Anthea Butler on White Evangelical Racism
And how Trump made the Evangelical D list into his A list of co-conspirators
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I am pleased to bring you this interview with Anthea Butler, who is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social thought and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a historian of African American and American religion and author of the recent book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. Butler was a Presidential fellow at Yale Divinity School for 2019-2020, and has served as a consultant to PBS series including Billy Graham, The Black Church, and God in America. You can find more of her writing and public engagement at Antheabutler.com. Our conversation took place on September 23, 2021, and has been edited for clarity and flow.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat (RBG): your book is a model of lucidity and it is beautifully written. Your core arguments are that racism is a feature and not a bug of White Evangelicalism and that we should consider Evangelicalism not just as a religion but also as a political movement in support of White Christian hegemony. It seems as though many people have not grasped this and you're trying to shift an ingrained collective perception.
Anthea Butler (AB): It is a conceptual problem, I think. And part of it has to do with how smart Evangelicals have been. You can say, oh, they're just religious people who have high morals. But the reality is, they're religious people who use morality to get power. This all has to be refracted through the lens of political power.
RBG: Your book shows how durable and adaptable Evangelicals have been at exploiting the fears of the moment. The "only we can stave off the collapse of civilization" narrative justified slavery, anti-Communism during the Cold War and Islamphobia after 9/11, and is now furthering far-right extremism. What, if anything, is unique to current Evangelical talking points?
AB: Abortion has always been there, but now abortion is not simply about "don't get an abortion because God doesn't want you to," it's about "we're going to be replaced." The idea that migrants are going to come in and White Christians will become fewer, there's that fear. There's also the reaction to Covid-19 and the fear of losing your "pureblood" status if you take the vaccine. And the huge shift of Evangelical attitudes toward Russia. They have put themselves together with Orthodox Christians in Russia for authoritarian purposes.
RBG: Speaking of saving the nation, your book covers the appeal of the Lost Cause in the 19th century. That theme has returned as a motivator of Evangelical spiritual warfare waged in tandem with the GOP today.
AB: This cause has been rebooted for the 21st century. Carrying the Confederate flag into the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a signal moment. And the attacks on Critical Race Theory are not just about the 1619 project, but about wiping out the teaching of slavery, period. The Lost Cause is not simply about monuments: it's about controlling the educational system.
RBG: I was reading about the growth of non-denominational churches. Some of these mega-churches rival Evangelical ones in their commitment to Trump and the GOP and to spiritual warfare.
AB: I think it's really important to think about how Trump weaponized that. Most presidents saw Evangelicalism as focused on the family and went through the established influence channels, like the Family Research Council. What Trump did was really different. He went to what I call the D list and he made those people into the A list. He went to these people who had little ministries, they were either Pentecostal or charismatic, but they didn't have denominational authorities to tell them what to do. They had big followings and he brought together all of these people.
Think about Paula White. There were people who knew about her, but maybe primarily because she had been with TD Jakes. So Black women knew her. And there were a whole set of Black and other Christians who were willing to accept Trump because of her. What he did was more like what a reality star would do than a politician, promoting all of these minor people, but it worked.
RBG: Where does this leave people, including people of color, who love their Evangelical faith? You take a dim view in your book of people who try and compartmentalize, separating the politics from the religion to save their church. Are people leaving for other churches?
AB: Yes, but I think that number is a lot smaller than we thought it was. A lot of Black Evangelicals are leaving because of the racism -- it's not even the faith, it's the racism. We'll see what happens in 2022 and 2024, will they continue to vote this way? The 2022 election cycle is going to tell us a lot. And unfortunately, I don't think the Democrats are ready for what's about to happen to them.
RBG: What role do you think that faith can have in Democratic platforms? It seems that the GOP has had a quasi-public monopoly on the faith and politics equation because Democrats have been more reluctant to make faith central to their profiles.
Biden has been a bit different, perhaps because he lost a son and he's grieved. But think of Hillary Clinton, who is a devout Christian but did not make her faith part of her public profile in 2016. Now that you have people getting elected like the Reverend Senator Raphael Warnock (GA), can faith be mobilized to capture swing voters or get non-voters to vote?
AB: The lines could be drawn better. Let's take an issue like immigration, there's a very big and long tradition about welcoming the stranger in Christianity and other religions. These are things politicians could talk about. The social contract to keep people fed and clothed, these are basic things to religions, whether we're talking about Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc., There's the concept of charity.
But I don't see candidates talking about these things in that particular way. My critique of Biden is yes, he talks about faith. He quotes Scripture. But only insofar as it's about grief, and not about change.
RBG: What do you do to keep balanced? What sustains you?
