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Sept. 25, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

30:15

Why We Can't Escape Our History

The Muckrake Podcast welcomes Robert P. Jones, author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in Christianity to discuss the corrosive influence of racism in religion and politics and to try and find a way out of this growing crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckberg Podcast.
	I'm Jared Yates Saxton.
	As always, I'm here with Nick Halseman.
	We have a really special guest today.
	Here in a second, we're going to speak to Robert P. Jones, the author of White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.
	A good conversation, I think.
	Yeah, absolutely terrific conversation.
	Yeah, and important to understand the, again, the confluence of religion and power in this country and It goes a long way in explaining how we've reached the point that we're at and why this crisis is currently unfurling in the way that it is.
	Speaking of crises, before we get to this, we do have to remind you that next Tuesday is the first presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a time that will be fraught with tension, anxiety.
	I don't know about you, but I'm already sort of not looking forward to it.
	What a sound that was.
	Am I looking forward to it?
	I think I kind of want to see how he's going to call him out on the Supreme Court stuff and whatever.
	But here's the worst part about it.
	They're both going to declare victory.
	Whoever's going to scream louder, I guess, will end up winning the debate.
	And that just frustrates me.
	You shouldn't be allowed to do that anymore.
	But the spin is too strong with both of these people.
	So here's the thing.
	I am proposing don't pay attention to spin.
	You don't have to turn on the TV and watch the regular pundits get on and declare their guy the winner.
	Come hang out with us, right?
	Because I'll tell you what, we are offering exclusive coverage of this year's debate.
	It is exclusive to our patrons over at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
	We're going to be on Tuesday night, as long as there's a debate, offering you free analysis and instantaneous reactions.
	So go on over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
	Once you become a patron, you're going to get free access to that stuff, free access to chats.
	We just had a very nice chat the other night.
	I thought it went well.
	Oh yeah.
	Good?
	Yeah.
	And we, of course, have exclusive episodes over there where we dive deep into pop culture and certain issues and movies.
	So that is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
	And right now, let's go on over and talk with Robert B. Jones, the author of White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.
	Hey, everybody, we're really lucky to be joined today by Robert B. Jones, the author of White Too Long, the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.
	I think longtime listeners of the show are not only going to be familiar with your work so far, but those who are not are going to be really, really interested to get a hold of this book, which I think is really important and prescient.
	And I'll just go ahead and jump in, Robert.
	I was looking over this number.
	You, of course, run the Public Religion Institute, and I saw that, according to one poll, that in 2016, you found that 66% of Trump voters believe that 2016, the presidential election, was their last chance to, quote unquote, stop America's decline.
	I was hoping as an introduction to your research and what you've been wrestling with, and why too long, if you could define what America means to these people.
	Well, I think that question goes right to the heart of the matter.
	So yeah, it's a good place to start.
	You know, I think one of the biggest challenges we're facing is that, you know, for many white Christians, they have thought of themselves as America.
	America as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant country.
	We even have a little acronym WASP, right, that describes that.
	And so I think this conflation with a kind of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant race and religious identity has been seen as normative for being American.
	And so I think some of the struggles that we're seeing, particularly among white Christians now with the changing demographics of the country, is that, you know, that has never entirely been true.
	But even demographically speaking now, white Christians, for example, only make up 44 percent of the country today That's down from a majority just 12 years ago, and in 2008 it was 54% when Barack Obama was running for president.
	So, the country's changing, and I think those changes are really de-centering that normative vision of America as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country.
	Well, you know, what was really comforting to me is when you see the number of those people, you know, declining across the country as a percentage of the electorate.
	And I'm wondering why that is, because they're certainly procreating and as is everybody else.
	So what exactly is minimizing their influence on the elections as we go forward?
	Yeah, well, two things.
	One is that they're actually not procreating as much, actually, as other people in the country are.
	So birth rates are down.
	among white evangelicals and white Christians in general.
	And that's actually has been part of the demographic decline of whites in general and of white Christians in particular.
