Robert P. Jones – Sheila Kennedy

Where It All Began

A friend recently recommended Robert P. Jones’ most recent book, “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future,” and as I’ve gotten through it, I’ve become aware of just how misleading my history classes were and why White Christian Nationalists are so determined to eliminate accurate history (which they inaccurately call CRT) from the nation’s classrooms.

Jones is an ordained pastor and the director of the Public Religion Research Institute. (He also wrote “The End of White Christian America,” exploring the political and social responses by White Christians to their dwindling majority.) In this book, he has probed the Christian roots of White supremacy, which–he persuasively argues–goes back much further than American slavery and is responsible for the horrific treatment of both Native Americans and Blacks.

Jones locates the institutional source of White supremacy in a document I’d never previously heard of: The Doctrine of Discovery, issued as a Papal Bull in 1493–the year after Columbus’ “discovery” of America.

As one academic source describes it:

The Bull stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be “discovered,” claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers and declared 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.” This “Doctrine of Discovery” became the basis of all European claims in the Americas as well as the foundation for the United States’ western expansion. In the US Supreme Court in the 1823 case Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in the unanimous decision held “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” In essence, American Indians had only a right of occupancy, which could be abolished.

That document, which essentially gave European Christians carte blanche to invade and dispossess any non-Christian populations that might be inconveniently in possession of desirable territory, reflected a belief in European (White) Christian supremacy that is still potent.

Jones provides example after example of the U.S. government cheating Native Americans, breaching treaties, and decimating tribes. I thought back to my history classes. Not once in high school or college did that instruction include a description of the ways in which early Americans mistreated Native Americans. Not once was there even a mention of the Trail of Tears, arguably the most famous of these reprehensible events. I only learned about the Trail of Tears as an adult visiting a Cherokee museum.

The book moves between the mistreatment of Native Americans and the history of slavery and Jim Crow–and the way we are still grappling with the remnants and persistence of both– and he provides important background and context for the murder of Emmet Till, the Tulsa massacre and other shameful episodes in our national life. In places, it has been very hard to read; I’ve had to take breaks from time to time as I considered, among other things, what sort of people would actually torture and kill a young teenager over the perceived “assault” of a wolf whistle, and what sorts of government officials intentionally refuse to honor treaties and routinely betray solemn promises.

Thanks to this book, I have a deeper appreciation for the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” because for a considerable part of our nation’s history, in many parts of the country, those lives didn’t matter to significant percentages of the White majority. (And let’s be honest; those lives still don’t matter to more Americans than I care to think about…)

It is coincidental that I am reading about this history during Black History month, but that coincidence emphasizes–at least, to me– the importance of teaching accurate, inclusive history. It has also given me a fuller understanding of the resistance; those who continue to harbor racial animus and view inclusion as a threat are frantic at the prospect of students abandoning a whitewashed (pun intended) version of the American nation as the “City on the Hill,” a virtuous product of White Christianity.

If the Germans can confront the Holocaust, Americans can confront our genocidal treatment of Native Americans and our vicious suppression of Black Americans. In fact, as Jones argues, we absolutely must. The only way to ensure that the past is truly past is to encounter and admit to it, warts and all.

Acknowledging the past and moving to remediate it is, in the end, our only “Path to a Shared American Future.”

Comments

Intentional Amnesia

I recently saw a cartoon that asked a very telling question: “If ignorance is bliss, why are so many Americans unhappy?”

Good question. Given the extent of Americans’ ignorance–of civics, of science, of history–if ignorance really was bliss, we’d all be on cloud nine….

Ignorance defined as a lack of knowledge is one thing; intentional ignorance is something darker. A lot of what Americans “know” simply isn’t so, and that isn’t due to inadvertence.

It’s intentional.

Jennifer Rubin recently interviewed Robert P. Jones, the chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute. The interview focused on one of the causes of American “amnesia” about episodes in our national history–and the fact that the perpetuation of amnesia about the atrocities committed against Black people and Native Americans has been intentional.

Jones began by recounting the omissions in his own Southern Baptist education.

My formative education was in the Jackson Public School system and at my local Baptist church and Mississippi College, both institutions affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. I graduated at the top of my class in both educational institutions and attended Sunday school every week. While I learned at church about the pious lives of early Baptist leaders, I was never taught that the word “Southern” in our denomination’s name was a reference to our forebears’ commitment to making chattel slavery compatible with the gospel. While I learned about Confederate General Robert E. Lee at my high school, home of “the rebels,” I was taught virtually nothing about important civil rights activists such as Medgar Evers, who lived and was gunned down by a White, churchgoing Episcopalian just 9 miles from my childhood home.

My college’s mascot was “the Choctaws,” yet, I was taught nothing about the genocide and forced removal of members of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Creek tribes from the land on which the college sits. It is a testimony to the power of white supremacy that such histories could remain suppressed with the evidence of the crimes kept so close at hand.

Jones notes that America has struggled with a “fundamental contradiction.” Our philosophical framework is that of a democratic society, but the country was built on a foundation of mass racial violence. The conflict between our ideals and our actions has been “papered over” with what he terms “an audacious religious claim”– the Doctrine of Discovery, the claim “that this nation was intended by God to be a promised land for European Christians.”

