Anthea Butler > Quotes

“Why do people who identify as evangelicals vote over and over again for political figures who in speech indeed do not evince the Christian qualities that evangelicalism espouses?

My answer is that evangelicalism is not a simply religious group at all. Rather, it is a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others.

To put it more broadly, evangelicalism is an Americanized Christianity born in the context of white Christian slaveholders. It sanctified and justified segregation, violence, and racial proscription. Slavery and racism permeate evangelicalism, and as much as evangelicals like to protest that they are color-blind, their theologies, cultures, and beliefs are anything but.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“Even the massacre of nine Black Christians following a Bible study class was not enough to make American evangelicals face the fact that racism remained a major problem within their ranks. They looked to religiosity in symbolism to deflect scrutiny of their own shortcomings and historical failures with regard to the racism in their churches. This willful blindness would open the door for a man who would be revered by them despite all of his moral failings. Donald Trump, who won the Republican primary against sixteen opponents and won the presidency in 2016, would become both the savior and the nadir of the evangelical movement in America. Their embrace of this thrice-married casino-owning reality TV star would both give them new recognition in the Republican Party and destroy the image of morality and uprightness they had so carefully cultivated. Evangelicals’ embrace of an unrepentant racist solidified the place of racism in the history of American evangelicalism. More than that, their embrace tore the covers off the anti-Black racism that had existed since the nineteenth century.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“America is not to be equated with God, and that America can be culpable for the injustices done to Black people throughout the nation's history.”
― Anthea Butler, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“By creating a history where the brutality and suffering of Black people was ignored in favor of promoting southern life and chivalry, the Lost Cause essentially turned the states of the former Confederacy into defenders of a noble ideal rather than just violent secessionists that had defied the Union.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“Trump isn't the reason why evangelicals turned to racism. They were racist all along.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“Evangelicals are not naïve individuals who were taken advantage of by a slick New York real estate mogul and reality TV star. They were his accomplices. Their prayers and shows of piety surrounding conservative elected officials — most notably in recent times, the 45th president — are a feature, not a bug, of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American evangelicalism. Race and racism have always been foundational parts of evangelicalism in America, fueling its educational, political, social, and cultural mores.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“All of these seemingly benign organizations [American Family Association, Focus on the Family, Family Research Council] had the specific purpose of lobbying government on evangelical concerns about the family, marriage, abortion, and education. They were also important in fostering an evangelical culture that promoted color-blindness and conservatism. The groups were not overtly racist, and all would at times feature African Americans in promotional materials, on radio shows, and as speakers at conferences. Yet the underlying message of these groups was that morality was essential to preserving the nation and that the sexual immorality of America, including race mixing, would be its downfall.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“The election of Barack Obama was the sign of the apocalypse for evangelicals. Because of the marriage of evangelical morality to the Republican Party — all in the service of maintaining white conservative male leadership — the election signaled a failure of the evangelical political machine. It also stripped the gloves off the carefully crafted racial reconciliations of the 1990s and moved evangelicals toward an alliance with outwardly racist movements. Evangelicals found themselves making friends with strange but like-minded conspirators who promoted their ideologies and took them down a bath toward embracing openly racist memes and themes to get their message out.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“While abortion is commonly understood as the issue that began to unite evangelicals in the 1970s, I give that dubious honor to the issue of race. Race hatred played the fundamental role in, first, pushing evangelicals towards a "color-blind gospel," which would provide cover for their racially motivated organizing against the federal government, and, second, their push to block implementation of the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement. This color-blind gospel is how evangelicals used biblical scripture to affirm that everyone, no matter what race, is equal and that race does not matter. The reality of the term ‘color-blind,’ however, was more about making Black and other ethnic evangelicals conform to whiteness and accept white leadership as the norm both religiously and socially. It is the equivalent of today's oft-quoted phrase "I don't see color." Saying that means white is the default color.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“If you are an evangelical reading this book, then I would ask you to look around and see what your witness has wrought. The nation is polarized. The candidates you back want to take us back to a mythical time—apparently the 1950s—that honestly did not exist. The bile and hatred of some of the leaders you emulate make it impossible for people to believe whatever witness you have left. While you are clinging to God and guns, mothers are clinging to pictures of children who have been shot dead in classrooms, in streets, in malls, in cars. More people go hungry today than ever before. Inequality is mounting. Calls for law and order mean more Black and Brown bodies dead at the hands of the police. The nation’s infrastructure is failing. Disdain for science has left America behind during a pandemic, while the rest of the world moves forward. The president you followed slavishly declared “American carnage” in his inaugural speech. Look around. You helped make this carnage we now experience. All of these things have occurred because evangelicals, through religious lobbying and interference, supported the political structures that curtailed, limited, or struck down truly important issues. The polarization we are experiencing in government has stymied progress. That polarization has taken on a resemblance to ideological and theological battles. Your nationalistic evangelicalism is hurting others. Your racism is actively engaged in killing bodies and souls. My analysis and prognostications may be dire, but it is never too late to make amends.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“The 2008 presidential election represents a turning point in the story of evangelical racism.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“The Christian Coalition, like many evangelical organizations of the day, was concerned with abortion, homosexuality, and other, as they saw it, moral issues, but it rocketed to success as a powerful lobbying arm under the control of Ralph Reed, who was hired as executive director in 1990. Reed, who was president of his College Republicans chapter, had spent his undergraduate years writing columns for the student newspaper about such topics as “Black genocide,” decrying a high rate of abortions in the African American community. This angle was and continues to be an important strategy for evangelicals to reach out to churchgoing African Americans in order to bring them into supporting the pro-life position and into voting for conservative issues.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“As we have seen in this trip through American history, racism consistently figured in the very structures of American evangelical life. Over the course of the twentieth century, racism persisted as poisonously as ever, though evangelical leaders learned how to deploy it covertly when they wanted to. Evangelical visions of political power would become a reality in the twenty-first century but came at the expense of the shield of morality that cloaked their ambitions. This vision and the activism that accompanied it have come at great expense to evangelicals.

