“Expanding the Table” Podcast - Season 1, Episode 6
GCORR’s Award-Winning Podcast on Practicing Anti-Racism
Episode 6: How White Christians Should Confront Racist Histories: A Conversation with Robert P. Jones
In this episode, our guest Robert P. Jones joins us to discuss his book, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.
Robert P. Jones is CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won the 2021 American Book Award. He is also the author of The End of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Jones writes regularly on politics, culture, and religion and has written for or been interviewed by CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Robert earned a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University in Atlanta.
Jones writes weekly at https://robertpjones.substack.com, a newsletter for those dedicated to the work of truth-telling, repair, and recovery from the legacy of white supremacy in American Christianity.
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Season 1, Episode 6 Transcript:
Garlinda Burton: [00:00:01] Hello and welcome to Expanding the Table, the podcast from the General Commission on Religion and Race. I am your host Garlinda Burton, and I am delighted today to have Robert P. Jones with us. He is an author of a bestselling book, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won the 2021 American Book Award. Robert is also the author of The End of White Christian America, which won awards in 2019. He is CEO and founder of the Public Religion Institute. He is a frequent writer and contributor on topics such as politics, culture and religion and has written for or been interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio and in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Robert earned a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a PhD in religion from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. And we are going to talk with him today about how white Christians should confront their racist histories. Robert, welcome. Today, we're so glad to have you.
Robert P. Jones: [00:01:28] Thanks. Yeah, I'm glad to be here.
Garlinda Burton: [00:01:31] Okay. So I read the book twice. I found it fascinating.
Robert P. Jones: [00:01:35] Oh, bless you.
Garlinda Burton: [00:01:36] Yeah, I found it fascinating. I am a Southern born, fifth-generation United Methodist. So it really spoke to a lot of my experience. And I wanted to ask you, what inspired you to write the book? What did you hope to accomplish?
Robert P. Jones: [00:01:53] Well, I think, honestly, you know, what was most driving me is that this was the book I needed to write for myself to really get clear about how entangled white supremacy had been in my own faith and in my own tradition. So if you're a fifth, fifth generation Methodist, I'm at least a sixth or seventh generation Baptist from the South. I could trace my roots back in the middle, Georgia, you know, six generations and then the seventh generation back to Virginia and all Baptist, you know, and a mix of a number of Baptist preachers and pastors, Confederate soldiers, people, enslaved others. And sometimes all of those identities were all rolled into one. So it was really trying to, and I think just one artifact to begin with that I had on my desk as I was writing, I've inherited our Family Bible from 1815, and that has come down through my mother's side of the family and now sits with me. And in that Bible is inscribed, you know, the way those old Bibles are in the middle between the Old Testament, the New Testament, they're these family history pages of births and deaths and marriages, and they're all hand inscribed for multiple generations from that first generation that came down to Georgia. And, you know, it's so clear how much Christianity was a part of that. And then I also, through recent research, has dug up the last will and testament of actually the father of the person who owned that Bible, where, you know, and their inventory of their estate, they list, you know, things like a cart, a horse, you know, sheep, a gun, a table. And there were also four human beings that they listed as chattel, you know, in the inventory. So I think it was really trying to wrestle to the ground these contradictions of devout Christianity, enslaving other people. And so white supremacy all wrapped up with Christian faith and just trying to wrap my head around that.
Garlinda Burton: [00:04:14] Yeah, that it's fascinating that you talked about the family Bible and the history and that that history was preserved for you to go back and research it. So how exactly did you begin the research for the book? What was the first thing you did?