When social movements and other voices threaten to expose these contradictions, White Americans have acted powerfully in their defense. After the Civil War, for example, the United Daughters of the Confederacy organized to build their version of American history into granite, bronze and into public school textbooks. More recently, we’ve seen similar reactions following the retreat of White students into Christian segregation academies following school desegregation. And in the wake of the election of our first African American president and the Black Lives Matter movement, we’re experiencing another desperate wave of willful amnesia and historical denial.

Jones insists that confronting this history is in the self-interest of contemporary White Christian churches–churches he characterizes as unhealthy.

Centuries of complicity in violence and oppression, followed by denial and repression, have taken their toll. Across the board, attendance is dramatically declining, seminaries are closing or merging, Christian colleges are struggling, and churches are facing widespread sexual abuse scandals.

Jones counts himself among the Christians who are struggling to keep their faith despite what they recognize as their co-religionists intentional refusal to confront the past. When Rubin asks him how he is reconciling his current understandings with the church of his youth, he responds:

I’m still thinking, writing, and struggling to hang onto my Christian faith. But it was, ironically, the experience of going to a Southern Baptist seminary that confirmed — for me and many others — that it was not going to be possible to live a life of integrity within the denominational boundaries of my childhood. During those years, it became clear to me that most White evangelical denominations were already in bed with Christian right politics. Even before this led to White evangelicals’ devastating marriage to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, I knew that was a union I couldn’t be a part of.

I’d never heard of the “Doctrine of Discovery,” but it has clearly influenced a significant part of the culture–and not for the better.

America could use more Christians like Jones and a lot fewer MAGA Christian Nationalists.

Comments

The American Idea

It’s December. Are we ready for the War Over Saying Merry Christmas?

I don’t mean to be flip. After all, when you step back and look at the issues that are currently pitting Americans against one another, virtually all of them are rooted in a profound disagreement about what I call “The American Idea”–a disagreement that animates the Christmas wars.

On the one hand, we have the Christian Nationalists, whose vision of America has much in common with the “blood and soil” beliefs that roiled Europe for centuries. America, to them, is a White Man’s country, with various “others” here essentially as guests. So long as we “others” mind our manners and recognize the rightfulness of their ownership–so long as we “know our place”– we can be permitted to stay and participate in the workforce and (to an extent) political life.

Most of us see the American Idea rather differently. As I read the country’s history and philosophy, an American is someone who believes in the governing philosophy advanced in the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Unlike citizenries that depend upon some element of identity–ethnic, religious, etc.– for their cohesion, one becomes an American via acceptance of those overarching ideas. As G.K. Chesterton argued, America aspired to create “a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles” united by voluntary assent to commonly held political beliefs.

As America has diversified, White Nationalists have found themselves faced with a new and unpleasant reality: rather than inviting “guests” to “their” national table, they are facing claims to shared ownership.

In a very real way, how we manage difference is a fundamental challenge of humanity, and it is a challenge we can no longer evade, thanks to the communication and transportation technologies that increasingly shrink the distances between people. It has become more and more difficult to isolate like-minded and otherwise similar folks into the kinds of self-contained communities that used to dot the American landscape.

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that this clash between world-views goes a long way toward explaining our current political dysfunctions. It also helps–but doesn’t completely explain– the differences between Red and Blue states. I recently came across a chart ranking the states by various measures and types of diversity, and I was unsurprised to find that my own state of Indiana was ranked 40th overall. Indiana clearly has a long way to go when it comes to recognizing, let alone accommodating, diversity–thus far, our legislature is firmly in the grip of lawmakers who think they still live in the “Father Knows Best” 1950s.

The study on which the graphs were based broke “diversity” into a number of different kinds of difference: racial, religious, political, income and other categories, providing sociologists with intriguing data that can be mined to determine what sorts of differences are most or less politically relevant.(Different states, of course, come to these challenges with very different political cultures–and taking very different approaches to their changing populations. The top two states on the diversity list were California and Texas, states with governments that have responded to their growing population differences in dramatically different ways.)

White Nationalists are not responding well to the country’s changing demographics, to put it mildly. In his book “The End of White Christian America,” Robert P. Jones offered some trenchant observations about Americans’ very different approaches to the American Idea, and the degree to which those different world-views have influenced the identities of today’s Republicans and Democrats. He especially highlighted contrasting responses to the country’s changing demographics and culture as the country has ceased to be a majority White Christian nation — going from 54 percent in 2008 to 43 percent today.

As Jones has written,

Democrats — only 29 percent of whom are white and Christian — are embracing these changes as central to their vision of an evolving American identity that is strengthened and renewed by diversity. By contrast, Republicans — nearly three-quarters of whom identify as white and Christian — see these changes eroding a core white Christian American identity and perceive themselves to be under siege as the country changes around them.

America’s first motto was e pluribus unum–out of the many, one. Our “Christian soldiers” prefer to substitute “One nation under God.” Those competing slogans tell the tale of Americans’ contending approaches to nationhood. We either celebrate our differences within the overarching philosophy embedded in our constituent documents, or we revert into a “blood and soil” society based upon acceptance of White Christian male dominance.

It’s a war, and not just about Christmas.

Comments