By 2000, evangelicals allowed, seemingly without ambivalence, their traditional religiosity and moralism to become yoked to national electoral politics, and the structural racism in evangelicalism clearly and visibly exploded.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“Evangelicals are not naïve individuals who were taken advantage of by a slick New York real estate mogul and reality TV star. They were his accomplices.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism, Second Edition: The Politics of Morality in America

“Evangelicals capitulated. Evangelicals prevaricated. Evangelicals tolerated. Evangelicals participated. Jesus said, "By their fruits you shall know them." Evangelical fruit — the results of evangelicals’ actions in civic life — today is rotten. Racism rotted it.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“Trump isn’t the reason why evangelicals turned to racism. They were racist all along.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism, Second Edition: The Politics of Morality in America

“For me, it was the moment I found out that despite my frenetic activity and full-steam participation in the church, I was invisible. For the service, I was sitting by Hayford’s mother, who knew me from several other events. She turned to me at the greeting time and said, “Welcome to Church on the Way.” At that moment, I knew that no matter how much I had worked or served or prayed with people, I was simply a Black person visiting the Church on the Way. Much like many evangelicals of color, I was just a Black person in this woman’s white space. I had been welcomed due to the situation, but I couldn’t possibly be a member of the church she belonged to. That moment encapsulated for me what evangelical attempts at interracial cooperation accomplished. Invisibility.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“The new Klan, reinvigorated by racism and anti-immigration sentiment, staged pageants and parades across the country. Notably, the Klan staged a large march in Washington, D.C., on August 8, 1925, that drew 30,000 members to march down Pennsylvania Avenue. At the end of the march, with rain threatening, district dragon L. A. Mueller proclaimed to the assembled Klansmen and audience, “I have faith enough in the Lord that he is with every Klansman. You ought to have as much faith in him as I have. We have never had a drop of rain in Washington when we got down on our knees.” Almost immediately, a downpour began. The crowd dispersed quickly.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“Up to this time, evangelicals had cloaked themselves in morality, respectability, and power. Their politics seemed, to the average onlooker, and perhaps to most of themselves, to be rooted in biblical admonitions and piety. The racism that underlay their religious movement could be waved away through belief, theology, and denial. Not so since the year 2000.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“In fact, it was the stripping of tax-exempt status from Bob Jones University following its loss of a civil rights case brought by African American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, in May 1969 that was the catalyst for full-throated evangelical engagement in the political realm.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“The hard truth is that evangelicals are one of the most, if not the most, polarizing voting groups in America, and the racism, sexism, and patriarchal structure of their movement has embedded itself within the Republican Party.”
― Anthea Butler

“Slavery is the foundation of racism and power in American evangelicalism.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“Simply put, “Americanism” meant pride in the nation, in the founders, in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—and, most important, in the idea that America was a nation ordained by God to save the world.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“Evangelicals, you have a problem. That problem is racism.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“I am vexed by the constant hand-wringing of evangelical scholars and popular writers explaining away their racism or, at worst, not even considering race in their analysis. Their very omission of race continues to promote the supposition that evangelicalism reads "white.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“I call Falwell's method of using a great tragedy as a way to signal the loss of morality of the nation or of individuals "evangelical hostage taking." By making these kinds of statements to ascribe blame to groups they deem ‘sinful’ or lacking morality, evangelicals draw their followers closer to them while at the same time broadcasting their issues loud and clear.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“During this era, evangelicals consolidated power both by aligning themselves with the Republican Party and by taking on a moral mantle that showed off their strong stances against abortion and homosexuality. Indeed, these were the two issues that would allow them to build their power through organizing and fundraising and that would, more and more, allow them to align themselves with electoral, and presidential, power. These issues would definitely increase their visibility in the media while proving to sustain a formidable fundraising machine that would provide means for white leaders, almost always male with the exception of Phyllis Schlafly. Through these means, they would build organizations like Focus on the Family and the Eagle Forum to energetically promote evangelical concerns and values … from a perspective of white hegemony.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“While for white evangelicals personal salvation was the first order of business, during this era the second order was for born-again Americans to embrace “Americanism” as a way to protect the nation and its citizens from the communist threat.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“Evangelical Christians and churches engaged in lynchings, attending and cheering brutal spectacles of murder enacted upon Black bodies. Many took body parts of the lynched, such as fingers and toes, as souvenirs of the horrendous events, and others sold postcards of mutilated and burned Black men and women.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

“Racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism.”
― Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America