	Part of that, interestingly enough, has to do with white in the evangelical case, which is the most recent group to kind of go into decline, has been with white evangelical women getting college educations and entering the workforce And then so because of that, wanting to space out the number of kids they have, and that ends up limiting the number of kids they have to make it compatible with a career.
	But the other big thing that's really turbocharged these numbers are that people are just leaving the category.
	Young people in particular, you know, have left the fold.
	So at the same time this group is shrinking, I don't know, Robert.
	median age of this group is going up.
	So it's shrinking and graying at the same time, which tells you that it's losing young people, you know, particularly under the age of 50.
	It's the average age now of kind of white Christians in general and white evangelicals is in the mid-50s.
	It's about 10 years older than the general population.
	I don't know, Robert, you're talking about women going out and getting jobs and getting educated and young people going to college and possibly getting educated and, you know, falling under the indoctrination of professors like myself. you know, falling under the indoctrination of professors like myself.
	It's That sounds to me like there is a self-preservation in a lot of the political and cultural issues that, who we're talking about here with white evangelicals, that definitely leads into maybe some of the things they're opposed to and some of the political issues that they're sort of galvanized around.
	Can you talk about that a little bit?
	Sure.
	I mean, one that isn't a concrete issue, but I think gets the worldview.
	One of the most predictive questions that we at PRI, Public Religion Research Institute, that I run, asked in 2016 ahead of the Trump-Clinton election was a question about American culture.
	And it said this, do you think American culture and way of life has changed for the better or changed for the worse since the 1950s?
	Right.
	And what we found is that that actually was one of those predictive questions we asked in the entire survey for how people were going to vote in 2016.
	And so it turns out that the country is evenly divided, basically, on this question.
	The two political parties are mirror images of each other, with two thirds of Democrats saying things have changed for the better, two thirds of Republicans saying things have changed for the worse.
	And all white Christian groups are lined up on the side with Republicans saying that things have changed for the worse since the 1950s, and no one thinks that more than white evangelical Protestants.
	Seventy-five percent of them said things have changed for the worse since the 1950s.
	So if you ask yourself, well, what has changed since the 1950s?
	Well, we have school desegregation.
	We have the Civil Rights Acts.
	You know, more, as you said, more opportunities for women entering the workforce on equal terms with men and equal pay.
	We haven't quite got there on equal pay, but sort of better than it was in the past, but certainly more opportunities.
	And so I think it really is the loss of a world.
	I mean, I've even talked about white evangelicals as nostalgia voters for this reason, right?
	That not so much values voters, as I think they've built themselves, but really being motivated to kind of hold on to this version of America that's really slipping away.
	And I think that what they feel like is slipping through their fingers.
	Well, Robert, your description of what has occurred since the 50s was pretty sort of high-minded and intelligent.
	But I'm wondering, what do they say?
	What is their answer?
	What is so wrong with society?
	Can you give us a little glimpse into what their mindset is?
	Because they're not going to say, well, the Civil Rights Act has destroyed our country.
	What are the words that come out of their mouths when they kind of voice these things?
	Yeah, I've actually written this in print in a Washington Post piece, but I do think what you hear more from the inside is this family values thing, right?
	That's the kind of mantra, right?
	So it's been about the family's under threat, marriage is under threat.
	It's anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, so it's those kinds of things.
	But, you know, if you really kind of look under the hood, that's not what you really see as animating this movement, you know, even from the beginning.
	So there's a kind of public narrative about this that's about family values, right?
	But those family values have always been about, you know, opposing marriage equality for LGBT people, and it's about kind of preserving a very Hierarchical view even of men and women in heterosexual marriage is a very, again, it fits a kind of 1950s patriarchal kind of view that's more hierarchical.
	And not incidentally, in that view, I mean, men are over women and white people are over black people and other people of color and that kind of hierarchical, you know, vision of society.
	And I think that's at the heart of, you know, the new book when I'm writing about, you know, white supremacy in the heart of American Christianity.
	That hierarchical worldview is really very much, I think, what's driven this movement.