Robert P. Jones: [00:04:31] Well, you know, I think once I decided that I needed to really write a book, you know, I realized that I needed to. And that part of the book was going to be personal. That's a little bit new for me, actually. I mean, in my day job, the hat I normally wear it's kind of a social scientist hat and so I'm used to kind of flying comfortably at 30,000 feet over the landscape and analyzing things from a fair distance. And I realized that that was just not going to be possible. You know, for this for this book. So with that realization, I also knew that I needed to be a lot more reflective and conscious of the ways that race, and white supremacy had impacted kind of my upbringing than I had been. And I think that actually that was one of the early realizations, is that as someone who grew up white, I kind of had the luxury of not thinking about race that often. It was largely rendered invisible to me growing up. It was a kind of conspiracy of silence and invisibility about it that I had to confront and try to get behind that screen a little bit. So one of the first things I did was just some journaling. I really tried to sit and kind of take myself through my earliest memories up through elementary school and middle school, young adulthood, and just ask myself like, where does race even show up for me and my memories at all? And, you know, and there was a real eye opening, literally eye opening process for me of realizing things that I had just let go by I had not thought that much about were actually fairly momentous events.
Robert P. Jones: [00:06:12] And just to name one was the realization that I had experienced but not thought that much about the integration of our public school system in Jackson, Mississippi. I remember the first African American kid showing up in third grade at my all white public elementary school. Now, it's remarkable, right, that I could have experienced that and as an adult had largely just kind of even forgotten that as a significant event in my life. But I think it's because there was absolute silence about that at my church. Right. Which is one of the places I would have talked, that we would have talked about these events, but there was literally nothing said. Right. So again, this kind of momentous event that changed the everyday experience of every kid in our church and the church had literally nothing, no framework to give us nothing about what was going on, nothing about why this is happening in 1976 instead of 1954, none of that. And so that was just one of the events that this kind of process of journaling kind of brought to my really brought to consciences conscience for me.
Garlinda Burton: [00:07:23] And so were there things that surprised you in your research? You talked about that experience, 1976 that's I'm from the Deep South and that's still kind of late. But yeah, there are other things that surprised you as you did the research, other things that struck you about your own life or other things.
Robert P. Jones: [00:07:42] Yeah, I mentioned coming across this document in the in some genealogical research that listed the names of human beings that my ancestors had enslaved and assigning monetary value to them on a line and that and that page. And that was something that I was not aware of. I kind of had a vague notion that our family had enslaved other people, but I didn't know any details. So seeing that page that they had a facsimile of that document, handwritten and seeing it there and just kind of legible on the page, I think was somewhat shocking, you know, to kind of get the reality of that. But then I think also just realizing that, I mean, one of the big conclusions I was brought up to believe that at worst, white Christian churches just stayed on the sidelines. You know, in the civil rights movement like that was their worst sin. But just realizing that, no, you know, that there was just like there was kind of a hub of organizing for civil rights among many black churches. White churches were hubs of organizing, of mass resistance to civil rights. There wasn't just a passive thing, but active places where civic leaders, elected officials, business leaders all met and colluded with one another while they were serving as deacons and Sunday school teachers and pastors.
Garlinda Burton: [00:09:15] Well, let's stay there for a minute, because I think that was one of the fascinating things for me about this book, because I do think in my experience there have, you know, when in working with my white family, white brothers and sisters and siblings, that there's a notion that, well, you know, it's this conspiracy of silence that's been the thing that's that white people have been guilty of and complicit in. And I think for particularly for people living today, that that's the popular narrative. And I think what your book unearthed for some was the fact that there were mainstream, well-respected churches and church people who were active participants in systemic racism. Say. Say more about what you learned.
Robert P. Jones: [00:10:09] Well, you know, I'll make this a Methodist and Baptist conversation real quick. Right. We're talking about our kind of two backgrounds here. I mean, also, one of the things I had not quite put together really, until I dug back in and was doing the research for this book, is that the two largest kind of white Christian denominations in the country have been historically Methodist and Baptist Methodist, larger in the 19th century, and Baptists coming into ascendancy in the 20th century. But in 1845, it's notable that both the Methodist and the Baptists split over the issue of slavery. And this is before the Civil War. And it's no exaggeration to say that white Christian churches provided the dress rehearsal and the moral justification for political secession because they split before the states split. And in that split, there were theological arguments, biblical arguments, moral arguments wielded on both sides. But, you know, it was so clear when you go back, and you read the historical documents that the supporters of slavery actually thought they had the better biblical argument. I mean, they were really confident about that. And so that comes through so clearly.
