Way back long time ago when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and looked wistfully at the ark Noah was building that was too small for them, I was reading Christian apologetics through the ministry of Josh McDowell. While we can have disagreements with some of his recent observations about systemic racism, one thing he did do well was to help me look at the sources and ask the hard questions. (Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this. Like the preacher says, “just five minutes more.”)
There were two questions asked by some inquiring souls back in the (I think) 19th century about Christianity: was the tomb empty, and was Christianity about anything at all. For more about the stone being moved, of course the book to read was “Who Moved the Stone?”
The other question was about Christianity itself. Prior to the time of Augustus Caesar, there was no church. By the realm of Pontius Pilate in Palestine and later, there was. Whether we want to believe that the man Jesus of history existed or even want to believe that there is a text of his life and his teachings that is fairly well established as a text to have a consistent story, we have to deal with the fact that a religious community with a central message suddenly appeared in Palestine and spread rapidly through the people, first in the Roman world and Africa, and then later into the broader scope of lands outside the control of Rome.
Something happened, and if you don’t believe in the message of the Christian church, you still must acknowledge that it popped up almost overnight and spread a message that was, at the time, contextually valid.
The early church happened because there were circumstances rooted in contemporary events that explained its beginning and its spread.
And so it is with the wyte Evangelical church.
The wyte Evangelical church “popped up” in North America, which was largely an extension of England/Britain and then later the United Kingdom. Culturally it reflected English values and concepts with an American flavor, a mission church (mostly) of preachers and teachers from England such as John Wesley or others who braved the voluntary journey over the cold salt sea of the North Atlantic.
Solidly British in outlook, reflecting European-American cultural values, it began to form early on, and can be traced back to Edwards and Mather and all the rest.
As America evolved as an independent nation freeing itself from certain connections with Britain such as political and economic control, so did the church, centering itself in the power and people of America who ran the nation, and inescapably represented their cultural values through religious language and theology.
Those values were solidly planted in a notion of European American dominance and outlook that centered and praised the conquering nature of colonization, and those values became expressed through the American church that was devolving from European churches to become what would eventually be called the “Evangelical” movement of the 1940s and 1950s through a conservative lens of wyte patriarchal supremacy. The Constitution saw only European American landowners or men of wealth as those enfranchised with power.
Everyone else was either not mentioned (find “women” in the Constitution, for example) or described and limited due to their history (the Indigenous) or their circumstances (the enslaved, never mentioned by their enslavement but delicately described in evasive language that attempted to hide both their situation and status as owned property of those who wrote the Constitution).
The White Christian Councils (later rebranded “White Citizens Councils” because even back then they realized that their name was way too self-revealing) were the forefathers of the Fundamentalists, who were the fathers of Evangelicalism.
Most of us might call ourselves some form of Evangelical, whether it is as a member of the Big Three (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian) or as someone who is aligned with the broadly Evangelical “Independent” churches or churches that arose from the Azusa Street Revival such as the Foursquare churches or Assemblies of God which birthed the movements of Calvary Chapel, the Vineyard, and other manifestations.
But our background as believers and our theology is solidly rooted in the American theology of American dominance and supremacy, and that comes from the American fundamentalist views of wyte patriarchy and supremacy.
We might not like to hear that as people who say that we “follow Jesus.” I think many of us are very, very sincere in believing that about ourselves, and indeed strive to “follow Jesus.”
We might think that because we do not express our theologies and our dominance using the language of the wyte Fundamentalists, we are somehow not connected, but the reality is this:
You cannot explain the wyte American Evangelical church without understanding the history of European colonization, dominance, and wyte patriarchal supremacy. And in spite of the protestations that “we are not like our fathers,” the cold objective truth is that in our theologies and in our practices we have not only maintained that wyte patriarchal supremacy, we have refined it and extended it, continuing the marriage of our politics and our religion, so much so that critiquing America and American politics is seen as attacking God and the church.
I have no other way to explain it. And I don’t think we can weasel ourselves out of this reality.