Q&A WITH ROBERT P. JONES

Author of best-selling book White Too Long

By Stephen Reeves

You might resonate with Robert Jones’ story. He grew up a good Southern Baptist boy in Mississippi with family roots in Georgia and went to Southwestern Seminary in Texas. His life was similar to so many white Baptists in the South feeling called to Christian service. Somewhere along the way, maybe just like you, his convictions led him away from the SBC. In White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, his personal story is intertwined with the history of white Baptists in the South. He takes a critical look at a belief system that has too often blinded good white Christians to the reality of systemic racism and their role in perpetuating it. Jones then turns to disturbing findings of current social science research discovered by the Public Religion Research Institute, which he founded and serves as CEO.

The last year has opened wide the festering wound of racism in our country. If the truth can set us free, we first must face it. White Too Long takes an unflinching look at painful truths so often buried. CBF has chosen the book as our June monthly book club selection, and we’re proud to recommend it as powerful resource for pastors and churches ready to join the work of facing the truth and leading the way to a better future. I’m grateful that Dr. Jones was willing to sit down for an interview.

STEPHEN REEVES: I’ve often heard white folks who have come to a new understanding on race describe that realization as a journey. You tell some of your story in the book, but for those who’ve not read it yet, what are a few of the key markers on your journey? What events, relationships, books or insights set you on your way?

ROBERT JONES: White Too Long was an emotionally challenging book to write, but one I felt driven to complete as a way of opening the aperture, of coming to terms with my own faith and the role white Christianity is playing at this time of racial reckoning in the country. To put this in religious terms, it is my attempt to bear witness to the truth.

The best way to understand this journey is that it is one from naïveté to maturity, from innocence to critical understanding, from mythology to truth-telling. Ultimately it’s about arriving at a place that allows a different light to fall on what’s familiar.

The first serious step on this journey for me was learning the shocking truth about the origins of my home denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, which was literally born of the conviction that white ownership of Black people was part of the God-ordained social order, that slavery was compatible with the gospel. Despite attending SBC churches my entire childhood—and I was that kid who was literally at church five days a week growing up—I was never taught this genesis story until I was in my early 20s in seminary. I also was fortunate to have had teachers— one who was subsequently fired from Southwestern Seminary and several in my graduate program at Emory University—who opened me up to a new world of non-white theologians and public intellectuals whose Christian faith demanded addressing social and racial injustice.

But it was also the more recent events of the past five years that pushed me to put pen to paper: These include Dylann Roof’s white Jesus whom he saw as compatible with murdering nine Black parishioners in Charleston, the violent tiki torch white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, and a former president of our country who refused on multiple occasions to unequivocally condemn white supremacists while stoking the fires of white Christian nationalism.

Having been formed in a cultural world that so easily mixed white supremacy and Christianity, I’m aware that I certainly haven’t arrived at any final destination. White Too Long is my attempt to map my journey to this point.

REEVES: I’ve heard you say that CBF pastors and church members are exactly whom you had in mind when writing this book. What do you mean by that?

JONES: My own experience of attending CBF churches from the early days of its founding is that CBF clergy and churches also understand themselves as being on a journey of questioning traditional teachings, particularly those flowing from the SBC world. I know that the CBF of today has grown beyond the origins of that SBC breakup; but I’ve found the spirit of questioning and wrestling within CBF to be a healthy part of the culture. There have been serious theological conversations about women in ministry and LGBTQ equality and inclusion over the years. And the issue of race and personal racism has certainly been in the mix. But there’s never been a full acknowledgment of and conversation about the ways white supremacy and systemic racism have so deeply structured white Christian worldviews, culture and theology.

These are very hard conversations to have. At this moment of racial reckoning, the seeds of possible change are once again falling to the ground. When I think about CBF’s history and its willingness to question, I believe there is enough fertile soil here for it to take root. I’m hopeful that CBF might be a place for white Christians—many of whom trace their lineage back to enslavers—to finally face this history and live into a more truthful and just future.

REEVES: Americans are good at being bad at history. Your book forces folks to confront some uncomfortable truths of our history. What is the danger in ignoring our history? JONES: Simply put, we white Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, have never really seriously wrestled with the implications of the legacy of white supremacy. We’ve not fully grasped the damage we’ve done to our Black and Brown brothers and sisters, and we’ve been in deep denial about the damage we’ve done to our own psychological and spiritual health.

The defense of slavery, the dismantling of Reconstruction (which our ancestors disturbingly called “Redemption”), the erection of Jim Crow laws, the enforcement of racial segregation, the construction of segregation academies, the support of all sorts of voter suppression techniques, the institution of policing practices and criminal justice systems that disproportionately kill Black bodies—all have been supported and legitimized by white Christians and white Christianity. For nearly all of American history, white Christianity has been the dominant religious and moral force in the land, and none of these practices would have been implemented or perpetuated had there been a white Christian witness against them.