Robert P. Jones: [00:11:32] And so the Methodist Episcopal Church North, the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and then the Southern Baptist Convention again, this is the dynamics I grew up in. I always thought and it was taught that that Southern and Southern Baptist just meant that it was a geographic designation, that we were just in the South. Like literally, I had no idea until I was in seminary. Right? I was like 20 years old that I have any idea that that word Southern meant supporting slavery and that that was what the fight and the split was over in Southern eventually ended up meaning Confederate. And that, in fact, my own denomination's history, the Genesis story of it is a denomination formed to biblically justify slavery and to make the gospel compatible with enslaving people based on the color of their skin. It's just really remarkable that that is the overt founding story of what became in the middle of the 20th century, the largest Protestant denomination in the country. So it's not some fringe group out there. It became the dominant expression of Protestant, Christian, white Protestant Christianity in the country.
Garlinda Burton: [00:12:50] Yeah, very similar. Yeah. I was so fascinated by this in your book because I had heard these stories, but to read it in your book was just fascinating. And it does parallel with the story of the former Methodist and Methodist Episcopal Church. As, of course, early in our history, we had predominantly black denominations to form their own denominations, the African Methodist Episcopal African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches, and then the formally colored Methodist Episcopal Church in the South. And that was really formed because white folks wanted black folks to have their own denomination. And then around the world, we have different churches, Methodist churches that are mission churches, where, you know, people sought their own autonomy in other countries. But much of the genesis for our church, and particularly the Southern Church, was steeped in justification of slavery, you know, justification in defiance of our founding Fathers own teaching. John Wesley taught against slavery and the church, the Southern Church particularly said, you know, we're going to flip that on its ear. We can bend the gospel to say what we want it to say. And so what were in and so what then in your view was that intersection between racism, between institutional racism and the U.S. Christian church. So these churches and I know it wasn't just Methodist and it wasn't just Baptists, there were other denominations that split over slavery. So what was the result in terms of what happened to the church as a result of making these decisions?
Robert P. Jones: [00:14:44] Yeah, you know. Well, I'll say one, one quick other historical detail. I'll get back. Sure, sure. But just. Well, since we're on a Methodist platform here, you know, it's also worth noting that even in the 20th century, when the two denominations came back together. They still did not admit African American churches on equal footing with white churches. So even when the North and South Methodist Episcopal Church came together, they invented. Right. So typically, like the Methodist polity is there's a geographic designation and all the churches that are in that geographic region are kind of part of the district and all of that. But because they did not want African American churches to be included, they invented this thing called the central jurisdiction, which was the only non-geographical place if there was ever a euphemism for segregation. The central jurisdiction is one where they just stuck every African American church to dilute their power all over the country. And just it was literally a religious gerrymander, right. To kind of keep all the African Americans in one place. And that's the 20th century. So I think what it did is it made overt something that really has been with us from the beginning. It's worth so we just passed Columbus Day as the official federal holiday and increasingly being celebrated as indigenous people's day in the country. But behind what I think many people and there's another piece I learned working on the book is, so we all learned that little:
Robert P. Jones: [00:16:17] In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. But none of us learned really. I certainly didn't in my academic training what happened in 1493, and that is that the church issued a series of papal bulls that this was before the Protestant Reformation. So it's just the kind of Western Catholic Church issued a set of proclamations declaring that if any explorers were traveling around the world under the flag of a Christian king or queen, and they encountered any non-Christian people, they could forcibly take the land and dominate the people in the name of the state and the church. And that doctrine is called the Doctrine of Discovery. And that that doctrine is still with us today. In many ways. It's in fact been incorporated into US law with the Supreme Court decision in the 19th century. And but the idea. Right. That Christian that European civilization and Christian religion was superior to every other Christian religion and civilization in the world has driven much of the certainly all the manifest destiny stuff, the eradication and genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of African Americans. These were overtly justified things by Christian doctrine. I think that's the thing we've got to really remember. So it wasn't just something that started with the Civil War in many ways. There's a straight through line to what we saw explicitly preached by the southern end of these churches with the founding of the country.
