S03E02: White Evangelical Racism and Its Influence on American Politics an Interview with Anthea Butler

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Hello and welcome to the Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast.
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The producers of this podcast would like to acknowledge with respect the Onondaga Nation Firekeepers of the Hood Nishoni, the Indigenous Peoples on whose ancestral lands Syracuse University now stands.
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Now introducing your hosts, phil Arnold and Sandy Bigtree.
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Welcome back everyone to Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery supported by Henry Luce Foundation and Syracuse University.
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I'm Phil Arnold.
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I'm a faculty in the Department of Religion here and core faculty in Native American Indigenous Studies and the founding director of the Scannell Great Law Peace Center.
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And I'm Sandy Bigtree, a citizen of the Mohawk Nation at Akka-Suzny, and I was on the planning committee of the Scannell Center and also on the board of the Indigenous Values Initiative.
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We're delighted today to be joined by Anthea Butler, who is the Geraldine R Siegel Professor in American Social Thought and the Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Professor Butler is the author of White Evangelical Racism the Politics of Morality in America, and we're delighted to have her today.
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Thanks for joining us.
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Yeah, I'm excited Really, being a Mohawk woman, of course, not a stranger to the racist underlying structures of Christianity in this country we were hit in the early 17th century hard by the Jesuits invasion.
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But I really had a lot of questions about today and wondering about evangelical Christians and what role they play in manipulating the voting structures and policies that are now being passed by Republicans.
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And you lay that out so wonderfully in your short book.
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I mean it's like 150 pages and it's so packed and everybody really ought to get this book as it lays it out so clearly and it's just wonderful to have you here and I want to have you talk about your work and try to explain as well as you do these underlings of where it's brought us today, Like the morality majority.
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The moral majority, the moral majority and how it was founded and the connections made during the Reagan administration and how that's been building since we came out of the 60s.
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So yes, please.
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Well, I think for your listeners, what's important to know about the book is that it's a way to correct history in a way, and not just to correct history, but to insert the parts of history that evangelicals didn't want to say about themselves.
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If we think about just like you talked about the Jesuits tearing up the Mohawk nation, we need to think about how evangelicals have done the same across the nation with different people groups.
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Whether we're talking about slavery or we're talking about missions work, we're talking about education, we're talking about the political system, all of these things have been racialized by evangelicals, and I think what's important to know about my book is that I'm bringing together two things that we don't often talk about together, which is racism and morality, because morality, for evangelicals, is a shield, it's the way for them to talk about how their Christian faith influences what they do, except that usually they are using that morality as a shield and a protection to protect themselves from the way that they see the government or life or changes in civic engagement are affecting their kind of culture, and so what they try to do is excuse me.
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What they try to do is impose their own morality on others rather than living by themselves, and I think that's an important part of what I'm trying to show in the book through these different experiences from the 1800s to, basically, the Trump era, and what I think is an important takeaway from all of this is that we need to begin to see this as not just a religious project of theirs, but a political project that they have wholly signed on to, and I think that is key.
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If you could also go into a little more detail how, as a whole, this movement really wants to break down government and how does that play into being an evangelical when you're going out into the world and just evangelizing the world?
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Yeah, well, exactly, they want to bring about the kingdom of God, and so, for them, the kingdom of God has evangelicals running it instead of everybody else running it.
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That's the first of all.
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The kingdom is supposed to be on earth, and so I think that's an important theological piece that people have to remember is that when they talk about the kingdom, or kingdom works and all this, they're talking about ruling and reigning in power on earth, not in heaven, not someplace else.
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So that's the first piece.
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I think the second piece of this that's really important is that you also have to think about the ways in which Republicans have talked about limited government.
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Okay, and that very much dovetails with evangelical belief and thought that they see the government as imposing their structure and that first for them, is always God, and government is somewhere down near the bottom.
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It's God and family, and then maybe government, but limited in their actions as possible, and so their idea of government is somebody that is trying to impose something on you, right?
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No-transcript irony of it is is that they are the ones who are imposing their will on us, whether that's about abortion, same-sex marriage, trans rights, racism, what you can teach in schools and you know taking books off the shelves.
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All of these kinds of things are really important about thinking about what they are really doing, as opposed to what they are saying about themselves.