AB: Before COVID, it was travel, getting out of the country. The place that I seem to like the best in the world is Spain. That is a country that came out of fascism. And I can see the remnants of all of that when I visit. But I could see how people got through it.
I also try and to do something once a day that's going to make me laugh, like watching comedians. And there's my work with students - they can give us some hope. Seeing the light bulb turn on for students is a big thing. And knowing that I did my part.
The astonishing and bewildering success of the proto-fascist elements in our society threatens our continued existence as a (relatively) civilized nation, and undermines our fundamental sense of personal and political reality. It is therefore essential that we not allow their rhetoric and political strategy to distract us from the fundamental principles of political reality.
Ms. Butler observes that White Evangelicals use religion and morality as instruments to gain political power. This should take us back to first principles: the United States is by design not a theocracy, but a secular democracy. Hence the constitutional separation of church and state. This principle means that individuals, politicians, and members of political parties are entitled to say that their religious beliefs inform their political beliefs and actions. But they are not entitled to say that their religious beliefs deserve to be directly implemented into laws and government policy.
The abortion controversy makes a good example of this distinction. Antiabortion activists are entitled to say their activities and goals are informed by their religious beliefs. They are not entitled to say that their religious beliefs, or the dogmas of their church, deserve to be enacted, because they hold them, into law and government policy.
The proto-fascist movement in its religious dimension wishes to erase this distinction, which is one of the most fundamental and essential principles of American democracy. It wants to turn America into a theocracy. (Trump’s kakistocratic government was full of true believers in this goal.). This goal of the proto-fascists creates an asymmetrical political conflict, reflecting the larger asymmetrical conflict that occurs whenever the forces of democracy confront fascists. The former are committed to observing democratic principles, while the latter exploit democratic principles for the purpose of destroying democracy. Thus democratic forces respect the right of political opponents to engage in political activity informed by their religious beliefs, and to articulate that fact in their rhetoric. Proto-fascists exploit this asymmetry to employ rhetoric and engage in practices that are neither religious nor democratic, but in reality attack and subvert both. The forces of democracy do not want to attack anyone’s religious beliefs, and therefore remain silent in the face of proto-fascist rhetoric and practices masked in religious rhetoric. Democratic forces therefore engage in the self-defeating practice of refusing to declare that not everything that calls itself religion is religious.
But the IRS does not automatically grant a religious exemption to taxation to anyone who claims one. It investigates and then makes a judgment as to whether that party is in fact religious. In times of war, the state does not automatically grant conscientious objector status to anyone who claims a religious objection to participating in battle. Americans do not recognize a religious right of “religious” zealots to bomb airplanes and knock down buildings. Nor does the fact that an unregenerate sinner calls himself a Christian make him one. It makes him a hypocritical unregenerate sinner, who uses religion as a cloak for his wickedness. It is necessary to recognize a distinction between true religion and false religion, and not to be afraid of calling false religion what it is.
This is neither a matter of judging among religions, nor of criticizing anyone’s religious beliefs. First, the essence of contemporary American proto-fascism—of Trumpism—is that it seduces people into being their worst selves. There is no conceivable definition of any kind of religion under which a movement that does this can be considered religious. Its “religion” is a cloak for its fascist politics. This imposture should be relentlessly denounced. What should be denounced is not the hypocrisy of claiming to be religious while supporting an unregenerate sinner—we are all sinners—but the fact that nothing worthy of being called a religion could possibly support the political rhetoric or government policies of Trumpism. All rationalizations of Trumpism are paranoid fantasies, which is to say, projected fascist aggression. It can and should be explicitly said that religious rhetoric is not self-justifying, and that American and world history show again and again that religion is the favorite cloak of evil. The devil quotes scripture, and in contemporary America his religion is fascism.
Second, legitimacy should not be bestowed on proto-fascist religious rhetoric by addressing it as if it is to be taken seriously. Again, the abortion controversy provides a good example. Abortion-rights activists do not engage in religious debates with people whose religious beliefs prohibit abortion. They point out that those beliefs are theological (and are in fact not shared by various other religions, especially those with no official theology or dogma). Abortion rights activists adhere to secular rhetoric, because we live in a secular democracy. They point out that much anti-abortion activity is inspired by the secular desire to retain a traditional social structure that subordinates women, but laws and government policy in a democracy should instead respect the rights of the individual.
Chris Hedges’ “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” examines this phenomenon, which he calls Christian fascism.
Also, for Evangelicals, ‘Religious Liberty’ is their right to stifle other religions and go after those of whom the disapprove. Eg. won’t make a wedding cake for a gay couple etc.