Garlinda Burton: [00:17:56] Yeah. And sort of a continuation of, of the line of Christianity, if you will, from Europe to here. Yeah, very fascinating. I mean, I just thought you handled it so well in your book. So were there things that that struck you to the point where it has affected your own Christian faith journey? Do you still. Yeah, let's talk about that. I mean, what happened? Because, you know, these kinds of things inform and impact our faith as you know. So what were what were some of the things that were happening with you as you did this research and wrote this book?
Robert P. Jones: [00:18:37] Yeah. Well, like I said, you know, I knew that this was going to be personal from the beginning and there was no way to really do this research or write this book without making it personal. You know, like the first sentence in the book has the word I in it, the last sentence in the book has the word us in it. So it's very much close to the vest for me. I have to say, there were a number of times, both when doing the history and when looking at some of the even contemporary public opinion data, where I became so troubled and upset really, that I literally had to just push away from the desk and take a walk. I was a number of times in tears. I was a number of times like reading a sentence three or four times thinking like, Can that possibly be true? What I just wrote, you know? And the answer was yes. And so I think it has made me realize, I think, what a crisis we're in, I think, as a church, and that this is a can that is been kicked down the road for the entire history of the country. You know, we've had several. And I think that's the thing, is that it's clear that we've had several opportunities to take a different path and we have every time chosen not to do it. So when the Constitution was first being written, there was a clear moment. To take a different stand on enslaving other people. It was not taken despite the principles there. When reconstruction, after the Civil War, there was an opportunity there. Those we had that was our first civil rights movement was after the Civil War and the 1870s, which quickly got plowed under by white Christians in this country.
Robert P. Jones: [00:20:29] The civil rights movement was another moment. In fact, the title of the book, White Too Long, comes from an indictment by James Baldwin, who was writing after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and was just so disturbed that even after the assassination of a leader like King, it did not inspire a massive uprising on behalf of white people and white Christians in particular, to come on alongside and get behind the movement for civil rights for black Americans. And, you know, and so the line he has is, you know, I've been deeply impressed and convinced that that white Americans are, as he put it, beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. And his reason with that is that they have been white. If I may. So put it too long. Right. And just the sense that whiteness had so become so central to American identity, to American Christianity there. And so I think it just made me so aware of how many opportunities we have had to take a different path. And I will say that I think today is another one, right? There are these moments, I think, of awareness and reckoning where there's a kind of public energy and attention. And if you want to speak theologically, you could call it a movement of the spirit where consciousness is are raised. And this is another moment. And so I think it just made it clear to me that there I needed to do my part, at least in raising the alarm and a clarion call as I could, that we should finally expel white supremacy from our congregations.
Garlinda Burton: [00:22:24] Well, it's funny you should bring that up. It's interesting because we have noted this these moments. I think it really started with a with the Trayvon Martin experience, but definitely crescendoed with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. And we see that we you know, there was there seemed to be great despair on the part of people interracially about what was being unearthed about the state of racism in this country. And there seemed for a moment that people were ready to act and to think and to do and to change. And, of course, several of the things that you named I lived through, and I've been at that moment before, and then the moment passed. And so, you know, and even now, we still have we still have white folks of goodwill who want to do something and then other people who are going back to silence. And one of the backlashes has been this backlash against so-called critical race theory and preaching the truth about the history of racism in this country, a backlash against, you know, the indigenous people's celebration instead of Columbus Day. Why is it that you think why is it so challenging for white Christians to get over this hump and where does this backlash come from? And in the Christian context, what have you learned about that?