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And what they're saying about themselves.
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What I understand is that God works through them.
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As evangelicals, they are not in charge of the world and they have to be obedient participants in this structure of Christianity, and yet they're joining with the Republicans in government in enacting.
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you know voting systems and you know laws, so it's exactly yeah it's, it's, it's double talk and double speak at every moment with evangelicals, and if you don't understand that, then you might get very confused trying to follow all their machinations.
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But I think this is a really important part of what they're doing and one sense they're saying this out loud to people to say oh we, you know, we just want what God wants, right, but in reality it's what they want in order to control the narrative, to control schools, to control, you know, other parts of civic society.
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I think so much of what you're saying resonates with 15th century Christianity, you know, and how that justified the whole age of discovery, you know, which really begins with.
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You know, a number of papal documents that that justify in the enslavement of Africans, you know, through the Canary Islands and whatnot.
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And then and then the taking of lands of all non-Christian people right, they were, they were, their project was really about Christendom, you know, creating the kingdom of God on earth, which in many ways resonates with what I'm hearing about the evangelicals.
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Was that right?
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No, exactly, and I think you know the, the how should I put it?
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The game has changed, but the plan remains the same, and so, in other words, if you can think about all of these people that you are trying to make subservient to your willing, to your beliefs as heathens, and that you have the right to do whatever you want to do with them because they don't believe as you do and they are heathens, then this is how we see the kinds of things that we're seeing today, with the kinds of you know abuses, the cutting back of people's rights, you know.
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So those are the things that I think really resonate from the doctrine of discovery forward to the 21st century.
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This brings to mind a documentary that was done on a movement that was started with Billy Graham in the 70s and there's a documentary out called Awakened and he had a gathering of evangelical Indians who he pretends will be the saviors of Christianity as they move out into the world, so among the least of us shall.
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Shall now lead us to the kingdom of God, and it's just so mind-boggling.
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It's been very successful.
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You might add too, you know, among indigenous peoples.
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Yeah, we're talking about completely opposing orientations of how we live as human beings in the world.
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When the Jesuits came into Mohawk territory or any indigenous community in the northeast, they were first hit.
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They came in within a handful of years and right away renamed the people.
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They forced them into Christianity and restructured the matrilineal family into a patriarchy.
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And that started within, you know, years, months of first contact, so that family structure was part of the model for conquest, an effective way of conquering masses of people and cultures.
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And so you know you're talking about the power of the family among evangelicals.
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Well, that's nothing new.
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No, it's not no, but I think what my book shows is that you can see this, you know obsession with the family, even in the 19th century going forward, that's a little bit later than you know what happened with the Mohawk.
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It's still there, right, and still the control of the family means you get to control that.
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But I think even a more important point you know, for when we're talking about, you know, mohawk or any other indigenous group of people is that whiteness is the overarching game game, right, whiteness and Christianity.
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And so part of this is about Christianity representing a kind of cultural whiteness that has to be imposed upon groups so that you know your way of thinking about your cosmology, how you marry, how you bury, how you teach your children, the kinds of rituals that you have as Native American groups.
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Those things were wiped out and this is the same thing that happens and I talk about this in my book in the 20th and 21st century way, by talking about the issue of color blindness and how color blindness is the way in which, you know, people say, well, I don't see color.
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It means that they don't see anything but white and they like the cultural aspects of whiteness.
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You know whether that's about singing or, you know, worship or any of those other kinds of things, and that cultural whiteness is the norm.
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That is the norm that you must accede to in order to belong to these groups.
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And now back to the conversation.
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You'd mentioned in, I think it was the 70s, where the church white churches were being opened up to African American congregates and that they would come to church on Sunday, but no one was ever invited afterwards to come home and have dinner and have heavy conversations.
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Yeah, yeah, you're not invited to Bible study.
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You might disagree with how they read the Bible, right.
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Right, right, you know, you know, just to just to kind of backtrack a little bit, if you could for our listeners, just kind of go through briefly the history of the evangelical movement, because I mean we're glumping together a lot of you know Christian movements in the United States and beyond, but the evangelical movement starts as kind of a lesser version of Christianity, you know tent revivals or something like that, and then kind of you know, you know generates into you know university campuses and all these other kinds of things.