	And the thing that really pulled Jerry Falwell Sr.
	and others into the religious right movement, political movement, wasn't anti-gay politics, it wasn't abortion.
	In fact, when Roe v. Wade was passed, the Southern Baptist Convention meets a few months after it's passed and praises the decision.
	It wasn't until many years before that became grafted onto the Christian right movement.
	But what was there from the beginning was opposition to civil rights and the right for religious institutions, in particular such as schools, to discriminate on the basis of race. - Yeah, I have to tell you, as somebody who for the past year has been screaming about what I call the cult of the shining city or the idea of neo-confederate religion, as somebody who for the past year has been screaming I was so happy when you came out and started talking about that because when you actually start breaking it down, it's very obvious where this movement has been animated, right?
	Like, I think Falwell said, where God has drawn a line of distinction, man should not cross.
	And I'm glad that you're talking about that public view and sort of the political cudgels that have sort of I've animated that whole thing.
	And I kind of feel like Americans for a long time, and even Americans who should know better, I feel like they've just sort of approached religion and they've been like, oh, well, it's a good faith enterprise where you believe this and you believe that.
	And why would they ever, you know, vote for Donald Trump?
	I feel like for the longest time, it's been viewed through a charitable, I guess is the word I would choose, lens of how they've operated and how they've conducted themselves.
	But it feels like finally people are starting to see through that a little bit.
	Is that how you're feeling?
	I think that's right.
	I mean, it's, it's, that's a good description of kind of at least part of what I was up to in the book is just trying to tell a truer history, you know, of, you know, and I should say, I mean, you know, for your listeners who don't know my background, I mean, I grew up in Mississippi, you know, as a Southern Baptist.
	My family goes back in the deep South into Georgia, you know, Baptist all the way back, literally, you know, into the early 1800s.
	Um, you know, with some mix of Baptist preachers and Confederate supporters and, you know, all of that kind of, you know, thrown in the mix as many Southern families, you know, had.
	And so it really was about telling a truer story.
	And, you know, and in some cases it's so blatantly obvious and just not talked about, as you said.
	I mean, you know, and I think one of the biggest eye openers for me was, you know, I was a kid, I was at church like five times a week.
	I mean, I was active in the youth group, I went to a Baptist college, I have a degree from a Baptist seminary, you know, and it wasn't until I was in my early 20s at seminary that I ever heard the Genesis story of my own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, right?
	And that is that it was explicitly founded so that clergy could own Another human beings, right?
	And own them on the basis of the color of their skin.
	I mean, that was the founding principle of making that compatible with the gospel.
	You know, that was the founding principle of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845.
	And that, you know, and that's my home denomination, which grew into the largest Protestant denomination in the country by the middle of the 20th century.
	So it grew to be really the dominant expression of Protestant Christianity.
	And yet that history You know, has been very little talked about, and in my case was certainly completely suppressed, you know, all the way until I got out a Baptist history book and I was like 21 years old.
	Well, real fast, Nick, I'll just say that I grew up in a similar situation to you, and I didn't actually know until I was writing my recent book, American Rule, that you actually go back to, like, the Confederate States of America, which was an explicitly theocratic racial hierarchy.
	I mean, it was the worshipping of an explicitly racist white supremacist god, and that information's out there, but like you said, you have to get really deep into the books and really deep into the stuff, so I really appreciate that.
	And I'm kind of curious because obviously when a religion is founded in order to sort of go against what the religion There must be a lot of internal torque that exists in a lot of evangelicals now and I wonder if they have all these sort of coping mechanisms and ways to sort of tamp it down.
	I have imagined part of it is education and how we're hearing about this patriotic education system that Trump wants to install.
	Are there any other good examples of how they're able to wrap their head around having such extremely hypocritical positions based on the religion?
	Yeah, that's a good question.
	You know, I began the first chapter of the book is called Seeing, S-E-E-I-N-G, for precisely this reason, because I think so much of this has been rendered invisible.
	And then I have a chapter called Believing, which is about the theological structures and the way that those function to hide, you know, this reality.
	So there's a sort of like not being honest about our history.