Robert P. Jones: [00:24:08] Well, you know, I'll start with just quoting something from one of the people I interviewed in a white church. And their church had been trying to have these conversations. And he said, this is just a lay member of the church. And he said one of the biggest things that their church had to get over was this mythology about themselves, that they were in this way put it that we were good people who do good things. And that nothing else could possibly be true. Right. And so this this kind of I would call that a kind of arrogance, you know, that. Can't sort of I mean; the word critical writing critical race theory is not one that anyone who has any kind of doctrine of sin should be concerned about. Right. That that the entire Christian liturgy is built around critical introspection of one's self. Right. And that lens on history is, is very similar to what the liturgy calls us to do. Right. It calls us to see with new eyes. It calls us to hear with new ears a different story than the one we told about ourselves. The different story than the one we've been taught. And, you know, if Christians are about truth, then the word critical shouldn't be something that scares us, right? It's an invitation to freedom because it's only truth that's going to give us the ability to live rightly with other people, to live rightly with God.
Robert P. Jones: [00:25:48] And so I think, in fact, the fact that there is so much white Christian freakout over something called critical race theory is about as strong an indictment of the presence of white supremacy still living among us as I think you can find. If that's not there, I'm not sure what people are defending, except the exposure of the continued presence of white supremacy, not just in our history books, but in our lives. So I to me, it is almost a self-indicting move that's so defensive on the part of white Christians as to say. And I think the other thing to say is that, you know, it's it is about, you know. Like not wanting to know what our parents and grandparents did. Right. And so we want to kind of cover that up and then not teach our children about it. But that's really disingenuous. And I think, again, for a for a people that has its liturgical year and its services, you know, structured around confession. It's it points to a frightening amount of spiritual illness, I would say, to not be able to be open to that kind of, like I said, critical lens on who we are in the service of being more faithful.
Garlinda Burton: [00:27:19] Yeah, yeah, exactly what you said. It made me think of one of my colleagues who has been doing some work on this. And she is a white sister who's doing a lot of work on anti-racism. And she talks about challenging the inherent goodness of whiteness, that that is one of the most difficult things in terms of white Christians confronting racism is to overcome that notion that white people are just good and white Christians are just good and can't possibly be complicit in something that is evil. So we've got to recast the narrative, have got to, you know, genuflect, have got to hide the stories that are that are challenging to us. I mean, I was taken aback a few weeks ago. I don't know if you read where there was a school. I, I don't remember what state it's in, so I don't want to put some state down. But they were trying to remove books about the story of Rosa Parks. And I thought, really? I mean, we're just one of that expunged from U.S. history classes and didn't want to talk about it, about Native American massacres that are historically documented, wanted those things not to be taught that it was harmful to children. And, you know, and I think they were talking most specifically about white children. I even had a couple of weeks ago, I did a training with a group of women, and we did a lot of talking about anti-racism and work. And we were at the end asking people to weigh in on what they needed for next steps into taking an anti-racist journey, embracing an anti-racist faith. And one woman said, I just don't want to feel guilty about being white. That was that was her whole thing. After all this, you know, confession and conversation and women of color talking about their stories. And the only takeaway was, I don't want to feel guilty about being white. So that was tough.
Robert P. Jones: [00:29:26] This reminds me. Can I jump in real quick? This reminds me, actually, of another story from, again, this congregation I spent some time within Macon, Georgia, that was actually the parent congregation of my parents’ church that they grew up in. But I think it comes down almost exactly to this, like one of a white man who was kind of signed up for this trip to go to Montgomery to see the National Memorial for Peace and Healing in Montgomery, the documents, the history of lynching in the country. He signed up very late for the trip. And as they were kind of getting ready, they were having a little reflection time before they got on the bus to drive to Montgomery. And they kind of asked people about their experience, why they signed up and if they had hopes or fears. And he said, look, I almost didn't sign up for the trip. And he said, I was talking with my wife. And I think I realized that my hope and my fear are actually the same thing. And they said, All right, well, what is it? He said that I will feel responsible. And that was both his hope and his fear. Right. Because once you get into that space, you've got to do something about it, right? If you can remain a little oblivious.
