Let’s talk about white Christians and the election, shall we?
Of white evangelicals who voted, 81% broke for Trump. This is almost exactly the same percentage who voted for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
White evangelicals are a faithful voting bloc that Trump can rely on. No outrageous, divisive, racist, misogynist, hateful, mendacious, Nazi-themed thing that he says or does is enough to dissuade white evangelicals from turning out in strength to vote for their “hero,” Trump.
It’s not just white evangelicals. White Catholics and white non-evangelical Protestants consistently vote almost 60% for Trump.
White Christians were the biggest key to Trump’s victory.
What accounts for this intense, emotional loyalty among white Christians to a twice-impeached, adjudicated sexual abuser and convicted felon?
It’s staring us in the face.
Trump has tapped into a long and strong tradition in American history: white supremacy.
We were founded upon contradictory principles. Thomas Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence declared “all men are created equal.”
Of course he didn’t mean it. “All men” did not include women. It did not include the poorer classes of people who didn’t own property.
Most particularly and obviously, “all men” did not include slaves. Jefferson himself owned hundreds of slaves. He did not consider them “created equal.”
After the Revolutionary War, when the founders got together to craft the Constitution, white supremacy was embedded in the document. Four crucial clauses show that the framers legitimized and perpetuated the slave trade and the institution of slavery.
- The clause that slaves were to be counted as “two-thirds” of a human being guaranteed that slaveholding states, which had small numbers of white landowners compared to the other states, would have their interests disproportionately represented in Congress and the courts.
- The Electoral College worked in tandem with the two-thirds clause to give slaveholding states disproportionate power in presidential elections.
- The fugitive slave clause, adapted from the punitive fugitive slave laws of slaveholding states, required that law enforcement capture escaped slaves and return them to their masters.
- The Constitution forbade any changes to laws regarding slavery until 20 years after ratification, extending legal protection to the slave trade until 1808.
In other words, the original Constitution, the highest law in the land, supported, legalized and perpetuated slavery. No matter how ugly or degrading slavery was, it was enshrined as legal in the Constitution.
We Americans—especially white Americans, very especially white Christian Americans and most especially white evangelical Christians—need to be honest about these facts.
But, of course, these facts are seldom if ever acknowledged among white Christian Americans. We are too busy talking about how “exceptional” and foresighted our founders were and how advanced America is. These facts are too uncomfortable in the fantasy world we have been taught to believe.
We have been taught to revere the Constitution, almost as if it was perfect and was handed down directly from God. But, of course, it is not perfect and it is not directly from God. It is a human document coming out of a particular time and place.
Positively, it is part of a larger historical world development from autocracy to democracy, from the Divine Right of Kings to Consent of the Governed.
Negatively, it is a part of a larger story of Eurocentric colonialism—that white Europeans, being “stronger,” “more energetic,” “smarter” and “Christian”—have the moral obligation and the God-given right to conquer non-Christian peoples and lands, to “Christianize” and to “civilize” them. If that project of “civilizing” means slavery and genocide, so be it—but we won’t talk about it. We’ll pretend it happened naturally and for the most part peacefully.
Even before the founding of the United States as an independent nation, we were deeply enmeshed with white supremacy. That problem continued in our early years.
Bible teachers claiming that the “Curse of Ham” condemned Blacks forever to be slaves. “Manifest Destiny” justified the wholesale land grab and stealing of Native American lands. Western expansion “necessitated” “Indian Removal” and mass genocide of Native Americans. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision decreed that African Americans have no rights at all (no “standing”) to bring their cases of abuse before the courts.
The Civil War to End Slavery—not, as Southern white supremacists call it, “the War of Northern Aggression”—required the blood of 600,000 Americans to be spilled.
After the Civil War, the short-lived bright spot of Reconstruction was squelched by the federal government’s lack of resolve to live up to the 13th and 14th Amendments and stop Southern-style “Jim Crow,” lynch mobs, KKK terrorists and their law enforcement allies.
The story of white supremacists resisting equality and civil rights for all has continued in American history to the present. Yes, we have seen some gains, but they are always contested by white supremacists trying to game the system to their advantage, using sneaky tactics (disinformation campaigns, using racist tropes in political ads, gerrymandering Congressional districts to deny non-white communities representation) and claiming “persecution” when they don’t get their way or perceive that non-white communities are getting “benefits they don’t deserve.”
So this is the context we must keep in mind with Trump. He is expressing a deep American, and American Christian, malaise.
When he refused to rent his apartments in New York to Blacks, he was acting as a white supremacist.
When he paid for a full-page ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, he was channeling white fears that Black males are violent rapists.
When he challenged Barack Obama’s birth certificate, he was trying to delegitimize a Black man’s qualifications to lead the country, which magnified the outrage of white supremacists who hated having a Black president.
When he separated children from their parents at the southern border, he was asserting that asylum seekers from Central and South America were less than human.
This is what white supremacists do.
More recently, when Trump said, “Haitians are eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats,” obviously, he was not telling the truth (it was a lie). But truth-telling is totally beside the point with Trump. The point is to stir up racial resentment and racial hatred.
When Trump says immigrants “are poisoning the blood of this country,” he’s using a Nazi-esque trope (it is a lie). But truth-telling is not even close to being on his agenda. What Trump is saying resonates deeply with white grievances and fears of losing their dominant place in America.
When Trump says, “my beautiful white skin” or tells people at one of his Minnesota rallies that they have “good genes” (i.e., they have white skin), or when he says, “Make America Great Again” or courts white Christians, he’s telling whites that Jesus is their savior and he is their “retribution.” He tells them he’s the only one who can “fix” things. He alone can bring about the longed-for white supremacist “Christian” nationalist state.
He’s a demagogue. He knows how to play on fears, gin up hatreds and find scapegoats. He knows what he’s doing.
That white Christians can be so cozy with Trump is a sign that white American Christianity is profoundly sick and has profoundly deviated from the teachings and example of Jesus. They’ve bought into Trump’s white supremacy because they are so comfortable with their own white supremacy.
Not all white Christians are white supremacists. But all white Christians need to ask the hard questions of their conditioning and training. It’s the only way to root out white supremacy. It’s a huge project because white supremacy in our culture, and in Christian culture, is so pervasive.