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And so I think you know you're distinguishing in the book between mainline Christianity and then evangelical Christianity, which is sometimes referred to as non-denominational.
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I think that's right.
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Yes, yeah, that's where it gets messy.
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So if you can kind of like, so let me give you a streamlined version.
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First of all, I have to tell you that they would not like to think of themselves as lesser, so that's very important.
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So that is very important.
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You know, never say that to the evangelical because they'll go.
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We're the reason why you got Martin Luther.
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We are the different kinds of things, and if we think about the first great awakening with, you know, jonathan Edwards and others, to the second great awakening and Cain Ridge Revival and Revivalism and the rise of evangelicalism in the 19th century, this becomes important.
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So if you want to think about what evangelicals are, let me give you an example for people who are listening, how that might work out for you.
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Southern Baptists are evangelicals.
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You could talk about Christian reform churches as evangelicals.
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You know these are denominations, but they're not mainline in the sense that we're talking about Methodist Presbyterians.
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We're talking about groups that have a particular orientation to evangelicalism and to the way in which they evangelize.
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Okay, one person that people don't think about a lot and thinking about in terms of evangelicalism is Charles Finney, the great revivalist, who came up with the idea of the anxious bench, and so that happened right around Syracuse University in Rochester, new York.
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That was the first place that the anxious bench happened right, and so that mode of confessing yourself and confessing your faith in Jesus Christ became an important part of services.
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And so in the 19th century, which you can, you know, sort of think about in terms of evangelicalism is you could think about pro-slavery movements, you can think about anti-slavery movements, you can think about missions and revival.
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You can also think about violence, because lots of evangelicals were involved in the Civil War on both sides.
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Okay, so that makes it important.
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I think what's also important to talk about for evangelicals and they don't like it very much is to talk about what I discussed in my book the Lost Cause, the Confederacy and lynching and all of those kinds of things that are happening post-Civil War that influence not just, you know, civil society but religion and racism.
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Right.
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And in the 20th century we can start to think about the ways in which evangelicals start, you know, religious schools or they break apart from schools.
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Let's think about, you know, princeton versus Westminster Theological Seminary and the seminary I went to, fuller Seminary, which is the home of neo-evangelicalism, or that new evangelicalism in the 1940s.
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Okay, but I think you know if you really wanted to place evangelicalism in a certain point, that is an understandable point for people who are not historians and not, you know, religious studies scholars.
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You look at the figure of Billy Graham.
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Billy Graham was an evangelist, traveled all over the world, was very instrumental in having lots of different revivals and places all around the world, and not only that, was very instrumental in bringing together something very important, which is Presidents with this evangelical leadership.
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And that is really key because that is the moment in which we take that churn to religion and politics right.
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It's not that religion and politics didn't exist before.
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It's like evangelicals did this, and Billy Graham in particular, in part to inscribe this kind of nationalistic Christianity.
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And that nationalistic Christianity has come forward up until today, where we see people who were attacking the Capitol on 1-6, because they believe that the election had been stolen and that it should be given to this figure of Donald Trump.
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And I think that what people need to understand about this history and I'm not going to go into it because this is a podcast, we can't get everywhere, right, but I want you to read the book is that what I'm tracing in that book is the history of racial prescription and how evangelicals have been racist the entire time and pretended not to be, first of all, and, secondarily, how their own theology helps them to continue upon this path of racism and nationalism and whiteness.
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And it's really interesting the way you're deploying whiteness too in this book, I think, because it's not just white people, right.
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It's a kind of mythic framing or a kind of framework, sociological framework in some way right, that it doesn't adhere to, like Native Americans or African Americans or whomever.
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It's difficult to get at right.
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The racism that you're trying to introduce us to and to articulate in the book, I think, is a little more complex than people are normally at to think about, right.
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Yes, that's correct.
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It's complex in this sense, and forgive me for putting it like this, but there was a woman who just recently read my book, and she read chapter one, and she's had this incident that I talk about between an African American Christian singer and a pastor and a business leader I won't give it all away and she said I don't understand why this word blessing is bad.
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And I'm like well, you can't see this because of your whiteness.
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And this is where, even though you're reading my book, I'm having to explain this to you so that you understand how much whiteness has blinded you.
