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Robert Jeffress, Pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and an avid supporter of Donald Trump, earned headlines this week for his defence of the president’s adultery with a porn star. Regarding the affair and subsequent financial payments, Jeffress explained:
Even if it’s true, it doesn’t matter.
Such a casual attitude toward adultery and prostitution might seem odd from a guy who blamed 9/11 on America’s sinfulness. However, seen through the lens of white evangelicals’ real priorities, Jeffress’ disinterest in Trump’s sordid lifestyle makes sense. Religion is inseparable from culture and culture is inseparable from history. Modern white evangelicalism emerged from the interplay between race and religion in the slave states. What today we call “evangelical Christianity” is the product of centuries of conditioning, in which religious practices were adapted to nurture a slave economy. Over centuries, the economic and cultural priorities that forged their theology shaped the calloused insensitivity of modern white evangelicals.
Many Christian movements take the title “evangelical”, including many African-American denominations. However, today, evangelicalism has been co-opted as a preferred description for Christians looking to shed an older, largely discredited, title… Fundamentalist. A quick glance at a map showing concentrations of adherents and weekly church attendance reveals the evangelical movement’s centre of gravity in the Old South. Amongst those evangelical churches, one denomination remains by far the leader in membership, theological pull, and political influence.
Today, there’s still a Southern Baptist Church. More than a century and a half after the Civil War and decades after the Methodists and Presbyterians reunited with their Yankee neighbours, America’s most powerful evangelical denomination remains defined, right down to the name over the door, by an 1845 split over slavery. Southern denominations faced enormous social and political pressure from plantation owners. Public expressions of dissent on the subject of slavery in the South weren’t merely illegal; they were a death sentence. Baptist ministers who rejected slavery, like South Carolina’s William Henry Brisbane, had to flee to the North. Otherwise, they would end up like Methodist minister Anthony Bewley, lynched in Texas in 1860, his bones left exposed at a local store and played with by children. Whiteness offered protection from many of the South’s cruelties, but that protection stopped at the subject of race. No one who dared speak truth to power on the subject of slavery, or later Jim Crow, could expect protection.
Generation after generation, Southern pastors adapted their theology to thrive under a terrorist state. Principled critics were exiled or murdered, leaving voices of dissent few and scattered. Southern Christianity evolved in strange directions under ever-increasing isolation. Preachers learned to tailor their message to protect themselves. If all you knew about Christianity came from a close reading of the New Testament, you’d expect that Christians would be hostile to wealth, emphatic in the protection of justice, sympathetic to the point of personal pain toward the sick, persecuted and the migrant, and almost socialist in their economic practices. None of these consistent Christian themes served the interests of slave owners, so pastors could abandon them, obscure them, or flee.
What developed in the South was a theology carefully tailored to meet the needs of a slave state. It rendered the biblical emphasis on social justice miraculously invisible. It reinterpreted a book constructed around the central metaphor of slaves finding their freedom was. You couldn’t teach from the pulpit messages that might’ve questioned the inherent superiority of the white race, constrained the authority of property owners, or inspired some interest in the poor or less fortunate. It carefully and safely relegated any Christian suggestion of social justice to “the sweet by and by” where all would be made right at no cost to white worshippers. The forge of slavery and Jim Crow burned away the Christian message of courage, love, compassion, and service to others.
Stripped of its compassion and integrity, little remained of the Christian message. What survived was a perverse emphasis on sexual purity as the sole expression of righteousness, along with a creepy obsession with the unquestionable sexual authority of white men. In a culture where race defined one’s claim to basic humanity, women took on a special religious interest. It transformed Christianity’s historic emphasis on sexual purity as a form of ascetic self-denial into an obsession with women and sex. For Southerners, righteousness had little meaning beyond sex, and sexual mores were far less important for men than for women. Guarding women’s sexual purity meant guarding the purity of the white race. There was no higher moral demand.
Changes brought by the Civil War only heightened the need to protect white racial superiority. Churches were the lynchpin of Jim Crow. By the time the Civil Rights movement gained force in the South, Dallas’ First Baptist Church, where Jeffress is the pastor today, was a bulwark of segregation and white supremacy. As the wider culture nationally struggled to free itself from the burdens of racism, white evangelicals fought this development while the violence escalated. What happened to ministers who resisted slavery happened again to those who resisted segregation. White Episcopal Seminary student Jonathan Daniels went to Alabama in 1965 to support voting rights protests. After his release from jail, an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, who was acquitted by a jury, murdered him. Dozens of white activists joined the innumerable black Americans murdered fighting for civil rights in the 60’s, but very few of them were Southern.
White Evangelical Christians opposed desegregation tooth and nail. Where pressed, they made cheap cosmetic compromises, like Billy Graham’s concession to allow black worshipers at his crusades. Graham never made any difficult statements on race, never appeared on stage with his “black friend” Martin Luther King after 1957, and he never marched with King. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, Graham responded with this passive-aggressive gem of Southern theology:
Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.
For white Southern evangelicals, justice and compassion belong only to the dead. Churches like First Baptist in Dallas didn’t become stalwart defenders of segregation by accident. Like the wider white evangelical movement, it was then and remains today an obstacle to Christian notions of social justice thanks to a long dismal heritage. There’s no changing the white evangelical movement without a wholesale reconsideration of their theology. No sign of such a reckoning is apparent. Those waiting to see the bottom of white evangelical cruelty have little source of optimism. Men like Pastor Jeffress can dismiss Trump’s racist abuses as easily as they dismiss his fondness for porn stars. When asked about Trump’s treatment of immigrants, Jeffress shared these comments:
Solving DACA without strengthening borders ignores the teachings of the Bible. In fact, Christians who support open borders, or blanket amnesty, are cherry-picking Scriptures to suit their own agendas.
For those unfamiliar with Christian scriptures, it might help to point out what Jesus reportedly said about this subject and about the wider question of our compassion for the poor and the suffering:
Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.
What did Jesus say about abortion, the favourite subject of Jeffress and the rest of the evangelical movement? Nothing. What does the Bible say about abortion, a practice as old as civilisation? Nothing… not one word. The Bible’s exhortations to compassion for immigrants and the poor stretch long enough to comprise a sizeable book of their own, but no matter. White evangelicals won’t let something as pliable as scripture constrain their political ambitions.
Why is the Religious Right obsessed with subjects like abortion while unmoved by the plight of immigrants, minorities, the poor, the uninsured, and those slaughtered in pointless gun violence? No white man has ever been denied an abortion. The deportation of migrants affected few if any white men. White men aren’t kept from attending college by laws persecuting Dreamers. White evangelical Christianity has a bottomless well of compassion for the interests of straight white men and not a drop for anyone else at their expense. The cruelty of white evangelical churches in politics and their treatment of their own gay or minority parishioners is no accident. It is an institution born in slavery, tuned to serve the needs of Jim Crow, and entirely unwilling to confront either of those realities.
Men like Russell Moore, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy group, are trying to reform the Southern Baptist church in increments, much like Billy Graham before him. His statements on subjects like the Confederate flag and sexual harassment are bold, but only relative to previous church proclamations. He’s still about three decades behind the rest of American culture in recognition of the basic human rights of the country’s non-white non-male citizens. The resistance he’s facing from evangelicals will continue so long as the theology informing white evangelical religion remains unconsidered and unchallenged. As long as white evangelical religion remains dedicated to its roots, it’ll perpetuate its heritage. What this religious heritage produced in the 2016 election when white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump by a record margin is the truest expression of its moral character.
You’ll know a tree by its fruit.
11 March 2018
Chris Ladd
Political Orphans
Voices from Russia 
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