Image: Charles Cullen, Frontispiece to The Black Christ, by Countee Cullen, 1929
“Everything!” people exclaim when I tell them I’m teaching a course this semester for ministerial students called “White Supremacy: What’s Religion Got to Do with It?” We see it in the prayer rally the night before the January 6 attack, to the insurrectionists storming the Capitol with flags for Trump and Jesus. White supremacy is evident in the presence of right-wing Christians on the Supreme Court, the election of a stalwart Christian Nationalist as Speaker of the House, and the disturbing rise of explicit white Christian Nationalism in U.S. life in our news cycles. In a blatant expression of white supremacist Christianity, Donald Trump is running for President, playing the role of both victim and savior, and evoking devotion from his followers akin to worship of God.
This isn’t just happening in the U.S. Religiously based nationalism accounts for the startling affinity between right wing U.S. Christians and the authoritarian governments of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. Anti-democratic movements such as these are united in the desire for a pure national identity unpolluted by the “toxins” of non-white immigrants and secured by a uniform, controlling religious ideology infused into all aspects of government.
“Religion is not an unqualified good.”
Religion is not an unqualified good. It can be an impetus for humanity’s most unjust, cruel, and destructive ambitions. White Christian Nationalism is the most recent face of racism in the name of Jesus, but it is hardly new. My students and I have traced its theological roots to Europe’s 9th–11th century turn to crucifixion-centered, apocalyptic Christianity, forged as a tool for empire building. Devotion to the crucified Christ impelled centuries of Holy War that slaughtered Jews, Muslims and Christian dissenters. By the fifteenth century, Crusading evolved into the enslavement of Africans and the colonization of the “new world.” The sixteenth century Protestant Reformation sought to purify Christianity of its excesses and oppressive practices, but kept an emphasis on redemptive violence, God’s division of humanity into the saved and the damned, and the goal to prepare for God’s Kingdom to come on earth by overthrowing corrupt regimes and establishing theocratic government.
This Holy Week many Christians will participate in rituals focused on Jesus’ suffering, humiliation, and violent execution, offering their devoted gratitude for his pain, without considering, for example, how praying before the Stations of the Cross began during the Crusades as a pious practice for white European Christians who could not go on an armed Crusade to Jerusalem. Once Jesus’ death became theologically celebrated with the 11th century formulation of the doctrine of the atonement, the torture of Jesus as sacred victim or image of love is repeated, not only symbolically in the breaking of bread and pouring of wine in the communion ritual, but in the public spectacle of lynched black bodies, the legacy of slavery, the inequities of the “New Jim Crow,” the ongoing exploitation of the labor of black and brown low-wage workers, and the targeting of high-profile black leaders, such as black women serving as college presidents, judges, and prosecutors.
“A more ancient stream of Christian spirituality centered on loving ‘this present paradise’...”
Image: Apse, San Vitale, 5 th Century Christian Sanctuary, Ravenna, Italy
There is an alternative. The turn to Christian sanctification of violence eclipsed a more ancient stream of Christian spirituality centered on loving “this present paradise” and resisting the depredations of Empires. Paradise-centered Christianity celebrated “the beautiful feast of life” hosted by the living Christ and fostered spiritual practices of non-violence, mutual care, and intellectual discernment that could pierce harmful deceptions. No images of the tortured, dead Christ hung in Christian sanctuaries for most of the first thousand years of Christianity. Instead, believers worshiped in sacred spaces vibrant with blue waters, green meadows, and canopies of sheltering trees. Jesus’ death was remembered and mourned on the Friday before Easter, but it was the sustaining power of life in the face of injustice that infused Christian existence, not the power of death. (Rita Nakashima Brock and I unveil this history in our book Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire).
“...it was the sustaining power of life in the face of injustice that infused Christian existence, not the power of death.”
“Have you got good religion?” I ask the class participants. Creating and participating in good religion is a profound pathway to countering white supremacy. I love the mission of the Braxton Institute for this reason:
“The Braxton Institute co-creates collective strategies to repair and heal harms and traumas of historically oppressed communities and to lift up legacies of resistance and joy. We do this by employing education, the arts, ritual and spiritual traditions…to provide healing, resilience and sustainability in dangerous times.”
Image: Blue Jesus, by Anderson Johnson, American Artist, 1915-1998 Private Collection
Good religion provides humanity with spiritual practices and frameworks of meaning that foster just and abundant life, that advance healing, liberation, and the flourishing of humanity and nature together. Good religion offers resistance and repair to the ongoing harms and the legacies of white supremacy and faces into the realities of harm without covering them in a cloak of religious fervor or righteousness.
How can Christians resist White Supremacy during Holy Week and Easter? By not valorizing the death of Jesus on the cross as a redemptive event. Instead, on Good Friday, mourn the crucifixion of Jesus and lament the ongoing crucifixions and harms perpetrated in his name. Follow the counsel of womanist theologian Delores Williams: forge good religion that embraces the ministry of Jesus – his non-violent resistance to an oppressive Empire, his acts of healing, feeding, welcoming, and his confrontation of unjust practices. Side with life, with the sacred worth and dignity of us all –never allow systems or theologies to divide us into the saved and the damned.
“Good religion offers resistance and repair to the ongoing harms and legacies of white supremacy.”
These are dangerous times. The Braxton Institute’s current projects “Reparations for Lakeland Now!” and “Creating Sanctuary for Trans and Queer BIPOC” counter the harms of white supremacy. We do so with a spiritual grounding in good religion that recognizes the counter-oppressive strength of inclusive love, self-care as well as care for others, humility rather than benevolent paternalism, non-violent resistance, multiple religious belongings, and community building that respects difference and diversity and works of positive social change. We are a faith-based ministry of teaching and healing and we believe in resurrection.