	That's kind of one piece of it.
	But then I think the other piece of it is that there are these theological Constructs that by their very design hide or put moral blinders on white Christians, particularly when it comes to racial justice and systemic justice.
	And the main one I talk about, you know, in the book, I think that I think for me, like becoming clear about this was this idea of, you know, if there was anything I heard in every religious service I went to growing up as a Southern Baptist, it was a personal relationship with Jesus.
	I must have heard that word.
	A hundred thousand times, you know, growing up.
	And what I became clear about is that the particular way that that's understood in many, you know, evangelical churches particularly, but I think it bleeds over into other white Christian churches as well, is that that is the very beginning and the end of religion.
	It's all about this kind of interior, individualized relationship with Jesus.
	And if that really is all it's about, it does mean that you can feel very secure, you can feel very comfortable, And you can feel very innocent, really, of any of the injustices swirling on about you.
	That was certainly true for me.
	I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in Jackson, Mississippi.
	I was rife with racial strife in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement.
	I remember the first African-American kids showing up at my school, my public school, and there was absolutely no conversation about what that meant, where it came from.
	Bunches of my friends went to these white Christian academies.
	Um, all of which were set up, uh, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education to be places for white kids to go so they wouldn't have to go to school with black kids.
	Um, you know, no conversation about any of that stuff, but I, I think that kind of theological construct, um, this kind of hyper-individualism that really does screen out, um, you know, questions of injustice and, and, and structural, uh, justice, um, is really key to how this kind of perpetuates itself kind of generation after generation.
	So on our last episode of the Muckrik podcast, Nick and I started talking a little bit about apocalyptic scenarios on the right, the idea that America is being torn asunder, you know, we're getting ready to have a new civil war, the idea that Trump might, for some people, be a messiah facing off the Antichrist, all these ideas.
	And one thing I found in my research is that Particularly in the Christian faith, every time that they feel like that they're overwhelmed or losing a political struggle, there's some sort of apocalyptic vision or thing that gets people on the same page that we either fight this war or we're going to be subsumed, swallowed by the beast, whatever you want to say.
	Can you talk a little bit about how, like, the idea of the eradication of, like, white supremacy or white power in America represents, truly and honestly to some of these people, a religious apocalypse?
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, you know, there's nothing like, you know, seeing yourself at the center of something and then finding yourself not to kind of set off these alarm bells, you know, and I think the earlier kind of trends we were talking about Um, you know, I, I think including seeing their own kids not go to church, right?
	I think, you know, many of them have left the church.
	So I think there's not only the kind of stuff out here, you know, uh, that is moving away from these, again, these 1950s values, uh, kind of white values.
	Um, but, uh, but I, I think that, um, where was I going with this?
	The, yeah, this, this apocalyptic thing, what it also does is it sets off, uh, permission To kind of go into a kind of emergency ethic, right, that suspends the normal rules.
	And I think that's one of the ways in which white evangelicals in particular have justified their support for Donald Trump, right?
	I mean, there's just no way you square the circle of like who on the one hand white evangelicals said they were looking for in a candidate and who he is.
	I mean, there's just no way you match that.
	But what you can do is you can say, okay, well, look, here's the problem, though.
	We're in these extraordinary end times, right, where everything's on the line.
	And so if everything's on the line, the normal rules don't apply, and we can suspend, you know, what our normal, typical rules would be, and we just need to kind of make sure that we accomplish this, and the means kind of cease to matter.
	So I think one of the things that Trump has succeeded in doing is really converting, again, you know, evangelicals, From having a political ethic, or has really shifted their political ethic from one of like principle, where they say, okay, we're values voters, we have these values, we're going to put them out there, we're going to measure every candidate by these values, and we'll let the chips fall where they may, until we find somebody who represents our values, right?
	To one that's really a utilitarian, a straight up utilitarian ends justify the means kind of ethic, where we have this end, and this end is that we have to elect a Republican president, Um, to protect our kind of way of life and, and that can protect us against the changes in the country that we don't like.
	Um, and Trump happens to be that guy.
	So that's it, right?
