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 [Donald Trump's] accomplices." Thus writes Butler (religion, Univ. of Pennsylvania) in the introduction to White Evangelical Racism. After leading with the current political divide Butler unpacks the ways in which Eevangelicalism has been complicit in that division. She traces Evangelicalism's rhetoric on race from its roots in the 19th century to the present. She looks at how Scripture was used to support slavery, evangelical Christians' participation in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Evangelicals' opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, race as a key factor in evangelical organizing around the rise of the religious right, and Evangelicals' engagement with Islam in the post-9/11 period. Butler concludes that "Evangelicals ... have a problem. That problem is racism" (p. 137). Evangelicals will object, but Butler's review of the ways in which it can be seen as leading to the election of Donald Trump makes clear that there is a profound problem, one that has led a number of Evangelicals (David Gushee calls them "conscientious objectors") to leave the movement. Those who claim the name Evangelical should consider Butler's work very carefully. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers. --Mary M. Veeneman, North Park University

In this vigorous volume, Butler (The Rise of the New Religious Right) forcefully argues that racism is "a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism." She traces how white evangelicalism has responded to and been influenced by eras of slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights era, and in the rise of the "Moral Majority" and makes a persuasive case that evangelicalism is a "nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others." Butler's narrative revisits famous figures such as Frederick Douglass (whose autobiography "provided fuel for the abolitionist movement" and caused rifts in communities of white evangelicals), Franklin Graham (whose overt Islamophobia demonstrated how "racism became an undeniable aspect of American evangelicals and their public persona"), and Sarah Palin (who "tugged at the heartstrings of older white evangelicals who did not want to see a Black man in the White House") to show how evangelicals' contemporary embrace of right-wing politics is rooted in its centuries-long problem with race. This scathing takedown of evangelicalism's "racism problem" will challenge evangelicals to confront and reject racism within church communities. (Mar.)