If we don’t know our own history, we don’t know who we are. If the core of our worldview is a sanitized mythology of the glorious role that white Christians have played in the history of our communities and our nation, we belong less to a church worshiping a living God and more to a cult venerating our own innocence. Ultimately, we have to realize that this defensive impulse— which we see everywhere today among white Christians—is a trap. It blocks our ability to see the truth about ourselves and robs us of the opportunity for real repentance and healing.

REEVES: In addition to a reevaluation of our history, your book digs deep into the particular white Christian theology that often fails to question and, in fact, reinforces systemic racism. What are a few tenets of traditional white Christian belief that need to be reexamined?

JONES: Our selective historical amnesia is no accident. The theology we have inherited in white churches was bound up

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity By Robert P. Jones

White Too Long by Dr. Robert P. Jones is a work that seeks to tell the truth about racism. With an opening quote from James Baldwin, Jones begins his task of describing the entanglement of white Christianity and white supremacy through history, social scientific data and personal stories. The book demonstrates the way in which white Christianity—many times the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) specifically— was not just a complacent bystander in the atrocities of racism in the United States, but rather a dominant cultural power in its formation and perpetuity.

Jones is the CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in Washington D.C., which researches the roles of policy, religion and culture. He holds degrees from Mississippi College, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Emory University. In this book, he speaks at length of his own upbringing in the American South and his relationship with the SBC as the church of his childhood and adolescence, as well as part of his higher education.

Jones intertwines history, data and his own memories to present a full history and analysis of the relationship between white supremacy and white Christianity. His historical work details the time building up to and around the Civil War as white Protestant denominations in the United States split along similar lines as the nation, and how white ministers preached on the virtues of owning slaves even as church members participated in lynchings in the community immediately preceding or following a church service. This historical record serves as a correction to the narrative that the Christian Church was at worst a bystander to the sins of slavery and at best was leader in the abolitionist movement. Jones also discusses the social-scientific data collected by PRRI and shows the relationship between white supremacist ideas and white Christian identity. Using a “Racism Index,” a collection of questions and analytic tools seeking to provide a single rating for a person’s opinions and beliefs regarding race, Jones’ work shows that the entanglement exists not only in the history of the Church, but in the present as well. His results lead to a conclusion that a white person sitting in a church pew on a Sunday morning is more likely to hold racist attitudes than a person similar in all other metrics, but who does not attend church.

Jones intersperses his story into the data and historical work. He uses his own life in the white evangelical world to illustrate some of his findings as well as to show the realities of these datapoints in an individual’s life. Furthermore, he celebrates churches, such as the two First Baptist Churches of Macon, Ga., where white and Black congregations come together to heal the wounds of racism.

White Too Long is a text which points to the truth. Jones bears witness to the historical and present sins of white Christianity and provides a correction to the narratives long told. The work serves as a strike to the “reality” carefully constructed by white evangelicals of their own innocence. The book displays this truth as Jones calls upon the reader to believe and act in ways that more fully celebrate the image of God in all people. White Too Long by Dr. Robert P. Jones is a work that seeks to tell the truth. With an opening quote from James Baldwin, Jones begins his task of describing the entanglement of white Christianity and white supremacy through history, social scientific data and personal stories. The book demonstrates the way in which white Christianity —many times the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) specifically— was not just a complacent bystander in the atrocities of racism in the United States, but rather a dominant cultural power in its formation and perpetuity.

with a pre-commitment to white supremacy, the lie that people of European descent were intended by God to be at the top of a hierarchical society, that white lives were inherently more valuable than non-white lives. American history and Christianity’s role in it are incomprehensible without that basic insight. This means that Christian doctrines, as they developed in white Christian spaces, necessarily accommodated the basic tenets of that worldview.

Understanding this history exposes some deep fault lines that go to the core of white Christian theology, including our conceptions of Jesus. Despite the fact that the Bible is clear that the historical Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew, many of our churches still have portrayals of a white Jesus on our walls, in our stained-glass windows, and in the manger at Christmas. These depictions are not incidental, but do ongoing theological work, connecting an ahistorical whiteness to divinity. And as I describe in White Too Long, the assertion that the beginning and end of Christian faith is about a personal relationship with Jesus is itself a form of hyper-individualism that has, by design, powerfully numbed white consciences to the injustices all around us.