Robert P. Jones: [00:30:47] You can find if you're white, you can find excuses not to do anything. And so but I found that so striking and so honest about because there's a real comfort in willful ignorance. Right. And if you're white, it's a luxury. You can try to give yourself is just kind of maintaining will. But it takes at this point in our and our history, it is a willful ignorance. There are very few people, I think, who can be innocently ignorant at this point. And so but I think there is a willful ignorance, but I just want to kind of go back again and say, like, it's it is such this is the root of it. For me. It is such an odd. I'd say even heretical conception of Christianity. That to say that it teaches us that we are good people who do good things. And that's the beginning and the end of the Christian story. Like, I mean, you can't read that into the I mean, the Bible doesn't say that. Our liturgy doesn't say that. What our liturgy and our and the Bible says, we've all said, right, all of the glory of God. That's the reason why we don't just do confession at baptism or confirmation. We do confession as an ongoing practice because we're always missing the mark. So I think that's the thing is.
Garlinda Burton: [00:32:18] That's why Jesus came. That's why that's why we you know, that's why salvation was extended to us, because we couldn't do it. We couldn't do it. Well, you know, we did.
Robert P. Jones: [00:32:28] But I think so many white Christians today are saying, I do not want to know where I have missed the mark. I do not want to know where my parents and my grandparents missed the mark. I do not want to know where my church missed the mark. I just don't want to know. Yeah, because it's too inconvenient to know. To know those things.
Garlinda Burton: [00:32:48] Yeah, it is. It is. You know, not to put too fine a point on it, but that is a heretical point of view. It really is. And it's I know it's a challenge for folks, but it is a challenge. It's a challenge that folks have to meet if we are going to be you know, if we're going to do the work of Christ in the world, I believe, you know, we've got to get real clear. Well, how did your speaking of people that you've talked with, how did your own family and friends respond to the book, particularly the people who nurtured you in the faith? Did you have any positive feedback, negative feedback learning's from them or for them?
Robert P. Jones: [00:33:30] Yeah. You know, I mean, I've gotten a few my Facebook kind of networks are really interesting mix of academics and people from back home and all of that. And so I got a few, you know, kind of dismissive of things that are that were just about calling me a lefty or whatever, you know, just the kind of dismissive kinds of things. But for the most part, I think people have. Been mostly responsive and even if they've disagreed, I think enough of it rang true because it's got enough of common experiences. I mean, certainly no one who's written me, who went to church with me and said, oh, those things you described in your book didn't happen because we all lived through them, you know? I think some of them have tried to put a different lens around them, but those experiences were pretty straightforward, you know, growing up. So I would say, like, you know, there's mostly been kind of, I think, silence from folks who have not agreed. But I've had a number of people, right. Both in the church I grew up in and say, thank you for finally saying this. Thank you for speaking up. This rings true to me. I thought this, but I haven't quite had the word to say it.
Robert P. Jones: [00:34:48] This clarifies a lot, those kinds of things. But I do think there is an opening in. You know, we're talking about the resistance. But I also think, like I just came back this past weekend from Kentucky, not a bastion of liberalism, and was there at the invitation of some white Baptist churches who really wanted to have the conversation about white supremacy and their faith. Now, that's notable. And, you know, I'm 53 years old, and I would say I certainly don't think I've seen the kind of openness in many congregations that I that I have seen. You know, and I think it really did, you're right Trayvon Martin, and then I think the other one that I have heard from so many white congregations was the murder at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Right. Because these were African Americans at church in Bible study gunned down. And who are they gunned down by? Killed in cold blood by a white confirmed Lutheran. Right. Somebody who for whom his faith was integrated into his white supremacist worldview that helped him pull the trigger. And I think that was so unsettling for so many people that if you take Dylann Roof seriously, you know, you can't if you look at what he said and you look at his and I document this in the book at his journals that he had in prison, they are shot through with Christian theology and symbols.
