Ponder, for a second, the depravity of a culture that permits mere boys to gather kindling to facilitate the burning of another human being. Or consider another example highlighting the depravity of southern culture. On July 19, 1935, Rubin Stacy was lynched in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Thanks to a widely circulated photograph, a young girl is shown looking up at the lynched black man "with wonderment rather than horror, a smile of excitement on her face as if show ponies had just galloped by her at the circus." (Caste, pp. 92-93)
It should be noted that these lynchings by self-proclaimed Christians occurred after the South's humiliating Civil War defeat. It was a critical part of a campaign to retake control of the South by terrorizing blacks who now were legally free men and women.
Mr. Jones notes that the humiliating Civil War defeat gave rise to the myth of the "Lost Cause," a bogus historical fabrication asserting that the South's cause in the war was noble. Coincidentally, "Lost Cause" apologists seldom mentioned the primary cause of the war; their insistence in maintaining ignoble slavery.
Some of the foremost propagandists of the Lost Cause myth were the women of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), some 100,000 women who worked tirelessly to erect monuments in public spaces to honor the heroes of the Lost Cause; traitors like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Strikingly, more than 90% of the monuments were erected after 1895 -- 30 years after the South's defeat. Nevertheless, the monuments proved very effective in reasserting the South's unique brand of white supremacy, brainwashing many ignorant Americans elsewhere in the country, and keeping blacks in their subservient position.
Even more significant, however, was the change in the worldview of southern Christians in the wake of their Civil War defeat. "Prior to the Civil War, it was generally popular for white Christians to be what theologians call postmillennialist: to believe that Christ will return for this victorious period only when society has advanced sufficiently toward the ideal of a Christian civilization....The establishment of the confederacy represented progress toward God's ideal for human society."
But, "the Lost Cause generation began to adopt a premillennialist theology that held the opposite: the present world represents the work of a sinful and fallen humanity, it will continue to decline, and it will be redeemed only by a second coming of Christ. This view was widely spread by the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible "in 1909.
As Dr. Jones tells us, "The most significant outcome of the shift is that the logic of premillennialist theology undercuts calls to social justice, since it proceeds from the presumption that the world is evil and in continued decline. The presence of injustice is the unsurprising outcome of a fallen world, not a call for action."
Jones argues that the logic of the premillennialist theology is based upon three core beliefs: freewill individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism.
"Spelled out, freewill individualism means that, for white evangelicals, individuals exist independent of structures and institutions, have freewill, and are individually accountable for their actions. Relationalism means that white evangelicals tend to see the root of all problems in poor relationships between individuals rather than unfair laws or institutional behavior. Finally, antistructuralism denotes a deep suspicion with which white evangelicals view institutional explanations for social problems, principally because they believe invoking social structures shift blame from where it belongs: with sinful individuals."
Now, just imagine how improbable it is, then, for white Christians in the South to get off their asses to take collective action to atone for the slavery and terror their ancestors inflicted on blacks over the centuries. The adoption of a premillennialist theology also means that most evangelical churches will remain structurally incapable of confronting and atoning for their despicably racist past - thereby leaving their white supremacy unchallenged.
For those who express optimism about the good days destined to follow, once the old racist Christian "crackers" die off, Dr. Jones offers sobering evidence to the contrary. "In a rigorous statistical analysis linking county-level slave ownership from the 1860 US Census and public opinion data collected between 2006 and 2011 by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a large-scale national survey of the American electorate conducted by nearly forty universities, they find that whites residing in areas that had the highest levels of slavery in 1860 demonstrate significantly different attitudes today from whites who reside in areas that had lower levels of slavery: (1) they are more conservative and more Republican leaning; (2) they are more opposed to affirmative action; and (3) they score higher on questions measuring racial resentment." (p. 155)
Such depressing social intractability reminded me of another time and place, and an even more dire situation where generations of people really did not change for the better. In her book, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Future. Christine Kenneally observes: "In 1348 in a castle on Lake Geneva, a Jewish man named Agimet was tortured 'in the presence of a great many trustworthy persons.' Eventually he broke and confessed to having caused the Black Death by poisoning the local wells." As a result of the false confession caused by Agimet's torture, "terrible pogroms"took place all over Europe for more than a decade."
"Out of 320 towns that had a Jewish community in the territory that later became Germany, 232 carried out pogroms, destroying homes, inflicting torture, and expelling or killing Jewish inhabitants." On January 9, 1349, in Basel, Switzerland, "some six hundred Jews were forced into a specifically constructed wooden building on an island in the Rhine, where they burned alive."
Two scholars, Nico Voigtlander and Hans-Joachim Voth, "compared the treatment of Jewish people in towns after the Black Death with their treatment in the same towns in the 1920s." They "identified the towns that exhibited the most virulent anti-Semitism in pre-World War II Germany, and they found a remarkable correlation with the Black Death pogroms." Thus, they had "found evidence that animosity endured generation after generation, for as long as six hundred years" (pp. 147-48).
The heart of White Too Long is Chapter 5, titled "Mapping: The White Supremacy Gene in American Christianity." In that chapter. Dr. Jones discusses the "Racism Index" that he has created to measure the degree of racism in individual respondents. What he found, based upon such measurements was that "[w]hite Christians think of themselves as people who hold warm feelings toward African Americans while simultaneously embracing a host of racist and racially resentful attitudes that are inconsistent with that assertion."
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