REEVES: In the South, race is often seen as a Black and white issue. While that history is distinct and particularly tragic, we know that others are impacted by racism as well, including the Native American, Asian and Latina/o communities. In your current research, how does white supremacy impact other racial and ethnic groups in America? JONES: It’s important to connect these dots. The version of European Christianity that landed on these shores was animated by the idea, declared by the European church, that non-Christian peoples should be forcibly conquered by Europeans for the propagation of the gospel. This sentiment was formally codified by Pope Alexander VI in a 1493 edict called the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which was designed explicitly to shore up Spain’s claims to lands visited by Christopher Columbus the prior year. This official Christian doctrine stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be claimed by Christian rulers so that “the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” It was also integrated into U.S. case law in the 1823 case Johnson v. McIntosh, which applied this doctrine specifically to deny that Native Americans had any rights to their lands.

Virtually every American of European origin who can trace his or her family tree back to the early 1800s or earlier has a connection to this history. My ancestors, some of whom were slaveowners, arrived in middle Georgia in the early 1800s, and remained on land in Twiggs and Bibb Counties for the next 200 years. When I dug a bit deeper, I realized there was another story I hadn’t been told. This land had become “available” to be distributed in 200-acre plots to white settlers after the killing and forced removal of Native Americans by the newly-established United States federal government in the late 1700s. My alma mater, the SBC-related Mississippi College, founded in the early 1800s, had a similar story of establishment and land acquisition. Our football team name? The Choctaws. Each week during football season we had a cartoonish Native American chief mascot on the field and cheers in the air (“Scalp ‘em, Choctaws, scalp ‘em!”) but never any Christian reflection on this tragic and shameful history.

And you can see the legacy of these attitudes extending beyond this history with Native Americans. White Christians today, for example, hold significantly more anti-immigrant views than whites who are religiously unaffiliated and other Americans.

REEVES: Your book includes data derived from surveys of white Christians to assess their attitudes about race. Those were conducted before the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor which sparked the movement for racial justice last summer. What has the data shown since that time? I’ve seen more openness on the part of white churches to address race. Does the data show that to be the case?

JONES: Although I have experienced many more churches beginning to take up this work, including more than 50 speaking invitations from churches over the last year, we have not seen a lot of movement in the public opinion data. In 2018, seven in 10 white evangelical Protestants and six in 10 white mainline Protestants and white Catholics said they believed the killing of African Americans

by police were isolated incidents rather than part of a pattern of how police treat African Americans. Among white Americans who are religiously unaffiliated, only one-third share this view. In late 2020, following the nationwide protests for racial justice, those numbers are essentially unchanged. But we’re just at the beginning of the work and, for most churches, these conversations are very new. We’re not going to untangle 400 years of white supremacy’s hold on white Christianity overnight. The important thing is to begin to have these difficult conversations.

REEVES: At the end of the book, you give examples of things that give you hope, including the partnership in Macon, Ga., between a CBF congregation, First Baptist Church of Christ and First Baptist Church, a predominantly African-American congregation. In fact, the book is dedicated to those churches. Beyond those types of partnerships, and once folks have read your book, what are some actions steps you suggest for majority white churches?

JONES: I’ve heard many white Christian congregations say they feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin this journey. But the important part is just to begin the work; there’s no perfect starting place and no 10-step program. Here are just a few concrete suggestions:

• One simple place to start is to ask why the church building is located where it is. Was it part of white flight to the suburbs following the desegregation of public schools? On what Native

American lands does it sit?

• What is the church’s history on civil rights in your community? Did it bless and harbor segregationist community leaders as members, lay leaders or clergy? Did it have a “whites only” congregational policy?

• What relationships, if any, does the congregation have with predominately

African American, Latino or other non-white congregations? Building substantive relationships moves the work away from abstract intellectual efforts. The issue of reparations, for example, is more difficult for white

Americans as a detached issue than as a question of being in right relationship with people you love.

At the end of the day, I’m convinced this journey is less complicated than it might seem. Finding the path comes down to two things: our willingness to tell the truth and our commitment to love all of our neighbors. Holding those convictions at the center of our consciousness provides a reliable true North bearing. Neither of those things will come without difficult conversations and significant costs, both social and economic. But we too often forget that the prize for us white Christians is not only building right relationships with our non-white brothers and sisters, but healing from the disfigurement caused by centuries of allowing white supremacy to flourish within our midst.

I’m hopeful that if we shed enough light on this troubling past, it might cast out the demons of willful amnesia in our present. If we can muster the humility and courage and love to tell the truth, we just might, as James Baldwin so eloquently put it nearly 50 years ago, “end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”

CBF Book Club

www.cbf.net/books

JUNE BOOK RESOURCES INCLUDE:

• Enhanced discussion guide • CBF Podcast interview • JUNE 1 - CBF Gathering, featuring a conversation with author Robert P. Jones • JUNE 24 - White Too Long online discussion group