Robert P. Jones: [00:36:22] And so while he's writing this racist white supremacist screed calling on for white Christians to become a, quote unquote “warriors” religion and start a race war in America, that's what he was calling on. It's sprinkled with there were more than a dozen crosses doodled in the margins of that journal and full page pictures of crosses. And what I reproduce in the book about white Jesus emerging from the tomb, you know that that that shows a lot of very like it's not a crude drawing. It has a lot it shows a great familiarity of Christian iconography. It would be immediately recognizable by most Christians. But I think that that piece has like open people's eyes, I think because it was so horrific. And the only real way to say it, although the media didn't talk about it this way, is, you know, I think the thing we have to reckon with is like, well, what do we do with that kind of violence being carried out by a white Christian terrorist? Uh, in our in our midst, who was nurtured in our churches.
Garlinda Burton: [00:37:30] And can we even wrap our heads around that notion that there can be a white Christian terrorist? You know, when the when this country talks about terrorism, it usually has a brown face. It has a religion other than Christianity, many times not homegrown. And so the notion that that that our church is nurturing our churches are nurturing terrorists, you know, is a hard pill, I think, to swallow. And keeping us, as you have so eloquently said, keeping us from doing the hard work of anti-racism. So I know I mean, we've talked about people who are in firm denial, people who are avoiding. And I work with a lot of people who are frustrated. They don't know what to do. So I hear this a lot from Methodist Church folks, United Methodist Church folks. You know, they there are people who, you know, have never willfully taken any native indigenous land. They never owned black people for the purpose of slavery. They never challenged the citizenship of Asian Pacific Islander Americans. They don't go around yelling at people who are speaking Spanish and telling them to speak English. So what is the work that they need to embrace as they absorb this history and reckon with this history? What is what can white folks do who have a notion to do and participate? What can white church folk do right now, in your opinion?
Robert P. Jones: [00:39:15] Yeah, well, I think the biggest thing is for white Church people is to keep it from being abstract, right? That it's not something way back in history book. It's not something between our ears, but it's something in our neighborhoods. And so I think that one practical thing I've suggested to help white Christians really bring it home is that they do an audit of their own churches and congregations. And what I mean by that is, so every congregation has been around for any length of time, usually has some glossy church history sitting on the shelf in the church library that some members have taken on. And maybe it gets updated every 20 years, but those are almost always rosy. You know things about the founders who could do no wrong and were pillars of the community. And it is that that narrative of we're good people who do good things and we built this institution. But almost always for white churches, there's a different story to tell about the church. And so one of the you know, I mentioned it's kind of personal journaling exercise I did, but there's a communal version of it. I think that that can be done, too. And many churches are, in fact, doing this today. But if every white church in America started by saying and church going, people started by saying, let's just ask the question of why our church building is located, where it is. Like just that one question would pretty quickly get to issues of race. Like if it's an older building pre 1970, it's almost certainly sitting in a whites only section of town right now.
Robert P. Jones: [00:41:02] Why? Why is that? And what was the church's role in that? And a lot of these neighborhoods had either, either by law or even after those laws get struck down by private design, restrictive neighborhood covenants, often churches were some of the key anchoring institutions of those racially restricted neighborhood covenants. They either provided meaning space for the neighborhood association to meet where they were talking about keeping black and brown people out of their neighborhood or the church itself was a kind of I know in a couple of cases, Richard Rothstein documented this pretty well and the color of law that the churches showed up in court and where some of the people testifying in court about how detrimental it would be to allow black and brown people and what a threat to move into the neighborhood and what a threat it would be to white people and often where they would argue it is to our white girls. I write this with these sexual overtones, predatory overtones and the language that's coming from pastors right in court. So I think just asking that question and if it's a newer church out in a suburb, why is it in that suburb? Right. Why is it back in the city? Did it follow white flight out to the out to the suburb where it could just hang out a shingle and even though it was ministering to the neighborhood, it would kind of know it was going to be an almost all white neighborhood, I think getting clear about that. And then just walking around the church, you know, what are the stained glass windows look like? Is Jesus white and the stained glass windows are all the disciples white is what is.