	I mean, there's nothing else to consider because the end is the most important thing.
	Um, and you even hear this in like Robert Jeffries, who's a pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas.
	I'll never forget him in 2016, uh, in, in an NPR interview, I heard it live and, um, they were kind of pushing him on this point, like, how can you support this man who doesn't, fit any of the values that you've said you're looking for in a candidate in the past.
	And he just said, you know, things are so dire in the country right now that when I think of who I want in the Oval Office, it's the meanest son of a you-know-what I can find, and that's Donald Trump.
	I mean, that was his religious justification, you know, for supporting Trump.
	So I think it has even kind of disrupted, and I think there's no more clear vision of that than in the Republican National Convention this year that went without a platform.
	Like, they went completely without a party platform, right?
	So they weren't even going to commit themselves to any principles or any things other than to say, we're just following this guy.
	Like, so wherever he goes, we're with him.
	But I think that's a sort of surrender, right, of a religious and a political ethic, really.
	And when you do that, you do that when you're desperate.
	I'm curious, when we talk about the ends just by the means, what exactly is the end for them?
	I mean, short of end of days, I suppose, you know, do they really believe that they're suddenly going to awaken 70% of the country or 75% of the country to their way of thinking and their way of life and we're all just going to join the same ideological group?
	Is that the end for them?
	I mean, I think it's about, you know, straight up about power.
	I think it really is about preserving kind of white, again, this kind of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, you know, normative vision, like that group as being in power in the country.
	And if you listen to Trump's, like even on the homestretch in 2016, his stump speech, he was saying things like, look, you know, you're never going to see another candidate like me again.
	This is your last chance.
	And he would talk about turning back the clock, restoring power to white Christian churches, You know, and clamping down on immigration, which is another way the country is, you know, shifting demographically.
	So, I mean, he was kind of painting this picture of, like, if you want to preserve kind of white Christian America, like, I'm your guy.
	And he was saying, like, only I can do it, right?
	Anybody else is not really going to deliver the goods for you.
	And I think that was really the strongest part of his appeal.
	And in that, his slogan, you know, in the Make America Great Again slogan, I think all the power for white evangelicals and white Christians was in that last word.
	Again, right, is kind of like what you have in mind is of this golden age of the country.
	Right.
	Kind of, you know, Bieber, Cleaver ish, 1950s, white Protestants, you know, running the world.
	I'm I'm with you on that vision.
	And we're going to try to we're going to try to reestablish that even as the country's changing.
	Robert, we're going to let you go here in just a second.
	But I would be remiss if I didn't ask you because it feels like we're in a pretty dangerous combustible situation.
	cycle.
	On one hand, we have a group that feels like they are being persecuted, and as a result, they feel like that they probably need to persecute before they're persecuted.
	You know, that's a really quick way to get into a cycle of violence and vengeance, and it leads to a really bad situation.
	How do you see this being solved or getting better or de-escalating without, I don't know, being submerged in a theocratic sort of terrible situation?
	Like, How does a group that sort of runs on that martyrdom and perceived persecution, how do we get to the point where we can have a shared society?
	Yeah, well, I mean, that is the question of the moment, isn't it?
	You know, it's I'm worried.
	And honestly, you know, one of the challenges is that the way that our political system has developed, you know, we've got now race, religion and partisanship all kind of wrapped up together.
	And and kind of pulling people apart with all three of those very powerful kind of identity markers.
	So, you know, the Republican Party today, self-identified Republicans, have become today two-thirds white and Christian, right?
	So it's a very homogeneous group, whereas the Democratic Party is only one-third white and Christian.
	And so if you've got, again, race, religion, and partisanship kind of Wrapped up together.
	I mean, it's a really dangerous mix, and we've become more polarized along those lines, you know, over the last few decades.
	So this is something we really haven't had to deal with in this way.
	The one thing I would say is that we are at this transition point, and so I think when you have these transitions and you haven't quite moved into the new, right?
	The old is passing away.
	You haven't quite gotten to the new.