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And so I think it was really important for her to understand what was actually happening, first of all, and then, secondarily, to also grasp the fact that well meaning white people too, can be engaged with this concept of whiteness that drags us all into this kind of, you know, morass of not seeing people as they really are, first of all, and then, secondarily, trying to make them fit into spaces that they should not fit into.
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Right, yeah, right.
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And I mean you know whiteness is a creation, in many ways, of you know the colonial moment, you know coming into territories that aren't yours, justifying that occupation, enslaving indigenous Africans.
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You know these tactics of creating a society based on race, based on whiteness.
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Then, you know, is deployed very specific reasons, right, and I think we're still grappling with that kind of legacy.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, we are.
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I mean, I think what's also important too is if you think about, you know, the doctrine of discovery alongside this age of discovery right, and how people are doing this.
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Well, the next thing that happens, obviously, is the enlightenment, and that's where you start to see the beginnings of, you know, racial philosophies and things like that, with people who are, you know, looking at this through the lens of a Protestant lens in Europe, okay, and also through Catholic lens at some point.
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So I think you know, if we think about somebody like Votar, who talks about the noble, savage right and imagines, you know, the Native American to be a certain kind of person, or we think about Kant and others, I think that's really important for people to understand that genealogy and how that happens, okay.
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So one good thing I would suggest for readers there's an old book by Cornell West, prophecy Deliverance, and in that there's a chapter in that it talks about the genealogy of modern racism, and I always find that very helpful for people to understand if they're trying to figure out how the doctrine of discovery pairs up with the ways in which you think about racism and how we got to this point, then you can start to see these Enlightenment thinkers and how they put this together and how those thoughts, how those intellectual constructions of race become part and parcel of what begins to happen in the American context with slavery and other things.
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Wow, fantastic.
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In the early 17th century there were Wyandotte borders who went over to Europe very early in the 17th century.
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This is after it was recorded that the Wyandotte had been exterminated and yet they're still traveling around the world as Wyandotte and they're offering knowledge and their observations of Europe.
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And it's before the cusp of the Enlightenment.
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They're like saying you people speak of liberty and equality, but you're only equal under the monarchs or the pope.
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You don't know what living freely is about.
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So their eye is on the Americas and coming in and taking the resources on this continent.
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It wasn't that any of the Indigenous people were unaware of what they were up to or who they were.
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They were very much aware and gave them much more thought than Europeans are really giving the Indigenous people that lived in Africa or in the Americas.
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So it's like a reversal of observations and it's really so sad and painful to think through this manipulation to get at the resources.
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Yeah, I mean in the recent books, for example the Dawn of Everything, they map this early 18th century influence of Wyandotte 17th century.
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No 1600.
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1600.
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Oh wow, okay, so they map this early influence or conversations really between Jesuits and these Native American orators right and how.
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For example, where?
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did the French For the early 1700s.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So how did the French come up with ideas of equality and fraternity and democracy?
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Well, not through Christianity, right?
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So I mean, I think that's what you're getting at here.
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You know is that these are anti-democratic principles that have been drawn out of Christianity and certain reading of the Bible, and, you know, they resonate again with what's going on in this early period.
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So we have these kind of what, these forces that are at odds with one another in some way, democracy and, but you know, the kingdom of God, I guess, right.
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Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right yeah.
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I mean the earth is a democracy.
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Yeah.
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And it doesn't exist if all the elements that live on this planet did not live and fulfill the responsibilities of providing each other, in this network of life, with food.
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And you know, it's our identities and diversity comes from the original relationships we had with the natural world.
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That's what created a diverse humanity.
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Yeah, so you know, as the Haudenosaunee say, peace cannot exist unless you're in proper relationship with the natural world.
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We cannot know ourselves unless we connect with the earth that provides us our sustenance.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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There's a kind of radical democratic principle.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to be so happy to be able to welcome you into Onondaga Nation territory.
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I know you for some of your career anyway.
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You were up here and in Rochester and you know some of this.
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But you know, what we try to do at the Scano Center is introduce people to the influence of the Haudenosaunee, for example on American democracy or the women's movement, as a way to kind of but challenge the dominant narratives, I guess right.
