to take advantage of um you know the civil rights movement was a moment and it, you know, it kind of came, there was this effervescence. And then we had this period through the eighties where that wasn't there

anymore. Right. In the nineties. And I think we're at a new moment where we can really make some headway on these things. But, you know, that assumes that racism. So, you know, I understand the kernel of truth in that, but it assumes that racism lives in individuals, right? And so we just have to wait for those individuals to die. That's a good point. I never thought of that. But what it doesn't do is realize that racism lives in systems and in institutions, right? And so even after those people die, the institutions that they built,

and I don't just mean buildings or laws, I mean, although I do mean those things, but I mean theology, liturgy, practices, habits, like all of these things are things that we have inherited. And so I think that's the interrogation and the work that has to be done is to say, okay, just because the people who wrote the hymns or wrote the theology, you know, in the 19th century are dead doesn't mean that their influence doesn't still live on, right? And so it really is, again, our generation's job, I think, to sort of take what we've received, take a hard look at it in the light of our history, and ask the question, like, which of these represents a faithful way forward

that has integrity, right? That isn't wrapped up with protecting, you know, our sense of whiteness or using Christianity to protect that space of power. But how can we really move forward in a way that is, you know, more consistent with our higher principles and not blind to those things that are sort of hiding away and built into our institutions. That makes complete better sense. Yeah, totally. You know, it's interesting to me how we've gone on this path. And one of the things I've been citing is, you know, right now we're in this dark moment. Like I ask people, do we do we have to go this dark to deal with racism? But I guess hopefully this is our bottom because i don't

want to know what the next bottom is if it's not um another four years of trump um where he's just gonna where he's just gonna you know go full go gusto um with his agenda um but also the thing that i worry about is that if biden is re-elected or elected, that we go back to that sort of Obama era where all the racist, you know, overt racism goes back in the closet and was hidden from, and jeez, I lost so many friends that were hiding in the closet when they first, when they came out after Trump.

I was like, holy crap, I thought you guys were with us. And I'm just worried that it's going to go back to, like you say, the period of where we go through these roles and everyone's just going to go back in the closet, BPC for a while, and then we're just going to have another Trump in, I don't know, two presidents or one. Well, I think that's up to us, right? I mean, I really do.

I think it's up to us to kind of chart that course, and we've got an opening here. I'll end with maybe one more hopeful note. So almost this time last year, as I was finishing up the book, I was in Richmond, you know, the former capital of the Confederacy, and I was walking up and down Monument Avenue. It's this 14 block kind of promenade. It's one of the wealthiest areas in Richmond. And it was, there's like five massive Confederate statues and monuments along the way. Four of the five of those are now gone.

They've all been removed since George Floyd, and the fifth one to Robert E. Lee is scheduled for removal. Now, those statues have stood for over 100 years there in Richmond, and within just a few weeks' time, enough movement has happened that they've actually been moved. And again, that along with the Mississippi State flag, I think opening day of Major League Baseball, that was all about Black Lives Matters, you know, at the beginning of the games. These are all very new things for us. And I think there's some hope here that

something new is happening, that it won't start to fade in the background, no matter what happens in early November. I sure hope so. And I've loved the discussion about identity because that's going to really stick with me. You know, and that's why it makes it hard is because we grew up with that identity. You know, I, I, I spoke about this, you know, I, I grew up in California and I didn't feel like I had a lot of racist sort of tendencies, but you have unconscious bias, but I, I grew up idolizing, uh, John Wayne and, and kind of idolizing him from a, from a standpoint of a man being a man, but I didn't see the unconscious, you know, stuff that was being fed to me through the TV.

And so even now I've, I've been, it's, it's kind of hurt a little bit to go, I got to give up my John Wayne and, uh, but I gotta, I gotta, you know, I gotta deal with, uh, some of that stuff that he brought into me. And so it's hard, it's hard to, it's hard to realize that maybe the story of America, the shining city on the Hill, isn't as pretty as we'd like to think it is. I mean, there's, there's that pride that you have where you're like, we're Americans, you know, and what are we, like, number one in imprisoning people in the world or something? Ooh, go for that.

Now we're number one in coronavirus, so there's that. Do you want to put a plug in for PRRI, your organization? Sure, yeah. So PRRI stands for Public Religion Research Institute. We're a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization conducting research at the intersection of religion, values and public life. And we'll have a big pre-election survey coming out in September that we're doing. I'm sorry, coming out in October, just a few weeks ahead of the election that we do every year for the past 11 years with the Brookings Institution. So stay tuned. Stay tuned. And then did we get a.com for them in there? Sorry, it's pri.org.

All about the plugs, too. And let's get some plugs for your book and where to find you on the interwebs. Great. So it's White Too Long, the Legacy of White Sovereignty in American Christianity, and it's up at Amazon. It's up at Bookshop. Anywhere you can get books locally at your local bookstore should be able to get their hands on it. Awesome sauce.

I love this discussion we've had today. I got to say, for me, even as an atheist, I respect people and religion. And I look forward to the day when everyone comes forth and we can all kumbaya and love each other and human beings together and they and and whoever supported trump goes yeah we we were bad we did wrong and uh you know let's let's do something better so i i hope we can all get to that moment because i i'm a big believer in john lennon's imagined you know as as one people one humanity one everybody you know we can argue about the whatever sort of silly beliefs or, you know, maybe we should do this, maybe we shouldn't do that.

We can all argue about that. But as long as we're a humanity of one people, to me, that's the most important. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. I'll just keep reading James Baldwin. It's my little rock of hope. So there you go. Anyway, guys, thanks to Robert Jones for being on the podcast with us.

We certainly appreciate it. Check out his book. You can go to Amazon.com or other book sellers. White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. You can also check out his other book, The End of White Christian America. I want to take and read that as well. Or you can see him on all the different columns he writes for, The Atlantic, etc. Thanks, Manish, for tuning in.

Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube to see the video version of this, and all the wonderful interviews we've been having for a lot of different authors. You can also go to thecvpn.com, CR9 Podcasts over there, Chris Voss Podcast Network, and you can support the new book club we just launched yesterday, patreon.com, Fortress, Chris Voss.

We're going to be talking about the background, the books, and all that sort of good stuff. And I think you'll like it. Thanks, my audience, and thanks to Robert Jones for being here. We'll see you next time. Thank you.