Robert P. Jones: [00:42:38] If they have a crush or nativity scene outside during Christmas is the baby Jesus white in that nativity scene? And what message does that send? And often what happens with those nativity scenes is that Mary, Jesus and Joseph are white, and the wise men are brown. Right. And so what is going on with that? Yeah, right. At least one of them is brown. And what's that about theologically? Right. And what are the children's material? I had somebody write to me last month about saying they did an audit of their children's Sunday school material, and all the little books sit on the shelves. And the preschool, the picture books especially, and all the biblical characters are look like they're from Sweden. And those in those books and what even when our kids are either pre-verbal or just getting kind of their verbal skills down, those pictures are very powerful in how they think about God, how they think about Jesus, and are hard to dislodge. Right after you've had that in your life for ten or 12 years and you know it. So could we give the gift of the next generation of kids, of not having them have a default white Jesus, you know, for example? And so they're not having to deconstruct that later. But I think just practical stuff like that and then just realizing that things like that are often dismissed as politics that are that are clearly about race and, and the legacy of white supremacy in this country.
Robert P. Jones: [00:44:04] Call for action. I mean, you know, so things like voter suppression, mass incarceration, you know, the killing of African American men by police, I mean all of these things that I think white people just can, again, have the luxury of not think. Being that much about. These are things we're called to really take seriously and to be active on. And just the racial disparities in the city. I mean, in many big cities, your zip code or your little neighborhood census tract like has as much to say about your life expectancy than almost anything else. Right. And some of these sometimes, like in St. Louis and Baltimore, there are census tracts that are no more than a few miles apart. And the life expectancy difference between the mostly black and brown people in this census tract and the mostly white people in this one can be like 20 to 30 years. And what is that about? I think it's there's a lot of places to engage. But I think the thing is not to sort of being overwhelmed being excuse, but just to start somewhere like find somewhere to start. And I think that that's probably the best, best thing to do, because I think it's easy for other than for whites to kind of say, well, this is all feels too big, right? I'm just overwhelmed. But I think we can't let that be an excuse to do nothing. I think to just find there's no perfect place to engage. But I think finding somewhere to engage in some actual action is critical.
Garlinda Burton: [00:45:37] That's so helpful. A reminder there that there are things that can be done to mitigate, to undo, to dismantle, to start new conversations and new ways of being. I think it's hard for church folk anyway, you know, especially when you're part of an institution, institutions don't move very fast, but they do move. And so, you know, we can all be part of, as you say, be part of a movement to another way of being. And that's good news. Isn't that what we're supposed to be sharing? Good news. It's it has been a delight, Robert, to have you on this podcast. Your book was next level for me. I so appreciate it. And I'm going to be following you on your page, at your substack at it's at RobertPJones.substack.com. He has a newsletter that is dedicated to people who are engaged in truth telling, repair and recovery from the legacy of white supremacy in American Christianity. I think that would be it will share that as we are sharing this podcast but again it is RobertPJones.substack.com and we thank you for that, Robert. Thank you so much for your time today and keep on doing what you're doing.
Robert P. Jones: [00:47:08] Well, thank you and thank you for all the work that you're doing and I'm glad to be in the work with you.
Garlinda Burton: [00:47:13] Well, this has been the Expanding the Table podcast from the General Commission on Religion and Race. We want to thank you for joining us on this very important day in this conversation about how white Christians can and should respond to the history of racism in our denominations and churches. We want to thank especially our guest, Dr. Robert P. Jones, who is author of the groundbreaking book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. He is also CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. You know, we love hearing from our listeners, so let us know what you think and give us some ideas for upcoming topics. You can email us at podcast@gcorr.org. As always, if you've liked what you've heard, if you've enjoyed this podcast, if you've learned something new, please subscribe and share it with other people and follow us on social media. And of course, after you listen, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform because your positive reviews let us know that you value and appreciate us and want more of this content. Until next time, I am Garlinda Burton reminding all people of faith that God is calling us for such a time as this. So go and do good.