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So the question, I guess it's not so much in your book, but I'm wondering how do we make change when these dominant narratives are so, you know, intractable in our world?
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I mean, you know we're trying to change or decolonize the narrative in some ways, you know, and I wonder, from your point of view, how do we start to challenge those dominant narratives of whiteness and, you know, transform what is a very bad situation now?
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I think part of the way is to engage civically, and what I mean by that is to be involved, not just in having discussions, but to actually doing things.
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I've said this to people before and they always look at me as scant when I say voting is not enough, and what I mean by that is you can go and pull the lever, but if you're not involved in your local community where they're doing, you know things at the school board or you know city hall, all of these kinds of things you know.
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Changing historical signage is actually really important.
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Okay, that's key.
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So you need to be involved with preservation societies.
00:26:57.748 --> 00:27:02.127
You have to be involved in certain kinds of ways where you can see things begin to change.
00:27:02.127 --> 00:27:03.523
This is how you change the narrative.
00:27:03.523 --> 00:27:05.009
Let me give you an example.
00:27:05.009 --> 00:27:08.038
I have a chapter in the 1619 book.
00:27:08.038 --> 00:27:16.846
The 1619 project was welcomed and received by so many people because it offered something different to the narrative that has been said about America.
00:27:16.926 --> 00:27:19.666
Right, but what did immediately happen?
00:27:19.666 --> 00:27:28.926
Donald Trump and others decided to come up with the 1776 project, which kind of died on the vine, and 1619 is gonna last much longer than that.
00:27:28.926 --> 00:27:39.384
But there's always gonna be this competing thing and I think one of the things we have to do is to make sure more of this history gets out like what you're doing with talking about the doctrine of discovery.
00:27:39.384 --> 00:27:44.409
You have to educate people, but you have to educate people in terms that they understand.
00:27:44.409 --> 00:28:01.109
It can't just be this academic enterprise that we hold it to ourselves, but we also have to figure out how do we bring knowledge to the public, how do we help the public engage so that when they start to see these bad history books by David Barton about, you know America was a Christian nation.
00:28:01.640 --> 00:28:13.130
You know this is the hardest thing to uproot, for people is to realize look, those guys who came here Ben Franklin, thomas Jefferson, all the rest of them none of them wanted Christianity.
00:28:13.130 --> 00:28:15.307
They just wanted it to be like it was.
00:28:15.307 --> 00:28:22.067
It doesn't mean they were perfect, it just means that even they didn't want the imposition of Christianity from the English.
00:28:22.067 --> 00:28:25.307
Okay, so they wanted this to be a place where they could be.
00:28:25.307 --> 00:28:27.827
You know, people could worship as they wanted to.
00:28:27.827 --> 00:28:34.107
Unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way and unfortunately their behavior at times didn't advance that belief that they wrote about.
00:28:34.107 --> 00:28:41.528
But I think it's really important to point people back to what's the what's this real history of America, how does this happen?
00:28:41.528 --> 00:28:49.686
And that we can't just say that this was an empty, barren land and not recognize that there were tribes and nations here before anybody, any white person, got here.
00:28:50.539 --> 00:28:53.429
Right, right, at least that, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:28:53.429 --> 00:28:58.348
Well, thank you, antia Butler.
00:28:58.348 --> 00:29:02.431
This has been a tremendous conversation.
00:29:02.431 --> 00:29:03.544
We really enjoyed it.
00:29:04.140 --> 00:29:06.367
And everybody get Antia's book.
00:29:06.367 --> 00:29:08.567
It's like 150 pages.
00:29:08.567 --> 00:29:09.904
You fit so much in there.
00:29:09.904 --> 00:29:16.807
I have to reiterate that again White evangelical racism, the politics of morality in America.
00:29:20.859 --> 00:29:24.083
The producers of this podcast were Adam D J Brett and Jordan Lawn Cologne.
00:29:24.083 --> 00:29:28.986
Our intro in outro is social dancing music by Oris Edwards and Regis Cook.
00:29:28.986 --> 00:29:38.145
This podcast is funded in collaboration with the Henry Luce Foundation, Syracuse University and Hendricks Chapel and the Indigenous Values Initiative.
00:29:38.145 --> 00:29:43.161
If you liked this episode, please check out our website and make sure to subscribe.