	I do think you see these eruptions, these disruptions Um, and so I think if we can weather them and manage to hold enough together, um, you know, I think we'll get to a new place where, uh, we can tell a different story about, about the country.
	And we've done that before.
	Um, but, but I, I think it's contingent really on whether we can hold onto enough, uh, while, you know, we're in this disruptive phase, um, so that we've got enough pieces to pick back up again on the other side.
	I'm kind of curious, has your spidey sense been tingling when you see people like William Barr discussing his religious fervor in the context of being the Attorney General of the United States?
	Well, you know, anytime you've got overt You know, kind of religiosity headed toward anything that is like a theocracy account.
	I'm worried about that.
	And Trump trades in this, too, even though it's very clear it's not part of his own makeup.
	He trades in this language, you know, this kind of theocratic language as well, as again, as if it's the norm, as if it is American, right?
	This kind of Christian theocratic language.
	But I think the threat of Christian nationalism is real, you know, and one that it And the one thing I would say is that it is always, whenever I've used that term, I don't want to be careful, it is always white Christian nationalism, right?
	We're not talking about African American Christian nationalism.
	This is a kind of white, white supremacist version of Christian nationalism that we're really talking about here.
	And the thing I'm worried about is that it has become more and more overt, right?
	And not just sort of subtle and under the radar, but something that people are just kind of marching forward with it kind of on their sleeve.
	Again, it's worrisome.
	I think things that people have thought they needed to whisper, now they can just get a megaphone and feel just fine about it.
	That means that norms are slipping when we see those kinds of shifts.
	Again, I'm hopeful that we can kind of hang on and that the better angels of our nature will prevail.
	But but I think in order to do that, we are going to have to tell a truer history of ourselves in order to get to the next to the next phase.
	And I think it's at least one thing I'm trying to do with the book is kind of help us get beyond the fairy tales, get beyond the, you know, kind of quaint tales of innocence and actually tell a truer history, because I think that'll lead us into a more stable future.
	And that book is White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.
	You should go out and buy it.
	It is the true history that you're talking about that we absolutely have to learn.
	Robert P. Jones, we thank you so much for joining us.
	Where can the good people find you and more of your work?
	Yeah, so our website is prri.org.
	We have a newsletter that goes out multiple times a week.
	It's called The Morning Buzz, news with a shot of data.
	If you're I want to stay in touch with what's happening in religion, culture, and politics and have some data wrapped around it.
	It's a good spot.
	So it's PRI.org and we've got a big pre-election survey coming out with the Brookings Institution on October 19th.
	So heads up for that.
	All right.
	Thank you so much, Robert.
	Great.
	Thank you.
	So, yeah, that was Robert Jones.
	A fantastic discussion.
	And what I like about talking to people like that who are so well-read into this situation is I love to be able to ask them, like, what is the mindset?
	Get me into their minds.
	I want to see what they're thinking and how that works.
	I'm not even sure how it helps me necessarily, but it does just to kind of get a sense of how they're going to rationalize a lot of these untenable positions that they have.
	And it was very illuminating on that end.
	Yeah, you love trying to crawl into the mind of other people, like spending days on days watching Fox News and reading Breitbart.
	So as we all know, again, just a magnificent performance by you during that episode.
	I still think there's a part of me that wonders if part of that is burrowed into your brain a little bit, and like if you wake up screaming in the middle of the night and you're just like, Benghazi!
	Yeah, I was probably about one day away from getting to that point.
	Oh, it's the four-day mark is what it is.
	Yeah, I think so.
	Okay, the four-day mark is where, like, that mind worm starts really burrowing in.
	But again, that was Robert P. Jones, the author of White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, an absolute must-read on top of so many other must-reads.
	I mean, we're in a situation that we have to understand, and we have to understand it quickly, because this is a crisis no matter how you cut it.
	So go over there, check out, again, White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.
	Again, next week we're going to have exclusive coverage of the first presidential debate.
	To become a patron, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
	In the meantime, you can find Nick over at Can You Hear Me?
	SMH.
	You can find me at J.Y.
	Sexton.
	My God, people.

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